An Epic about Capitalism and Detroit

John Sayles is a fantastic storyteller. Most people who share this viewpoint probably know Sayles from his films, which include Eight Men Out, Matewan and Return of the Secaucus 7. While those films certainly are among some of the best films in the last fifty years, it’s through his writing that I know Sayles best. I first read his story “At the Anarchists Convention” in the February 1979 issue of Atlantic Monthly. It was one of those afternoons when I was hanging out at the public library in downtown San Diego, California. Perusing the magazine shelves, I picked up that issue and glanced at the table of contents. Two things captured my interest: an article by Stephen Kinzer about the revolutionary forces in Nicaragua and a short story with the seeming contradiction of an anarchists’ convention. After finding a seat, I read the two submissions. Kinzer’s article didn’t exactly jibe with my understanding of the revolutionaries in Nicaragua, but it was decent stuff for a mainstream liberal magazine. John Sayles’ short story made me laugh, while his ability with words was a lesson in composition. I looked up his name in the card catalog and found that he had published two books—Pride of the Bimbos and Union Dues and in the weeks that followed read both.

Sayles made many more films in the next decade. His next novel Los Gusanos was published in 1991. Since then, he has published five more novels, all of them being what I would call epics, as in a long poem or narrative describing heroic deeds. To clarify, it’s not like Sayles novels are on par with ancient tales like Odysseus or even the Old Testament. However, the deeds of his protagonists inside these fictions of modern life can certainly be considered heroic within the context of the story being told. The most recent is titled Crucible and tells a story centered around the motorcar mogul and megalomaniac Henry Ford. The time period the tale takes place runs from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. The characters portrayed include workers, company thugs, union organizers, their families and their women. The profit-driven fantasy of Ford’s that resulted in the construction of a village in the rubber-producing jungles of Brazil is but one location in the webs of power, corruption and capital woven by Henry Ford. So too, are his antisemitism, white supremacism, interest in Nazism and the paranoia and ego that informs it all.

In the Amazonian village constructed to produce rubber, there’s a young girl named Kerry whose father is assigned to manage the whole show. The girl’s natural curiosity and heightened intellect influence her interactions with the locals, even creating a teen romance for the times between her and an indigenous lad who is equally curious and smart. The experiment in rubber cultivation ultimately fails, the economic crash being only one of the reasons. Meanwhile, back in Detroit union organizers are making headway amongst the workers. Unlike the failed jungle town, the economic crisis is the primary reason for this unforeseen (in the minds of management) transfer of loyalties among Ford company workers. Interwoven and splashed across the growing struggle between Ford’s capital and the United Autoworkers (UAW) organizing are the omnipresent curses of US history; curses manipulated by CEOs and anti-union forces even today—racism, sexism and anti-immigrant hatred. These phenomena appear discreetly in the conversations the author creates for his characters and violently in the actions of police, scabs and their protectors. They are not only present in the boardrooms and banquet halls of the owners; they are understood in their conversations and in the orders they send to the cops and private police fighting workers in the streets.

Certain protagonists imprint themselves in the reader’s mind, in part due to their relatability and in part because of Sayle’s mastery of the art of fiction. I found the communist labor organizer Rosa to be as genuine as the foreman in Brazil Jim Rogan’s daughter; the African-American autoworker Zeke as rounded a human being as the Polish worker called Kaz. The scenes inside the factories smell of steel, ring with industrial noise and rival the fear, anger and attitude of the men and women standing opposite well-armed cops of all kinds in the struggle for a union. Merriam-Webster suggests that the word crucible came from the “medieval Latin crucibulum, a noun for an earthen pot used to melt metals”. Over time, it has also acquired the definition which one undergoes a severe trial; a “place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development.” Considering all of these definitions in regards to this novel titled Crucible, it becomes clear that each description fits in its own way. The aforementioned Zeke works in a furnace room with most of the other African-American workers melting ore into steel. The international economic crisis and the onset of fascism and war provide a severe test at a time which results in changes unforeseen, as in the crucible of war and depression, death and repression. As the title of the novel, the word Crucible describes the work wholly and completely.

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