HOLLYWOOD MANGLES UPTON SINCLAIR
by Dave Chaddock

No writer has done a greater job portraying the struggles of working people here in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century than has Upton Sinclair. His two novels about the Colorado coal miners, KING COAL (1917), and THE COAL WAR (published posthumously in 1976) give us the background of the Ludlow Massacre, wherein women and children were shot and burned in their beds by Rockefeller goons, while the press of the  entire  country  maintained  a conspiracy of silence about the affair.

Then  there is the moving two-volume novel BOSTON (1928) which contains the true story of the frame up and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, a story that Sinclair began to write immediately after the innocent pair were electrocuted. So painstakingly researched and true to reality were these novels that George Bernard Shaw wrote to Sinclair: “When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime I do not refer them to newspaper files and to the authorities, but to your novels.” We have recently seen in the DISPATCHER how SAM KAGLE was an avid Sinclair reader. I have no doubt that many  early  members of our union were inspired by his eloquence. Brother PETE KOLLOEN recently told me how he had read Sinclair thirty years ago.

Having recently read another Sinclair novel, OIL!, when I saw that the new film THERE WILL BE BLOOD, was said to be “based” on this novel, I was eager to see it. First off, I wanted to check on how the director handled that wonderful opening section, the first 15 pages or so, in which the boy and his dad are driving across the country in the early days of the automobile. But this marvelous nostalgic scene was reduced to about seven seconds. Then it got worse. Much worse. 

The movie tells the story of a sick, murderous individual who kills two people in cold blood and threatens to kill another, for reasons best explained by pathology. 

As a former pinsetter, who has spent a good deal of time dodging errant bowling balls and pins, I was especially appalled by the concluding scene, in which the leading actor beats a man to death with a bowling pin. This movie is “based on” Upton Sinclair only in the same way that water is “based on” hydrogen and oxygen. The completed product bears almost no resemblance at all to the components on which it is “based.” Yes, there is an oil well and a man who dies after falling in the hole. Yes, there is an unctuous preacher man who plays a minor role in the novel, but the movie transmogrifies him into a principal character who gets beaten to death in the climax. The director imagines a scene in which an oil gusher makes the oilman’s son deaf in order to supply a complicated implausible reason for the oilman to be angered against the preacher. All in all, the dynamics of the movie impressed me as being extremely stupid. I had all  I could do to avoid shouting  out in the theater that the movie was a crock, and that it would make Upton Sinclair turn over in his grave. Of course it is all perfectly consistent with the trouble Sinclair had all his life trying to get his message across. The novel that made him famous, THE  JUNGLE, almost never saw the light of day. Five publishers had turned it down because it was “too shocking.” 

But then Jack London raved about it, declaring: “Here it is at last! The book we have been waiting for these many years! The UNCLE TOM”S CABIN of wage slavery!…It depicts what our country really is, the home of oppression and injustice, a nightmare of misery, an inferno of suffering, a human hell, a jungle of wild beasts.” London  helped to make it possible for the book to get published, but even then it was embraced for an incidental reason rather than for the reason Sinclair intended. He had gone to Packingtown and lived for seven weeks among the workers. His aim was to “interest the American people in the conditions of labor in their packing plants.” But along the way he related a few facts about the tainted condition of the meat supply. This touched a raw nerve. He said: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it  in the stomach…The slaves of Packingtown went on Living and working as they were described as doing in THE JUNGLE and nobody gave a further thought to them.”

In all of his books, Sinclair depicted the plight of the working people, and with the exception of THE JUNGLE,  they have been relegated to obscurity. The owners of the press, and of the giant publishing companies, are not eager to reveal the dirty linen that muckraker Sinclair has documented. As London pointed out in his book THE BRASS CHECK, when there was a great coal strike in West Virginia in 1912, beginning on April 1st, the first news item of the Associated Press mentioning the strike of the was a brief dispatch  on  April 6 telling of threats of violence. There was a second item a month later warning that “serious rioting is imminent.” And that was the extent of what the public was told. There was “not one line about the causes  of  the strike, not one line about the demands of the miners.”

 The  US press, Sinclair declared, if strikers are “follows this simple and elemental rule violent, they get on the wires, while if strikers are not violent, they stay off the wires.”  By this device an idea-association was established in the mind of the public: Strikes – violence! You will not see a hint of the real Sinclair Lewis in this new Hollywood movie.  You  will not hear him declaring, as he does in the book upon which the  movie is supposedly “based”, that the oilmen who bought the presidency of Harding had a view that “the affairs of the country had to be run by the men  who  had  the  money”  and  that  “the  mass  of  the people had to be bamboozled.”  You will not hear a word about how Senator LaFollette could not be bought off, and how he helped expose the Teapot Dome scandal.  Nor will you be told how US troops invaded Russia and shot a few longshoremen, who

brought coffins to the American consulate on the Fourth of July with banners asking us “why we had shot their people.”  On a day when Americans were celebrating their own revolution, Russian longshore workers wanted to know, “why  had  we overthrown theirs?”  Why were US troops standing by as guards  while the “Whites” packed over 2,000 prisoners into cattle cars and shunted  them  onto  sidings  for  weeks  until  their victims “perished of hunger,  thirst  and  disease?”  Why, in short, had the US , in Sinclair’s words, intervened in Russia to “put the workers down and the landlords and bankers up.”?  Not a word, not a hint, not a whisper of any of this in the movie.  All of this accurate history, it seems, is much “too shocking” for Hollywood !

And yet, ironically, thanks to the running of this movie, Penguin Books has just published a “companion” volume to the movie, a paperback issue of the novel “OIL!”  For the first time in recent memory, one of Upton Sinclair’s greatest books is readily available. Now we can easily read for ourselves all the good stuff the movie has omitted, and can expose the movie for the pompous fraud that it is.

For too long all we could buy was THE JUNGLE sometimes seven or eight different editions in one store, but never anything else. Of course, THE JUNGLE is a good read, but it is high time that the American appetite is whetted to enjoy a bit more of the ninety-odd books in the Sinclair corpus.