Chapter XV: The Great Pamphlets

I.

Modern industrial America has proved a difficult theme for the artists whose business it is to handle it. There have been two recognized attitudes of literary approach to this theme. The first, to be found in the popular magazines, is an attitude of uncritical adulation and blatant celebration of the advantages which accrue to its beneficiaries. The other attitude, now found increasingly in fiction appealing to the intelligentsia, is one of hopeless sentimental protest against a machine civilization which is conceived as utterly vicious, spiritually degrading, and altogether too hideous and uninteresting to be worth picturing in any realistic detail--the space being occupied instead by accounts of the miseries of the sensitive and artistic souls who are represented as its chief victims. A welcome from the American intelligentsia awaits any writer who will picture present conditions as a confused and hopeless chaos; and on the other hand a vast popularity, though with no such critical esteem, awaits the writer who will uncritically celebrate the joys of riding about in expensive motor cars, eating at expensive restaurants, playing at expensive sports, indulging in expensive adultery, and exploiting generally the advantages which accrue to the beneficiaries of the industrial process. From a literary point of view, the objection to both these methods is that they fail to come to grips with their subject.

In so new, vast and confusing a heap of materials as modern industrial America presents, what is needed first of all is a pattern, an ideological map of the scene. The old patterns will scarcely do--at least those patterns which concern themselves narrowly with the fortunes of individuals, against a background which can be taken for granted. Here the background is of greater importance, and it is with masses or groups of men that the story must needs be concerned. Or so it would seem. The most successful experiment in this kind of fiction was made by Frank Norris in _The Octopus_; there the canvas was sufficiently large for the event portrayed, a farmer-railroad war. But he failed to follow up this method in his succeeding book, _The Pit_, where attention was concentrated upon a few individuals. A literary problem is here involved, which has not yet been successfully solved in fiction. Upton Sinclair’s _Jungle_ did suggest that one solution lay in putting, as he declared he had attempted, “the content of Shelley in the form of Zola.” But in his immediately succeeding books, _The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_, he failed to make his wealth of reported detail a living part of his story. The problem might have advanced further toward a solution, but for the serious discouragements which American literature suffered, for more than a decade, at the hands of those timid business classes who felt that their interests were endangered by truthfulness in fiction; and now that the younger writers in America are in general revolt against the censorship of respectability, their daring has manifested itself chiefly so far in venturing to deal frankly with sexual themes, leaving almost everything else untouched. The problem still remains. But it is again being attacked, in the field which precedes perhaps by necessity the fictional one, that is to say in pamphleteering.

It was pamphleteering--magazine “muck-raking” as it was called--which preceded and accompanied the great fictional period with which the names of Frank Norris, Jack London and Upton Sinclair are associated. That period of pamphleteering had scientific rigor as its goal; a series of magazine articles on railroad corruption was praised by saying that it read “like an interstate commerce report”. The new period of pamphleteering is no less scientifically rigorous in its factual basis, but it is more human, robust, vigorous, eloquent, humorous, satirical, personal--and in these respects approaches and sometimes achieves the effects of imaginative literature. This pamphleteering at its best has the narrative and dramatic and psychological excitements of the novel; and it does what the novel has but seldom succeeded in doing, it comes to grips with the American theme. It does so by virtue of having patterns which include the tumultuous and shifting details of this theme--ideological maps of the landscape, by which the writer can guide us swiftly from point to point; and most of all, perhaps, it succeeds by reason of having no such restricted personal scope as the novelist habitually feels obliged to confine himself to: it deals with the broad panorama of life. It furnishes perhaps the experimental models of a fiction soon to be born, able to cope with such a theme as America presents. In any event, it stands, in its foremost examples, as the latest and greatest achievement of contemporary American literature.

And, as might perhaps have been expected, it is one of the surviving leaders of the gallant fictional campaign of twenty years ago who has set the pace in this new effort. Baffled, it would seem, by the difficulty of getting so huge a drama into fiction, Upton Sinclair has magnificently turned all his powers loose into the generous medium of pamphleteering--to use that term in the sense not of small but of controversial books.

