Literary Ramblings: Siddhartha Meets Jesus And An Argument For The Separation Of Business And State (a review of Upton Sinclair’s Oil!)
Upton Sinclair can’t put a sentence together as beautifully as William Faulkner, nor is he what one would call a post-modern writer, and his frequent habit of offering conversation summaries in place of dialogue would have participants in a creative writing workshop calling for the authors to “show, not tell”, but though Oil! is flawed in many respects, such as its portrayal of capitalism as the seemingly only engine of history’s propulsion, and though it is at times laboriously long, it remains a masterpiece that is as important today as it was when it was first published as it illustrates in great details the self-perpetuating, quid-pro-quo nature of the relationship shared between business and state, redefining America’s political system as a capitalist one, not a democratic one, while encouraging the reader to consider their own culpability in the mendacious capitalist system as the herd behaviour that is often defined by passive neutrality toward, and sheepish participation in the capitalist structure is shown to be as integral in maintaining the capitalist status quo as crooked politicians, brutalizing police forces and mobs, and the self-serving business men who Sinclair makes out to be the ringmasters of this oppressive system.
In trying to take hold of a novel’s core message, it is often important to understand the author and its context. Such an investigation is not needed when trying to dissect Oil! as it is quite clear that the author is a passionate socialist at least, and very likely a communist (ideologically speaking). To say the novel is class conscious would be an understatement. Sinclair has had great success in his career whilst writing on class struggles and indeed earned his reputation with The Jungle, a novel which detailed the life of working class and destitute immigrants who found their dwellings and occupation in the meat packing industry of Chicago. In both novels Sinclair tries to solve the problems of the working class and offers hard handed lectures at the novels’ respective conclusions, and though it is often only a literary habit of an author to tie things up neatly in a pretty little bow, this was not the case with Sinclair as he himself was so passionate about changing the class system that he used funds from his novel sales to front the money for a colony within the boundaries of the United States, which was ultimately burned down. Sinclair’s idealistic proposals, within the context of the novel, seem like exactly that, idealist proposals, and though the reader may scoff or even chuckle at the seeming naivety of the suggestions, the issues that stir Sinclair to formulate such proposals are very clearly lined out within the novel. Within the context of the novel Sinclair even acknowledges the simplicity of these suggestions through other characters who note the reasons why independent colonies, like those the Quakers and Mormons have set up, will ultimately fail or end up as insular societies at best. Even amongst socialists and communists there are differences of opinion that seem as extreme as the differences between capitalist and communist ideals, differences that are not unlike those shared by Martin Lurther King Jr. and Malcolm X, people who were fighting ultimately for the same thing, but saw different ways of achieving this. Sinclair seems to illustrate the differences of ideologies within the left by taking the prototypical Christ figure, popular in American literature, and placing him next to an American interpretation of Siddhartha/Buddha.
It is true that American literature is littered with Christ figures, carpenters, or protagonists with the initials “J.C.”, or even carpenters with the initials “J.C.”, and Oil! does offer a carpenter who is given the name of one of Christ’s disciples (Paul) and even rejects the showmanship of contemporary religion much as Jesus denounced the vanity of the Pharisees, and like Christ, takes on no love interest for the sake of travelling around and preaching about his cause before dying in sacrificial form in his early thirties at the hands of a mob that is not unlike the rabble which cheered the Romans on as they crucified Christ. And since Christ himself was one of the earliest communists in the western world (what is more communist ideal that “the meek shall inherit the earth”?), it seems more than fitting for Sinclair’s Christ figure to adopt communism. The novel’s protagonist, James Arnold “Bunny” Ross Jr. though, is Sinclair’s American manifestation of Siddhartha, the sun of a wealthy oil baron (James A. Ross Sr.) who wanted to provide his son (Bunny) with the life of comfort he never had as a youth. Bunny however is wary of the easy path laid out before him and sees numerous moral dilemmas, and though he never rejects all his wealth as Siddhartha had, he does go out on a pilgrimage of sorts to learn from and sample various social ideologies. His first lessons in life are from his father, and then high school teachers before he goes to college falls under the tutelage socialist professor. From there he is torn, much as Siddhartha was torn between his life of indulgences and his subsequent life of minimalism, Bunny though is torn between his father’s way of life and Paul’s high moral code, just as he is torn between the physical pleasures offer by his love interest Viola “Vee” Tracy, Paul’s sister Ruth, and his socialist, Jewess classmate Rachael. Like Siddhartha did before attaining enlightenment, Bunny ultimately seeks to find a middle path and see socialism as his own middle way while capitalism and communism serve as the two extremes on either end. And like Siddhartha, who would come to be known as Buddha, Bunny sought to eliminate the things which he desired in life that he might not be weighed down by desire, which he learns early is the cause of pain. Even while promoting the socialist school he wishes to open toward the end of the novel, he notes that students of his college will have to forgo luxuries like tobacco and fancy clothes, to which some scoff, claiming that no students will wish to give up such things, and thus illustrating one of the essential problems of the communist and socialist movements; that even the people who promote these ideologies desire to indulge in the comforts offered to the wealthy who benefit from the capitalist structure. Bunny’s sympathies for the working class and seemingly romantic feelings for Ruth also seem to suggest that he is not unlike the protagonist of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Freder, whose love for a working class woman compels him to offer his loyalty to the working class and not the privileged life which his father offers him. Both works were realised around the same time and both offer an idyllic synthesis of the working and ruling class, but neither ultimately offer pragmatic solutions.
