A couple of years ago I wrote a column about a family trip my mother took to the coast in the 1920s. It was an almost yearly summer vacation spent with Kimbrough cousins at Aston Hall, their beach house at Mississippi City between Gulfport and Biloxi.

The world of the early 1900s was in some ways much like today. There was unrest as labor fought with Ford and Rockefeller to gain better pay and working conditions. There was tension between conservatives and socialists.

That tension reared its head in the family when, in 1913, Mary Craig Kimbrough married Upton Sinclair, who was not only a divorced man but even worse — a socialist. Mary Craig was my great-aunt Lucille Hardy Kimbrough’s sister-in-law.

Sinclair was a leading socialist and labor reformer of the day and later a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. A recent 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 socialists known as “Muckrakers,” a term President Theodore Roosevelt used to refer to them, though not necessarily in a negative fashion as he had 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. Sinclair won over Mary Craig’s mother fairly quickly, 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 hold respectful and friendly discussions on social and political differences.

The Sinclairs often stayed at Aston Hall and enjoyed life on the coast. On one of their visits there, Sinclair learned that by then former president Theodore Roosevelt was visiting Pass Christian.

Sinclair wanted to talk to Roosevelt about the Colorado Coalfield War in 1914, 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 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 Roosevelt, but they would allow Sinclair a 10-minute meeting.

Sinclair went to Pass Christian and was allowed to have a short meeting with the former president while others, including the governor of Louisiana, waited. Sinclair and Roosevelt began talking and the 10 minutes became 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 for two hours.

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 imagination ran wild. They had all sorts of visions as to what a muckraker might look like. Would it be some mud-covered creature from the swamp or 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.

It’s a pity that today too many people are letting political differences break up 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 through friendships that often minds, over time, can be changed.

This 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.

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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