Revisting the shambles of Chicago
By ROGER K. MILLER
Published January 29, 2006
THE JUNGLE
By Upton Sinclair
Bantam, $5.95 paperback, 400 pp
Reviewed by ROGER K. MILLER
"I aimed at the public's heart," Upton Sinclair ruefully said after the initial publication of The Jungle 100 years ago, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
Few novels, no matter how bestselling or classic, can be said to have changed our national life. Probably the greatest example of one that did is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Abraham Lincoln reportedly credited, only half-jokingly, with starting the Civil War.
A close runner-up is The Jungle, about the horrifying conditions in Chicago's stockyards and meatpacking industry. Published Feb. 26, 1906, the book was an immediate sensation, and four months later Congress passed and President Theodore Roosevelt signed the nation's first Pure Food and Drug Act.
Which is the point of the Sinclair quotation above. He had set out to make his fellow citizens outraged over the inhuman working conditions in the meatpacking industry -- the novel is dedicated "To the Workingmen of America" -- and instead he got them nauseated over the repulsive foodstuffs they were putting down their throats.
Sinclair, born in Baltimore in 1878, was supporting himself by writing in his teens. After a string of ho-hum novels, he was groping for his proper subject matter and growing in his newfound faith of socialism. The two merged in The Jungle.
Intrigued by a failed 1904 Chicago stockyard strike, he got a socialist weekly, Appeal to Reason, to commission him to write about the industry. Actually, the weekly published his writings first, in serial form starting in February 1905; book publication did not come until the next year, and only after a struggle.
Everything about The Jungle and its author is remarkable. Sinclair spent only seven weeks in Chicago, but he learned a trainload of stuff and got it down with an accuracy that proved impervious to savage criticism.
The Jungle is the story of Lithuanian immigrants, Jurgis Rudkus and his wife Ona and their extended family. Right from the time they first set foot in Packingtown -- Sinclair's name for the residential area known locally as Back-of-the-Yards -- their lives become a downward spiral of despair and death.
Henry James he was not; one critic later said Sinclair's distinguishing trait as an author was "a subliterary belligerence." Nevertheless, The Jungle is compelling reading, partly because of the passionate, vigorous narration, but mostly because of what is being narrated.
There is scarcely a page that does not contain something to turn your stomach or inflame your anger, or both. Packingtown itself is a festering sump of land made from dumping city garbage, where sickness seems to sprout from the very soil.
Jurgis earns 17.5 cents per hour (by no means the lowest wage) as a "shoveler of guts." Through him we discover the revolting ingredients that make their way into breakfast sausages and pickled meats: cows with tuberculosis and hogs with cholera, floor sweepings, rats and their droppings, insalubrious chemicals -- even, Sinclair claimed, the occasional Lithuanian rendered into lard.
That is not even a beginning of the disgusting litany. It extends to the tarting-up of spoiled meat with borax and glycerine to make it salable, and to lax government inspectors willing to look the other way.
Employees, living in filth and working without recourse to sanitary facilities, introduce diseases. The plant is a honeycomb of graft, jealousies and hatreds, where decency and honesty are nowhere to be found; "from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie."
Sinclair skillfully throws a new ingredient into (or under) the pot now and then to keep it boiling, such as Ona's being forced by her boss into prostitution. Horror follows upon horror, yet nothing seems unreal. The author, remember, has seen it all.
There are some memorable touches. In a scene at a Lake Shore Drive mansion, the insouciant scion (a stage drunk, admittedly) of a meatpacking magnate exposes the emptiness of his family's existence. Another is Sinclair's description of the well-oiled Chicago political machine -- six decades on and he could be describing the administrations of the first Mayor Daley.
Perhaps the most poignant and revealing touch of all, however, is a moment when Jurgis, in utter despair, goes out as a tramp after the death of his wife and son. A farmer refuses to sell him food, and so Jurgis, once out of sight, vindictively pulls up a row of 100 newly planted peach trees: Decent, honest, hard-working Jurgis has learned his lesson well.
The world was, then, literally a jungle, with everyone at everyone else's throat -- a world the narrator says, "in which nothing counted but brutal might." What was the answer?
Jurgis stumbles into a socialist meeting, becomes converted, and the final 50 pages form a sort of socialist tract. "CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!" are the book's closing, defiant words.
A limp ending, but somewhat fitting for the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery.
- Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
EXCERPTThe members of the immigrant family of Jurgis Rudkus are finishing the last leg of their long journey from Lithuania. They -- and the readers of The Jungle -- get the first inkling of what is in store for them: "A full hour before the party reached the city they had begun to note the perplexing changes in the atmosphere. It grew darker all the time, and upon the earth the grass seemed to grow less green. Every minute, as the train sped on, the colors of things became dingier; the fields were grown parched and yellow, the landscape hideous and bare. And along with the thickening smoke they began to notice another circumstance, a strange, pungent odor. They were not sure that it was unpleasant, this odor; some might have called it sickening, but their taste n odors was not developed, and they were only sure that it was curious. Now, sitting in the trolley car, they realized that they were on their way to the home of it -- that they had travelled all the way from Lithuania to it. It was now no longer something far-off and faint, that you caught in whiffs; you could literally taste it, as well as smell it -- you could take hold of it, almost, and examine it at your leisure. They were divided in their opinions about it. It was an elemental odor, raw and crude; it was rich, almost rancid, sensual, and strong. There were some who drank it in as if it were an intoxicant; there were others who put their handkerchiefs to their faces. The new emigrants were still tasting it, lost in wonder, when suddenly the car came to a halt, and the door was flung open, and a voice shouted -- "Stockyards!"