Radical Innocent by Anthony Arthur

Author:Anthony Arthur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307431653
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Sinclair interrupted his pursuit of his next Dead Hand target, American education, to toss off a novel in six weeks that he called 100%, ironically subtitled “The Story of a Patriot.” He published it himself in October 1920 as a cautionary tale about the evil effects of the government’s campaign against the “Red Terror” following the war. Louis Untermeyer, one of the few critics to comment on 100%, called it a “cumulative record of blackmail, espionage, intimidation, intrigue, unwarranted assaults, invasions, property destructions, paid witnesses, illegal jailings, horse-whippings, lynchings, frame-ups, ‘patriotic’ murders; an orgy of confiscation, Bolshevik-baiting, mad hysteria, mad fear, and a madder frenzy.”

Somewhat more substantial was Sinclair’s collection of columns from The New Appeal called The Book of Life, also self-published, in September 1921. Many of his readers had come to regard Sinclair not merely as a political guide but as an expert in all fields, including mental, physical, and spiritual health. He responded to their many letters eagerly, pleased to tell them “how to live, how to find health and happiness and success, how to work and how to play”—everything up to and including “what books to read.” He poked fun at himself for taking on such “a large order, as the boys phrase it!”—but he was serious about his advice, much of it stemming from his own experience, and some of it recycled from his correspondence with his son, David, now a college student at the University of Wisconsin.

David had graduated from high school in Greenwood, Mississippi, in June 1920. During that summer he wrote to ask his father’s advice on choosing a college. Sinclair thought David was too immature to leave Mississippi and the security represented by Craig’s family. He urged him to attend a local agricultural or trade tech school. David was desperate to get out of Mississippi and to win his father’s approval by taking on a more challenging course of study. He suggested that he might attend Stanford, less than four hundred miles from Los Angeles. He even added a note to Craig, touchingly insincere. He was sorry to hear she had injured herself in a fall: “you are a mighty unlucky person, as well as a very kind and unselfish person.”

Sinclair vetoed Stanford on the laughable ground that it was too dangerous: some of its heavy stone buildings had tumbled into dust during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Besides, if David were to fall ill again with the “flue,” as he had earlier, Craig would feel compelled to come up and care for him. Her own health was still precarious, undermined by constant stresses—she had been up half the night trying to catch a horse that had broken into the orchard. David should consider attending college “somewhere in the Midwest” (where any distant illness presumably would not trouble Craig). Sinclair suggested Kansas or Wisconsin. Wherever David went, of course, he would have “to work and fight your way as I did myself,” with no financial support from Sinclair: it built character when a young man put himself through college.

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