Essay: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

           I was very surprised by the affect this book had on me.   

          

         Before reading The Jungle I knew that the book dealt with the state of the food processing factories of the early 20^th century and how their handling of the city’s food was so sub-par that people were getting sick and dying from it.  I’d heard of how men fell into the chemical vats and were processed along with the beef and how children lost their fingers working in factories. And that the imagery from the story was so grotesque that the public called for immediate action to clean up the food industry. I knew that the result of books popularity had led to the establishment of Bureau of Chemistry, what we now know as the Food and Drug Administration in 1930.   So I went in thinking the entire book was about factories mistreatment of our food and how it went unchecked.

            
               I discovered however there the story was far more encompassing than that.  It’s more than a story of beef gone bad!  The Jungle a warning to all working class Americans of the overall corruption we face each every day in every aspect of daily lives.   This story spells out that we, as working class citizens, really have few friends in the world of economics and politics. And explains why criminals are the only ones making money.    

            The story follows Jurgis Rudkus a man from Lithuanian who falls in love with a pretty young girl named Ona.  He doesn't have a chance with her in Lithuanian because her family makes more money than he does. But when her father dies and the government takes the old man’s money Jurgis sees his opportunity to come in as the hero.  He convinces Ona and her family to come with him to America where wages are much higher than they can hope to make in Lithuania.  He’s believes that he, a big strong healthy young man can find a job easily and support her and her family.                  

            But when they reach Chicago they find that the cost of living in America is much steeper than they expected, so much so that the higher wages hardly matter.  Although Jurgis does find a job it doesn’t pay enough to afford them any cost of living.  Every member of the family has to get a job of some sort – even the children who are too young to work at some point must also find jobs in the stockyards or on the streets of Chicago. 

            The jobs they make barely pay for them to rent a small cramped apartment where they share rooms with other immigrants.  They lean that they could buy a house with unable to speak English they are talked into signing a contract with no knowledge of interest, insurance, fees or the true condition of the house they’ve bought.  They are barely paid enough to eat off each day even though they work from sunrise to sunset without even a day off to get married.  As their health and spirits begin to fail they encounter trouble with their bosses, the law, and the growing indifference of everyone around them.  They become trapped in an endless cycle of need.            

            The Jungle addresses corruption in the housing market, education, health care, the justice system, prostitution, women’s health, political corruption and the general lack of concern for the safety of the working class – not just food safety.   

            The story also addresses race but only in terms of how different classes were treated in relation to factory work.  This novel describes how the earliest immigrants were lured here with false promises and turned into wage slaves.  They were treated like little more than parts of a machine – as if food, water, and decent shelter wasn't necessary for them because they could be worn down and easily replaced.  They were programmed to perform tediously simple tasks and set to  work at a mechanical pace without thought of safety precautions or concern for their well being.  There reward was barely enough to live off of, much less support a family.   Overall they were no more than tools for making rich richer. 

            At first Jurgis marvels at these speed and proficiency of American industry but over time becomes jaded.  We watch his innocent naivety starve from him soul as he is beaten into the same tired mold as everyone around him.

              Jurgis is by no means a character to be pitied, however.  He is a strong character, a survivor and his determination to make it is what keeps the book from being too overwhelmingly depressing.  He comes off very human.  He makes mistakes, he becomes a villain at times and there are times when he is as broken and lost as any man in his condition would be.  There are parts where I even stopped liking him and put the book down to recover from his foolishness. It reads like a historical soap opera or thriller sitcom where nothing ever seems to go right until near the end.  But he in the end he finds his focus again, one that is all together different from where he started out.   

             The scariest thing about the book is how what’s happening now, with the recession and the wariness of the working class, is a very clear echo of what was happening in 20^th century America.  I myself am a single woman living alone with no kids and yet I’m barely make enough to pay my rent and by gas to get to work each day.  I have a college degree and yet I need food stamps so I can eat while paying back my student loans.  I can’t afford to get sick, or buy new glasses.  Saving money for future investments is damn near impossible.  And still I know that I am among the very fortunate.  The book has opened my eyes to my own naivety about the economy, and the government and political agendas. I had noticed how easy it is to slip into poverty but it had not occurred to me just how unfair that fact is. 

