The Metropolis by Upton Sinclair

Lifestyles of the rich and stupid

The Metropolis, a novel by Upton Sinclair, was published in 1908, just a couple years after his controversial breakthrough book The Jungle. The two novels are written in a similar muckraking, pro-socialist style, but The Jungle is much more eye-opening, compelling, and insightful than this tepid successor. By comparison, The Metropolis feels shallow and poorly thought-out.

Allan Montague is a lawyer born and raised in Mississippi. Despite his Southern upbringing, his father fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union. After Dad’s death, Allan moves to New York City, along with his mother and cousin Alice. Allan hopes that, through his deceased father’s connections, he can find some profitable work in the big city. Allan’s younger brother Oliver already resides in New York. He lives the life of a wealthy man, but it is unclear what exactly he does for a living. Oliver is active in high society, and he introduces Allan, Alice, and Mom into his high-dollar social circles. The Montagues attend a series of lengthy and lavish parties in which no frivolous expense is spared. The hosts of these parties expend enormous amounts of money in an attempt to outdo one another. It’s unclear why exactly these millionaires would welcome the Montagues into their circle, since the family from Mississippi are merely upper middle class. Nevertheless, Allan Montague is the reasonable man through whose eyes we view the outrageously extravagant lifestyles of these kings and queens of New York society. 

The bulk of this book is just Sinclair rattling off examples of insane things the rich spend their money on, and how much those luxuries cost. This goes on for chapter after chapter. For example, a woman had a million-dollar coat that was made from the feathers of rare Hawaiian birds. Is this really the problem that’s plaguing American society? Not until Chapter 11, when Allan is hired as a lawyer to work on a lawsuit, does some semblance of a story actually begin. That plot thread, however, barely goes anywhere. If Theodore Dreiser wrote this novel, he would concentrate on the business, legal, and financial aspects of the story, perhaps to the point of inducing boredom. Sinclair, on the other hand, rushes through the legal case rather sketchily because he just wants to rant about the rich. He succeeds in getting his point across that the wealthy waste a lot of their money on stupid and useless stuff. There is a brief passage on the idiocy of fashion that’s rather well-said, but then Sinclair just resumes his catalog of expensive oddities: “There was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras,” and so on and so on.

Sinclair never acknowledges the fact that all this expenditure of wealth might trickle down to the artisans who make these luxuries, the merchants who sell them, and the servants who clean and maintain them. He will try to shock you with the fact that a rich old woman employs 32 servants, but that’s 32 people who have jobs. (I’m a liberal, and I’m making these arguments. That’s how annoying this novel is.) Sinclair’s typical modus operandi would be to contrast his exaggerated rich people with some exaggerated poor people­—i.e. look at what the wealthy are doing while these workers starve—but in this book he never gets around to the poor people, other than a few brief comments the aristocrats make about labor strikes. Sinclair is too busy reciting all these Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not examples of extreme wealth and waste.

In general, I like Sinclair’s work (The Jungle is a masterpiece, in my opinion), but at times he can get carried away with his exaggerated black-and-white socioeconomic rhetoric to the point of campiness. Such is the case with The Metropolis, and it’s not even fun.

Oil! by Upton Sinclair

The prototype for Lanny Budd

Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! was published in 1927. It takes place in Southern California, amid fictional towns with names like Angel City and Beach City. The story opens somewhere around 1910. J. Arnold Ross, a former mule driver, has struck it rich as a self-made oil tycoon. He travels around California buying up land and drilling exploratory wells, some of which have paid off quite handsomely. Accompanying him on his business trips is his young son, J. Arnold Ross Jr., nicknamed Bunny. As he grows into manhood, Bunny enjoys the wealthy lifestyle made possible by Dad’s profits, but he doesn’t understand why the laborers who make such profits possible are often forced to live less fortunate lives and endure relative poverty and dangerous occupational hazards. When the oil workers strike against Dad’s company, Bunny finds himself advocating for the workers’ rights. As the story progresses through World War I, the Harding and Coolidge administrations, and the Teapot Dome scandal, Bunny’s personal values grow more and more anti-capitalist, and he becomes a more active ally of the socialist movement in America.

In recent years, Oil! has enjoyed some resurgence of attention because it is the book upon which the film There Will Be Blood is based. There’s very little similarity between that movie and this novel, however, other than they both deal with the oil business during the same time period.

Anyone who has read any of the novels in Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series will be struck by the close resemblance between Oil! and the eleven novels in that series. All are written in exactly the same style. Although dealing with serious subject matter like war, poverty, and labor unrest, the tone of the writing in both cases is oddly breezy and light-hearted, with a somewhat sarcastic humor. Bunny, for all intents and purposes, is Lanny Budd, except that instead of a European playboy, Bunny’s a Californian. Both characters are wealthy young men with wealthy fathers who, despite their high class status, learn to sympathize with the socialist cause. Their leftist ideals clash with those of their more conservative fathers. Lanny and Bunny even have similar love lives, and both become annoyingly involved in séances and mediums, allowing Sinclair to indulge his pet paranormal interest of spiritualism (communication with the dead).

In both cases, Dad’s job and wealth allows the son to mingle with all kinds of important personages. The Lanny Budd series uses real famous people, but almost all of the politicians, movie stars, and tycoons in Oil! are fictitious. Sinclair supplies supporting characters representing all levels of social status and class hierarchy in order to explore events and issues of the period, thus compiling a fictional narrative loaded with “people’s history” in the vein of Howard Zinn. To that end, however, Oil! is less successful than any of the Lanny Budd novels because it’s less realistic in its conspiracy-theories and in its optimistic visions of a utopian socialist future. Sinclair spends many pages praising the Soviet Union to high heaven in this novel. Eventually, after Stalin’s atrocities became common knowledge, he would do some major back-pedaling in books like The Return of Lanny Budd (1953). Despite all of its exaggerations and meandering storytelling, however, like all of Sinclair’s books it nevertheless ends up being a valuable historical document of American culture at the time the story is set, albeit from a leftist perspective.

