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