            And so after reading The Jungle for myself I asked myself why have only heard about the food stockyards before reading this book?  What about the rest of this craziness?  I’d read the book to see how one story could affect the establishment of a brand new administration, and closed it wandering why that was the only big affect it had! 

            Upton Sinclair’s depiction of Jurgis’s sad life in the "The Jungle" is a collage of real stories he’d collected while working as an undercover reporter for the “Appeal to Reason” – a socialist news paper.  A year later this paper was the first to print of The Jungle among its pages.    Sinclair wanted his story to go beyond the reach of the newspaper.  He was desperate for all American people to know about the corruption affecting every aspect of their daily lives but o publisher would touch it.  .  Ultimately he had to publish the work himself to get it out there.    

            Alas the readership only cared about the grotesque depictions of the beef packing industry.  They glossed over how unpaved roads lead to babies drowning in crater sized puddles. They ignored how Jurgis and his family’s house was built over landfill and how the plumbing simply went straight down and pooled underneath their home. And they failed to notice or care about how the same political figure who was responsible for most of these atrocities depended on trickery to obtain the votes of the very illiterate immigrants that suffered from his cruelty. 

             Upton Sinclair exposed all of these things but only the condition of the food was evidently the most memorable part to the public.  President Theodore Roosevelt called him a fool and a liar.  But the public’s outrage led at least to inspections of the factories.  The results of these inspections were not published but were shocking enough to be sent straight to Congress were acts to monitor the food production process were more carefully established. The book is given direct credit for the passing of the MeatInspection Act in and the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 of and later due to continued public outcry the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration.  And still the other topics of the book went un-addressed for another decade.

            "I aimed for the heart of the public but accidently hit it's stomach instead." Upton Sinclair October 1906, Cosmopolitan Magazine

            I enjoyed this book over all.   Despite it’s depressing theme the novel is well written page turner. Jurgis is by no means a sad sorry sod the entire story.  You watch his naivety become starved out of him.  He becomes jaded but eventually he figures out a way to survive.  I found myself cheering for his turns of good fortune, yelling at his foolish decisions, and cheering him on when he finally finds starts heading in the right direction.  He was a real person in a since who had real history, needs, and emotions.  There were times when I loved him and wanted to be his friend, there were other times when I hated him and almost stopped reading from anger at his foolishness.  But I kept on because I just had to see how the story ended.  Even so the socialist propaganda near the end, while educational, is preachy and weights down the story a bit in my opinion.  It resulted in an anti-climatic conclusion to an overall very good book.

            Still I wander what how did the audience of the 1920s miss the ninety percent of the message.  Now I can only speculate.

            
             Was is because there were just so many things wrong in Jurgis’s world?  Perhaps the multiple corruptions were too hard a focus for so large an audience to digest?  Perhaps Congress can only make a few big changes at a time. 

           
           Was it 20^th century racism?   The story is about a Lithuanian family and tells of the hardships of other Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, Irishmen, and African slaves from the south.  Those of German and English decent are mentioned as the higher ups, the judges, and the wealthy.  Perhaps it’s the fact that these things were only happening to the unfortunate lower classes that made the people in power blind to what it meant to everyone of a blue collar profession.  The reading audience simply couldn't relate, or wouldn't relate to these problems of poorer people.   

            Those who were at the time suffering these atrocities probably couldn't read at the time, either from illiteracy or lack of time to indulge in the pleasure reading – they were after suffering from similar afflictions as the books main character.  And even if they had read it and gathered the message, what good would it do?  They didn’t have any sort of pull politically.  They couldn't hope to change anything so they didn't even bother trying.  They just went on suffering, and working as hard as they could.  At best the book would have given these people the peace of mind in knowing that they weren't alone in their suffering. 

            However, the food issue was something that affected everyone’s palate.  And that was where they could relate, that was something the rich could change and wanted changed.  So that is where the change happened. 

            
       Was it the Socialist agenda that encompasses the end of the book?  Jurgis finds hope in Socialism, but the curve is a hard one to take and causes an anti-climate ending to the story.  A dull ending will kill even the best stories.  And the American audience notoriously turns a sour ear to the mention of such politics. 

            Even though I did enjoy the majority of the story, and I understand the benefits of Socialist politics, I had a hard time struggling through the last few pages of the story . . . which is why this last blog took much longer to post. 

NEXT UP!

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Elizabeth Stowe.