Chapter XVI: An Interview on Marriage

Two or three days after the Shredded Wheat episode, there called on me a pleasant lady who introduced herself as a friend of an old friend of mine. She wanted to ask me some questions; and as I was just going in to lunch and had an engagement immediately afterwards, I asked this lady to lunch with me. It appeared that a man and woman in the city had announced the completion of a five or ten years’ “trial marriage.” Would I say what I thought about this couple, and about “trial marriages” in general? I have always been willing to say what I thought about any subject, so I explained that while I was not an advocate of “trial marriages,” it was apparent that this couple were sincere, and one must respect people who stood by their convictions in the face of prejudice and ridicule.

I went on to talk to this lady on the subject of modern marriages. I cannot, of course, state word for word what I said, but I know my views, which have not changed in any way, so I can practically duplicate the interview.

In any competitive society, woman is necessarily condemned to a position of inferiority by the burdens of maternity; so, either she has to suppress her love-nature and her desire for children, or she must find some man who will take care of her. In a society whose standards are pecuniary, that is to say, whose members are esteemed in proportion to the amount of their worldly possessions, the average woman is forced into a mercenary attitude toward love and marriage. In weighing the various men who offer themselves, she will generally have to balance money against love; and the more corrupt the society becomes—that is to say, the greater the economic inequality—the more mercenary will become the attitude of women, the more they will weigh money in the balance, and the less they will weigh love. This is particularly true of the older women, who know the world and the ways of the world, and who seek to control the marriages made by their young.

In the course of this abstract discourse I gave some instances. I told of a couple of mothers I had watched, marrying off their daughters to what they called “eligible” men—that is to say, men who could support the daughters in luxury. I said: “Those girls were practically sold.” I told of a young girl being married to a hard and dull old business man. I told of another young girl being married to a rich man who had syphilis. I told of another young girl, who happened to be intimately known to myself and my wife, who had been in the plight of a school-teacher—that is to say, facing a life-time of drudgery, and the ultimate breakdown of her health—and who had married a middle-aged corrupt politician. We had watched the progress of this marriage. We knew that the husband was unfaithful to his wife, and we knew that the wife knew it, and we knew that for the sake of a home and fashionable clothes she was parting with the finer qualities of her nature. Said I: “We have seen this woman’s character deteriorating stage by stage; and when we see things like that, it almost makes us feel ashamed of being married.”

Now, of course, this was a foolish remark; but it was no worse than foolish, was it? It wasn’t precisely criminal. But see what was done with it!

I parted from the lady who had been my guest at lunch, and next morning, January 30, 1909, a member of my little theatrical company called me up in excitement and distress of mind, to ask had I seen that morning’s “Examiner.” I obtained a copy, and on the front page I saw a picture of myself and a picture of my wife—that stolen picture about which I have previously told. The story had a scare headline reading:

UPTON SINCLAIR SORRY HE WED. SAYS CEREMONY IS FARCE

Underneath the pictures was the caption:

Upton Sinclair and the wife he declared yesterday he is sorry that he
married.

I will quote a few paragraphs from the article; you will appreciate the jolly tone of it:

Upton Sinclair says he’s sorry he’s married.

He said it right out in a calm, matter-of-fact tone of voice, and the
waiter almost dropped the butter-plate, well trained as the particular
waiter who happened to be leaning over the back of Mr. Sinclair’s
chair with this particular butter-plate happened to be.

As Mr. Sinclair talked he threw a handful of California raisins into
his dish of Waldorf salad and watched with evident pleasure the
contrast of the dull purple of the raisins with the pale silver of the
celery and the gold of the aspic mayonnaise.

“Why am I so prejudiced against marriage? Why shouldn’t I be
prejudiced against it? You might as well ask me why I am so prejudiced
against slavery—or against thievery—or if it comes to that against
murder either. Marriage in this day is nothing but legalized—slavery;
that’s the most polite word to call it, I fancy. The average married
woman is bought and sold just exactly as much as any horse or any dog
is bought. Marriage—ough! It really isn’t a subject to be discussed at
the table!”

