Autobiographical Recollections

Charles W. Ervin

[Excerpts from The Autobiography of Charles W. Ervin, edited by Jean Gould and published by Dodd, Mead & Company, 1954]

[Upton] Sinclair came to Arden on the invitation of the late Frank Stephens, the founder of this single tax colony. Sinclair was there with his first wife and young son David. During this time he was writing his book, Love's Pilgrimage, as well as magazine articles.

Slight of build, with an air which was almost ascetic, he was destined, through a domestic entanglement, to bring publicity to Arden which was not relished by the quiet dwellers of that little community.

A poet by the name of Harry Kemp, the author of Tramping on Life, was a guest at the Sinclair house. In a short time Mrs. Sinclair and Harry disappeared together, and as Sinclair had achieved national prominence as the author of The Jungle, the disappearance became a front page story. Sinclair, who was nothing if not original, wrote the story of his domestic upset and sent it to the newspapers. He told me he did it because they might as well have the correct story.

While he was in Arden he made all sorts of experiments in the use of various diets, and in the use of no food at all. At one time he did without food for four days; he kept dictating during that time, checking up each day to find out whether his mind was more keen as his stomach became emptier. He had a theory that one could write better with little or no food in process of digestion. He kept a careful record of the effects which he believed these dietary experiments had upon him, and wrote various stories for the physical culture magazines based on this material.

I recollect a rather amusing happening as a result of some of these articles. He had sold a story dealing with one diet to a physical culture magazine, and a few months afterward sold a story dealing with an entirely different diet to another magazine. Each diet, as he wrote the respective stories, was a successful diet, even though they were almost diametrically opposed. Both articles came out in contemporary issues of the respective magazines.

One day he was giving me a lot of his wisdom on diet, and I became rather bored, saying, "Well, I haven't got much time to think about my stomach; I am too busy on my job. He answered sarcastically, "A good engineer looks after his engine." And I replied, "Good God, he has to run it also." And that was the beginning and the end of any dietary talk I ever had with Upton.

Sinclair turned everything into copy. I think he would have turned the funeral of his dearest friend into "good copy." He was just made that way.

During his stay in Arden there was a big internal row. The founder of Arden was an advocate of absolute freedom of speech. This principle had, however, come a cropper because a shoemaker anarchist by the name of Brown insisted upon saying things in town meetings that Frank Stephens didn't like. And the rest of us didn't like them either. Brown did his talking on communal property the open-air theater. Stephens, the head trustee, finally decided to have him arrested. Along with others, I protested against this because I wanted free speech continued even if I was entirely out of sympathy with Brown's ideas.

I knew Brown, who had a very active mind, would strike back in some unexpected way. And he did. Brown had been fined and released and said nothing; but he did a lot. Delaware still had its old blue laws. One of these laws forbids any worldly amusements on the seventh day of the week "commonly called Sunday." Of course the laws had not been enforced for years, but they were still on the statute books. Arden was in the habit of having Sunday baseball games between Arden and neighboring villages, and also Sunday tennis tournaments.

Brown went to Wilmington, near by, and swore out warrants for all the "John Does" playing baseball and tennis. As the constable got $2 for each warrant served, he didn't care if he swore out warrants for the whole colony. On Sunday morning, when Upton Sinclair was wielding his racquet on the tennis court, and while a baseball game was going on on the green, the constable and assistant appeared and arrested some twenty-five people engaged in "worldly amusements." They were taken to Wilmington, six miles away.

When the hearing came off, they were, of course, all fined, there being no disposition on the part of the justice to send them to jail. But a principle was involved, and the entire crowd, indignant that they were being fined for amusing themselves on Sunday while only a mile away, on the golf links, the DuPonts and a United States judge were playing golf, elected to go to the workhouse rather than pay the fine. Well, they went, and I think they were kept there twenty-four hours and then shooed out.