One might expect the capitalist side of the novel to be presented by a one-dimensional and demonic depiction, but such isn’t the case. J. A. Ross Sr. for example is not shown as a man of excess, but rather as a hard working pragmatist. After his first wife is convinced to leave him for a man of more profitable financial means, Ross decides that if he is to provide a life free from such loss for his children he must provide them with the means to prevent that loss: money. When he begins to see profits in the oil business, he wishes to expand and at every step he sees government bureaucrats holding out their hands in order to grease the political machine that either allow, or prevent Ross from accomplishing his work. When Ross deals with people he is straight forward and honest, and he respects his workers and the sacrifices they make, so much so that even though he is not allowed to pay them wages higher than other oil companies as he is by the nature of his business forced to join a trust of sorts, he would give his employees different job titles that they might be allowed a higher wage. And when the workers go on strike Ross, at the bequest of Bunny, even allows his workers to remain living in their bunkhouses. Ross even defends their position during the strike, which does not make him any friends among his oil baron peers. Though he is a flawed character that does not indulge in socialist ideologies, he is a fair person who supports his son even though their views are at odds, and though he himself doesn’t agree with the system as it is, he, being a pragmatist, simply learns how the system works and then does what is required for him to succeed. Ross Sr. is a sort of predecessor to the “don’t hate the player, hate the game” argument.
Ross Sr.’s partner in the novel however is not so benevolent. Vernon Roscoe is an oil man and seeks to buy the presidency for his own candidate with the help of Ross and succeeds, earning the rights or naval land rich in oil, and pushing out a small, independent oil company to do so. Roscoe seems to have no moral compass, and since Bunny was unwilling to take over the oil business from his father, a partnership with Roscoe was the only option, and it was an option which turned Ross into the very thing he had been fighting against: the big oil companies that seek to push out the small ones. This is another step in Ross’s pragmatic formula, and though he acts based on self survival, his partner seems somewhat malicious in the matter, and later in the novel is very deceitful in matters of the partnership between he and Ross, leading to the Ross family being robbed of much of their fortune.
Sinclair takes a very modernistic view on matters of social reform and seems to believe that all things are motivated by the struggle between the classes, and though there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of feminist though put into the novel, there can still be interesting feminist readings of the novel. Women play a very big role in Bunny’s life, Vee for example, though she too is missing a moral compass, is very strong willed and assertive in nature. Ruth, Paul’s sister, does often defer to her brother’s line of reasoning, but she holds within her a devotion and loyalty shared by few others in the novel, while Rachel is very much her own thinker and one of the strongest characters in the novel. Each are very different but Sinclair offers a Taoist view on all, suggesting at one point that though women seem “gentle and impressionable…it was the pliability of… water- that comes back the way it was before.” Just as Lao Tzu praised strength of the yielding, but erosive nature of water, Sinclair sees this same quality in the women who surround Bunny and praises patience and persistence as powerful and potent virtues.
Religion is also a topic taken up by Sinclair, though it isn’t a dominant part of the novel, Sinclair takes the time to satirize the extreme nature of evangelicalism and how it appeals to a broad base audience that makes its authority all the more scary. Indeed, there was a time when it was state and church that helped to wash each other’s hands and it seems as though Sinclair brought the church into the novel to illustrate the authority it still has, but also to illustrate the changing nature of capitalism, where instead of church and state, it is business and state who help to wash each other’s hands, suggesting through implication that just as there needed to be a separation of church and state, there also needs to be a separation of business and state.
