Upton Sinclair and the Not-So-Roaring 1920s

Like his friend and colleague H.G. Wells Upton Sinclair's left-wing convictions should have made him an opponent of the First World War--and indeed Sinclair did oppose the war for an extended period (Lenin himself commending his attitude), but then became a propagandist for the war, and afterward regretted what he had done.

Sinclair expresses dismay at the post-World War I state of the country in especially pointed fashion in Money Writes!. Where he had for a time been prepared to champion the defeat of "the Kaiser" in the name of Woodrow Wilson's professed ideals, it was now his view that he was " one of the hundred and ten million suckers who swallowed the hook of the British official propaganda." Sure that rather than the piece of plain and simple German villainy it was made out to be in the war years he now holds that "history will not acquit any nation of guilt, and the diplomatic conspirators of France and Russia will carry the heaviest load," Sinclair recounted the shameful idiocies of the war fever, some more grave, some less (like "calling sauerkraut 'liberty cabbage'"), and how they "taught our money-masters that there is literally nothing we cannot be made to believe." In the end the war and what it led to across the world (not least, revolution) produced a climate of political reaction that buried Progressivism and what there had been of the left and of a labor movement in the country, putting into place "spies, blacklist and terror" that reduced the worker's right to the principle that "[e]ach individual steel-worker may bargain on equal terms with the most gigantic corporation in the world, and if he doesn't like the terms, he will be slugged, or thrown into the can, or if he is a foreigner, shipped back home to be shot by his native Fascisti" of whom American business openly approved. Indeed, where "America . . . once went wild over Kossuth" it was now an ally of figures like "Horthy, Mussolini and Rivera," while waging the wars that made General Smedley Butler declare that "war is a racket."