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Class finds itself in classic's pages

Forget the harsh working conditions and rotten meat. In wealthy Palm Beach, students see a different Jungle.

By Wall Street Journal
Published April 13, 2007

PALM BEACH - Every year, high school students around the country pore over Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the stomach-churning novel about life in the Chicago slaughterhouses in the early 1900s. Most come away with a better appreciation of socialism and a strong aversion to hot dogs.

But here in Palm Beach, one of the richest towns in the world, students have a slightly different reaction.

"I think Upton Sinclair took all wealthy people and set out to make them look as bad as he could," says Henry, a 14-year-old who comes from a wealthy Palm Beach family. "We're never told about the good sides of capitalism or the wealthy."

"Like philanthropy," says Maia, a chipper 13-year-old in a perfectly pressed oxford-cloth button-down. "My dad, he gives to all these foundations and he helps all these people, but they don't show that kind of stuff in the book."

It's The Jungle, Palm Beach style, where silver spoons replace pitchforks, and cries for justice and equality are replaced by a budding noblesse oblige. The median income in Palm Beach, which has a year-round population of 10,000, is about twice the national average. The median sales price of houses last year was $3.7-million.

Every year, eighth-graders at Palm Beach Day Academy are assigned The Jungle as part of their English and history courses. While students in middle America who read the classic tend to dwell on the brutal working conditions, contaminated meat and hopeless plight of the Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, Palm Beach kids raise other questions. Like: Are the rich inherently bad? Do our nannies, gardeners and chefs - mostly immigrants - live better than Jurgis? How can the wealthy best help the poor, through jobs or charity?

Scott Thompson, a history and art teacher, says he teaches The Jungle to give Palm Beach kids a greater awareness of how the other half used to live. And on a small piece of land packed with millionaire and billionaire families, in a school that costs $18,000 a year in tuition, The Jungle also serves as a prism for bigger issues, like class, capitalism and the growing wealth gap in America.

"Palm Beach is a unique strip of land, and most of our kids come from very wealthy families," Thompson said. "We teach this book to give them a broad perspective, to show them how fortunate many of them are."

The discussion in last week's class started with food. In The Jungle, meat is shoveled from dirty floors, sausage contains dead rats and workers who die on the job are boiled down into lard. "Some parents have complained that their kids become vegans after the book," Thompson says.

James offers a simple solution. "Don't buy low-grade meat," he says.

"What if you can't afford it?" Thompson asks.

The students shrugged their shoulders.

Then they turned to the plight of immigrants, then and now.

"I felt really bad for the immigrants. They had such a bad life," says Ali, 14.

"The American dream is supposed to be about getting a better life," Maia says. "For the immigrants, their life just kept getting worse. The dream kept getting crushed."

As for whether the same holds true today, the class was divided. Their experience with immigrants comes mostly from their Filipino nannies, Mexican gardeners and Guatemalan cleaning ladies. Compared to Jurgis working in a deadly factory, the lives and pay for immigrants are far better today, the kids say.

Working conditions for factory workers have also improved since the 1900s, they say, as the government imposed regulations.

"My dad's working on a deal with a company that can test to see if a worker's muscles were injured on the job," says superachieving Liza. "They didn't have those back then."

Coco, 13, offers another view.

"What about all the migrant workers in the sugar fields in Florida?" she says. "They all come here looking for the American dream like Jurgis and they get paid next to nothing and they all get stuffed into rooms. It's the same."

[Last modified April 12, 2007, 22:59:31]