The core of Sinclair’s novel is the concept that America is not a democratic society so much as a capitalist society, and that this capitalist structure is so powerful and influential, that it goes so far as to dictate foreign affairs. Domestically, Ross Sr. and other oil men make a habit of buying the influence of political figures, and when Ross wishes to get moving on a project he has to appeal to non-government officials who holds much in the way of money and influence, illustrating how the real authority in America is not actually held by those chosen by the people. Though the novel starts off by illustrating such graft at a municipal level, it promotes itself to a national scale where at least one presidency is bought (a political system which is better detailed in Sinclair’s novel The Jungle) in order to steal oil lands away from an independent oil contractor. On an international level the tactics are even more troubling. Paul, who is drafted to fight in World War One is forced to stay on for over a year after the war is over that he might to help quell the communist influences of the Russian revolution and restore a capitalist order to some European countries at the request, not of the government, but of business men. Sinclair’s portrayal of the Russian revolution is a little biased and promotes Soviet Russia as an almost utopian idea (an interpretation that seems understandable flawed in hindsight since at the time of publication neither the Great Purge or Gulag had been a reality in Soviet Russia), but this biased view of Russia balances the portrayal of Soviet Russia in the media at the time, a view that was quite biased in the inverse. The post-war exercises of the American military are described as brutal and oppressive and makes the American capitalist structure seem very much like invading tyrants, but Ross Sr. seems to think its justified as he see the oil lands in Europe as very valuable. Later in the novel, whilst Roscoe is vacationing in Europe to avoid being called to take the stand in a senate hearing regarding political bribes, this international application of American, capitalistic foreign policy is employed as Roscoe uses his time in Europe, not only to escape from the American judicial system, but also to lock up oil lands in Europe.
One of Sinclair’s most compelling arguments is his portrayal of the class struggle being in a constant state of war. The American constitution guarantees freedom of assembly, but this right is taken away several times in the novel when strikers, socialists and communists assemble to discuss their views, most notably at the novels tragic conclusion where even innocent young children suffer great injury in the name of capitalism. Likewise due process of law is ignored for these people, but more potent than that is Sinclair’s commentary on the mortality rate of the working class. Even today oil workers indulge in one of the most dangerous professions, but in Sinclair’s time 75% of workers would be injured or killed whilst working in the oil fields. When workers fighting for better wages, fewer hours see their strikes broken by the law and return to the fields only to die or be injured, the militaristic nature of the struggle becomes clear, and Sinclair is efficient in illustrating the brutal nature of the working class struggle. It is not only in the oil fields that the working class suffered and when Oil! is juxtaposed with Sinclair’s The Jungle, where workers in the meat packing industry of Chicago suffered and even higher mortality rate, it becomes clear that the working class was very much fighting for their lives.
Oil! though is not an irrelevant novel that serves merely as an artefact, its themes remain important today. Sinclair’s novel The Jungle inspired the government to address issue in the meat packing industry and eventually lead important changes in that sector, changes that were all for not as companies like Tyson have pushed the clock back and have replaced the European immigrants of Sinclair’s novel with Mexican immigrants of the contemporary era, making that novel very much relevant today, even a century after its first publication. Likewise Oil! is very much relevant today. Instead of Soviet Russia and countries that have fallen under its influence, America is sending troops to Iraq and seeking to gain control over the land in the Middle East, all in the name for oil. It is still the American military moving in the name of capitalism. As for domestic concerns, the working class may not for the most part work in the same conditions that they once did, and the working class has made important progress, but immigrant workers still suffer through unsafe working conditions for low wages in areas like the fishing industry and others. Coupled with that, working class workers in America still have to fight for things that should be fundamental rights, medical care, prescription coverage and education. Oil! may seem stylistically dated, and plodding, and formal, but it is an important work none the less that resonates still today and illustrates how our actions carry implications that can be applied on an international scale and that even on a minute scale we are culpable for helping to grease the wheels of capitalism. Sinclair was speaking to a nation which widely indulged in Christianity at the time of the book’s publication and asked them to consider how Christian ideals have been corrupted by manipulative evangelicalisms and to see the contrast between capitalism and Christian ideals which are actually more inline with communism, and suggesting that the first step in America’s progression to a system that is fair to all, is to consider the middle way offer by Siddhartha. An approach that, in America at least, remains fresh close to a century later as many Americans prefer to spell “socialism” with four letters as Republican pundit and supporters are fighting tooth and nail to prevent working class people from receiving the same medical care as those in the ruling class, and is doing a good job of convincing the working class that socialism is not in their best interest vie the media, just as the newspapers in Sinclair’s Oil! portrayed socialism as a determent to society at the request of the capitalist businessmen.