Morality in Oil!—a mess

The moral education of Bunny Ross is a central focus of Oil!, but its thrust is weakened by the structure of his Bildung. You see, Bunny’s most salient feature is his softness, his willingness to absorb any idea and admire its originator. He doesn’t just get involved with fads, or go along with the crowd; rather he chooses particular figures to idolize and forces himself to favor conflicting parties at once.

The two main figures here are Bunny’s father, J. Arnold Ross, and Paul Watkins, a country boy who runs away from home at 16 and makes his own way in the world. Bunny meets him at Mrs. Groarty’s house—he’s her nephew—and spends years looking up to him and romanticizing his family without knowing them at all. He thinks Paul is so moral and wise that he convinces his father to buy out the Watkins ranch and all the surrounding land for a “wild-cat”* and eventually to practically support the family. Paul will grow up to become a labor organizer and eventually a Communist.

Bunny’s admiration of Paul for his self-sufficiency and workingman ethic ends up turning him against the interests of his father—sort of. J. Arnold Ross is a highly moral capitalist: he pays his men more than other drilling concerns do, builds them better places to live, gets involved personally with each new well, and most importantly he really knows his business, earning him respect among the workers. He seems to be the most clearly moral character in the novel—more so than Paul because we don’t actually know Paul—right up until we find out he’s joined a federation of other oil employers. He’s no longer allowed to pay new men more money; the oil workers want to strike and he sympathizes with their demands but can’t do anything his confederates don’t want to do. Bunny argues that Ross should let his men unionize because he was allowed to unionize himself—and Ross wants to let them—but of course Ross’s union is eating away at his righteousness at every turn.

Once this happens the tide swings more and more toward Paul, but there are confounding figures—women, mostly, but also other capitalists and workingmen—and Bunny is tossed back and forth really too many times. Did Sinclair think the novel would be better if he kept his mind from being made up for 400 pages rather than 300 or 200? It’s not the length, really; but it’s episode after episode of Bunny being influenced by some more commanding figure and thinking, “Hmm, he certainly has a point…but so did that last guy…”

And while Bunny dallies, the reader remains a little confused as to who will win in the end. Bunny loans thousands and thousands of dollars to Paul over the course of the novel, most on the assumption that he would never use violent means in his cause, but as he continues to radicalize he does become a Communist and espouse violent revolution. Bunny is never comfortable with this and crowns another winner in the contest when he marries a peaceful socialist. That was at least a bit of a surprise, but it’s also by far the least interesting of any of Bunny’s relationships and makes the end of the novel seem partly failed.

Throughout, Bunny is in a difficult position: a Communist sympathizer oil prince. But that never gets him down, the only thing that really does is when Paul calls him “soft”—because he is soft, and he knows it. But nothing he ever does makes him less so, certainly not forsaking Communism for good. The most telling scene, I think, is when Bunny arranges for Paul and his (as yet unknown) future wife to meet. He always wants his friends to get along, and he wants the two of them to argue everything out with each other and come to an agreement, so Bunny will know what to believe.

The fact that Paul and the other workingmen in the novel sing the praises of the workers’ paradise in Russia doesn’t clear up the muddle here either. They are admirable in their disbelief in American propaganda, and of course in 1927 Sinclair couldn’t have known about Stalin, but it still makes him seem very naïve.

*”Wild-catting” is the practice of drilling for oil when you don’t have more than a hunch it will really be there. In fact, the Rosses do know pretty well that there will be oil on this land, but pick it up on the cheap claiming the whim of a small boy. The question of whether Ross has thus cheated the Watkinses troubles Paul for ages, though it is really not as difficult as all that. More softness from Bunny.