Letters to Judd
An American Workingman
By
UPTON SINCLAIR
Published by the Author
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
LETTERS TO JUDD
BY
Upton Sinclair
INTRODUCTION
Judd is an old carpenter who has done odd jobs on our place for thepast ten years. Just how old he is I don’t know, but he’s pretty old;his hands are gnarled and calloused and his finger nails chewed up andbroken by hammer blows; there are knotted veins in his forehead and hishair is grey and thin. But he works like a beaver, and don’t you everhint that he should slow up—he will hoot at you, and say that he canlick any young feller with one hand. He will hitch his harness intoplace—he has a rupture, and wears some kind of truss—and will slideunder the house to connect up a gas pipe, and come crawling out withhis hair and eyes full of cobwebs, and my wife will say, “Come out ofthere, you old gopher.” He adores her when she talks to him like that,he would lift the side of the house to please her. The two of themengage in violent arguments as to how a door ought to be hung or a treepruned. “Nobody ever did it like that,” Judd declares—and considersthat sufficient reason. He does it her way, so long as she stands overhim; but if she leaves, he is apt to finish it his way—for, after all,it is manifest that a man knows better than a woman.
Ten years ago our home was a row of vacant lots on a hillside, coveredwith weeds and rusty cans. Now it is an old-fashioned Southern housewith a long veranda and a row of white columns, surrounded by rosegardens and grape arbors and fig trees and oranges. The house was madeout of five old houses, bought for a little more than nothing, andmoved onto the place and joined together; the gardens were made by mywife sticking baby plants into the ground, and holding a hose over themall day and part of the night. I helped a little; and two school boyshelped after hours; but Judd was the Hercules who did most of thismighty labor. He would rout us out of bed in the morning, and many atime we have worked after dark, to get a roof over something beforeit rained, or finish a concrete job before it set. What is there wehaven’t done together?—digging ditches and setting fence-posts, hoeingweeds and pruning trees, laying shingles and tacking down tarpaper,cleaning old furniture and painting an automobile, moving a garageand installing a sprinkler system. And always with a presiding femalegenius hovering over us, exhorting and appraising, mostly on the debitside! Never was there such a woman for saving, and for devising, andfor utilizing. Once Judd in his digging came upon a rusty iron[Pg 2] spike,and showed it secretly to me. “Better throw it over the hill quick,” hesaid. “If the missus sees that, she’ll start a railroad!”
When the house was done, there was a party. The living room isextra fancy, with high, peaked ceiling, and lights way up, dim andmysterious; in a million years you’d never guess that it was once anold tailor shop, bou