Already, in 1918, there had appeared the first of a series of great pamphlets which were to get modern America down on paper with a fullness and a freedom never yet achieved in any other literary form. This initial work was _The Profits of Religion_, announced as “a study of supernaturalism from a new point of view--as a source of income and a shield of privilege”. If the point of view was not actually new, it had at least not been embodied in so ambitious a review. Its manner was new, at least since Voltaire. Scarcely since then had there been such a ruthless showing up of sacred institutions. It was not a matter of arguing about creeds; it was a revelation of the facts about the actual function of churches and churchmen in a class society. It was a more devastating book than can readily be imagined. A liberal clergyman, the Rev. John Haynes Holmes, wrote of it: “I must confess that it has fairly made me writhe to read these pages, not because they are untrue or unfair, but on the contrary, because I know them to be the real facts. I love the church as I love my home, and therefore it is no pleasant experience to be made to face such a story as this which you have told. It had to be done, however, and I am glad you have done it, for my interest in the church, after all, is more or less incidental, whereas my interest in religion is a fundamental thing.... You have done us all a service in the writing of this book.”

From a certain point of view, however, the importance of the book is less concerned with its thesis than with the details of contemporary life through which it leads like a pathway. Indeed, there is a sense in which an ideological pattern of any sort justifies itself as a means, whereby the artist leads us into the heart of his subject. And Sinclair’s pattern is of value precisely where the facts would otherwise be most confusing or negligible, that is to say in modern life. In his historical prelude, the pattern seems to introduce too great a simplification, and its literary value may be doubted; but it serves as an efficient map through that contemporary American welter of superstition and exploitation which is his actual theme. Doubtless there are other important factors involved besides the economic one; that does not so much matter when the picture is before us--“the Church of Good Society”, “the Church of the Servant Girls”, “the Church of the Slavers”, “the Church of the Merchants”, “the Church of the Quacks”. These are part of our America; and these are the uses to which a business régime finds these institutions apt and ready. It may be in part an indictment of human nature rather than of capitalism; but it is a true picture of a not unimportant aspect of modern industrial America.

II.

It was announced, moreover, that this volume was to be the first of a series that should “do for Education, Journalism, and Literature” what had here been done for the Church: “the four volumes making a work of revolutionary criticism, an Economic Interpretation of Culture under the general title of _The Dead Hand_”.

If there were any doubt of the significance of the Church as an aspect of modern American industrial life, there was none concerning Journalism and Education. American Journalism was in a peculiar position: the newspapers, being almost the sole mediums of publicity, had confidently and arrogantly used their opportunities to sing their own praises, attributing to themselves all the virtues, and glorifying in particular their own honesty, truthfulness, fairness, incorruptibility. Their victims might be aware of the contrary, their editors might have tales to tell in private, soap-box orators might denounce them for falsifying and suppressing news of industrial struggles in the interests of the employers--but who would listen? They seemed as secure as Gille de Rais in his castle. And at their back stood the Associated Press, loaded with international honors, a sacrosanct institution, alert to prosecute for criminal libel any obscure Socialist publication which dared charge it with partisanship. It would indeed be difficult to prove a case against them, to expose the truth which lay behind these gigantic self-advertised reputations for purity. Yet it was nothing less than this that Upton Sinclair undertook.

_The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism_ appeared in 1919. The reference in the title is to the metal counters used in brothels, according to investigations which had given the phrase some currency as a polite synonym for prostitution. The book was an indictment of the corruption of the American press, with facts, names, dates, proof complete. If the charges were false, they constituted criminal libel, and the author could have been put in prison. But, despite repeated challenges by the author, the truth of these statements was never denied in court.

_The Brass Check_ is an extraordinary book--not in its daring alone. Its contents vary from what might be described as dynamite to the most preposterously farcical matters, which are not, however, without their strict relevance to the subject under discussion, since American journalism has its farcical as well as its tragic aspect. Never in modern times have such widespread charges been made in such personal terms--personal with reference to the accuser as well as the accused. For it is, incidentally but first of all, an account of the dealings of the author himself with the newspapers of America. The book might for that reason have been ineffective; it was certainly unconventional. But in this case the story of one man’s relations with the press, embracing as it does some of the most important episodes in American newspaper history during our time, is a valuable document. Not all the personal incidents are important, though they illustrate the characteristic traits of the American press. But the story of Sinclair’s efforts to get the news of the Colorado coal strike into the papers, and his battle with the Associated Press in connection with the coal strike, is of the greatest importance. And this personal story is only the beginning of the record; with an immense mass of the most careful documentation, the whole field is covered in a factual and convincing way.

