Art vs. Propaganda
SINCLAIR, UPTON
Art vs. Propaganda From Samuel Butler to our day By Upton Sinclair Some thirty years ago, this writer published a book entitled Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation. It had a mixed...
...It isn't marching now, it is only "creeping...
...But Butler did not allow it to be published until after his death...
...It is Samuel Butler's own life story, and he creates two characters to represent himself??first, the hero of the story, and, second, the old man who tells it...
...The story portrays the adventures that might happen to such an individual and ends up with his being drafted into the Army and sent to fight the Russian revolutionists in the snows of Murmansk...
...But suppose??just suppose??that our civilization is not destroyed in an atomic war, but that some kind of peace is patched up...
...he never received any reward except the hope that his children would live in a better world than he himself had known...
...but it might march again, singing the Socialist hymn that is in Jimmie Higgins...
...In that case, there will be a depression worse than any before known...
...It seems hard to imagine now, because the Russian dictatorship has poisoned the very word "socialism...
...1 took it home and found that it held my interest without flagging...
...The hero is the son of an Episcopal clergyman, who beats him when he is two years old because he cannot pronounce a certain English word correctly...
...In short, it is a magnificent piece of "propaganda...
...It was written when the First World War was coming to an end and it appeared that the whole world was going socialist...
...The point here is that the American critics all called it a work of propaganda and said that the hero was utterly unreal and unbelievable...
...He loves the latter because they are his property, and he hates the third one for showing signs of deviation...
...I won't be alive to see it, but that will make it all the easier...
...It was widely translated and is still remembered abroad...
...and can anybody question that it is propaganda...
...The villain is the Chinch of England, its dogmas and rigidities, and the conformity which it imposes upon its priesthood and its followers??or which it imposed upon them a century ago...
...But there was his sister, and his brother Joey, and the hundreds and thousands of young people throughout England whose lives were being blighted through the lies told them by people whose business it was to know better, who scamped their work and shirked difficulties instead of facing them...
...Charles Willis Thompson, writing in the International Book Review Digest, called it "a most wondrous compound of jazz and depth, of gaiety and scorn, of license and self-government??really a book that quite takes one's breath away...
...I could well understand why they thought this, because few of them had ever been in touch with the Socialist party and its affairs...
...Everything throughout the story is contrived to put the blame for all this upon the Church and its dogmas, and the melodrama of the book lies in the hero's efforts to escape from the thraldom of these dogmas...
...I search my memory for a novel which espouses a cause that has not yet been recognized, and, with due apologies, I choose one by Upton Sinclair, published in 1919 and called Jimmie Higgins...
...It had since come to rank as one of the greatest English novels, and I was curious to see how it would impress me when I was three times as old as I had then been...
...This father is determined that his three children shall grow up to be reproductions of himself, and he succeeds with two of them...
...If the book had been published when it was written, which was in the 1870s, it would have been called propaganda by everybody, and most would have added some such adjective as "satanic...
...Recently, in a drugstore, I picked up a copy of The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler, a book that I had read when it was first published half a century ago...
...Or maybe a hundred years ago.] Yes, Jimmie Higgins is a character we all know, and this is a work of art, not of propaganda...
...To me, Jimmie Higgins was one of the realest characters I had ever known...
...I no longer attempt to predict the future...
...Then it received the unstinted praise of Bernard Shaw, and by that time a large percentage of the intellectuals had come to be of the same opinion as Shaw, so the leading critics hailed it as a work of art, and it has taken its place as one of the masterpieces of English literature...
...De mortuis nil nisi bonum...
...When he succeeds, he comes to this conclusion: "'By faith in what, then,' asked Ernest of himself, 'shall a just man endeavor to live at this present time?' He answered to himself, 'At any rate, not by faith in the supernatural element of the Christian religion.' " And then, after further reflection, the following: "He knew that he had been humbugged, and he knew also that the greater part of the ills which had afflicted him were due, indirectly, in chief measure to the influence of Christian teaching...
...but I had lived in the movement for seventeen years, and had known not just one but scores of Jimmie Higginses...
...The thesis of the book may be summed up in one sentence: All art is propaganda, whether it knows it or not...
...It is melodramatic, and some of the plot developments are as naive as in the stories of Mark Twain...
...It had a mixed reception...
...but it is passionately felt, packed with a stored-up fury of half a lifetime...
...I am not saying that it is a great novel, or even a good one...
...Suppose that military expenditures are reduced, and it turns out that our national powers of production are twice as great as our purchasing power enables us to consume...
...I made an effort to prove this thesis by examining the literature and art of the ages, beginning with the war between Euripides and Aristophanes, and coming down to the war between Henry James and, let us say, George Bernard Shaw...
...The book might be reprinted and "rediscovered," and people would say, "Why, yes, this is the way it was fifty years ago...
...and suppose??gain, just suppose??that our Government is forced to take over the basic industries and produce goods not for profit but for use...
...still, if the mischief had ended with himself, he should have thought little about it...
...Nothing could be more explicit...
...I have not read it in thirty-five years...
...On the other hand, some critics called it nonsense and most called it propaganda??socialist propaganda, the very worst kind...
...In the American movement, "Jimmy Higgins" was the comrade who did the hard work of organization and propaganda...
...Romain Rolland called it "one of the most powerful works which have been written on the war...
...I had met him in the Stockyards of Chicago and the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the glass factories of South Jersey and the sweatshops of New York City...
...He attended party meetings, distributed leaflets and posters, and sold literature at lecture halls...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 19
