Workers' Rights in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
by Social Issues in Literature/ Greenhaven Press
Chapter 1:Background on Upton Sinclair
2. Sinclair Was an Idealist by David Denby (p. 31-40)
David Denby, "Uppie Redux?" The New Yorker, August 28, 2006, p. 70. Copyright © 2006. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.
Intro
Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, "the sensationally grim expose of noisome squalors and dangers of the meatpacking industry," was published more than a hundred years ago.
Dedicated to the "workingmen of America"
became a bestseller
Theodore Roosevelt invited Upton Sinclair as a guest to the white house and eventually passed the Pure Food and Drug Act in June of 1906. (he saw soldiers die from eating rotten meat during the Spanish-American War)
The book's influence on the dinner table: Americans were eating less meat than before
"By common consent among literary historians, only one American novel, before or since-Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin"- has had so powerful an influence on practical affairs.
Sinclair is Largely Forgotten
In 1906, he wrote The Jungle when he was 27 yrs old, and would not stop for More than sixty years.
No two scholars would agree with the number of books Sinclair wrote but he clearly wrote over 90 books.
wrote:
-social-protest novels
-historical novels
-plays
-screenplays
-tracts
-journalistic exposes
-didactic dialogues
-instructional manuals
-autobiographies
"(American poet) Erza Pound, who knew a thing about obsession, said that Sinclair was not a maniac buy a "polymaniac" '
...He is "resurrected" by die hard leftists through media and literature...
"Throughout the years of America's century-long triumph, Sinclair was always mocking or scolding or keening for some unachievable national paradise. If he no longer seems original, it may be because he anticipated both out reforming highmindedness and so many of our follies..."
Challenged to Write
Feb 1904 finished Manassas a novel about slavery and Civil War
he read German Philosopher Carl Marx and Norwegian American sociologist and economist Thorstien Veblen
Socialist politician Eugene V. Debs formed The Socialist Part of American in 1901--> 1904, Upton joined
early years of the century, socialism was militant humanism
Sinclair believed (like many socialists of the period) the scramble for profits degraded relations between people.
He approached socialism "as a moralist not a political theorist," Anthony Arthur writes. "Both his strengths and weaknesses derived from his simplistic belief that all injustice stemmed from greed, whether for money or power"
After Manassas, the editor of a popular socialist magazine (Appeal to Reason) challenged Sinclair to write a novel about "wage slavery"
At the time, livestock was one of the most profitable industries in the country. In Chicago, companies like Armor and Swift owned acres o yards, pens, slaughterhouses, and packing plants
Livestock the most important business of Chicago
Chicago- center of the American meatpacking industry
The "Beef trust" (the big companies working together) bribed govt meat inspectors and exercised enough control over local newspapers to avoid serious censure. any rebellious worker was quickly replaced by more eager immigrants of eastern Europe; unions were defenseless
Sinclair supported striking the meatpacking industry, albeit from a distance via writing in the pages of The Appeal to Reason
Arrived at Chicago, happy b/c of being away from demanding wife.
walked all over Chicago's dismal neighborhoods, questioning workers, union organizers, settlement-house officials.
Wandered through the vast Armour facilities in shabby clothes, lunch bucket in hand. there was very little security in the plant. no one challenged this oddly inquiring worker
The Jungle's Power
The Jungle is written about Lithuanian immigrant family
Jurgis Rudkus is our broadbacked hero and his refrain (no matter what happens to him) "I will work harder"
Stockyards = reverse Henry ford production line
Jurgis at first content that he has a job... several months later he is sore and disillusioned
The conditions are short of torture:
"There was no heat upon the killing beds; the men might exactly as well have worked out of doors all winter. For that matter, there was very little heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms and such places – and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they had to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on above the waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On the killing beds you were apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving your skin on it. The men would tie up their feet in newspapers and old sacks, and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soaked again, and so on, until by nighttime a man would be walking on great lumps the size of the feet of an elephant. Now and then, when the bosses were not looking, you would see them plunging their feet and ankles into the steaming hot carcass of the steer, or darting across the room to the hot-water jets. The cruelest thing of all was that nearly all of them – "
The force of The Jungle can be suggested only by quoting it at length. (meaning, Sinclair's true gift was to give the audience a vivid detail of the horrors of the meatpacking industry;a shock factor put into a good use of journalism and propaganda)
Sinclair's prose is fluent and forward moving but rarely writes a singular line of words that compels the readers to underline it and say "Aha! that was smart"
""He holds rhythm steady and lets the hideous facts do their work":
There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white – it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one – there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water – and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage – but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound."
