Once I learned that the movie There Will Be Blood was based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil, I was anxious to see it. I have this vague memory of when the book came out in 1927. Papa was very excited about it and was insisting that, for all who wanted to understand the capitalist system, this book was a must read. The movie is about one man’s obsession with being an oil millionaire, although Kate says it is mainly about a deranged man. We both agree that Daniel Day Lewis did an admirable piece of acting. I had reservations about the book’s relationship to the Sinclair novel, so I decided to read it.
It’s a long novel (527 pages) that reads more like a saga with many interweaving plots. J. Arnold Ross and his son Bunny are the main characters. (In the movie their names are Plainview and H.W.) Movie reviewers have been generally favorable. Dargis, from the Times, said an “epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of greed and envy of biblical proportion--reverberating with Old Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism--which Mr. Anderson mined from Upton Sinclairs 1927 novel Oil!”
Rereading the Sinclair novel was an emotional throwback to another time when there was serious discussion taking place regarding capitalism. The book, about the discovery of oil in California, is simply Sinclair’s vehicle for going after the whole system of capitalism that ends up corrupting everything it comes in contact with. Sinclair does not blame Ross, he blames the system that produced him. In the book his son Bunny becomes his alter ego, constantly questioning what Ross is doing and why. Ross keeps explaining to Bunny that, if he is the to continue becoming a millionaire “oil man”, he has to go along with bribing local politicians, stealing the land of local ranchers, supporting the US government’s intervention in the Russian Revolution and supporting the local police raids against the IWW in Los Angeles. When Bunny asks his father if the Federation of Independent Oil Producers are going to buy the Presidency of the Country, his father answers, “yes, that’s what we are going to do.” That became known as the “Teapot Dome Scandal” with huge payoffs that reached right into the White House.
Upton Sinclair was first and foremost a lifelong socialist. What he was doing in Oil, as he did in his books Jungle and Coal, was to expose the corrupting nature of the capitalist system. In Oil he even takes a big swipe at Hollywood film making. His son becomes involved with a very sexy, beautiful movie queen. It turns out that she too is a victim of the system since she has absolutely no say in making movies that denigrate people who are seen as “outsiders.”
For a nonagenarian like me, I am saddened that people are given such watered down versions of what was going on in the country a short 90 to 100 years ago. What has been lost in the present discussion of issues is any fundamental examination of what makes us what we are? That’s what people like Upton Sinclair added to those debates back then. In the present so-called primary debates, the only one who even was suggesting that corporate America is our real problem was John Edwards, and unfortunately he’s out of the race. That may very well be because there are no socialists, no Upton Sinclairs, no Wobblies, no communists who are constantly challenging the capitalist system for its failures to serve the interest of all, instead of the few.
I do not disparage my own years as a radical and union leader for I think we helped to humanize the system. That is a process that needs to be ongoing. There always needs to be a group of people who are willing to question “the system”. Edward’s couldn’t sustain his questioning about the “corporate dominance” of America because people have lost a familiarity with the argument. It just isn’t out there anymore.
For a good insight into another time in the history of our country, I highly recommend Upton Sinclairs Oil. If read alongside my own book, Wasn’t That a Time: Growing up Radical and Red in America, one can get a fairly interesting perspective of some of the countervailing forces at work in a time of great change.
Thank you Kate N.H.W.Y.
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2 comments:
Hi Roberto,
Your comment on the book and movie are interesting. I don't remember if I ever read the book but do think of Upton Sinclair as someone who exposed the underbelly of American capitalism in the early part of the 20th century. The movie did not represent that theme. Rather it was very much about a psychopathic individual who got involved in the mining and then the wildcat oil business.
Meanwhile the environmentally reckless ways of the oil drillers continue. Here in NM and CO we are fighting to keep them from drilling in pristine areas. With the high price of oil the wildcatters are willing to gamble for deposits anywhere.
You say "In the present so-called primary debates, the only one who even was suggesting that corporate America is our real problem was John Edwards, and unfortunately he’s out of the race." which is true. But there is a presidential candidate who has played that drum relentlessly: Ralph Nader. How can you be concerned about the corrupting role of corporate America and not support Ralph Nader's candidacy? Fundraising has turned both major parties into a bunch of corporate stooges.
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