It’s hard to understand why Oil! is Sinclair’s second best-known book after The Jungle, since it certainly isn’t close to being his second-best book. The Lanny Budd series may be intimidating to those who don’t want to settle in for an 11-novel haul, but it is ultimately worth the effort. Having read about 30 of Sinclair’s books myself, I would also recommend Mountain City and 100%: The Story of a Patriot.

Jimmie Higgins by Upton Sinclair

Socialism vs. militarism in World War I

Jimmie Higgins, yet another novel about Socialism by America’s most prolific muckraker Upton Sinclair, was published in 1919. In this book, Sinclair paints a picture of what it was like to be a Socialist during World War I. Socialists by definition are pacifists because they refuse to take up arms against their brother workers of other nations. In this time of extreme militaristic jingoism, not only were Socialists persecuted for their beliefs by so-called American “patriots,” they also faced a troubling dilemma in deciding whether to abstain from the war and uphold their pacifism or join the war effort and fight for the defeat of the German Empire.

Jimmie Higgins is a factory machinist who moonlights as a propagandist for the local office of the Socialist Party in the town of Leesville. His position in the party is one of an eager underling. Jimmie is not the kind who makes fiery speeches at Socialist rallies. He’s the guy who posts the flyers and sets up the chairs. Early in the book, Jimmie has a chance encounter with the Socialist candidate for U.S. President (patterned after Eugene V. Debs). When World War I breaks out in Europe, Jimmie and his Socialist friends are outspokenly against America entering the war, at first. Despite his pacifist intentions, however, Jimmie keeps finding himself getting roped into the war effort. The factory in which he works is converted into a munitions plant. After some German Socialists pay him to distribute anti-war propaganda, Jimmie discovers they are agents of the Kaiser. Sinclair finds humor in such ethical conundrums, but they read true to life nonetheless. As Jimmie’s party comrades squabble over what their official stance should be toward the war, Sinclair satirizes the inner workings of the organization, pointing out, for instance, how the Party’s wealthier members—doctors, lawyers, professors—are treated as elites in a party that preaches universal equality.

Much like Jimmie Higgins, Sinclair is a known propagandist. Though he’s often criticized for laying on his socialist views a little thick, in this novel it’s sometimes difficult to tell exactly what he’s trying to say. In some chapters, he satirizes the socialists; in others, he satirizes the capitalists. Rather than one overarching theme to the book, it reads as if Sinclair is making a different point in each chapter. The plot structure of the novel is almost picaresque in that the hero just kind of stumbles from one escapade to the next, as if Sinclair didn’t have a definite plan in mind when he started the book but rather just made it up as he went along. The prose of this novel is written in a style very similar to Sinclair’s later Lanny Budd series, except that Lanny Budd is an international playboy, whereas Jimmie Higgins is a working-class rube only slightly more intelligent than Forrest Gump. Sinclair makes the reader like Jimmie and sympathize with his well-intentioned Socialism, while simultaneously making fun of him.

Though Sinclair gets across his Socialist views in this novel, reading between the lines reveals a rather apologetic tone to the book. It seems as if Sinclair the Socialist felt the heat during World War I, causing him to temper his views for a mainstream audience and assert that “Socialists love their country too!” Sinclair, through the surrogate of Jimmie, seems to be saying, I can be a Socialist and a patriot at the same time . . . so please don’t beat me up or set my house on fire. The novel also suffers from an absurd ending. Sinclair wants to admonish mainstream America for its persecution of Socialists and pacifists during the Great War, but he feels the need to dilute his message with humor. It’s one example of how Jimmie Higgins just never strikes the right balance between frank and funny. A year after the publication of this novel, Sinclair would be far more successful combining social realism with satirical humor in his novel 100%: The Story of a Patriot.

The Coal War by Upton Sinclair

Too many facts, not enough feeling

The Coal War is Upton Sinclair’s sequel to his 1917 novel King Coal. The Coal War was also ready for publication in 1917, but Sinclair couldn’t find a publisher who wanted to print it. After his death, the manuscript was retrieved from his archives of papers, and the book was finally published in 1976. The Coal War is a historical novel based on the Colorado coal miner strikes of 1913 and 1914, including the Ludlow Massacre. Sinclair based many of the events in the book on the testimonies of miners and their families during the inquiry following the massacre. He changed the names of all the people and places, however, so not even the state of Colorado is mentioned.

In King Coal, Hal Warner, a college graduate and son of a millionaire, decides to work as a coal miner as a sort of sociological experiment. All his life he has lived off the sweat of his father’s laborers, and now he wishes to see how laborers live. Appalled by the miners’ working and living conditions, he soon becomes a labor organizer working to unionize the miners. Much class conflict ensues between the workers and the mine-owning oligarchs and their minions, which brings us to The Coal War. In this sequel, the miners go on strike. The mine managers bring in scab workers, which leads to violent altercations. The governor calls in the state militia to keep the peace, but the militia soon turns out to be essentially mercenaries working for the mine owners. Hal’s participation in the conflict escalates from encouraging the miners in their strike efforts to leading them into armed battle.

The main problem with The Coal War is the same fault that plagued its predecessor: the fact that Sinclair views the events through an upper-class protagonist, rather than through the eyes of the workers themselves, as he did so well in The Jungle. The Coal War is slightly more palatable than King Coal simply because Hal isn’t slumming it in the mines any more. Rather, he adopts the more realistic role of a well-intentioned reformer, which is more believable for his character. What’s not credible, however, is the stark good-vs.-evil contrast between the saintly strikers and their draconian antagonists. For example, the militia men are all rapists, while the miners wouldn’t even dream of premarital kissing. After reading enough Sinclair books, one gets the idea that the author was a pretty straight-laced fellow himself, which reflects upon the heroes of his books, who are hampered by a gentlemanly Victorian propriety long after the end of the Victorian era. Writers like Jack London or Emile Zola lent more realism to their labor novels by acknowledging that shades of gray existed on both sides of the class conflict.