Needless to say, here was another occasion where the concrete wall became a news-channel. This story was telegraphed to all the Hearst newspapers, and published with the same photographs in New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The substance of it was telegraphed abroad and laid before the readers of my books, not merely in England and France and Germany and Norway and Sweden, but in South Africa and Australia, in Yokohama and Hong Kong and Bombay. Please do not think that I am just giving you a geography lesson; I made a memorandum at the time concerning this particular story, which hurt me more than anything that had ever happened to me.

It chanced that my three one-act plays were to have their opening performance in San Francisco that evening. So when I was called on the stage to make a speech, I spread out a copy of the “Examiner” and told what had happened. Next morning the “Examiner” took up the cudgels, and published an article by “Annie Laurie,” the interviewing lady, upbraiding me for “playing the cry-baby” and refusing to stand by the words that I had spoken. Thinking the matter over, I realized that quite possibly “Annie Laurie” was partly sincere; she may have thought that the interview she wrote represented me! She was so vulgar that she saw no difference between the phrases I had used and the twist she had given to them.

This misquotation by ignorant and vulgar reporters happens not merely to muck-rakers and Socialist agitators; it happens to the most respectable persons. For example, here is Professor J. Laurence Laughlin, of Chicago University; he hides himself in the shade of his classic elms, and does his best to preserve his dignity, but in vain. In an address to a graduating class he urged the class “to seek a sense of form—in dress, manners, speech and intellectual habits. In antithesis it was pointed out that we had lived too long in a kingdom of slouch.” The New York papers got it by telegraph in this fashion:

The wiggling, swaying movements of American women on the streets and
the stage have made them the ridicule of all Europe. They have a glide
and a wiggle that makes them both undignified and ungraceful.

Whereupon the horrified professor writes to the “New York Nation”:

Of course, I never said any such thing, but papers in all parts of the
country could not know that the report was stupid fiction, and that
the quotation marks were absolutely false. Yet in this form the above
vulgar paragraphs have gone the length and breath of the country as my
utterances.

To understand such incidents you must know the economics of reporting. The person who misquoted Professor Laughlin was probably a student, scratching for his next week’s board-bill, and knowing that he would get two or three dollars for a startling story, and nothing at all for a true story—it would be judged “dull,” and would be “ditched.” In my own case, the person to blame was a “star writer”; she was working on a fancy salary, earned by her ability to cook up sensations, to keep her name and her picture on the front page. If this “star” had gone back to her city editor and said, “Upton Sinclair is a good fellow; he gave me an interesting talk about the corruption of modern marriages,” the editor would have scented some preachment and said, “Well, give him two sticks.” But instead she came into the office exclaiming, “Gee, I’ve got a hot one! That fool muck-raker tore up his marriage certificate before my eyes! He says that married women are sold like horses and he’s sorry he’s married to his wife!” So the city editor exclaimed, “Holy Smoke!”—seeing a story he could telegraph to the main offices in New York and Chicago, thus attracting to himself the attention of the heads of the Hearst machine.

For you must understand that while the city editor of the “San Francisco Examiner” will be getting three or four thousand dollars a year, above him are big positions of responsibility and power—Arthur Brisbane, getting ninety or a hundred thousand, Ihmsen, Carvalho, von Hamm and the rest, getting fifteen or twenty thousand. If you are to be lifted into those higher regions, you must show one thing and one thing only; it is called “a nose for news,” and it means a nose for the millions of pennies which come pouring into the Hearst coffers every day. From top to bottom every human being in the vast Hearst machine, man, woman and office-boy, has every nerve and sinew stretched to the task of bringing in that flood of pennies; each is fighting for a tiny bit of prestige, a tiny addition to his personal share of the flood. And always, of course, from top to bottom the thing to be considered is the million-headed public—what will tickle its fancies, what particular words printed in large red and black letters will cause it to pay out each day the greatest possible number of pennies.

