Upton Sinclair's "Dead Hand" Series, and the Sometime Necessity of Self-Publishing

The student of sociology may recall having encountered the concept of "substructure-structure-superstructure."

In this conception society not only has a structure (the organization of a human group into sub-groups, like socioeconomic classes); but a substructure that is based on the nuts and bolts of how people actually produce the material essentials of life (the organization of work), on which the structure is based (for, as someone once said, "life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things"); and a superstructure, which one can think of as broadly the ideology of the society, rooted in the substructure and structure "below" it.

In his "Dead Hand" books (the name of which is, apparently, a play on Adam Smith's conception of market forces as an "invisible hand" that produces optimal economic results in a context of free exchange), Upton Sinclair, who had earlier written about the other levels of societal life (in fiction like The Jungle, or The Metropolis, but also nonfiction), turned his attention to that "superstructure" as it existed in American society in his day. Specifically in the six books to which that sequence eventually came he addressed the matters of religion (in 1917's The Profits of Religion), the education system (1923's The Goose-Step and 1924's The Goslings) , the news media (in 1919's The Brass Check) and the arts (1925's Mammonart and 1927's Money Writes!).

In those six books Sinclair presented a fiercely critical view of the state of all those aspects of American life, the thinking they promulgated, and the backward, venal and oppressive forces he saw lying behind them. Naturally the publisher which put them out took a risk--and the Dauriats of Sinclair's time had no more interest in such risk than they did in Balzac's time, or in ours. After their declining the first of Sinclair's books because of its subject matter (The Profits of Religion). The result was that Sinclair decided to publish the books himself, and continued in the practice with the books that followed.

As those who have experience of self-publishing can testify self-publishing, like any other sort of small business when we get away from the piety and outright romanticism about it standard in this society, is basically an affair of working harder, for less. And as if the ordinary obstacles in its way were not enough the very press that had treated Sinclair and all he stood for so abusively throughout his career, and which he criticized in his books, did not make this easier for him, in the main remaining silent about the books. However, that is no judgment on their quality--the books retaining interest a century on not only as works by a writer who had then been in the first rank, or as historical documents testifying to conditions in Sinclair's time, but for what they tell us about ideas and institutions that, contrary to Sinclair's hopes when he produced these books, remain dominant in our own day (and are today written about, for the most part, with rather less rigor, frankness, insight than Sinclair displayed).

Indeed, that the publishers and press of his time behaved as they did toward Sinclair's books can seem to be as much to the credit of Sinclair and his books as it is to the discredit of those publishers and press--while this seems to me something worth remembering in our time, with its ceaseless elite and elitist sneering at any democratization of publishing. The defenders of traditional publishing and the rest may claim to be upholding high standards, but in reality what they hate is losing control of what may be put before the public, even if it has only been in a much smaller degree than most appreciate, for what that means not just commercially, but politically.