Sinclair no doubt based the violent incidents and tyrannical cruelty depicted in this book on real-life persecution suffered by strikers in Colorado. The problem is he catalogs way too many instances, to the point where the book reads like a desensitizing laundry list of atrocities. Just a few of such incidents, imbued with some emotional power and pathos, would have been far more effective, as demonstrated by Zola’s Germinal or Frank Norris’s The Octopus. Sinclair also writes about the woes of the miners with an odd tone of flippancy and sarcastic humor, as if to say “Wouldn’t you know it? Isn’t that just like those oligarchs!” The effect is similar to listening to late-night talk show hosts make jokes about the Trump administration while Mexican babies are locked in jail or insurrectionists are storming the Capitol. To his credit, Sinclair does manage to deliver an education on American labor history in The Coal War, but it’s a rather misconceived and tone-deaf vehicle for imparting this history lesson.
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King Coal by Upton Sinclair

Rich kid slumming in the mines

King Coal, a novel by Upton Sinclair, was published in 1917. The story takes place in an unspecified location in the Rocky Mountains, amid fictional towns and cities, but it is pretty clearly based on the Colorado coal strikes of 1913 and 1914. As America’s preeminent literary muckraker, Sinclair exposes the horrible working conditions of coal miners, depicting them as wage slaves or indentured servants to the corrupt, authoritarian coal corporations that employ them.

The hero of the novel, Hal Warner, is a wealthy college-educated young man. As a sociological experiment, he decides to work as a coal miner to see how the other half lives. After being turned away from one mine where he is suspected of being a union organizer, Hal finds employment in North Valley, a mine of the General Fuel Company owned by coal king Pete Harrigan, who happens to be the benefactor of Hal’s alma mater, Harrigan College. Hal befriends many of the miners while working and living among them. He witnesses firsthand the terrible conditions under which they work and live, and the corruption and violence by which the coal company strips the miners of their rights. Hoping to better their condition and save lives, Hal leads the workers in organizing a union, but the mine management will use every means necessary to thwart his efforts. As one might expect, the story is told through Sinclair’s socialist perspective and in a very didactic fashion. It is difficult for the reader to care about the characters when much of the plot of the book consists of a string of examples of the coal company’s corrupt activities related as if Sinclair were presenting evidence at a trial.

Sinclair rose to fame after the publication of The Jungle, his unflinching look at immigrant laborers in the Chicago stockyards. In that superb book, the workers are at the center of the story. Somewhere along the line, however, Sinclair got the idea that he needed to mediate his labor narratives through upper-class protagonists, perhaps to broaden his audience. Sometimes this strategy works, as in his Lanny Budd series. Sometimes it fails miserably, however, as in Boston, his novel about a wealthy widow’s experience of the Sacco and Vanzetti trials. King Coal is not that bad of a failure, but a failure nonetheless. Not only does the plot proceed at a glacial pace, but while workers’ families are starving and miners are trapped underground, the reader is asked to waste time worrying about what Hal’s snooty brother or shallow fiancée think of him. Knowing that Hal can walk away at any time and resume his life of leisure makes the stakes here feel very low. If you want to read a novel about coal miners and the harsh realities of their lives, one that puts the workers front and center, read Emile Zola’s Germinal, perhaps the best labor novel ever written. Sinclair no doubt read Zola’s work, but King Coal doesn’t hold a candle to it.

Sinclair closes King Coal with a nonfiction afterword that details real-life measures taken by the Republican Party and coal companies in Colorado to disenfranchise working-class voters. Sinclair expects readers to be shocked by this crime against democracy, but to those who have lived through the Trump administration it seems like small potatoes. The Colorado Coalfield War of 1913 to 1914, which includes the Ludlow Massacre, is an important episode in American history that deserves a better novel than this. King Coal does have a sequel, The Coal War, published in 1976 after Sinclair’s death. Perhaps that book takes a more compelling look at these events, but if Hal Warner is still involved, probably not.
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Boston by Upton Sinclair

An odd choice of perspective through which to view these events

American socialist author Upton Sinclair made a career out of writing books about social injustice and the class struggle, so it is no surprise that he would write a novel about one of the most important historical events affecting the working class in America: the trials and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were two Italian immigrant laborers in Boston who were accused of armed robbery and murder. Despite a prejudicial trial and evidence asserting their innocence, after seven years of legal battles the two were sent to the electric chair. In his 1928 novel entitled Boston, Sinclair contends that Sacco and Vanzetti were not executed for their crimes but rather for their ethnicity, class, and openly anarchist beliefs.

This is definitely a compelling subject, but Sinclair sure chooses an odd way to approach it. The protagonist of the novel is Cornelia Thornwell, the sexagenarian widow of a former Massachusetts governor. Fed up with her bickering adult children, Cornelia runs away from her wealthy family to live independently as a factory laborer. Having denounced her riches, she is forced to lodge in a low-rent boarding house in an Italian immigrant neighborhood, where she befriends one of her fellow lodgers, Vanzetti. Because of this focus on Cornelia and her family, much of the book ends up being about rich people’s problems rather than the injustices suffered by working class immigrants. In his eagerness to proclaim the men’s innocence, Sinclair makes Vanzetti cartoonishly saintly and virginal, almost to the point of simple-mindedness. Sacco, on the other hand, is barely a character because he doesn’t have the good fortune to be Cornelia’s neighbor.

As a historical novel, Boston feels like a warm-up to Sinclair’s later series of Lanny Budd novels. Like Boston, the Budd novels star a wealthy outsider who sees the light and embraces leftist socioeconomic theory. Both Lanny Budd and Cornelia Thornwell witness real-life world-changing events and interact with famous historical personages. This narrative strategy works far better in the Budd novels than it does in Boston, however. Lanny and his family are actually likable characters with whom the reader can identify, while the Thornwell family are annoying and pretentious and feel like a waste of time.

Even though at least half the novel is taken up by the Thornwell family, the book is so overly long that Sinclair still manages to delve deeply into the legal proceedings. Sinclair thinks the case against Sacco & Vanzetti was ridiculous, and rightfully so. Evidence of their guilt was manufactured by the prosecution, while evidence of their innocence was withheld or disregarded. In expressing his bemused disbelief, Sinclair relates the events of the crime, trial, and punishment with a sarcastically comedic tone that is totally inappropriate for a book about two men who were executed for crimes they didn’t commit.