The impression which the book made upon America, the eagerness with which it was read here, as well as all over the world, revealed the fact that there was an immense resentment against the pseudo-sanctity in which these institutions had wrapped themselves; whether or not any reforms were immediately effected by this exposure, it at least lifted a cloud of repression from the minds of the American people. It was now possible to speak disrespectfully of these great institutions without seeming to be guilty of lèse majesté. It had been done, with impunity!

Aside, however, from its uncontroverted authenticity in detail, it was a picture of America which could be recognized by those who knew their country--a picture which has not before been compassed in our literature. Here was a real American story: nor, from that point of view, did it matter that the characters bore names that could be found in Bradstreet’s. When the persons named in the book are forgotten, when they are mere characters in the book, the book will still live on as a picture of its age. Here pamphleteering has reached the heights of great art.

III.

Upton Sinclair, almost forgotten as a novelist by his countrymen, became by virtue of this book again a figure in American life and literature. The post-war disillusionment had begun, people were willing to listen to the truth--and here was a man capable of telling it. What would his book on American education be like?

American education, it had begun to be realized, was largely a fetish. Was it really education at all, the process so elaborately conducted in our universities with amphitheatrical football performances in the foreground and intellectual terrorization in the background? And if not education, what was it, and why? Upton Sinclair, from the point of view of those who are interested technically in the problems of modern education, cannot furnish a final answer to that question. But, in _The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education_, his pattern provides us with preliminary guidance through the labyrinth of astounding and ridiculous facts: it does show us, if not everything that is the matter with American universities, at least what uses American business stupidity is making of these huge and lumbering institutions. There is, indeed, no Machiavellian cunning here, certainly no far-seeing effort to make higher education in America an efficient part of the capitalist system; but there is fear everywhere of truth, fear of intellectual freedom, hysterical fear and stupid tyranny. It is a tragic farce that is revealed in the book. The tragedy lies in the wastage of youth, and the frustration of teaching talent. But comic in the highest degree are the pompous figures that stalk so solemnly through its pages--the dignified and ridiculous little lords of the educational world who are hired to run their institutions so as to please the men who have money to give.... The book was followed in 1924 by _The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools_, in which the picture becomes both more ridiculous and more tragic, for petty greed and unscrupulous commercial exploitation, as ruthless and vicious as has ever been practised upon the helpless and the ignorant, become part of the scene. These revelations are all of a specifically factual and utterly convincing sort, and they portray in indelible terms the species of moral and intellectual serfdom to which the higher and lower educational institutions of America have been all but universally reduced by the ignorance and the fears of a business régime. And, together with their predecessors in this series of great pamphlets, these books constitute a Contemporary History of American Civilization by which we are known and judged all over the world, and which must be read and studied by all Americans who dare to face realities.

In these books, moreover, a writer who despite two extraordinary artistic triumphs has so often failed to come to complete and satisfying fullness of expression in the medium of the novel, reaches and maintains himself at the height of his powers. In this realm of facts, as not always in the realm controlled by the imagination, he is utterly assured and at home--capable, in this large field, of Aristophanic laughter and epic vision. Across these huge canvases march the multitudes of living mankind, tricksters and deluded ones, liars and dupes, thieves and victims, masters and henchmen, the preachers, editors, railroad presidents, financiers, politicians, soldiers, gunmen, salesmen, teachers, children: it is a panorama of contemporary American humanity, candidly, tenderly, relentlessly, magnificently displayed.

IV.

_Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation_, published in 1925, the latest in this series of gigantic exposés, is a venture of a different sort from the others. It does not deal especially with the American scene; and its interest lies only partly within the field of fact, being still more significantly within the field of opinion. It is in one of its aspects a polemic in art criticism, or, more specifically, literary criticism--an attack upon the theory of art for art’s sake. It is also, from its own revolutionary point of view, an “Outline of Literature”--the most spirited, honest, interesting and informative ever published. But it may perhaps most interestingly be considered here as a psychological document.

