Jeeze this only took a minute:
1. For one thing, Goldberg claims that it was Sinclair’s “The Jungle” that provoked Theodore Roosevelt to coin the term “muckraker.” Sorry, it was a series of 1906 magazine articles by David Graham Philips.
2. More critically: Pasco describes Moore as “the men’s lawyer” (meaning Sacco and Vanzetti). In fact, when he met with Sinclair, he was their former lawyer—fired over key disputes on how to handle the case. Goldberg repeats this error. Would this make Moore, perhaps, more likely to turn on the men?
3. Next, the whole Sinclair-Moore conversation is hardly a scoop. It is recounted, for example, in the main Sinclair biography to date, “Upton Sinclair: American Rebel,” by Leon Harris, published in 1975. That book finds Sinclair-- mirroring the newly-found letter-- telling a correspondent precisely what Moore said in that same 1929 meeting. He asks leftwing writer Robert Minor to keep the Moore charges quiet for the time being as he wants to finish his novel and he feared there was a real possibility “that some anarchist might think it is his duty to keep me from finishing the book.”
4. Further, Anthony Arthur, whose new biography of Sinclair will be published this June, provided excerpts from the book to Spiegelman. They show that in other letters, Sinclair quotes Moore as not even being sure both men were guilty. "Moore said neither man ever admitted it to him,” Arthur writes.
In other words, it was only Moore’s opinion: hardly the “unvarnished truth,” as Goldberg presents it. Yet Goldberg charged that Sinclair “knew” that the pair were guilty and “quite simply, lied.” |