What Sinclair does well in Boston, but only in a few passages, is give the reader an idea of just how notorious and divisive the Sacco and Vanzetti case was. The framing and execution of these two Italian immigrants was America’s very own Dreyfus Affair, but without the happy ending. Sinclair portrays Sacco and Vanzetti as martyrs willing to die for a call to arms. Workers all over the world were enraged by their wrongful convictions and engaged in demonstrations, some violent, in major cities around the globe. The sad part, however, is that the story behind these two recognizable names is largely forgotten today, while the injustices they endured continue. Unfortunately, Sinclair’s bloated, meandering, and sardonic novel is unlikely to get anyone excited about that.
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The Return of Lanny Budd by Upton Sinclair

Sinclair repudiates the Soviets

The eleventh and final book in Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series, The Return of Lanny Budd, was published in 1953. Originally Sinclair had only planned to do ten Budd novels, concluding with the end of World War II, but he felt he had to bring the hero back to address the Cold War. This novel covers the years 1946 to 1949, with Lanny frequently traveling back and forth between the United States and Berlin. Written at a time of the expansion of Soviet totalitarianism and an escalation of anti-communist alarm in America, The Return of Lanny Budd feels like Sinclair’s apology for being too kind to Joseph Stalin in previous novels.

In the tenth installment, O Shepherd, Speak!, Lanny retired from spy work to produce a liberal radio show. Now he is called back into action by President Truman. A ring of neo-Nazis or communists or both is flooding Europe with counterfeit British pounds and American dollars, thus threatening economic havoc. Because of his European connections, Lanny is sent to Germany to investigate. Following World War II, Berlin has been subdivided by the U.S., France, Britain, and Russia, but the Wall has not yet been built. Spies, dissidents, and refugees fluidly move back and forth between East and West, creating a dangerous atmosphere where abductions and executions can occur anywhere at any time. While at first the book focuses on postwar Nazis, the enemy quickly switches to the Soviet Union, and the book becomes an extended piece of anticommunist propaganda

One of the commendable aspects of the book is that Lanny finally encounters some of the dangers inherent in being a spy, dangers he has for the most part unrealistically avoided over the course of the series. Even so, he still gets off relatively easy. He proves far luckier than most political prisoners, and even his torturers are surprisingly tolerant and reasonable. In his verve to quash communism wherever it rears its ugly head, Lanny displays uncharacteristically nonheroic behavior with his surprisingly callous attitude towards informing on friends and family members.  

Ideologically, there’s nothing particularly wrong with Sinclair’s approach to The Return of Lanny Budd, but it is a marked departure from his earlier work. It’s hard to deny that the Soviet Union under Stalin was a totalitarian regime with little concern for human rights. When you read a Sinclair book, however, you’re hoping to get a different perspective on history than what you’ll usually find in mainstream literature. This novel hammers home the same unilateral Cold War paranoia that was drilled into our heads from the McCarthy era to the Reagan era. What’s worse, Sinclair lays it on so thick that one really gets the idea that he wrote this book to avoid being blacklisted for his socialist rhetoric of the past. While previously Lanny (and Sinclair) had been critical of American imperialism, there’s none of that here. Sinclair praises J. Edgar Hoover, overlooking the FBI’s police-state disregard for civil liberties while excoriating the USSR for the same. Sinclair also pushes religion in this book far more than I’ve ever encountered in the two dozen books of his that I’ve read. The author who wrote The Profits of Religion was never a full-blown atheist, but here, in the guise of Lanny, he advocates a surprisingly conventional view of deity and prayer that feels like he’s pandering to American puritanism.

When focusing on actual events, Sinclair is still a fine historical novelist who provides detailed insight into the time period he’s depicting. Here, however, the narrative too often devolves into preachy sermons. The Return of Lanny Budd is by no means a terrible novel, but as a capstone to this monumental and impressive series it is a disappointing departure from form.
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O Shepherd, Speak! by Upton Sinclair

Lanny Budd from World War to Cold War

Published in 1949, O Shepherd, Speak! is the tenth volume in Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series. Following on the heals of One Clear Call, this installment covers events of the years 1945 and 1946, chronicling Lanny’s adventures through the end of World War II and the dawn of the Cold War. As the novel opens, the Allies have just about wrapped up the war in Europe and are pushing the Nazis out of many of their formerly occupied territories. Lanny is still serving as an “assimilated colonel” in the U.S. Army, meaning he wears a uniform but plays a noncombatant role. Since he has lived most of his life in Europe and speaks German fluently, he assists the Allied forces in the interrogation of prisoners. Also, as an art expert, he is working as one of the Monuments Men in recovering works of art stolen by the Nazis and returning them to their rightful owners. In addition, because he has previously done some spy work regarding Germany’s nuclear weapons efforts, Lanny lends his expertise to the Alsos Mission, in which Allied intelligence personnel track down and interview German scientists about Nazi military technology, secure their laboratories, and confiscate their records and equipment.

Lanny’s previous experience as a secret agent masquerading as a Nazi sympathizer makes him a valuable asset to the Allied forces in the European Theatre, and once again Lanny crosses paths with his old acquaintance Hermann Göring. The Pacific Theatre, on the other hand, does not get much coverage in the series because there’s really no good reason for Sinclair to send Lanny to Asia. Instead, Sinclair finds many interesting war-related activities to keep Lanny occupied in America and Europe. This book also answers the question of what Lanny will do in peacetime. He inherits a million dollars from his childless godmother, who specifies that he spend the money towards the cause of world peace. (This plot element seems rather an unnecessary gimmick, since Lanny was already rich.) With the help of his wife and a few close friends, Lanny then transforms himself into someone very similar to Upton Sinclair—not exactly a writer, but the founder and editorial head of an indie media mini-empire that broadcasts a socialist perspective on current events. This peacetime enterprise is not as exciting as Lanny’s wartime exploits, but it does help to tie up many of the series’s loose ends. Almost all of the various supporting characters of the series are revisited, and each gets his or her own “Where are they now?” recap.

One recurring plot element that’s largely absent from this episode is paranormal phenomena. Since the beginning, Sinclair has used the series not only to outline his leftist history of the World Wars but also to propound his beliefs in extra sensory perception, communication with the spirit world, and possibly telepathy. In O Shepherd, Speak!, thankfully, Sinclair keeps the séance shenanigans to a minimum, though he does allow some discourse on the topic towards the end. He can’t resist one incredible message from the dead, but his treatment of the incident feels more sentimental than serious.

