The Moneychangers by Upton Sinclair AudioBook Full

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Upton Sinclair's disturbing novel about the Wall Street scare of 1907 portrays the tactics of greedy capitalists who organize the fall of a rival trust company, creating a crash in the stock market crash and a run on American banks. Ultimately thousands of jobs are lost, throwing the world into financial chaos.

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The Jungle has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking 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. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.

I find it chilling that the peril of institutions that could be both too big to fail and driven to ruin by disingenuous wreckers was known exactly 100 years prior to the bubble burst of 2008. The Moneychangers is eerie in its similarity to the economic snap that began the so called Great Recession. But it is not perfectly prophetic. Sinclair's target in 1908 was the trusts. In some ways these were the same robber barons as today, but the dynamic has notable differences. Sinclair's panic has a classically literary onus. There are virtuous actors.

But there are also real historical contrasts and comparisons for the perceptive reader to note. Presidents (Theodore) Roosevelt and (George W.) Bush would deal with reckless speculation differently. The media circus devoted to the crisis would strike stunningly similar tones.

Let the following excerpt speak for itself:

"It was very interesting to Montague to read these newspapers and see the picture of events which they presented to the public. They all told what they could not avoid telling - that is, the events which were public matters; but they never by any chance gave a hint of the reasons for the happenings - you would have supposed that all these upheavals in the banking world were so many thunderbolts which had fallen from the heavens above. And each day they gave more of their space to insisting that the previous day's misfortunes were the last - that by no chance could there be any more thunderbolts to fall."

The protagonist in The Moneychangers, Allan Montague, is a bit like a grown up Nick Carraway, somewhat streetwise but still possessing of his genuine essence and wiser than the great men who tower overhead. Like Fitzgerald's protagonist, Montague is ultimately unable to protect the woman in his charge. Bloodshed ensues. The financial crisis at the center of the melodrama is, in fact, caused by avarice and lust. Much like the Trojan war, the resources of economic empires and the blood of a nation are gambled in retaliation to a woman's rejection of unwanted advances.

I am a fan of Sinclair's work, from The Jungle to the Lanny Budd saga. However, I am surprised The Moneychangers doesn't occupy a more prominent place in his catalog, or indeed the progressive political literary canon. Perhaps as our understanding of the Great Recession grows, The Moneychangers will rise to prominence.

If only it had been heeded before, not after, it rang uncomfortably prophetic...

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