Upton Sinclair's Oil!
A book review
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Normally, I review nonfiction books, and new books at that. In this way I hope to steer folks to books on the environment that they might find enlightening and inspiring. It is thus a little out of the ordinary for me to critique fiction, and a book that is close to 100 years old at that. Yet, since I picked up Upton Sinclair's Oil! a couple of weeks ago, I’m more and more convinced that this book remains quite relevant for today.
First serialized in The Daily Worker, the national newspaper for the Communist Party USA, Upton Sinclair opens his 1926 novel with a car ride and the seductive nature of the petroleum we pump out of the ground:
The road ran smooth and flawless, precisely fourteen feet wide, the edges trimmed as if by shears, a ribbon of gray concrete, rolled out over the valley by a giant hand. The ground went in long waves, a slow ascent and then a sudden dip; you climbed, and went swiftly over—but you had no fear, for you knew the magic ribbon would be there clear of obstructions, unmarred by bump or scar, waiting the passage of rubber wheels revolving seven times a second.
Sinclair understood over 100 years ago that automobiles, gasoline, and highways are less about getting from point A to point B and more about the the relatively safe thrill of trees, houses, and mountains swiftly passing by. Oil turned ordinary life into a carnival ride. The car ride that takes up the first chapter is all that is needed to explain why we work so hard to drill and pump oil out of the ground.
During this drive, Sinclair introduces the two protagonists: James Arnold Ross, a man of middling success until he became an oilman in midlife, and his son, Ross Jr., who is nicknamed Bunny.
Ross Sr. is a serious, money-making man, quick to spy an opportunity and take advantage of it. and not shy about using the workings of government to further his business interests. Soon after discovering oil on a tract of land, he knows just which political figure he needs to pressure to get a new road built—all with the backing of the local press—to transport equipment to his new oilfield.
The author paints in broad strokes, yet Ross Sr. is no caricature or two-dimensionally-depicted straw man used to bolster Sinclair’s outlook. Sinclair most often refers to Ross Sr. as “Dad,” pointing up his familial relationship with Bunny and softening the portrayal of the oilman. During the early chapters of Oil!, a strike unfolds, and Dad is not unsympathetic to the men who work for him.
The novel concentrates on the dilemmas and struggles of Bunny, who has a strong moral center. He takes the side of the strikers, even though they are striking against his father’s—and Bunny’s—oil company. Much of what Bunny believes comes from his friend, Paul Watkins, who has seen the workings of the Soviet Union firsthand and who claims as slanderous propaganda the depictions of the horrors perpetrated by the Bolsheviks.
Bunny believes in labor and distrusts the workings of capitalism, yet he witnesses and experiences how “the system,” whether it is big business, government, or even the citadel of learning and free thought—our university system—can punish those who espouse views outside of capitalist orthodoxy. And Bunny is continually tempted and seduced by the ease and luxury that his father’s millions can afford.
Oil! lacks the yucks to be considered satire, but Sinclair peppers his observations with humor. After skewering much about college campus life, Sinclair lists a plethora of “isms” prevalent at the time that college students didn’t have the time to figure out:
Socialists, Communists, and Syndicalists and Anarchists, Communist-Anarchists, and Anarchist-Syndicalists, Social Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, Populists, Progressives, Single Taxers, Nonpartisan Leaguers, Pacifists, Pragmatists, Altruists, Vegetarians, Antivivisectionists and opponents of capital punishment.
The novel is more than a critique of the oil industry and its corruption. In the book’s 543 pages, Sinclair takes shots at the social trends during the U.S. entry into WWI and the early 1920s. Freethinking libertines party with and bed the new sensations of the time, Hollywood starlets. Religious revivalism produces characters like Eli Watkins (Paul’s brother), charlatans who ably exploit the burgeoning mass media and marry U.S. Protestant religiosity to a blend of nativism and capitalism. (Anyone observant of the synergy between the GOP and evangelical Protestants, with the nativist anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies will see this political religiosity continuing today.) Sinclair even takes note of youngsters continuing their education in high school, a somewhat new development at the time. And what is there not to ridicule about high school?
Much of the latter portion of the book is a fictionalized account of the Teapot Dome scandal that plagued the McKinley administration (1897-1901). And in the later chapters, Sinclair offers a vision of a society that doesn’t reward the Gordon Geckos of the world.
Since the publication of Oil!, petroleum and our dependence on it has deepened and transformed our world. It has shaped and inspired wars. Highways and superhighways crisscross the globe. Oil enables us and encourages us to live in sprawling suburbs. We make everything—spoons and forks, parkas, blankets, backpacks, packaging, laptops, guns, and lots, lots more—from plastic, which is made from oil. And plastics in the form of microplastics have spread all over the continents and the oceans. Microplastics are even in our food and our bodies. And all the oil that we’ve burned from the time Sinclair wrote his book now exists as CO2 in our oceans and atmosphere, warming the planet with each passing day. But hey, it’s a thrill to speed down the highway.
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