Sinclair intended O Shepherd, Speak! to be the conclusion of the Lanny Budd series, as is evident by its feeling of closure. Later, however, he felt the need to write an eleventh novel, The Return of Lanny Budd, published in 1953, which presumably follows Lanny further into the Cold War. O Shepherd, Speak! is not the best novel in the series (that would probably be One Clear Call), but it certainly falls within the top half of the ten books so far. The series as a whole is truly amazing. The sheer number of plot threads that Sinclair juggles and the wealth of historical information he imparts to the reader are awe-inspiring. Were it truly the final volume, O Shepherd, Speak! would have proved a fitting capstone to this monumental achievement.
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The Overman by Upton Sinclair

Philosopher Crusoe

The Overman, a story by Upton Sinclair, was originally published in the December 1906 issue of The Windsor Magazine. Though really just a short story, it was published as a hardcover volume of 90 pages in 1907, so it is usually listed among Sinclair’s novels. In 1924, socialist publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius also published an edition of The Overman as part of his Little Blue Books series, making it Little Blue Book No. 594.

Given Sinclair’s lifelong preoccupation with labor and the class struggle, I expected the title to refer to some capitalist slave driver, such as a tyrannical factory foreman. What I got, however, was far different. The Overman is not a work of social justice typical of Sinclair’s body of work. Instead, it is a deeply philosophical tale, and one more romantic than realistic. The title refers to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the übermensch, which has been translated into English as “beyond-man,” “superman,” or “overman.” Nietzsche proposed the overman as the next step in evolution to which humanity should aspire. The übermensch would be an “artist-tyrant” who would create new life-affirming, non-theistical values for humanity to supersede the other-wordly values of traditional religions. Nietzsche’s concept has been interpreted in myriad ways and co-opted by a variety movements ranging from fascists to anarchists. In The Overman, Sinclair’s interpretation of the übermensch is rather fantastical, rhapsodic, and transcendental.

The story is narrated by Edward, a scientist. His younger brother Daniel, a gifted musician, was shipwrecked during an ocean voyage and presumed lost at sea. Years later, however, Edward meets a survivor of the voyage, who tells him that a few castaways managed to reach an uninhabited island, where they lived for several months. When the other survivors made an escape attempt in a small craft, Daniel chose to remain on the island. Hearing this, Edward launches a search to find his long-lost brother and ends up shipwrecked himself, on the very same island as his brother Daniel! This brief and not at all realistic setup serves the purpose of getting the two brothers alone on an island, where there two natures can be compared and contrasted.

In his twenty years alone on the island, Daniel has come to embrace his solitude. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, he hasn’t even bothered to better his life on the island, but instead lives a rather ascetic existence inspired by Diogenes the Cynic. Daniel doesn’t even play his violin anymore, as he is now able to compose entire symphonies in his mind. Emphasizing an internal life of the mind over the needs of the body, he has elevated his existence to a higher intellectual and creative plane, as if he has acquired new senses with which to commune with the universe. Sinclair’s pet fascination with paranormal psychology—telepathy, clairvoyance, and such—also plays into Daniel’s heightened mental and spiritual state, to a degree which Nietzsche himself likely would have frowned upon, as the story crosses the line from philosophy into fantasy.

The Overman is essentially a dialogue between two sides of Upton Sinclair. The Daniel side aspires to be the transcendent artist who reaches lofty literary heights by expressing the sublime. The Edward side is the scientific realist who writes about the world as it is and who must practice his literary craft as an income-producing profession. Coming from Sinclair, The Overman is a very unusual and unexpected piece of fiction, but one that intimately reveals much about the author’s values, dreams, and inner struggles at this period in his literary development.
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One Clear Call by Upton Sinclair

Lanny Budd invades Italy and France
One Clear Call is the ninth of eleven novels in Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series. Published in 1948, this book covers the historical events of World War II from 1943 to 1944. If you’ve made it this far, then you already know that Lanny is a wealthy art dealer with socialist political views who masquerades as a Nazi sympathizer in order to gather intelligence for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the previous installment, Presidential Mission, FDR sent Lanny to Nazi-occupied North Africa to find military and civilian parties with anti-Nazi leanings to enlist them in supporting an Allied invasion of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. Since Lanny did such a good job with that mission, FDR asks him to perform the same function once again, this time forming alliances with partisans and anti-Hitler Germans to help the Allies drive the Nazis out of Italy. 

Before he embarks on such an important mission, Lanny decides to perform two tasks which he has repeatedly undertaken in the previous few volumes: hold a séance and visit Hitler. Despite the fact that America is now at war with Germany, Lanny has developed quite a friendship with Hitler, who thinks that Lanny is spying for him. Lanny is also on good terms with fellow art lover Hermann Goering, who has amassed a sizable collection of masterpieces that the Nazis have looted from their conquered territories. As for the aforementioned séance, Lanny’s interests (and Sinclair’s) include such paranormal arts as telepathy and communication with the spirits of the dead. With so much action happening with the war, however, such activities are only mentioned briefly, and whatever revelations Lanny gleans from beyond the grave play little if any part in the plot. In fact, One Clear Call may be the least paranormal book in the series thus far, which definitely works in its favor.

Another factor that sets this entry apart from most of the previous volumes is that in this book Lanny finally encounters some real life-threatening dangers in his spy work. Previous volumes, including Presidential Mission, made his feats of espionage seem unconvincingly easy, whereas this novel more than once forces him to exercise his brains and derring-do to extricate himself from a potentially lethal situation. In following the events of the war, the main focus of the plot eventually moves on from Italy to France (though Lanny of course hops across the Atlantic numerous times). The Allies’ D-Day landing on the beaches of Normandy takes place in this novel. As is often the case, Lanny does not witness the invasion firsthand, but Sinclair provides him with a realistically minor role to play behind the scenes. In the series as a whole, and Once Clear Call in particular, one really learns a great deal of detail about the historical events of these pivotal years, not just the military history but the political, cultural, and economic history as well. Sinclair’s leftist people’s-history approach provides a refreshing alternative perspective to the usual romanticized patriotic narratives of the period.