An American writer who early in this century wished to deal with themes of social and economic significance found himself hampered by an academic tradition concerning literature which had grown up since the Civil War. That vast struggle had left America too spiritually exhausted to take its due part in the great intellectual battles which raged through Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century; and the literary productions which reflected those conflicts came to us a little late and with an odor of sanctity which obscured their controversial quality. The new effort to exploit the vast commercial possibilities of America absorbed, moreover, for a generation or more, all its best energies, and literature was left to the professors. By these it was characteristically conceived as a serene realm high above the vulgar conflicts of the day, a refuge from immediate interests, a shelter from passing hopes and fears, a communion with “eternal” things. This professorial view of literature had preferred to forget the origin of its most admired productions in that very stress and sweat of earthly conflict. It was a forgetfulness natural to the epicene and timid class to whom education itself was no preparation for the struggle of life but rather a retirement from it. According to these professorial standards of taste, literature must not come too dangerously close to reality, or it would incur the damnation of being dismissed as “propaganda”. It was this attitude which the young Upton Sinclair encountered when he began his literary career. He wanted to show the evils of the existing world, and he wanted to help create the desire for a world fit to live in. Such intentions as these are no new thing in the history of literature--they have been implicit and explicit in much of the world’s greatest literature. But he found himself offending the taste of timid and nervous critics. They thought it was all right for him to have opinions about the Civil War, because that happened a long time ago; but he really ought not to have any opinions about the Class Struggle, because that was possibly going on right now. To try to make people sympathize with struggling poets was sufficiently artistic; but to try to make people sympathize with struggling workingmen was, in the cant phrase of the day, “propaganda”.

And yet it seemed to him, looking back over the world’s literature, that it was full of “propaganda”, of one sort and another. If Aristophanes satirized Athenian democracy, if Virgil concocted an imitation epic in celebration of the founding of Rome, if Juvenal muck-raked the high Roman society of his time in the most scandalous fashion, if Shakespeare mocked and reviled the mobs and their rebel leaders, if John Milton called on God to avenge the massacre of Protestants in Piedmont, that wasn’t called propaganda, to be sure; when the propagandists were dead enough, they were called artists. But wasn’t all art inevitably concerned with revealing a view of life? Propaganda in that sense was an intimate part of every work or art. Mediocre poets like Southey were called artists in their time, because they said all the approved things; and great poets like Shelley were dismissed as loud-mouthed ranters because they wanted to change the world. Keats was told to go back to his pills by the aristocratic reviewers of his time because he was a radical and a friend of Leigh Hunt’s.... Apparently, then, esthetic criticism was not as purely esthetic as it deemed itself, but was involved with the fears of the ruling class. Those who praise the existing scheme of things will find their artistic virtues readily enough acclaimed. The rash young revolutionist who turns his coat and comes out for law and order will likely enough be made poet laureate. Morals, too, are involved--the writer who is a rebel in politics will have his moral frailties emblazoned before a shocked world and will be regarded as a monster; while the writer whose opinions are correct may, if he is careful, enjoy his adulteries and perversities and remain the darling of respectable society. And, when one looks over the world’s literature, how many first-rate writers are there who have not been social rebels? How many writers have written anything worth while after they ceased to be rebels? How many hugely-bolstered reputations of the correct sort have any validity? And of those writers who were notoriously hostile or indifferent to the great social rebellions of their time, how much has their art lost by their blindness to what was going on?

These questions, fulminating in the mind of the young writer, set in motion a long historical and critical inquiry of years, of which _Mammonart_ is the result.... In the meantime, and especially since the war, it appears that these professorial doctrines have passed over into the minds of the younger generation of the American intelligentsia and its writers generally, a natural symptom of the social helplessness of this period of disillusionment. The _fin-de-siècle_ art theories of the European ’nineties have been taken over with much enthusiasm as a means of retaining artistic self-respect while sitting among the ruins of pre-war hopes. Under these circumstances, it can easily be understood that Upton Sinclair’s book should arouse resentment--for it is implicitly a challenge to the young writers of America to take their place as leaders in what Heine called the Liberation War of Humanity.

Such is the content of _Mammonart_; in form it is a handbook covering in short, vivid chapters a vast part of the world’s literature, reviewing it against its own political and economic background, with special attention to the manner in which the social struggles of the times are reflected in the life and work of the writers. It describes itself as an inquiry into art from the point of view of revolutionary economics. It is the first of the kind to be broadly undertaken, though Bernard Shaw in his essay on Wagner and in his criticisms in general has furnished some interesting and valuable examples of the method. It is a kind of criticism that is familiar in Russia, where it has long been practised. But, though at present something of a novelty in America, it is not likely to remain so. The weakness of the various current attempts to deal with art from a purely esthetic standpoint seem to make it inevitable that this more revolutionary and realistic method will come into vogue.

