Upton Sinclair

“ They're in a strange country, and one person tells them one thing, and another tells them something else. The masters and their agents say: 'Don't trust the union agitators. They're a lot of grafters, they live easy and don't have to work. They take your money and call you out on strike, and you lose your jobs and your home; they sell you out, maybe, and go on to some other place to repeat the same trick.' And the workers think maybe that's true; they haven't the wit to see that if the union leaders are corrupt, it must be because the bosses are buying them. ”

“ Also Hal was interested in his attitude towards the weaknesses of working-people. The "inertia" of the poor, which caused so many people to despair for them--their cowardice and instability--these were things about which Hal had heard all his life. "You can't help them," people would say. "They're dirty and lazy, they drink and shirk, they betray each other. They've always been like that." The idea would be summed up in a formula: "You can't change human nature!" Even Mary Burke, herself one of the working-class, spoke of the workers in this angry and scornful way. ”

“ No individual man can do it--it's 'down the canyon' with him if he mentions the law. In Western City our union people go to the state officials, but they never do anything--and why? They know we haven't got the men behind us! It's the same with the politicians as it is with the bosses--the union is the thing that counts!"
Hal found this an entirely new argument. "People don't realise that idea--that men have to be organised to get their _legal_ rights." ”