All in all, One Clear Call is the best book in the series thus far. The historical events are exciting, and the stakes feel higher in Lanny’s personal life as well. This novel brings together a lot of loose ends from previous novels and brings them full circle. The series sports a vast cast comprised of scores of characters, and every novel spends its fair share of time checking in on many of them, but here Sinclair does a great job of inserting the characters in realistic and purposeful ways. The suspenseful story rarely drags, and unlike some of the less compelling volumes in the series One Clear Call feels like a unified novel and not just a series of disconnected events. The Lanny Budd series is a monumental achievement in historical fiction, and this novel is Sinclair at his best.
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Presidential Mission by Upton Sinclair

Lanny Budd’s North African interlude
Presidential Mission is the eighth book in Upton Sinclair’s 11-novel Lanny Budd series, not to be confused with the similarly titled fifth book in the series, Presidential Agent. Published in 1947, Presidential Mission is set amidst the events of World War II from 1942 to 1943. As established earlier in the series, Lanny is a wealthy French-born son of American parents who uses his career as an art dealer to gather intelligence for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Pretending to be a Nazi sympathizer, he is able to strike up acquaintances with high-level Germans including Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Rudolf Hess, as well as other powerful personages in Europe and America. Lanny’s globetrotting occupation and access to world leaders offers Sinclair the opportunity to provide a detailed look at historical events of the twentieth century, as told through his leftist perspective as an outspoken American socialist.

Presidential Mission opens at the point when the United States has decided to enter the war in Europe, but they have yet to make a decision as to where to land their troops. FDR sends Lanny to North Africa to gather intelligence, gauge the response of the locals to an American invasion, and recruit sympathetic anti-Nazi agents to work with the OSS (the precursor to the CIA). France controls most of North Africa, but France itself is occupied by the Nazis, and it is unclear to what extent the French armed forces will greet the U.S. troops as friend or foe. Lanny travels extensively in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, pretending to shop for Islamic mosaics while spying for FDR and forming alliances to support an Allied invasion.

As always, the intricacy with which Sinclair plots the events of World War II is impressive, and the way he works Lanny into the proceedings is ingenious. Lanny’s seemingly unlimited access to FDR strains realism, however, as does the fact that he only reports to the President in person. This causes Lanny to repeatedly trod a triangle from Washington to Vichy France to North Africa and back again. The novel treads water like this rather tediously for two-thirds of its length. From there, however, the pace picks up considerably and veers off into a totally different direction about which the less said the better, to avoid spoilers. Suffice it to say that the final third of the novel is a considerable improvement over what comes before.

Thankfully, Sinclair devotes very few pages in this novel to Lanny’s annoying hobby: séances, mediums, and talking to the dead. Unlike in other novels of the series, the supernatural plays no important part in the plot of Presidential Mission. The main fault of this novel, and of the series in general, is that for an espionage narrative it lacks any real sense of danger. Because the plot is so firmly tied to historical events, the outcome of Lanny’s efforts is rarely ever in question. We know how the war is going to end. We know Lanny is going to survive until the 11th book. He almost never fails at any mission he undertakes, because to do so would be to alter the course of history, which would defeat Sinclair’s purpose for the series, to provide a leftist history of the war. As a result, though Lanny is integrally involved in major historical events, his contribution to those events feels largely inconsequential. By the end of Presidential Mission, even Lanny himself admits that the intelligence he gathered really wasn’t all that crucial to the war effort.

Though this novel does have its faults, it does succeed as an eye-opening alternative perspective on world history. The Lanny Budd novels often fall short of perfection, and Presidential Mission is certainly not the best book of the bunch (so far that would probably be A World to Win), but the series as a whole is undoubtedly a monumental achievement.
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They Call Me Carpenter by Upton Sinclair

Jesus as the ultimate socialist
When one thinks of socialists and religion, there may be a natural tendency to assume that all reds, like Karl Marx, are atheists and materialists. That’s not always true, however, and in fact there is a movement of Christian socialism that even predates The Communist Manifesto. Author Upton Sinclair, being an outspoken critic of Christianity and organized religion in general, could not be classified within that movement, but there’s no denying that he is a great admirer of Jesus Christ. In the 1915 book edited by Sinclair, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest, he devotes an entire chapter to Christ, consisting of excerpts from leftist literature that depict Christ as the ultimate socialist. Sinclair took this idea a step further with his 1922 novel They Call Me Carpenter, which stars Christ himself. In this book, Sinclair speculates what would happen if Christ visited 1920s America and witnessed firsthand the modern class struggle and oppression of the working class.

The novel takes place in Western City, a thinly disguised surrogate for Los Angeles. The narrator of the story is a young gentleman of the upper class named Billy, who has no apparent occupation and describes himself as a “club man.” Though a fellow of leisure, Billy is a World War I vet who saw combat in France. In the opening chapters, Billy goes to see a film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Upon leaving the theater he is caught up in a jingoistic, anti-German riot, and despite his record as a war hero is beaten for being a German sympathizer, simply for seeing the German film. Dazed and demoralized, Billy takes refuge in a church. As he gazes up at a stained glass image of Christ, he is astonished to see this Christ descend from the window and stand by his side. Christ then decides to go forth into the world, with Billy as his guide, and disguises his identity by adopting the name of Carpenter

The novel starts out pretty farcically. Sinclair lampoons Hollywood by having Carpenter meet up with rich movie moguls and decadent starlets who demonstrate the excesses of the wealthy. Billy and Carpenter venture into a beauty parlor/plastic surgery shop which resembles the face-stretching scene from Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. Then Carpenter meets some members of the working class and begins to see the rampant income inequality of this modern world and the horrible working and living conditions it engenders. He begins speaking out against the exploitation of labor and is branded as a “red prophet” by the press. The capitalist powers use every means to attack him, including legal action, public denunciation, and violence.