But Uppy was having the time of his life. He wrote a poem while there I think it was about bedbugs in the workhouse. A few months afterward he had himself nominated for governor of Delaware on the Socialist ticket, which gave him a chance to say something more about Delaware on the stump. The incident was closed by the Ardenites informing the authorities at Wilmington that if there was any more interference with "worldly amusement" at Arden they would swear warrants in Wilmington for the DuPonts, Judge Grey and other residents for playing golf.

Shortly afterward Uppy moved to California and gave color to the life of the Los Angeles-Pasadena district, even before it became the headquarters of the cinema industry.

Upton Sinclair is an odd mixture. He has been a most useful citizen. His two books, Goosestep and Brass Check, showed up the newspapers and our educational system at the very time they needed most to be shown up. Both of these booklets are at least 80 per cent true indictments. But the trouble with Upton is that he has always been careless about checking up his data, with the result that spokesmen for the institutions which he has attacked descend upon the vulnerable 50 per cent of Upton's statements, and thus throw doubt upon the 80 per cent, which is absolutely true.

As an illustration, let us take Columbia University. I knew the person from whom he got much of his information regarding Columbia, and it was all true. And yet, Sinclair put in other material which had not been checked, with the result that the spokesmen for Columbia attacked that portion of Sinclair's story which did not hold water entirely and destroyed in a great measure the usefulness of his exposure of certain practices radically wrong with this institution of learning.

The book that made Sinclair famous was The Jungle. He had written it with the idea of calling attention to the injustices being done the workers in the packing industry. In my judgment it has never been equaled by any of his later works. But it had an entirely unexpected, entirely different result from that which he had anticipated. As he put it to us, "I struck at the American people's heart, but I found I had hit their stomach." He literally did turn the stomachs of the American people, many of whom were afraid to eat meat after his description of what happened in the packing houses.

Under pressure from President Theodore Roosevelt, the federal government took the matter up, and meat inspection was put into practice in the great stockyards. Sinclair only succeeded in having the government supervise the conditions under which fresh meats could be marketed and canned. The workers were entirely lost in the shuffle, and it was not until 1939 that a real organizing campaign under the C.I.O. rallied the workers into an effective organization to better their conditions and wages.

Between 1906 and 1912, however, most of my time, outside of my own business the handling of coffees was spent in fights for free speech and in helping various groups of workers to organize in the industrial field. I was particularly active in helping in the struggles of the needle trades. Up until 1914, it was the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union who were constantly engaged in establishing their organization in the Philadelphia market. In 1914 the newly born Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, operating in the men's clothing industry, began their long struggle to organize the Philadelphia market.

Outside of the building trades, Philadelphia at that period was called the graveyard of unionism. There was certainly good reason for this and it dated back from the time in 1805 when the shoemakers in Philadelphia had been found guilty by a jury of combining to raise their wages through a union. The City of Brotherly Love, so-called, in those days was the City of Union Hate, as far as allowing the workers to organize was concerned. Judges and the police throughout the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries were constantly on the backs of the workers in almost every attempt the latter made to better their conditions and wages.

Eugene Victor Debs came into the Philadelphia picture on the labor field in the bitterly fought street railway strike of 1909. Every authority in the town was against the strikers who were struggling to get the enormous hourly wage of 25 cents. They had been working for 2 1 cents an hour. The mayor of the city was John E. Reyburn, who had succeeded Weaver, and the political gang which had been ousted for a little time in 1905 was again in full control. The Department of Public Safety, so-called, let loose the police against the strikers in every part of the city, and the mounted police were extremely vicious. They served notice on all hall proprietors that if they hired their halls for meetings of the strikers they would lose their licenses. This forced the strikers back on two labor halls in the city and even these halls were filled with plain-clothes men and uniformed police. It was difficult to get anyone to address the strikers.

