pamphlets which were to get modern America down on paper with a
fullness and a freedom never yet achieved in any other literary form.
This initial work was _The Profits of Religion_, announced as
“a study of supernaturalism from a new point of view--as a source
of income and a shield of privilege”. If the point of view was not
actually new, it had at least not been embodied in so ambitious a
review. Its manner was new, at least since Voltaire. Scarcely since
then had there been such a ruthless showing up of sacred institutions.
It was not a matter of arguing about creeds; it was a revelation of the
facts about the actual function of churches and churchmen in a class
society. It was a more devastating book than can readily be imagined.
A liberal clergyman, the Rev. John Haynes Holmes, wrote of it: “I must
confess that it has fairly made me writhe to read these pages, not
because they are untrue or unfair, but on the contrary, because I know
them to be the real facts. I love the church as I love my home, and
therefore it is no pleasant experience to be made to face such a story
as this which you have told. It had to be done, however, and I am glad
you have done it, for my interest in the church, after all, is more
or less incidental, whereas my interest in religion is a fundamental
thing.... You have done us all a service in the writing of this book.”
From a certain point of view, however, the importance of the book is
less concerned with its thesis than with the details of contemporary
life through which it leads like a pathway. Indeed, there is a sense
in which an ideological pattern of any sort justifies itself as a
means, whereby the artist leads us into the heart of his subject.
And Sinclair’s pattern is of value precisely where the facts would
otherwise be most confusing or negligible, that is to say in modern
life. In his historical prelude, the pattern seems to introduce too
great a simplification, and its literary value may be doubted; but it
serves as an efficient map through that contemporary American welter
of superstition and exploitation which is his actual theme. Doubtless
there are other important factors involved besides the economic one;
that does not so much matter when the picture is before us--“the Church
of Good Society”, “the Church of the Servant Girls”, “the Church
of the Slavers”, “the Church of the Merchants”, “the Church of the
Quacks”. These are part of our America; and these are the uses to which
a business régime finds these institutions apt and ready. It may be in
part an indictment of human nature rather than of capitalism; but it is
a true picture of a not unimportant aspect of modern industrial America.
II.
It was announced, moreover, that this volume was to be the first of a
series that should “do for Education, Journalism, and Literature” what
had here been done for the Church: “the four volumes making a work of
revolutionary criticism, an Economic Interpretation of Culture under
the general title of _The Dead Hand_”.
If there were any doubt of the significance of the Church as an
aspect of modern American industrial life, there was none concerning
Journalism and Education. American Journalism was in a peculiar
position: the newspapers, being almost the sole mediums of publicity,
had confidently and arrogantly used their opportunities to sing
their own praises, attributing to themselves all the virtues, and
glorifying in particular their own honesty, truthfulness, fairness,
incorruptibility. Their victims might be aware of the contrary, their
editors might have tales to tell in private, soap-box orators might
denounce them for falsifying and suppressing news of industrial
struggles in the interests of the employers--but who would listen?
They seemed as secure as Gille de Rais in his castle. And at their
back stood the Associated Press, loaded with international honors,
a sacrosanct institution, alert to prosecute for criminal libel any
obscure Socialist publication which dared charge it with partisanship.
It would indeed be difficult to prove a case against them, to expose
the truth which lay behind these gigantic self-advertised reputations
for purity. Yet it was nothing less than this that Upton Sinclair
undertook.
_The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism_ appeared in
1919. The reference in the title is to the metal counters used in
brothels, according to investigations which had given the phrase
some currency as a polite synonym for prostitution. The book was an
indictment of the corruption of the American press, with facts, names,
dates, proof complete. If the charges were false, they constituted
criminal libel, and the author could have been put in prison. But,
despite repeated challenges by the author, the truth of these
statements was never denied in court.
_The Brass Check_ is an extraordinary book--not in its daring
alone. Its contents vary from what might be described as dynamite to
the most preposterously farcical matters, which are not, however,
without their strict relevance to the subject under discussion, since
American journalism has its farcical as well as its tragic aspect.
Never in modern times have such widespread charges been made in such
personal terms--personal with reference to the accuser as well as the
accused. For it is, incidentally but first of all, an account of the
dealings of the author himself with the newspapers of America. The
book might for that reason have been ineffective; it was certainly
unconventional. But in this case the story of one man’s relations with
the press, embracing as it does some of the most important episodes in
American newspaper history during our time, is a valuable document.
Not all the personal incidents are important, though they illustrate
the characteristic traits of the American press. But the story of
Sinclair’s efforts to get the news of the Colorado coal strike into
the papers, and his battle with the Associated Press in connection
with the coal strike, is of the greatest importance. And this personal
story is only the beginning of the record; with an immense mass of the
most careful documentation, the whole field is covered in a factual and
convincing way.