The novel eventually turns into a retelling of the Passion, with various characters standing in for figures from the Bible. After beginning the novel in such a looney tone, Sinclair then expects us to feel pathos for Carpenter, and quite frankly the mixture of satire and sermonizing is too incongruous to succeed on either front. Sinclair is good at injecting humor into politically charged novels, such as 100%: The Story of a Patriot or the books in the Lanny Budd series, but when he goes full-on satire he often fails, as in The Millennium. All the silly stuff about Hollywood only detracts from the serious points he’s trying to make about the class struggle. The main thrust of the story is that if Christ were to descend to Earth in the modern era he would be harassed by the police and vilified by the press. That’s not particularly clever and really not all that different from what happened to Christ 2,000 years ago; only now we have newspapers and movies. Though Sinclair has proven himself a great writer in better books, They Call Me Carpenter is neither very enlightening nor very funny, and instead just ends up being mostly a bore.
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A World to Win by Upton Sinclair

Around the world with Lanny Budd

A World to Win is the seventh of eleven novels in Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series. Published in 1946, this historical novel covers events in world history from the Summer of 1940 to early 1942. Lanny, the wealthy and well-educated son of an American arms manufacturer, was born and raised in the South of France. Working as an art dealer, Lanny has traveled throughout Europe and America, meeting many famous and powerful people along the way. Though a leftist at heart, in the past couple books Lanny has pretended to be a Nazi sympathizer in order to gather intelligence from prominent Nazis with whom he has struck up an acquaintance, including Adolph Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Rudolf Hess. In A World to Win, Hitler’s power continues to increase. Germany has invaded and occupied a large portion of Europe and now has its sights set on Russia.

There’s no denying that the Lanny Budd series is a monumental achievement in American literature. The grand scope of the narrative is truly impressive, and the intricate detail with which Sinclair chronicles historical events is immensely educational. Nevertheless, the books in this series are often quite frustrating due to the glacial pace with which they proceed and the myriad subplots which digress from the main narrative, including Sinclair indulging his own avid interest in psychic communication with the spirit world. The first half of A World to Win is discouragingly slow, but the latter half is far more engaging, enough to grab the reader’s attention and hold it captive until the very end. While all the Lanny Budd books have their flaws and frustrations, overall I’d have to say that this may be the series’s best volume yet.

Thankfully, this novel contains fewer séances than the previous installments, and the paranormal does not play as integral a role in the plot as it has before. Lanny’s love life, however, does feature largely in this novel’s narrative, and the reader is often diverted from the events of World War II in favor of matters of the heart. Sinclair likes to point out that Lanny is one of the world’s most eligible bachelors, and here our hero has three or four women, all of them about twenty years his junior, vying to be the next Mrs. Budd. Because of his secret agent responsibilities, Lanny is reluctant to commit to any of these prospective brides, but that doesn’t stop him from making constant mental comparisons of their merits and faults. About halfway through the book, I finally got what I have been waiting for in this series: a genuinely exciting secret agent mission! Soon, however, circumstances rob the reader of such easy gratification, and the narrative reverts to romantic comedy mode, though as far as rom-coms go, one must admit that Sinclair sets up a pretty ingenious scenario.

While Lanny has been concentrating his efforts on the Nazis, Japan has begun to assert its military might on the world stage. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor takes place during this novel, though Lanny does not witness the event first-hand. This marks America’s official entry into the war, which will likely put a damper on Lanny’s ability to enter Germany and work among the Nazis. Lanny travels to Asia for the first time, as a tourist. Not surprisingly, given his socialist inclinations, Sinclair paints rather rosy pictures of Communist China and the Soviet Union. Mao and Stalin, our allies in the war, are portrayed as mostly benevolent rulers, their atrocities only hinted at as Sinclair focuses on the worldwide brotherhood of those opposed to the Axis powers. As always, Sinclair gives an interesting alternative perspective on world events and combines fact and fiction into an educational and entertaining reading experience. If you’ve already made it this far in the Lanny Budd series, you will certainly not be disappointed by A World to Win.
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The Moneychangers by Upton Sinclair

Financial chicanery and commercial skullduggery
Upton Sinclair’s novel The Moneychangers, published in 1908, is loosely based on the real-life stock market crash known as the Panic of 1907. The story takes place in New York City. In the opening chapter, Allan Montague, an attorney, is reunited with a childhood friend from Mississippi, Lucy Dupree, who is recently widowed and has decided to settle in New York. Lucy wants Montague’s help being introduced into “Society,” but he soon finds himself assuming the role of protector as the beautiful Lucy is sought after by wealthy, married philanderers. Though there is no romantic connection between the two, Lucy is naive to the big-city ways of the metropolis, and Montague takes it upon himself to defend her honor.

The story then makes a segue from chivalry into business. From their days back home in the South, Montague and Lucy are both stockholders in the Northern Mississippi Railroad. Lucy wants to sell her stock, and she asks Montague to act as her financial representative. Though this railroad is a small business, it has the potential to become a lot bigger through a deal with The Mississippi Steel Company. As New York’s wealthy financiers get wind of this, they show an interest in Lucy’s stock and start sniffing into her and Montague’s business. The more he deals with these interested parties, the more Montague learns about the underhanded deals going down in the world of New York finance, and how a handful of wealthy and powerful oligarchs manipulate the market, the courts, and the legislature to their advantage.

Compared to other writers of the muckraker era like Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair always had his own unique style that was more propagandistic and preachy than his contemporaries. He was never afraid to push his political agenda, no matter how blatantly, even at the expense of plot and characterization. (That’s not a criticism, just an observation; I actually admire him for it.) Here in The Moneychangers, however, Sinclair definitely makes an attempt to craft a satisfying melodrama. Stylistically, the book greatly resembles Dreiser’s novels The Financier and The Titan. Sinclair nevertheless still manages to get his digs into the capitalist class, but not so dogmatically as he does in books like The Jungle, 100%, or The Millennium. This may be because none of the book’s characters are members of the lower, working, or even the middle classes. The story is told entirely through the perspective of lawyers, bankers, and well-to-do businessmen. Having covered the proletariat with due diligence elsewhere in his body of work, perhaps here Sinclair was aiming to educate middle-class readers through subtler persuasive tactics.