It happened that Debs was in Baltimore on a lecture trip for a national Socialist paper, the Appeal to Reason. We managed to communicate with him there and he agreed to come into Philadelphia on his way to Pittsburgh and talk to the strikers at the labor lyceum hall. As his picture was very well known to the authorities we got him into town through the suburbs and took a room in another name at a third class hotel where the police would not be likely to look for him. We of course did not advertise that he was to speak. I stayed with him all day alone an experience I shall never forget.

Debs was an extremely modest person. He never indulged in heroics and had all the true humility of a great soul. He was that rather than a great intellect. He talked a' lot that day about Victor Hugo and particularly about Les Miserables. Highly emotional, he was naturally attracted by one as emotional as Hugo. Much of the day was spent in talking about books. I was particularly interested in what he had to say about his own experience when he was sent to jail for disobeying an injunction. The jail was at Woodstock, Illinois. He told me of his reception in his home town, Terre Haute, on his return from the six months he spent in jail; how the people had received him at the railroad station, put him on a truck, fastened ropes to it and drawn him to his house six blocks away. As he told the story he showed so much emotion and gratitude that one felt it had just happened the day before.

The echo to this story particularly interests me, as a little over a quarter of a century afterward, with other newspapermen, I went to Terre Haute to report his reception there when he came from the Atlanta penitentiary. Remembering his story of being drawn to his house on an open truck, I asked Dr. Madge Stephens, one of the members of the Socialist party in Terre Haute, if she remembered the incident and if there was any way of finding out if the truck still existed. She got busy and found that the truck had been in use all these years and was then stored in the yard of a livery stable. The committee succeeded in borrowing it, took it to the station with horses, then unhitching the horses attached ropes just as they had been attached in 1895. When the train came in with Gene the station was surrounded by some 25,000 people, most of whom were not Socialists. He was escorted to the truck, the ropes were manned and he was drawn to his house, just as he had been when arriving from the Woodstock jail.

In connection with this story of Debs's arrival from Atlanta: I had gone to Terre Haute believing that he was to get there on Monday. But he came from Atlanta via Washington and did not arrive in his home town until Wednesday. On Sunday I went to Gene's house and was greeted by a little man who had been sitting.

Around the year 1914 I witnessed another battle for free speech. I had met Scott Nearing, a summer neighbor of mine, when he was secretary of the Child Labor Committee of Pennsylvania in 1906. He later became an instructor of economics at the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania. He had aroused considerable antagonism among the university authorities by his plain speaking about the economic system of this country.

The Wharton School had been endowed by multimillionaire Joseph Wharton, sometimes called the Nickel King of Pennsylvania. In his letter endowing the school was a provision that it must teach the American plan meaning the protective tariff. In his lectures to his classes Nearing refused to be bound by this provision and dealt with all sides of our economic structure and pointed out the bad features as well as the good.

This would not have been so much against him had he confined his statements merely to his classes. But he was very much sought after as a speaker in public forums in the state, and speaking in these forums he naturally got into the newspapers which were read by some of the trustees of the university. He was constantly criticized by them, and they tried to squeeze him out of the faculty by not increasing his salary when others received increases.

He talked the matter over with me in the summer of 1914 and I advised him to take all the speaking engagements he could secure for the coming season and particularly all Sunday engagements, as Sunday night was what was known in the newspaper business as "hell night" for news. He would be sure to get more publicity for his ideas on that night than on other nights. I knew from his great intellectual and spiritual integrity that he was not going to allow himself to be bullyragged even by trustees of the university, some of whom were stuffed shirts with medieval ideas.

I said to Scott, "They are trying to let you out without creating an issue. Don't let them. Tell the truth as you have always done and they will probably fire you. If they do fire you such agitation for freedom of teaching will be created that you will be called to a broader field of usefulness." And it happened. He was fired from the University of Pennsylvania and later called to Toledo University (1915) where he became Professor of Social Science and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

In World War I he opposed the war, left the University of Toledo, became chairman of the People's Council of America and ran on the Socialist ticket for Congress.

