Oil!: Upton Sinclair

Oil! is the 1927 novel by Pulitzer-Prize winning author and socialist politician, Upton Sinclair. Sinclair doesn't hesitate to reveal his pink blood in this work of semi-fiction, which claims to be full of truths which have been shuffled like the cards of a poker game. I suppose at the time of it's publication the public was much more aware of his political aspirations and even his failed attempt to create a utopian society in New Jersey, but I had only thought he was a socialist journalist and sympathizer until doing further research mid-story. The plot is not like There Will be Blood at all. At All. Sure, there are some of the same characters and the beginning's match up a bit, but the main character of the book is the son, J. Arnold Ross Jr. (Bunny), and the tale revolves much more heavily around Bunny's socialist struggles including the creation of a four-page paper, the attending of meetings world wide, and the borrowing of dad's money to bail out political prisoners of the party. Oil! also features a loose fictional expose of the early years of the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal), mixed and "shuffled" with what Sinclair claims as facts (at least some of which can be verified through U.S Senate reports and Historical texts) about Sinclair Oil and Edward L. Doheny's roles in the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. Teapot Dome, for readers of my generation who don't remember from U.S. History, was the biggest government scandal before Watergate and involved oil tycoons bribing government officials to acquire private leases of U.S. Naval Oil Fields in Wyoming and in Elk Hills and Buena Vista of Southern California. In the novel, our hero's father and some of his powerful associates purchase the entire presidency and pay off cabinet officials through a company in Canada. One direct correlation to known fact in the novel is the $100,000 bribe made by "Dad" and Vernon Roscoe, which is the exact dollar amount paid by Harry Sinclair to Albert B. Fall, then Secretary of the Interior, who was eventually indicted on charges of conspiracy and accepting bribes and eventually served prison time.  All in all, this book was much longer and slower than The Jungle and in my opinion is much less of a must read. I did enjoy Oil!, as historical fiction, but honestly found myself becoming more and more attached to J. Arnold Ross Sr. despite his shady dealings. Sure, he was paying off government officials and making moves on some unsuspecting country bumpkins, but he was an extremely loving and understanding father. He built his own American dream by playing the game the way the people in power played and he always respected Bunny's ideals and even strove to be as fair and understanding of the worker's plight as he could until he was overpowered by the big boy's of the Oil Manufacturer's Legion. Bunny was a good kid and really wanted to do good in the world and figure things out for himself, but his lack of guts and street smarts just wore me out long before the slow and bitter descent to a sad ending spawned from Mr. Upton Sinclair and his party's failure to create change in our capitalist society and government. Boo Hoo.