Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/99



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