Oil, p.1
Oil!, page 1
PENGUIN CLASSICS
OIL!
upton sinclair was born into an impoverished Baltimore family on September 20, 1878. At fifteen, he began writing a series of dime novels in order to pay for his education at the City College of New York. He was later accepted to do graduate work at Columbia, and while there he published a number of novels, including The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903) and Manassas (1904).
Sinclair’s breakthrough came in 1906 with the publication of The Jungle, a scathing indictment of the vile health and working conditions of the Chicago meatpacking industry. The work, which won him great literary praise, helped in the passage of the pure food laws during the Progressive Era. He also joined the company of several writers and journalists of the time who were branded as “muckrakers” by President Theodore Roosevelt. Sinclair used the money from The Jungle to begin a utopian experiment, the Helicon Hall Colony of Englewood, New Jersey.
After the burning of Helicon Hall, in 1915, Sinclair moved to California, where he witnessed a revolutionary oil boom erupt in 1921. The event inspired his landmark novel Oil! (1927), one of the most important fictions about energy ever written. During this period, he became a powerful figure in California’s Democratic Party, and wrote impassioned political pamphlets while unsuccessfully running for public office on four occasions, almost winning the governorship in 1934. After his defeat he continued to write influential books. Other works include King Coal (1917); Jimmie Higgins (1919); The Goose-Step (1923); Oil! (1927); Boston (1928); World’s End (1940); Dragon’s Teeth (1942), which won him a Pulitzer Prize; O Shepherd, Speak! (1949); and Another Pamela (1950).
michael tondre is associate professor of English at Stony Brook University and the author of two books: The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender (2018) and Oil (forthcoming). His writing has also appeared in journals such as PMLA, ELH, Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Literature, and has received the 2018 Schachterle Essay Prize (from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts) and the 2019 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize.
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Introduction, notes, note on the text, and suggestions for further reading copyright © 2023 by Michael Tondre
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Sinclair, Upton, 1878–1968, author. | Tondre, Michael, editor, writer of introduction.
Title: Oil! / Upton Sinclair ; edited with an introduction and notes by Michael Tondre.
Other titles: Oil! (Novel)
Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022042088 (print) | LCCN 2022042089 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143137443 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593511510 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Petroleum industry and trade—Fiction. | Motion picture industry—Fiction. | California, Southern—Fiction. | LCGFT: Social problem fiction. | Political fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3537.I85 O5 2023b (print) | LCC PS3537.I85 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52—dc23/eng/20220909
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042088
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042089
Cover illustration: Tim McDonagh / Handsome Frank Ltd.
Adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed
pid_prh_6.0_143184100_c0_r0
Contents
Introduction by michael tondre
A Note on the Text
Suggestions for Further Reading
OIL!
Preface
I. The Ride
II. The Lease
III. The Drilling
IV. The Ranch
V. The Revelation
VI. The Wildcat
VII. The Strike
VIII. The War
IX. The Victory
X. The University
XI. The Rebel
XII. The Siren
XIII. The Monastery
XIV. The Star
XV. The Vacation
XVI. The Killing
XVII. The Exposure
XVIII. The Flight
XIX. The Penalty
XX. The Dedication
XXI. The Honeymoon
Acknowledgments
Notes
_143184100_
Introduction
In a letter dated June 1, 1925, Upton Sinclair announced a revolutionary experiment: the petro-novel, a new category of fiction inspired by modernity’s most vexing paradoxes of fossil-fueled life. “This oil novel,” Sinclair predicted, “will be the best thing I have ever done.”[1] Over the next seventeen months, that story poured out as a “gusher of words” to become the great American novel of petroleum power.[2] By turns an ardent family saga, a scintillating potboiler, and an anti-capitalist tirade, Sinclair’s 1926–1927 tale warrants its exclamation. It’s an energetic tour de force whose plot goes everywhere. From ivory towers and gated estates to bleak frontiers of slow death: Across these spaces, Oil! shows how a thirst for crude created new democratic dreams of freedom and their opposite. Through it all, the novel anticipates how the wreckage unleashed by big oil might lead to a greener, more inclusive world yet to come. It remains one of the most important critiques of fossil energy ever printed.
Today the earth is on fire, and fossil fuel corporations keep raising the heat. Recent years have been the warmest on record, sparking waves of mass migration and accelerating die-offs, with no real cooldown in sight. In a way, we’re all to blame. Climate experts agree that the extreme weather of our time comes from human energy use. Northern nations like the United States have burned eons of accumulated hydrocarbons since the twentieth century’s dawn—too much and too fast for the planet to absorb again, leading to a carbon cycle that’s perilously out of whack. But vowing to scale back and buy less, to burn less, won’t kill the flames. The truth is that twenty-five fossil fuel giants are responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions now, and that a huge fraction of workers already live hand to mouth while energy earnings soar.[3] Dismantling these institutions and their pyromaniacal profit motives will require concerted action. It will require new intimacies across long-standing economic, racial, and gender lines. And it will require alternatives to very old habits of thinking that make it hard to conceive a world without oil. To avert a dead-end future for humans and our planetary kin, we must reimagine who we are, and in no time flat.
