LITTLE STEEL

This is the first important book Upton Sinclair has written since Oil. Singularly timely, it seems almost as though the story were woven out of the very fabric of the LaFollette findings, for in this story of an Ohio town, built on "little steel", Sinclair reveals what goes on back of the diffiiculties to achieve organization. The owners, the press, the church, the school, the politicians all line up to block organization. The story revolves around the owner, out- moded, more interested in stamps than in labor problems, and made a tool of unscrupulous industrial counsellors, who play both ends against the middle, to their own benefit. The Reds are a banner of fear. The youngest daughter has married a leftish young newspaper man, and they have to leave town. While the rest of the family plot to get the old man into an institution. An old friend and eccentric foils the plot, and together they escape south, to the younger daughter, only to wind up in jail, with a chance to see life from the other side. Well paced story, and without being partisan or a treatise in fiction form, it is definitely "in the news". Sinclair can write.