The author of this article notes "if only Sinclair had possessed fiction-writing abilities equal to his ability to evoke squalor!" (he means that the story was bland and basic. Sinclair wrote about a family that is so engulfed in tragedy that "one suspects Sinclair outfitted the family with exactly those vulnerabilities which could be most grievously exploited by a brutal society"
pg 36 lists all the pain that the family has gone through
Sinclair's Characters Lack Depth
Sinclair's characters are simple. Some people can't relate to the characters because Sinclair only stresses outward influences and the consequences of the influences.
His characters suffer without gain in conscience: they "remain mere names attacked to depressing social conditions"
ex: Jurgis falls in a life of crime and corruptness of politics and then suddenly at a public meeting, he's electrified by a fervent voice: "They own not merely the labor of society they have bought the governments,; and everywhere they used there raped and stolen power to intrench themselves in their pprivileges."
The book ends with Jurgis's rapid conversion to socialism and with an outpouring of speeches inspired by the words of Eugene V. Debs.
The last line of the novel is "CHICAGO WILL BE OURS."
Sinclair has trouble understanding why Chicago didn't become "ours"
The shock The Jungle created was extraordinary, but did not produce what Sinclair has hoped for: an outrage of exploitation of inhumane (almost slave-like) treatment of workers-a step toward the defeat of capitalism.
"I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach"
It influenced Theodore Roosevelt's decision in the vigorous law making of FDA- standardizing food and drugs)
The president dismissed the call for socialist revolution and though Roosevelt acted vigorously on contaminated food, "his measures were niether as vigorous nor as comprehensive as Sinclair wanted."
Sinclair pestered the President while he was in Washington, until Roosevelt, losing patience, write ot Frank Doubleday, Sinclair's publisher, "Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while"
Sinclair's Improvement Schemes
In the spring of 1906, at the signing of the Pure Food and Drug Act, Sunclair was trying to build socialism on a small scale.
his idea: select group of intellectuals and artists get together and hire other people to cook/clean for them and take care of the children, leaving them free to work and exchange ideas.
The idea based on Brook Farm (19th century colony) w/o the emphasis on physical labor, schooling, or philosophical stength of Transcendentalism to hold it together.
Sinclair and his group bought a former boys' academy in Englewood, NJ named Helicon Hall
80 men and women lived there.
They ate stunningly healthy dinners of beans, potatoes, turnips, prunes, and salt free crackers known as "educators."
Some dropped by for a laugh. Overnight, it became famous and was visited by other famous academics and anarchists.
March 1907, the place mysteriously went up in flames.
Sinclair lost a lot of money from his proceeds from The Jungle
The shock of it all transformed Sinclair. He was even more skeptical of the morals of industrialists and newspaper publishers but receptive to the delusion of quacks. He had a weakeness for nostrums and half-baked schemes (including his own).
His failures are stacked; "this suggests a savior unable to save anyone"
However, his failures didn't stop him from preaching: he wrote more than 90 novels in total over 6 decades.
"He promoted programs of fasting, prolonged chewing, colon cleansing, and other such methods of ideologically approved digestion. He practiced a kind of socialism of the bdy, its constitutent parts rehabilitated along progressive lines-tennis for the heart and lungs, nuts and berries for the colon..."
The Jungle's Endurance
Author of this article claims that most of Sincalir's fiction no doubt deserves to molder in the book barn (implying that most of his books were of no value, literary or scholarly ,etc)
Sinclair's ideas didn't go away. His ideas bore the inspiration/foundation/base/etc of such organisations of (alternateive world within Americna capitalism has born fruit in such nonprofit organizations such as)
-food co-operatives
-day-care centers
-public radio and TV
his personal habits of non-stop opinionizing and self serving rant fin their natural heir in the blog
his austere citizenly dedication inspired the young (American activist and politician) Ralph Nader, who has acknowledged the debt
his obsession with health and physical culture prefigured our own
He was one of the great American squares, exasperating and tone-deaf his entire life
But an ethical man tugs at us from the grave more persistently than merely successful men, who have gone to a quieter form of rest.
