The Wrongologist

Today in 1968, one of
the bigger influences on the Wrongologist’s writing, Upton Sinclair, died. Sinclair wrote eighty
books. His most important books made a real difference in America: He wrote the
classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906), that exposed conditions in the US
meat packing industry. The Jungle
contributed to the passage of Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act later in 1906.

In 1916,
he wrote King
Coal, about Wall Street and the coal-mining industry.

In 1919, he published The Brass Check, an exposé of American
journalism that publicized the issue of yellow
journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States.
Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the
first code of ethics for journalists was created.

He won the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Dragon’s
Teeth, about Hitler’s rise to power, in 1943.

Many of
his novels are about life in the domain of Wall Street. Although the
industrial processes described in his books are outmoded today, the financial
chicanery and greed of today’s financial giants are simply more refined. His
work takes on a new relevance in our current time of market manipulation and
destruction of the commons under the guise of a free market.

Some thoughts about Sinclair by others:

Wikipedia quotes Time
magazine, who called him “a man with every gift except humor and silence.”

Howard Zinn said: “…at
the end of the novel The Jungle, Sinclair has one of his characters
present a picture of what a good society would be like:

• It
  would be a society in which the fruits of the Earth were shared in a kind of
  rough equality

• In
  which corporate profit would not be the driving motive of the economic system…

• In
  which democracy would exist

• In
  which people would have a voice not just in voting and choosing political
  leaders but a voice in how the economic system operates.”

Edmund Wilson: “Practically alone among the American writers of
his generation, [Sinclair] put to the American public the fundamental questions
raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them.”

A few quotes from
Sinclair for your contemplation:

• “One
  of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political
  corruption.”

• “They
  were trying to save their souls – and who but a fool could fail to see that all
  that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a
  decent existence for their bodies?” – The
  Jungle Ch. 23

• “You
  don’t have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it. I
  didn’t like the way I found America some sixty years ago, and I’ve been trying
  to change it ever since.”

• “They
  were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside. It was not less
  tragic because it was so sordid, because it had to do with wages and
  grocery bills and rents. They had dreamed of freedom; of a chance to look about
  them and learn something; to be decent and clean, to see their child grow up to
  be strong. And now it was all gone-it would never be!” The Jungle, Ch. 14

Upton
Sinclair documented and disrupted his era. The Jungle and The
Brass Check both changed American history. His best works deal with the
unbridled profit motive and human exploitation, and they remain relevant. They stand with the best of US political literature,
even today.

What
Sinclair did was, at the same time, simple and profound: His life was about helping people of
his era understand how society was run, by whom and for whom.

We
need the new media Sinclair’s to come forward and teach us today.