Oil! is the novel that best illuminates how we got here, and it leaves the blueprint for a more equitable future out of its ashes. At its core is the story of a whole new kind of society being born through the early twentieth century, when elites learned how to control a petroleum-powered system of production. That system allowed a few white men to get rich quick by exploiting everyone else below. It’s a system that has turned the world into the private landfill of oligarchs who have taken our land and labor and would now, in a final move, take a habitable future from us as well. But the novel shows that the story of oil isn’t a tale for all time. We can contest an unsustainable system of energy and work that took hold not that long ago, when deep-pocketed corporations conspired to let the world burn. One hundred years after fossil capitalism kicked into high gear, the question at the heart of Sinclair’s novel remains: How may we transition to a post-carbon democracy now? Oil! provides an outline for this urgent contemporary mission, this unmet demand on which all future life depends. Written well ahead of its time, to another world in the making, its power is unmistakable.
* * *
!
What’s in a name? It’s important but often overlooked that Sinclair’s novel is not called Oil. The novel is Oil!, and the exclamation is even more jarring, more important than it might at first seem. At first glance, the mark advertises how oil sparks extreme emotional reactions: the freedom of the road, the euphoria of flight, the vertigo of sudden social transformation. Indeed, as if bypassing language itself, the titular “black column” looks like a graphic illustration of the blowout or oil gusher (27).[4] Embossed on the first edition’s cover, Sinclair’s exclamation appears as a swollen line that visually echoes a derrick in the foreground. To read Oil!, it would seem, is to burn with hydrocarbons’ own concentrated power, as in chapter 6’s “amazing spectacle” of overflowing oil. There, skyrocketing crude ignites into a “tower of flame,” the narrator writes: “the burning oil would hit the ground, and bounce up, and explode and leap again and fall again” (162). A veritable exclamation mapped onto the world, the spectacle of gushing crude hints how oil could convert into language and vice versa, how a punctuation mark might become charged with the incandescent radiance of things.
But these provocations are just the start. As the action unfolds, Oil! slams on the brakes and develops a more counterintuitive approach—a poetics of the slow burn. Working to question the era’s subjective speed thrills, Sinclair teaches us bit by bit to see oil capitalism’s sheer scal e and corruption, with attention to the gaping inequalities at its core. Early exuberance on the road shifts into uglier feelings of creeping dread, moral outrage, and anxious alarm as the novel follows oil’s tentacular spread. It’s a gradual process of revelation that shapes Sinclair’s hero, and one that readers recapitulate as they glean a more conscious understanding of oil—an understanding that, Sinclair hoped, would lead to more militant opposition to the fossil complex once the book’s covers close.
This project is nowhere more marked than in the story behind the title’s exclamation, which was itself notably belated. Between June 2, 1926, and March 7, 1927, Sinclair published the novel unadorned—as just plain Oil—for readers of The Daily Worker, the national newspaper for the Communist Party USA. Only afterward did he learn that Walter Gilkyson had scooped him in 1924 by publishing Oil, a novel prophesizing that “the wars that were fought in the past for coal and gold will be fought for oil in the future.”[5] Sinclair’s gimmick let him skirt copyright protections for the text, though the anecdote captures its central narrative strategy. Instead of representing oil as a self-evident thing, Sinclair imbues it with a kaleidoscopic range of associations that reimagines it on new visionary terms: new language, new art, and new material relations that readers might bring to life.
It’s a project of special significance now. As if committed to go out swinging, fossil energy corporations have doubled down on oil even as the heat index mounts. Recent schemes include a vast oil formation to be opened on melting Alaskan tundra, where an army of devices will keep the permafrost just cool enough to drill. The machines may eventually sink below. But traces of fossil capitalism will endure in the geological record for millennia, and amid deepening droughts and raging floods, one wonders how tomorrow’s children will look back. What kept us tunneling into the earth even as the skies blazed? Why didn’t we stop to understand the nature of our fossil-fueled existence or work together to transform it? As a fevered modernity reaches its terminal burnout phase, Oil! helps to explain the forces unraveling our world. And amid the cataclysms of our hydrocarbon-scorched planet today, the novel’s exclamation has never been more urgently deserved.
* * *
!
The years surrounding Sinclair’s 1878 birth represent one of the most decisive transitions in human history: the first decade when fossil fuels provided more energy to societies than traditional photosynthesis.[6] Animating this transition was a shift from industrial economies of coal to the newly unlocked power of oil and natural gas. Countries like the United States were burning carbonized sunlight at an accelerating clip. In 1880, global oil production reached 4 megatons per year; by 1900, it exploded to 22.5 megatons, and quadrupled to nearly 100 megatons in 1920.[7] This imbalance in the carbon cycle created the illusion that wealth could expand without limit—without needing larger factories or labor forces, stockpiled gold reserves, or overseas territories.[8] Such visions of prodigal growth shaped Sinclair’s work as well, albeit with attention to their toxic underside: adulterated soil, smoldering skies, and dispossessive battles that erupted everywhere oil came to light.