The impression which the book made upon America, the eagerness with
which it was read here, as well as all over the world, revealed the
fact that there was an immense resentment against the pseudo-sanctity
in which these institutions had wrapped themselves; whether or not any
reforms were immediately effected by this exposure, it at least lifted
a cloud of repression from the minds of the American people. It was now
possible to speak disrespectfully of these great institutions without
seeming to be guilty of lèse majesté. It had been done, with impunity!
Aside, however, from its uncontroverted authenticity in detail, it
was a picture of America which could be recognized by those who knew
their country--a picture which has not before been compassed in our
literature. Here was a real American story: nor, from that point of
view, did it matter that the characters bore names that could be found
in Bradstreet’s. When the persons named in the book are forgotten, when
they are mere characters in the book, the book will still live on as
a picture of its age. Here pamphleteering has reached the heights of
great art.
III.
Upton Sinclair, almost forgotten as a novelist by his countrymen,
became by virtue of this book again a figure in American life and
literature. The post-war disillusionment had begun, people were willing
to listen to the truth--and here was a man capable of telling it. What
would his book on American education be like?
American education, it had begun to be realized, was largely a fetish.
Was it really education at all, the process so elaborately conducted
in our universities with amphitheatrical football performances in the
foreground and intellectual terrorization in the background? And if
not education, what was it, and why? Upton Sinclair, from the point
of view of those who are interested technically in the problems of
modern education, cannot furnish a final answer to that question.
But, in _The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education_, his
pattern provides us with preliminary guidance through the labyrinth of
astounding and ridiculous facts: it does show us, if not everything
that is the matter with American universities, at least what uses
American business stupidity is making of these huge and lumbering
institutions. There is, indeed, no Machiavellian cunning here,
certainly no far-seeing effort to make higher education in America an
efficient part of the capitalist system; but there is fear everywhere
of truth, fear of intellectual freedom, hysterical fear and stupid
tyranny. It is a tragic farce that is revealed in the book. The tragedy
lies in the wastage of youth, and the frustration of teaching talent.
But comic in the highest degree are the pompous figures that stalk so
solemnly through its pages--the dignified and ridiculous little lords
of the educational world who are hired to run their institutions so as
to please the men who have money to give.... The book was followed in
1924 by _The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools_, in which
the picture becomes both more ridiculous and more tragic, for petty
greed and unscrupulous commercial exploitation, as ruthless and vicious
as has ever been practised upon the helpless and the ignorant, become
part of the scene. These revelations are all of a specifically factual
and utterly convincing sort, and they portray in indelible terms the
species of moral and intellectual serfdom to which the higher and lower
educational institutions of America have been all but universally
reduced by the ignorance and the fears of a business régime. And,
together with their predecessors in this series of great pamphlets,
these books constitute a Contemporary History of American Civilization
by which we are known and judged all over the world, and which must be
read and studied by all Americans who dare to face realities.
In these books, moreover, a writer who despite two extraordinary
artistic triumphs has so often failed to come to complete and
satisfying fullness of expression in the medium of the novel, reaches
and maintains himself at the height of his powers. In this realm of
facts, as not always in the realm controlled by the imagination, he
is utterly assured and at home--capable, in this large field, of
Aristophanic laughter and epic vision. Across these huge canvases march
the multitudes of living mankind, tricksters and deluded ones, liars
and dupes, thieves and victims, masters and henchmen, the preachers,
editors, railroad presidents, financiers, politicians, soldiers,
gunmen, salesmen, teachers, children: it is a panorama of contemporary
American humanity, candidly, tenderly, relentlessly, magnificently
displayed.
IV.
_Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation_, published in
1925, the latest in this series of gigantic exposés, is a venture of a
different sort from the others. It does not deal especially with the
American scene; and its interest lies only partly within the field
of fact, being still more significantly within the field of opinion.
It is in one of its aspects a polemic in art criticism, or, more
specifically, literary criticism--an attack upon the theory of art for
art’s sake. It is also, from its own revolutionary point of view, an
“Outline of Literature”--the most spirited, honest, interesting and
informative ever published. But it may perhaps most interestingly be
considered here as a psychological document.
