Free Republic

September 12, 1905, a black day in history for America! On this day, about 100 people, including Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Walter Lippman(Dir, Council on Foreign Relations), and Clarence Darrow, met in NYC, to plot the overthrow of American culture, including Christianity, and replace it with the teachings of Karl Marx. They named their new organization the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, later renamed League for Industrial Democracy. Their plan? To infiltrate the education system, and ultimately, labor unions, churches, government, and all other American institutions, to promulgate Marxist/Socialist ideas into American society. They started by organizing chapters at colleges & universities,...

Poke and Sniff: A Lesson from 1906In 1906, Upton Sinclair came out with his book The Jungle, and it shocked the nation by documenting the horror of the meat-packing industry. People were being boiled in vats and sent to larders. Rat waste was mixed with meat. And so on.As a result, the Federal Meat Inspection Act passed Congress, and consumers were saved from ghastly diseases. The lesson is that government is essential to stop enterprise from poisoning us with its food.To some extent, this mythology accounts for the wide support for government’s involvement in stopping disease spread today, including Covid...

Ten years ago this coming February, George Zimmermann shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on a rainy night in Sanford, Florida. Without intending, Zimmerman triggered a dark new phase in the history of progressive America. Beginning with the Sacco and Vanzetti case in the 1920s, the left lied to conceal the guilt of the guilty. Yes, Virginia, those two bad boys were guilty. Upton Sinclair, who “proved” their innocence in his epic novel Boston, knew they were guilty. "My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe,” Sinclair confided to a friend, “I will be called a...

Liberals are constantly telling conservatives they are living in an "alternate reality" whenever they want to shut down discussion of the facts. The hilarious aspect of this is that it is usually the liberals who live in an alternate reality, or reel-ality, since they often rely on movies for their information which turns out to be misinformation.A recent example of this is the Netflix movie Mank about Hollywood screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz which has been cited over and over again as a realistic portrayal, especially his support of 1934 California gubernatorial candidate of socialist leanings, Upton Sinclair. The basic plot of...

A critically acclaimed young adult author has been “canceled” and dropped by her agent after vociferously defending classic books in a Twitter-fueled rage. Jessica Cluess, the author of the popular “Kingdom of Fire” series (among others) picked a fight with an anti-racist and anti-bias educator Lorena Germán who founded the #DisruptTexts movement which aims to get more works by people of color into schools and to look critically at works by famous white “classic” authors. “Did y’all know that many of the ‘classics’ were written before the 50s? Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this...

In his book The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation, Upton Sinclair makes an interesting observation: (page 299/300) And now the War has broken upon the world, and caught the churches, like everything else, in its mighty current; the clergy and the congregations are confronted by pressing national needs, they are forced to take notice of a thousand new problems, to engage in a thousand practical activities. No one can see the end of this - any more than he can see the end of the vast upheaval in politics and industry. But we who are trained in...

Jim Geraghty published an interesting article the other day about 'Narrative Journalism' titled "What If the Media’s ‘Narrative Journalism’ Harms Their Own Causes? It has been widely discussed in light of what it contains, so I am going to go right for what is outside the box. Narrative Journalism, in this context, also necessarily implies narrative protesters. The narrative being pushed by the journalist does not have to be true by any means, but to the protesters, it is very real. The challenge is that we as citizens are supposed to be able to trust the journalist establishment without fear...

Widely studied in institutions of higher and lower learning, Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle is commonly presented as a first-hand representation of turn-of-the-century (19 to 20) urban life. Go to USA.gov, type in his name in the search engine, and see how many school districts show up in use of his opus. Yet and still, can you trust the fiction of a man who proved himself to be so factually, if not ethically, challenged? “Many of those who later became useful stooges of the party went through their own baptism of mud at the hands of the comrades,” Eugene Lyons...

Whether it was Norman Thomas who said it in a 1944 speech or it was Upton Sinclair who wrote it in a 1951 letter to Norman Thomas is unclear, but it is definitely true that the origin of the statement emerged somehow between the two Socialist Party members of the past. The statement is usually quoted as coming from Norman Thomas, who is believed to have said, "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - He was a man for whom the term muckraker was coined, a crusading journalist and novelist who never hesitated to expose scandal at the highest levels of government and business. But now the integrity of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Upton Sinclair is being questioned 38 years after his death because of the discovery of a letter he wrote in 1929. Quotes from the letter in recent news reports make it seem that the man who exposed the horrors of the meat-packing industry in the 1906 book "The Jungle" covered up a confession from a defense lawyer that...

Why is it that liberals, progressives, leftists, humanists and the like seeking a brave new world for the rest of us often resort to lying or cheating to turn their vision into reality? Upton Sinclair was the socialist author of The Jungle in 1906. He meant his book as an attack on what he and other socialists termed “wage-slavery” but the book’s main claim to fame was as an exposé of unsanitary practices in the meat processing industry. It was Sinclair’s sort of writing that President Theodore Roosevelt termed as “muckraking.” Sinclair also wrote The Profits of Religion, a non-fiction...

Well, folks, after defending Sacco and Vanzettir for EIGHT decades, historians are finally beginning to admit that they were, in fact, guilty. Moreover, if you take a look at the comments, you will see that historians have known for three decades (at least) that their stories regarding Sacco-Vanzetti story were false. While this trial is always pictured as one where a WASP judge simply bullied two Italian immigrants to the electric chair, Upton Sinclair actually was afraid to release the truth because: 1.) He was afraid he would be killed by the anarchists (not the WASPy Judge;) 2. He was...

"... an envelope ... caught his eye... The return address read, "Upton Sinclair..." "... I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story." "The story was "Boston," Sinclair's ... condemnation of the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory..." "... Sinclair met with ... the men's attorney..." "..."I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote. " … He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a...

Upton Sinclair's "Pious Home City" of Pasadena and the Revival of Fake "Fascism" (See bottom of this 1934 political flyer at this link: http://www.ssa.gov/history/pics/epic6.gif) Upton Sinclair's novel "It Can't Happen Here" has been recently re-issued by the American Library (with a blood splattered cover no less) See: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/12/18/public_enemy/?page=full. Sinclair's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here" was a cautionary tale about America's descent into fascism. If you don't believe the political Left is not again beating the drums of fascist charges, this time against the Bush Administration, read Hannah Naiditch's current hyperbolic column in the Pasadena Weekly entitled "Democracy Now?" at...

TORONTO - The American science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein is known for such classic novels as Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. A new book reveals that Heinlein, at least early in his life, was a Socred, a believer in the Social Credit movement that came to power in Alberta in 1935. Heinlein's long-lost first novel, For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs, is scheduled for publication in January. It imagines a future America patterned on 1930s Alberta. Heinlein wrote the novel in the late 1930s. It tells the story...