The Jungle, By Upton Sinclair

Books that inspired me

The Jungle, By Upton Sinclair

US PRESIDENT Theodore Roosevelt, it is said, choked on his
breakfast and turned vegetarian when reading an advance copy of Upton
Sinclair’s expose of the meatpacking industry. The Jungle’s graphic account of
the presence of chemicals, diseased meat and rodent excrement in sausages is
enough to turn anybody’s stomach!

Alistair Tice

Appearing at a time when the practices of the "Beef
Trust" were already under investigation, Sinclair’s book, which quickly
became an international bestseller, helped force through Congress the
long-stalled Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act which became
laws in June 1906.

Sinclair was one of the school of journalists and authors
known as "muckrakers" who developed in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, exposing corporate and political wrongdoing in American society. He
was introduced to socialism in 1902 and wrote The Jungle following the defeat
of the 1904 Chicago stockyards strike.

The novel is based around the Lithuanian immigrant Rudkus
family who come to America yearning a better life but instead find the wage
slavery and misery of the mill, factory, sweatshop and slum.

In particular, Sinclair shows the brutal working conditions
in Packingtown – of physical danger, insecurity, fear, exploitation, corruption
and filth.

Sinclair’s description of the slaughterhouse makes you, the
reader, feel as though you can smell the warm, sweet, sickly stench rising from
the blood and guts you are standing in! And the suffocating stink of the
fertilizer plant makes your guts wretch as you are reading about it.

It is this ‘jungle’, these inhuman working conditions, that
break the spirit of the novel’s central character Jurgis (pronounced Yoorghis).
He arrives in America as a strong, hopeful young man, marries his true love Ona
in the first chapter, and optimistic to build a better life for his family.

He overcomes each adversity by working harder and
determining that he will not be beaten. But within a few years he loses his
job, his home, his wife (who dies unattended in childbirth), his son (who also
dies), his freedom (he is jailed for beating up his wife’s foreman who had
raped her) and finally his hope (turning to drink, and abandons what’s left of
his family)!

You’re reading the book thinking things can’t get any
worse, then they do! But as this tragic story unfolds, the capitalist system of
the "Beef Trust" and corrupt politicians is laid bare.

Sinclair doesn’t ram the political conclusions down your
throat- indeed Jurgis, whilst seeing the injustice of it all, still gets
trodden further and further down. With his spirit broken, he survives only by
sinking into graft and corruption, and then works as a scab foreman during the
stockyards strike.

Sinclair started writing The Jungle as a serialisation for
the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason but he didn’t know how to finish the
story. He was writing the novel to propagandise for socialism but had, in
damning capitalism, taken Jurgis so low, ‘lumpenised’ him, that such a
conclusion could not flow from his demoralised, broken state. So the ending is
contrived and socialism has to be brought in from outside.

Jurgis, taking shelter in a meeting hall, finds himself at
a socialist election rally and becomes aware of the speaker who appears to be
directly addressing him. Through the orator’s evangelical speech, Sinclair
expounds his case for socialism. As he admitted later: "I went crazy at
the end of the book and tried to put in everything I knew about the socialist
movement."

Jurgis is converted, a bit like a religious conversion,
reflecting Sinclair’s recent discovery of socialism and the strong Christian
influence in the American socialist movement at that time. Even so, it is
powerful, passionate and persuasive, and provides an optimistic rallying call
of: "Chicago will be ours!"

Sinclair remained active in the socialist movement for over
20 years but in 1933 he registered as a Democrat, and leading the ‘End Poverty
in California’ (Epic) coalition, won the primary and then narrowly lost the
election for state governor. He continued to write well into his eighties
winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1942.

The conditions Sinclair raged against have been spread by
capitalist industrialisation to sweatshops around the world. Workers still lose
their jobs, their homes and their families. Food is still adulterated (see the
articles below and left). The current US president may have choked on a
pretzel, but we still need socialism.