An American writer who early in this century wished to deal with
themes of social and economic significance found himself hampered by
an academic tradition concerning literature which had grown up since
the Civil War. That vast struggle had left America too spiritually
exhausted to take its due part in the great intellectual battles which
raged through Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century;
and the literary productions which reflected those conflicts came to
us a little late and with an odor of sanctity which obscured their
controversial quality. The new effort to exploit the vast commercial
possibilities of America absorbed, moreover, for a generation or more,
all its best energies, and literature was left to the professors. By
these it was characteristically conceived as a serene realm high above
the vulgar conflicts of the day, a refuge from immediate interests,
a shelter from passing hopes and fears, a communion with “eternal”
things. This professorial view of literature had preferred to forget
the origin of its most admired productions in that very stress and
sweat of earthly conflict. It was a forgetfulness natural to the
epicene and timid class to whom education itself was no preparation
for the struggle of life but rather a retirement from it. According to
these professorial standards of taste, literature must not come too
dangerously close to reality, or it would incur the damnation of being
dismissed as “propaganda”. It was this attitude which the young Upton
Sinclair encountered when he began his literary career. He wanted to
show the evils of the existing world, and he wanted to help create
the desire for a world fit to live in. Such intentions as these are
no new thing in the history of literature--they have been implicit
and explicit in much of the world’s greatest literature. But he found
himself offending the taste of timid and nervous critics. They thought
it was all right for him to have opinions about the Civil War, because
that happened a long time ago; but he really ought not to have any
opinions about the Class Struggle, because that was possibly going
on right now. To try to make people sympathize with struggling poets
was sufficiently artistic; but to try to make people sympathize with
struggling workingmen was, in the cant phrase of the day, “propaganda”.
And yet it seemed to him, looking back over the world’s literature,
that it was full of “propaganda”, of one sort and another. If
Aristophanes satirized Athenian democracy, if Virgil concocted an
imitation epic in celebration of the founding of Rome, if Juvenal
muck-raked the high Roman society of his time in the most scandalous
fashion, if Shakespeare mocked and reviled the mobs and their rebel
leaders, if John Milton called on God to avenge the massacre of
Protestants in Piedmont, that wasn’t called propaganda, to be sure;
when the propagandists were dead enough, they were called artists. But
wasn’t all art inevitably concerned with revealing a view of life?
Propaganda in that sense was an intimate part of every work or art.
Mediocre poets like Southey were called artists in their time, because
they said all the approved things; and great poets like Shelley were
dismissed as loud-mouthed ranters because they wanted to change the
world. Keats was told to go back to his pills by the aristocratic
reviewers of his time because he was a radical and a friend of Leigh
Hunt’s.... Apparently, then, esthetic criticism was not as purely
esthetic as it deemed itself, but was involved with the fears of the
ruling class. Those who praise the existing scheme of things will
find their artistic virtues readily enough acclaimed. The rash young
revolutionist who turns his coat and comes out for law and order will
likely enough be made poet laureate. Morals, too, are involved--the
writer who is a rebel in politics will have his moral frailties
emblazoned before a shocked world and will be regarded as a monster;
while the writer whose opinions are correct may, if he is careful,
enjoy his adulteries and perversities and remain the darling of
respectable society. And, when one looks over the world’s literature,
how many first-rate writers are there who have not been social rebels?
How many writers have written anything worth while after they ceased to
be rebels? How many hugely-bolstered reputations of the correct sort
have any validity? And of those writers who were notoriously hostile or
indifferent to the great social rebellions of their time, how much has
their art lost by their blindness to what was going on?
These questions, fulminating in the mind of the young writer, set
in motion a long historical and critical inquiry of years, of which
_Mammonart_ is the result.... In the meantime, and especially
since the war, it appears that these professorial doctrines have
passed over into the minds of the younger generation of the American
intelligentsia and its writers generally, a natural symptom of
the social helplessness of this period of disillusionment. The
_fin-de-siècle_ art theories of the European ’nineties have been
taken over with much enthusiasm as a means of retaining artistic
self-respect while sitting among the ruins of pre-war hopes. Under
these circumstances, it can easily be understood that Upton Sinclair’s
book should arouse resentment--for it is implicitly a challenge to the
young writers of America to take their place as leaders in what Heine
called the Liberation War of Humanity.
Such is the content of _Mammonart_; in form it is a handbook
covering in short, vivid chapters a vast part of the world’s
literature, reviewing it against its own political and economic
background, with special attention to the manner in which the social
struggles of the times are reflected in the life and work of the
writers. It describes itself as an inquiry into art from the point of
view of revolutionary economics. It is the first of the kind to be
broadly undertaken, though Bernard Shaw in his essay on Wagner and in
his criticisms in general has furnished some interesting and valuable
examples of the method. It is a kind of criticism that is familiar
in Russia, where it has long been practised. But, though at present
something of a novelty in America, it is not likely to remain so.
The weakness of the various current attempts to deal with art from a
purely esthetic standpoint seem to make it inevitable that this more
revolutionary and realistic method will come into vogue.
