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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