There is so much bitterness over politics in our country that an expanded version of a column I wrote five years ago is warranted.
It includes stories of politics and family relations challenged by strongly held political views.

The world of the early 1900s, though different, was in some ways much like today. There was unrest as labor fought with Ford, Rockefeller and other giants of industry to gain better pay and working conditions. There was tension between conservatives and socialists. Those tensions sometimes even led to violence.

That tension reared its head in my family in 1913 when Mary Craig Kimbrough married Upton Sinclair, who was not only a divorced man but even worse a socialist. Mary Craig was my great-aunt Lucile Hardy Kimbrough’s sister-in-law. Upton Sinclair was a leading socialist and labor reformer of the day and later a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. A popular movie, “There Will Be Blood,” was a screen adaptation of his bestselling book from the 1940s, “Oil.” Sinclair was one of a group of reformers and socialist known as “Muckrakers.” He had been referred to by President Theodore Roosevelt with that term, though not necessarily in a negative fashion, as Sinclair later found Roosevelt could be sympathetic to helping working people.

However, the Kimbrough patriarch and father of Mary Craig was Judge Kimbrough, a prominent lawyer and banker in Greenwood, and he was not fond of socialists. Mary Craig’s mother was fairly quickly won over by Sinclair, but it took Judge Kimbrough a good bit longer.

When the judge first found out his daughter would be marrying a socialist, he removed her portrait from the living room wall and moved it to the attic. Over time, the judge and Sinclair overcame their strong political differences and got along, even being able to respectfully discuss social and political differences.

The Sinclairs often enjoyed staying at Aston Hall, the Kimbrough’s beach house at Mississippi City between Gulfport and Biloxi. On one of their visits there, Upton learned that former President Theodore Roosevelt was visiting Pass Christian. Sinclair wanted to talk to Roosevelt about the Colorado Coalfield War, in which the camp of the striking United Mine Workers Union had been attacked by coal company private guards and Colorado National Guard soldiers in 1914. In what became known as the Ludlow Massacre, 21 people in the miner’s camp, including women and children, were killed. Sinclair contacted Roosevelt’s staff and was informed there were many people who wanted to meet with him, but they would allow Sinclair a ten minute meeting.

Upton Sinclair went to Pass Christian and was allowed to have a 10-minute meeting with the President while others, including the governor of Louisiana, waited. Sinclair and Roosevelt began talking, and the 10 minutes stretched to two hours. At the conclusion, Roosevelt said he would see what he could do about the situation in Colorado. When Sinclair departed, he walked out past an unhappy governor who had been kept waiting.

Much like Judge Kimbrough, Columbus cousins were not excited about ties to a socialist even if just by marriage. At first, they wanted nothing to do with Sinclair, that is until they all wound up together at a social function. After, as my grandmother would put it, they were heavy into the sauce, they discovered that so long as politics were not discussed they all really liked each other. There followed visits where no one but family would be told there was a visitor or who it was.

My uncle Carleton Billups and his first cousin Tom Hardy grew up together, and Tom once told me a story about one of the greatest disappointments of their childhood. When they were about 7 years old and at Whitehall in Columbus, they heard my grandfather say, “It will be a grand time tonight. The muckraker is coming here.” Tom said his and Carleton’s imaginations ran wild. They had all sorts of visions as to what a muckraker might look like. Would it be some mud and vine covered creature from the swamp or who knows what?

Just before the appointed hour of arrival, they eased onto the landing of the stairway in the front hall of Whitehall so they could peer through the balustrades and watch the front door. Tom said they were still pondering on what a muckraker might be or look like when the door opened. He said it was one of the worst disappointments of their childhood, for the muckraker looked like a normal person. Into Whitehall had walked Upton Sinclair, joining a gathering where friendships and family were more important than political differences.

It’s a pity that today too many people are letting political differences break up old friendships or prevent new ones from being made. Just because people disagree about politics or even social issues is no reason not to be friends, for it is often through friendships that minds can best be changed.

I recall another family political story of years ago. In the early 1870s there was a congressional hearing on the KKK in Columbus. My great-great-grandfather James Sykes, though not a member or associate of the Klan, was asked if he would testify as a local citizen and businessman. Sykes said he had no problem testifying and did so. One of the congressmen asked him his opinion of the federal government. He replied that he considered it nothing more than a bunch of incompetent scoundrels and horse thieves. He was then asked if he preferred the former Confederate government. He quickly responded that he considered them just as bad a bunch of incompetent scoundrels and horse thieves.

When I first wrote a version of this, it was an especially fun column to write as I spent a lot of time on the phone with two of my favorite people, my cousins Ellen Kimbrough Upton and Orman Kimbrough. Today I have again enjoyed spending much of the day on the phone trading stories with cousins.

Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].

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