Social revolutionary criticism, as it may be called, takes it for granted that an artist is an interpreter of life, and judges the truth and value of his interpretation by the test of how fully he shows himself aware of what is going on in his world, with special reference to social change, and whether he helps his audience to understand and sympathize with such changes. He is recognized as a discriminator of spiritual values, in some sense a creator of them, and he is judged by the spiritual values he helps to create in a world that struggles toward something greater and finer than its past. He is not asked to be consciously attempting to create such values, and least of all is he asked to believe in this or that specific program of change--he is judged as an artist and not as a politician. It is a frankly partisan criticism, but it represents the genuine esthetic response of those who feel themselves to be living in a changing world lighted by the hope of revolutionary improvement. It is a criticism which attaches no importance to such sacrosanct effects as those of tragedy. It welcomes cynicism and pessimism in regard to institutions, but it regards cynicism and pessimism in regard to man’s ultimate power of conquering his environment as merely morbid. It bases itself on science, and claims the right to rank various kinds of “beauty” according to its own scale of values. It is thus seen to be itself a discriminator and creator of spiritual and esthetic values; it does not hesitate to hurl gods from their pedestals nor throw outworn beauty in the dustbin of time. Its weakness is that of all other theories of art criticism--that it may become a cloak for the personal prejudices of those who use it, giving them a dignity they do not necessarily deserve. But it has vitality, and candor, and is more realistic than any other kind of criticism that has yet appeared. Upton Sinclair’s own moral preconceptions are occasionally obvious in this book; but he has triumphantly escaped most of the dangers of this kind of criticism. His book is so rich in its swiftly painted backgrounds, so moving in its drama, so profoundly true on the plane in which it moves, and so thoroughly and simply intelligible in its thesis, as to constitute a very impressive and valuable example of the new social revolutionary criticism.

As an utterance of its author’s point of view, the book arouses a certain psychological curiosity--his alleged “Puritanism” again comes under discussion. The erotic themes which constitute so large a part of the world’s literature receive scant attention here. It might seem that from his point of view mankind’s erotic problems are too simple to bother with in literature; but some reflection upon his own writings (including the unpublished manuscript of _Love’s Progress_) shows that this is not so. One hazards the explanation that they seem to him, these erotic problems of mankind, to be too involved with social problems to be isolated, and indeed too complex to be satisfactorily solved by mankind except upon terms of profound social change. His impatience with literary critics would thus be the impatience of a revolutionary mind, not content with such tawdry or cruel or cowardly escapes as the world has thus far afforded to its rebels in the sexual realm. One remembers the boy Thyrsis, who wandered at night seeking some adventure that would be “not quite shameful to a poet’s fancy”. So, it would seem, has he wandered through the byways of the world’s literature, finding no erotic fancies that were not, to a realist and a poet, tiresome to contemplate--as for example, when he turns away from Coleridge’s “woman wailing for her demon lover” with the remark that it is “a savage’s nightmare”. Such a mind would turn naturally to the world’s future for its ultimate satisfactions, and form the habit of subsuming under its social hopes its erotic dissatisfactions with the world of contemporary reality.

It may be remarked that Upton Sinclair’s own practice has not been invariably in the direction of slighting the sexual aspects of life; he notably did not slight them in _Love’s Pilgrimage_--and when urged by a friendly older novelist to be less frank in certain scenes, he replied in terms which constitute an interesting defense of the realistic method:

“I wish,” he wrote, “to give the inner significance of life, as it comes to me; but on the other hand, I conceive that there is no way to give this, except with the materials of the actual world which we have at our hand.

“You will readily believe that I did not write the particular passages in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ which you discuss, without much earnest thought about the subject. I had certain emotions to portray, and I knew only one way to do it. For instance, I could not have conceived of the conveying of the emotions of the man who sees his first child born, without describing the actual physical things which he saw. I simply did not know any other way to do it. If you think that there is any other way, I would be interested to have you tell me. Do you know of any place in the world’s literature where it has been done? For my part, I know of only one or two hints at it, and these very inadequate.

“You must understand that concerning both this subject, and that of the passion scenes in the novel, I have a very definite conviction that the attitude of modern civilization toward these subjects is a wholly false and unnatural one. I believe that these things are part of human life, and that we should learn to talk about them with the same simplicity and naturalness that we use about any other of the deep facts of life, such as, for instance, the problems of death or of religion.”