In conflict with such motives, considerations of honor, truth and justice count for absolutely nothing. The men and women who turn out the Hearst newspapers were willing, not merely to destroy my reputation, they have been willing again and again to drive perfectly innocent men and women to ruin and suicide, in order that the copper flood may continue to pour in. They have been willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war. Mr. Hearst’s newspaper machine telegraphed that vile misrepresentation of me all the way round the world; it telegraphed my repudiation of it nowhere, and I was helpless in the matter. Millions of people were caused to think of me as a vulgar and fatuous person—and some of them were permitted to denounce me in Mr. Hearst’s own papers! The following contribution by the Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst, a sensational clergyman of New York, was featured in the “New York Evening Journal” with large headlines and a portrait of the reverend physiognomy:

Upton Sinclair seems to be a person so profusely developed on the
animal side that marriage is not able to be conceived of by him as
being other than a mere matter of commerce between two parties of
opposite sexes, and sex simply a principle that starts and stops at
the level of the physical without ever mounting up into the region of
intellect and spirit.

A pig will contemplate even a garden of flowers with a pig’s eye, and
instead of arranging those flowers into a bouquet will bore into them
with his snout.

Mr. Sinclair’s doctrine is that of free love, and matrimony a physical
luxury and an evanescent convenience.

This comes dangerously near to companioning him with the cattle and
makes the marriage relation an elegant reproduction of the nuptials of
the pasture.

Also I quote a few scattered sentences from a long editorial in the “Commercial-Appeal” of Memphis, Tennessee, an extremely conservative family newspaper, widely-read throughout the South:

A few years ago a young man by the name of Upton Sinclair wrote a
novel about Packingtown. We do not recall the name of the book; but it
should have been entitled “The Slaughterhouse.” It was just about the
most nauseating novel that has ever been written by an American. It
was a compound of blood and filth and slaughter, commingled with vice
and shame. It was the kind of a book to be handled with a pair of
tongs.... But recently Mr. Sinclair has aired his views upon
matrimony, and what he has to say is simply shocking to decency.... It
is hard for any decent person to understand such an attitude. If there
is any one thing that distinguishes man from cats and dogs and other
animals it is matrimony.... If Upton Sinclair’s offensive philosophy
should be embraced, it would mean the absolute destruction of family
life.... The Sinclair philosophy is the philosophy of lust and
animalism and it could only emanate from a diseased and perverted
mind.

I have quoted the above because there is a “human interest” story connected with it, which will perhaps bring home to you the harm which dishonest journalism does. For something like thirty years the “Memphis Commercial-Appeal” has been read by the honorable and high-minded old Southern gentleman who is now my father-in-law. Like all good Americans, this gentleman believes what he reads in his morning paper; like most busy Americans, he gets the greater part of his ideas about the world outside from his morning paper. He read this editorial, and got a certain impression of Upton Sinclair; and so you may imagine his feelings when, two or three years later, he learned that his favorite daughter intended to marry the possessor of this “diseased and perverted mind.” He took the beautiful oil painting of his favorite daughter which hangs in his drawing-room, and turned it to the wall. And that may bring a smile to you, but it brought no smile to the parties concerned; for in the South, you must understand, it is the custom for daughters to be devotedly attached to their fathers, and also to be devotedly obedient to their fathers. If you had seen the tears I saw, you would know that this old gentleman’s daughter was not an exception to the rule.

And since we have started the subject, perhaps I might complete the “human interest” story by stating that after all the tears had been shed and the marriage was a couple of years in the past, I went down to visit this old Southern gentleman. It was a queer introduction; because the old gentleman was horribly embarrassed, and I, being impersonal and used to being called bad names, had no idea of it. After we had chatted for an hour or two I retired, and the daughter said: “Well, Papa, what do you think of him?”

The old gentleman is quaintly shy and reticent, and had probably never made an apology in his life before. He did it all in one sentence: “I see I overspoke myself.”