Social revolutionary criticism, as it may be called, takes it for
granted that an artist is an interpreter of life, and judges the
truth and value of his interpretation by the test of how fully he
shows himself aware of what is going on in his world, with special
reference to social change, and whether he helps his audience to
understand and sympathize with such changes. He is recognized as a
discriminator of spiritual values, in some sense a creator of them,
and he is judged by the spiritual values he helps to create in a world
that struggles toward something greater and finer than its past. He
is not asked to be consciously attempting to create such values, and
least of all is he asked to believe in this or that specific program
of change--he is judged as an artist and not as a politician. It is
a frankly partisan criticism, but it represents the genuine esthetic
response of those who feel themselves to be living in a changing world
lighted by the hope of revolutionary improvement. It is a criticism
which attaches no importance to such sacrosanct effects as those of
tragedy. It welcomes cynicism and pessimism in regard to institutions,
but it regards cynicism and pessimism in regard to man’s ultimate
power of conquering his environment as merely morbid. It bases itself
on science, and claims the right to rank various kinds of “beauty”
according to its own scale of values. It is thus seen to be itself a
discriminator and creator of spiritual and esthetic values; it does not
hesitate to hurl gods from their pedestals nor throw outworn beauty
in the dustbin of time. Its weakness is that of all other theories of
art criticism--that it may become a cloak for the personal prejudices
of those who use it, giving them a dignity they do not necessarily
deserve. But it has vitality, and candor, and is more realistic than
any other kind of criticism that has yet appeared. Upton Sinclair’s own
moral preconceptions are occasionally obvious in this book; but he has
triumphantly escaped most of the dangers of this kind of criticism.
His book is so rich in its swiftly painted backgrounds, so moving in
its drama, so profoundly true on the plane in which it moves, and so
thoroughly and simply intelligible in its thesis, as to constitute a
very impressive and valuable example of the new social revolutionary
criticism.
As an utterance of its author’s point of view, the book arouses a
certain psychological curiosity--his alleged “Puritanism” again comes
under discussion. The erotic themes which constitute so large a part
of the world’s literature receive scant attention here. It might seem
that from his point of view mankind’s erotic problems are too simple to
bother with in literature; but some reflection upon his own writings
(including the unpublished manuscript of _Love’s Progress_) shows
that this is not so. One hazards the explanation that they seem to
him, these erotic problems of mankind, to be too involved with social
problems to be isolated, and indeed too complex to be satisfactorily
solved by mankind except upon terms of profound social change. His
impatience with literary critics would thus be the impatience of a
revolutionary mind, not content with such tawdry or cruel or cowardly
escapes as the world has thus far afforded to its rebels in the sexual
realm. One remembers the boy Thyrsis, who wandered at night seeking
some adventure that would be “not quite shameful to a poet’s fancy”.
So, it would seem, has he wandered through the byways of the world’s
literature, finding no erotic fancies that were not, to a realist and a
poet, tiresome to contemplate--as for example, when he turns away from
Coleridge’s “woman wailing for her demon lover” with the remark that
it is “a savage’s nightmare”. Such a mind would turn naturally to the
world’s future for its ultimate satisfactions, and form the habit of
subsuming under its social hopes its erotic dissatisfactions with the
world of contemporary reality.
It may be remarked that Upton Sinclair’s own practice has not been
invariably in the direction of slighting the sexual aspects of life;
he notably did not slight them in _Love’s Pilgrimage_--and when
urged by a friendly older novelist to be less frank in certain scenes,
he replied in terms which constitute an interesting defense of the
realistic method:
“I wish,” he wrote, “to give the inner significance of life, as it
comes to me; but on the other hand, I conceive that there is no way to
give this, except with the materials of the actual world which we have
at our hand.
“You will readily believe that I did not write the particular passages
in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ which you discuss, without much earnest
thought about the subject. I had certain emotions to portray, and I
knew only one way to do it. For instance, I could not have conceived
of the conveying of the emotions of the man who sees his first child
born, without describing the actual physical things which he saw. I
simply did not know any other way to do it. If you think that there is
any other way, I would be interested to have you tell me. Do you know
of any place in the world’s literature where it has been done? For my
part, I know of only one or two hints at it, and these very inadequate.
“You must understand that concerning both this subject, and that of the
passion scenes in the novel, I have a very definite conviction that the
attitude of modern civilization toward these subjects is a wholly false
and unnatural one. I believe that these things are part of human life,
and that we should learn to talk about them with the same simplicity
and naturalness that we use about any other of the deep facts of life,
such as, for instance, the problems of death or of religion.”
XVI. OIL!
I.
One of the difficulties of writing a critical biography of a living
writer is that he changes while he is being written about. When this
book was begun, it was with the idea that Upton Sinclair, in spite of
two fictional masterpieces, had found the novel too narrow a medium
for the expression of his vast and robust interest in the social and
economic tragi-comedy of life, and that he had reached his fullest
self-realization in the series of great pamphlets descriptive of
American culture. But there is now at hand the astonishing new novel,
_Oil!_, upon which he has been at work for the past two years, and
that judgment has to be reversed.