Today's Economic History: Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"
(2006): On Upton Sinclair: 'I Aimed For The Public's Heart, And... Hit It In The Stomach': "'The Jungle' Was A Socialist's Cry For Labor Justice....
...It Launched A Consumer Movement Instead....
During the fall of 1904, [Upton Sinclair] left his home in New Jersey and traveled to Chicago, intending to write a novel about the plight of the city's meatpacking workers. The beef trust controlled the industry with an iron fist. It had recently crushed a strike by union members who were seeking a pay raise of less than 3 cents an hour. The meatpacking industry seemed to embody everything that was wrong with American society, operating largely in secret, wielding unchecked power, threatening the health of workers and consumers. As Sinclair later argued in 'The Jungle,' the beef trust was 'the incarnation of blind and insensate greed . . . the Great Butcher . . . the spirit of capitalism made flesh.'
Sinclair was a socialist with grand ambitions. He set out to write a book that would do for workers what 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' had done for slaves half a century earlier.... Sinclair was aiming pretty high. He was only 26 years old, and his previous novel had sold fewer than 2,000 copies. He spent seven weeks in Chicago, wandering through the stockyards and slaughterhouses, visiting the homes of meatpacking workers, listening to their stories and filling his notebooks with the details of their lives. Living on advances from a socialist newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, and a New York publisher, Macmillan, he returned to New Jersey and started writing on Christmas morning 1904.
'The Jungle' tells the story of a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, his family and his friends. It describes the terrible working conditions in meatpacking plants, the squalid housing, the ruthlessness of employers, the sexual harassment, the lure of alcoholism and prostitution, the political corruption, the misery of life in jail. It depicts a world where honest, decent people are transformed into cogs in a huge industrial machine. It upends the traditional rags-to-riches success story, portraying a downward spiral. The immigrants are exploited and discarded, not rewarded and applauded for their hard work. At a time when most popular fiction dealt with the problems of the middle or upper class, Sinclair focused on life at the bottom. He dedicated 'The Jungle' to 'THE WORKINGMEN OF AMERICA'...