Sinclair’s most influential bestsellers constitute a loose trilogy of industrial energy novels. These books track a history of the planet’s escalating energy burn, now measurable as parts per million of atmospheric carbon (ppm) that linger in the air at this very moment. Each novel, The Jungle (1906, 298 ppm), King Coal (1917, 302 ppm), and Oil! (1927, 309 ppm), is devoted to a particular fuel system: respectively, cheap food, cheap coal, and cheap petroleum. Moving in an arc of exponentially concentrated carbon inputs, together this cycle traces modernity’s freedoms to the violent capture of fuels, machines, and laboring bodies. The whole story of U.S. growth is recast as a tale of doubled exploitation: the exploitation of caloric or mechanical fuel stocks and of workforces battered in the era’s developmental storm. We see something here of the rationale behind the first energy systems studies in nineteenth-century culture, when physicists reduced all things to their potential for work.[9] But against a scientific desire to foster more productive, and thus profitable, relations of labor, Sinclair laid bare the strange and bitter fruits of industrialized life.
In this suite of fictions, Sinclair was groping toward an account of how conflicts around energy at once created civilization and its barbaric underbelly. Consider The Jungle, Sinclair’s first canonical success. Below its immediate concern with the meatpacking industry’s filth, The Jungle unfolds as an arch-fable of energization. It reassembles the base material ties that bound cattle, chickens, and pigs defiled by food production with workers who, like livestock, were degraded in the process of fueling modernity. A surface reading of The Jungle reveals how it literally identifies the exploitation of human bodies with that of livestock on the killing floor. Both feature within a coordinated energy system that benefits a capitalist class of profiteers. It’s an approach that King Coal extended by turning to America’s fossil economy. Unnerved by the violent suppression of a 1914 coal miners’ strike in Ludlow, Colorado, when a Rockefeller-owned coal company summoned state militia and paramilitary infantry to their side, Sinclair represented miners’ attempts to contest elites by banding together, blocking extraction sites, and disrupting energy profit flows.
This radical imagination of fuel was shaped by powerful exposés on corporate greed. Of particular influence was Ida M. Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904, 297.5 ppm), which showed how the Standard syndicate rose to dominance through the “ruthlessness and persistency” of its owner John D. Rockefeller.[10] The History made Standard a bête noire of the political left and animated Sinclair’s thought. His energy novels, however, are unique in two respects: their attention to the specific materiality of fuels like coal and oil, and how those fuels’ production, consumption, and representation shaped class conflicts around them. After a string of lukewarm successes in King Coal’s wake, Oil! marked a return to form. Namely it revived King Coal’s coming-of-age script, which followed a privileged youth, Hal Warner, from juvenile irresolution to a more mature understanding of coal capitalism’s harms. Oil! traces the maturation of James Ross Jr., aka Bunny, aka “the young oil prince,” sensitive heir to an energy fortune who grows to renounce his class commitments while meeting the era’s have-nots. Oil!’s opening, which is set in 1912, also identifies it as a creative child of another work: Tarbell’s History. In 1911, the U.S. government ruled Standard Oil in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and broke it into thirty-four regional companies—a liberal democratic victory that Tarbell’s bombshell spurred. But retrenchment followed. Out of Standard’s split was born a revenant era of collusion between a few oil oligopolies that swallowed or squeezed out the last independents. It was a stunning counter-formation that, for Sinclair, raised a larger creative question: How might fiction provide an alternative to oil capitalism that works like The History of the Standard Oil Company could not?
* * *
!
To truly answer that question, it helps to understand how Sinclair recast conventions of fiction writing in general. For, strictly speaking, all modern novels are oil novels. Choose your favorite story and you’ll find petroleum powering plots and shaping subjectivities. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925, 305 ppm) casts its hero’s gleaming car collection as a sign of nouveau riche aspirations, while Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925, 305 ppm) turns the meandering movements of aircraft and automobile into twin allegories for personhood, as Clarissa Dalloway’s stream of consciousness finds an echo in London’s incessant hum. Gasoline and diesel, desire and subjecthood: Once you stop to notice, it’s hard to miss how hydrocarbons beat beneath literature’s rising pulse, covertly animating its fictions of being and belonging, personal development and social transformation.
There’s good reason why oil poured into literature at this time. Between 1900 and 1930, global oil production surged some 300 percent amid a vogue for petroleum-powered motoring.[11] Oil’s inroads on the streets were flanked by its expanding embrace over the sea and the skies. And these mechanical marvels were supplemented by an avalanche of cheap petro-goods, including fertilizers and pesticides, vinyl records, and a thousand plastic products that saturated middle-class households in northern nations like the United States.
