Of Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires and Fish Growing into Pikes

John Steinbeck's remark that American working people tend to think of themselves as "temporarily embarrassed capitalists" has, in its slightly revised form as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," become notorious as an explanation for what seems the slight response of America's working people to calls for social change.

As it happens, many years before Steinbeck published his remark, Upton Sinclair wrote something similar in Money Writes!. In his second chapter, "Fishes and Pike," Sinclair identifies the "most important single fact about American civilization" as "economic inequality," and remarks how in contrast with every past civilization in contemporary America, the magic of the media (from tabloids to picture-shows) constantly bringing the have-nots face to face with the luxury of the haves in what could seem a reckless provocation of the poor. However, this did "not lead to instant revolution" because of "the conviction, deeply rooted in the hearts of ninety-nine out of every hundred persons" in America is "that he or she is destined to climb out upon the faces of the other ninety-nine, and have a chance to spend money like those darlings of luxury" that they see on the movie screen or elsewhere. In the image that Sinclair attributes to the Swiss (Sinclair says Italian) educator Johann Pestalozzi, the little fish preyed upon by voracious pike are mollified with the promise that "every year thereafter two little fishes should be permitted to become pike," the mathematically slight chance to be predators at the top of the local food chain trumping the desire to advance the welfare of fish generally.

One may wonder if the influence of this idea is quite so strong, if the public is really quite so stupid, frankly (and indeed, just as leftists like Steinbeck and Sinclair have promulgated it, leftists have also challenged the image). However, the point is that Sinclair did say it here--and in contrast with many of those who, when making the observation, do not seem to think much about where it comes from, or to treat it as a delusion that just "happened" to the working persons, Sinclair does point out that this was a matter of indoctrination; that "[i]t is what had been taught to the whole country from the beginnings of its life in grammar school, in high school, in church, in the newspapers, the movies . . . the political campaigns," if only implicitly in the rhetoric of a "land of opportunity" where "every child . . . has a chance to become president," and anyone questioning it is contemptuously dismissed as deficient in character or all too aware of a real inferiority (as a "grouch," a "sorehead," as someone overly negative), such that this "propaganda whereby ten million youths are kept contented with their lot" can be termed "the ethical code of a civilization."

Sinclair raises the matter here because it is inseparable from the content of American fiction, so heavy on the propaganda for this "ethical code" (in the country's fiction "you would find that fifty percent of all heroes are wealthy at the outset, and another forty-nine percent become so before the end of the story") that it seems "incense to Mammon," and the motives of so many of those who write or desire to write fiction, for whom the celebrity that will turn the fish into a pike is a major attraction.