I'm not sure reading Upton Sinclair's Oil right after reading Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here was all that great an idea. Besides feeling overwhelmed with the political issues of 1930's America, my grasp on which Sinclair is which is rapidly loosening.
But putting all that aside, I'll take a look at specifics in Oil I liked or didn't like.
1) A character declares "that the text of these treaties (secret treaties between the tsar and the allies), the most important news of the day, had been suppressed by the American newspapers." (page 220) I remain amazed at the similarities between the 1930s and now.
2) Czecho-Slovaks "was a German word, and just as we had changed hamburger into liberty steak and sauerkraut into liberty cabbage …" (page 227) You mean the idea behind freedom fries had been around before?
3) "Each (news)paper wants to beat the others, so they get everything ready in advance—speeches that have not yet been delivered, …" (page 233) As of 1969, they were still doing that. I was working for the NY offices of The London Daily Express in July of that year and had to type into the feed that went to the main offices an article expressing regret that the moon shot had gone wrong and everyone was dead. Imagine my surprise.
4) Midway through Oil, a teacher is accused of teaching politics and his office is ransacked. The most damning evidence was that for a typing exercise, he left the quick brown fox alone and chose instead the phrase "give me liberty or give me death." (page 284) Yep. Them words be scary stuff.
5) The protagonist offers his son some advice. "You listen to these Socialists and Bolsheviks, but my God, imagine if the government was to start buying oil-fields and developing them—there'd be more graft than all the wealth of America could pay for." (page 300) We sure are working hard to prove that true.
6) One of the protagonist's friends is ready to celebrate. "We've got a businessman for president, and we're going to run this country on business lines." (page 384) And we've got a failed businessman for president. Take it from there.
7) "Men and women are not bodies only, and cannot be satisfied with delights of the body only. Men and women are minds, and have to have harmony of ideas." (page 413) Didn't much like reading that. Wish I didn't agree with it.
8) "The radio is a one-sided institution; you can listen, but you cannot answer back. In that lies its enormous usefulness to the capitalist system. The householder sits at home and takes in what is handed to him, like an infant being fed through a tube. It is a basis upon which to build the greatest slave empire in history." (page 539) And it works even better with pictures!
Overall I think Mr. Sinclair could have made his point in less than 548 pages. I could say I now know more about drilling for oil than I ever wanted to know, but it'd be a lie. At best I only scanned those all-too-frequent sections. Actually, my next foray into the 1930s is to give There Will Be Blood another try. It made no sense the first time, but now I've read what it was based on. Bet I'll wind up liking the book better.
Now I'm starting to wonder: do we have any muckraker novelists today or are they all writing nonfiction? Anyone know?