During the World War I period Nearing wrote a booklet titled The Great Madness. The Rand School of Social Science published it. Hysteria was running high against anyone who dared to give voice to pacifist principles. Nearing was arrested and indicted as the author of the book. The trial produced one of the most remarkable verdicts in legal history.

Nearing went on the stand and proceeded to defend his right to give voice to his principles in print and then, in what was a veritable classroom lecture to the jury and judge, he vindicated this right. By the time his statement was finished you could hardly see him for the stack of books covering the defense of freedom of press and speech from which he had quoted. The jury was charmed with his frankness and with his refusal to take advantage of any legal technicalities. They went out and brought in a verdict that Nearing, the author of the book, was not guilty but that the Rand School, which published it, should pay a fine of $3,000.

While the jury was out I walked the corridor with the prosecuting attorney in the old post office building in New York. The attorney made no attempt to hide his admiration of Nearing's character, though in the trial he had been extremely bitter. He said, "You know, this man Nearing has made no attempt to egage in any legal quibbles like some other defendants whom I have been prosecuting during this period. He just told us he had written the book, that everything in it was true. He then paraded before us authority after authority backing up his rights to express his opinions."

For the last thirty years Nearing has continued his truth-telling career, commenting on current events both in print and by voice. The reactionaries in politics, in industry and in the church have done everything possible to prevent his being heard and too many times have been successful. He keeps his independence by operating a maple sugar farm in Vermont. Nearing comes of that American stock which could be neither bent nor broken, and went into the wilderness and conquered it.

Writing of Nearing reminds me of a debate he once had with Clarence Darrow.

Darrow, after all, was as temperamental as any artist is supposed to be. Injustice always aroused him to anger and often to action, but he certainly had no definite philosophy regarding life. That is, unless his constant talk about the futility of everything was a philosophy. I remember spending an entire day with him in a smoking compartment on a train between New York and Chicago. He had been reading Housman, the British poet. Poetry that is poignant with pessimism. At various times during the day he poured out quotation after quotation from The Shropshire Lad, backed up by his own comments futility everywhere.

A few years afterward he came to New York for this debate with Nearing on the question, "Is Life Worth the Living?", taking the side that it was not. I was editor of the New York Call at the time. By one of our reporters, I sent Darrow a note to the effect that if he won the debate by proving that life was not worth the living, for God's sake to be logical and commit suicide, giving me a good front-page story on which I could put a head, "Darrow, Noted Attorney, Proves Life Not Worth Living."

As a matter of fact, Darrow enjoyed pretending to be miserable. This does not mean that he was not sincere. It was just a peculiar twist in his mentality. Perhaps he resented much more than those of duller mentality the misery which exists in the world. When he wanted to, he could jar you loose from enjoyment better than any man I have known.

One night at a dinner celebrating the anniversary of an institution with which I was connected, and which Darrow had helped form in its early days, he proceeded to tell us that while the institution had been successful, and functioned along the lines for which it was founded, it had lost the early spirit of its members. And for fifteen minutes a bad time was had by all.

This peace-lover, this sincere denouncer of war, turned his back on all he had stood for when World War I came to this country in 1917. Though he had been the attorney in many a case involving a victim of the ruling class, he took no part in the legal defense of those who had the courage of their convictions and spoke out against the war from 1917 to 1919. Of course his reaction was just a part of the general hysteria, but one expected quite a different attitude on his part.

In sharp contrast to this statement by Wiggin is a recent comment by Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Sr., Professor of History, Harvard University, in his book, The Rise of Modern America. Schlesinger says, "Banking houses, instead of giving clients conservative advice, became high pressure salesmen for investments, domestic and foreign, of which they knew no more than what the roseate prospectuses told. People withdrew lifelong savings, and even mortgaged their homes in the hope of doubling and trebling their money ... In the late October, 1929, the crash came . . . The great depression had begun."