The Moneychangers isn’t very compelling at first, but it improves considerably as it goes along. The first half is rather slow, and the whole storyline about Lucy and her reputation feels a bit unnecessary to a novel that’s ultimately about finance and greed. The second half of the book, however, is really quite good. The instances of financial, commercial, and political corruption start out small but then gradually snowball into an avalanche. One particularly clever scene of journalistic espionage turns the book into a thriller worthy of a 21st-century film adaptation. Though Sinclair develops his case gradually without resorting to diatribes, by the end of the novel he has presented an ample laundry list of evils perpetrated by the oligarchs of American finance. The Moneychangers proves once again that even Sinclair’s lesser known works are often of high literary merit and loaded with valuable perspective on American history.
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Dragon Harvest by Upton Sinclair

Lanny Budd and the dawn of World War II
Upton Sinclair’s novel Dragon Harvest, first published in 1945, is the sixth book in the Lanny Budd series. The title echoes that of the third book, Dragon’s Teeth, making reference to the old saying about sowing dragon’s teeth, meaning to do something that inadvertently leads to trouble. In this case, the leniency with which European nations have reacted to Nazi aggression has allowed the German military to become extremely powerful. Here Hitler reaps the harvest of those appeasement policies by invading Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The great thing about this series is that Sinclair really explains in detail how and why World War II happened. It is easy for us to look back in hindsight and see Hitler and the Nazis as blatantly evil, but Sinclair shows you how they were viewed at the time and how they were allowed to get away with what they did. Not only was fear of war a factor in the Nazis’ rise to power, but many saw them as saviors from the spread of Russian Bolshevism. The story covers the years 1938 to 1940. Among the events depicted is the Dunkirk evacuation, subject of the recent film by Christopher Nolan which has received so much critical acclaim.

Though this is essentially a spy novel, one thing that keeps this book from being a first-rate political thriller is the fact that there’s no overarching mission that unites the book as a whole. In Dragon’s Teeth, you have Lanny rescuing Jewish friends from the Nazis; in Presidential Agent, you have the mystery of Lanny’s missing wife. Here, however, it’s just Lanny bouncing like a pinball between Berlin, Paris, London, and New York, exchanging information with world leaders, in some cases visiting the same person four or five times over the course of the book. Here the espionage narrative, however, isn’t really the main attraction. What makes these books worth reading is Sinclair’s perspective on history and the educational insight he provides into world events.

As usual, in between all the scenes of political intrigue we get frequent updates on Lanny’s love life. No less than three love interests materialize in this volume. The relationship subplots are a forgivable diversion in these novels, but I didn’t really like the direction in which Sinclair took them in this story. At one point Lanny enlists one of his lady friends into a dangerous missions, while keeping her mostly in the dark about the risks she’s running. Sinclair needs the device in order to move the plot forward, but it doesn’t seem true to the character of Lanny, who usually proves himself ever the selfless gentleman.

Through the first half of the book I was getting ready to call this the best Lanny Budd book ever. The history was fascinating, the drama was engaging, and there was not an instance of paranormal activity whatsoever. Then, at about the halfway point, Sinclair returns to his pet interest in spirit communication and lays it on extremely thick, as if to make up for his self-control earlier in the book. In order to influence Hitler’s decision-making, Lanny comes up with a cockamamie plot involving séances and mediums. Even if you believe someone can talk to the dead, the idea of him actually pulling off the stunt he comes up with here stretches the bounds of believability.

These books always end on a bit of a cliffhanger, leaving the fictional narrative feeling unfinished in order to set up the next book. Historically, however, the ending of Dragon Harvest feels more resolved than most, as it ends with the surrender of Paris to the Nazis. The series promises lots more intrigue as the war progresses. Despite all my complaints, reservations, and disappointments, I do enjoy reading these books, and I’m in it for the long haul.
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Prince Hagen by Upton Sinclair

Sinclair’s revenge phantasy
Upton Sinclair originally wrote Prince Hagen as a novel, which was published in 1903 with the subtitle A Phantasy. He later rewrote the story as a play, which debuted in 1909 at the Valencia Theatre in San Francisco. The play, published as Prince Hagen: A Drama in Four Acts, was printed in book form later that year. It was also included in his 1912 anthology Plays of Protest, along with The Naturewoman, The Machine, and The Second-Story Man. This review discusses the play, not the novel.

The curtain rises on a forest scene, where Gerald Isman, a poet and son of a wealthy railroad magnate, is sitting at a campfire. He is approached by a representative of the Nibelungs, a race of centuries-old beings who dwell in an underground civilization. Sinclair, an avid classical music fan, adapted the characters from Richard Wagner’s series of operas known as The Ring of the Nibelung. The Nibelungs spend their lives digging for gold and hoarding it in a massive treasure trove. Gerald is invited into their world and introduced to the king. The Nibelungs would like to send the king’s son, Prince Hagen, to the surface world, to learn the ways of Earth society. They ask Gerald to act as his guardian, and he agrees.

Once let loose in America, Prince Hagen develops an intense hatred of our corrupt capitalist system. He uses his seemingly unlimited fortune in gold to manipulate the stock market and crush the world’s wealthy industrialists and financiers, punishing them for their exploitative sins. The original subtitle of the novel was quite apt, as this is clearly Sinclair’s revenge “phantasy,” his way of saying, “If I had all the money in the world, I would beat those bastards at their own game!” Hagen’s cutthroat tactics would seem to run counter to Sinclair’s socialist ethos, but at least the author embraces the absurdity of his own premise. The story is all rather silly, but there’s moments of good humor in it, and the characters are occasionally given the opportunity to go off on the sort of ranting soliloquy one expects from Sinclair. For example, there’s a delightfully acerbic passage about how religion and morality are used to subjugate the masses, and another brief dialogue about how money is the great oppressor of the people.

Of course, these philosophical points are standard fare for readers of Sinclair. Here he simply attempts to repackage them in a novel way. The use of mythological beings seems like a dumb idea at first, but at least it lifts this drama above the level of mediocre propaganda tracts like The Millennium or The Second-Story Man. That said, Prince Hagen got bad reviews when it hit the stage and is unlikely to undergo a revival anytime soon. Only the most curious Sinclair enthusiasts are likely to read it, and that’s about all it’s good for.
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