In spite of his altruistic intention to bring attention to the plight of the human workers in the packing yards, it was Sinclair’s horrifying descriptions of the unsanitary handling of food that launched him and his novel into the spotlight. Public fervor erupted as the prospect of eating rotten and diseased food became a reality confirmed by Chicago newspapers.
The Jungle
was largely responsible for the federal Food and Drug Act, which went into effect just months after the novel’s private publication. The passage of this act heightened public awareness of food-borne diseases, as well as ways to prevent them, including regimented hand washing, refrigeration, pasteurization, improved care and feeding of animals, and the use of pesticides. Though Teddy Roosevelt was quick to condemn bad journalism, he was equally quick to implement reform based on what good journalism successfully revealed.
The Jungle
can be compared with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852) and Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
(1962) in terms of the immediate social response it catalyzed. It has spawned numerous successors, most recently Eric Schlosser’s
Fast Food Nation
(2001), which illustrates how little has changed since Sinclair’s time as far as industry corruption and monopolizing strategies are concerned.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The
com
mentary has been culled from sources
as
diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the history of the book. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
This book is published as a novel, and it might claim to be reviewed, therefore, under the head of fiction. But the very first thing to be said about it is that, if it is a novel, a work of imagination and invention, the conduct of an author who invented and published in a form easily accessible to all readers, young or old, male or female, such disgusting, inflammatory matter as this would deserve the severest censure. Unhappily we have good reason for believing it to be all fact, not fiction. The action of the President, who sent commissioners to inquire into the truth or falsehood of Mr. Sinclair’s statements, and the known ten-our of the commissioners’ reply remove all doubt, and give the book very great importance. By its truths or its untruths the story stands or falls, and it is with nothing less than horror that we learn it to be true. The things described by Mr. Sinclair happened yesterday, are happening to-day, and will happen to-morrow and the next day, until some Hercules comes to cleanse the filthy stable. If there is not actually in Chicago a Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant, who has followed exactly the course set out by Mr. Sinclair, there are, we are compelled to believe, a thousand such who have followed, possibly in a different order, some parts of it, who have seen the revolting things Jurgis saw, and suffered as he suffered. The names alone are fictitious. The rest of the book is a faithful report of abuses which fill the reader with nausea and indignation, to leave him at the close solaced with nothing better than the conviction that a change must come.
What are the matters on which Mr. Sinclair reports? First, and most fully, the great Chicago Meat Trusts. “We use everything of the hog but its squeal,” is the only jest ever heard in the stock-yards, the places where hundreds of thousands of animals are turned every day into meat; a bitter jest and a true word. We prefer not to dwell on the sickening details supplied. Let those who wish turn to Mr. Sinclair’s pages to learn of what indescribable filth the food is made which is sold far and wide over Europe and America; but we would warn any reader who may turn to these pages in search of sensation alone that what he finds will probably disagree with him. Only a serious purpose or an unusually degraded taste can make the study of such things endurable. Of Mr. Sinclair’s serious purpose there can be, we are convinced, no question. For he does not stop short at the matter of “clean food.” He has a wider cause to serve. The nausea that results from reading his account of the processes of manufacture is only supplementary to the indignation that comes of considering the lives of the men, the women, and the children who are tortured in this Inferno. Slavery is too kind a word for their state. It is not merely that, to make a pittance they must work harder than human strength can bear, must spend so many hours every day doing one thing over and over again at the highest speed that they are too tired when work is over to preserve the decencies of human beings. Every single department of the work they have to do is always degrading and either dangerous or bound to result in some horrible disease. There are branches of the work which bring certain death in five years. Once more we are compelled to refrain from dwelling on the facts Mr. Sinclair has to tell. They are worse than anything we have read of “phossy jaw.” And outside the factory there are thieving house agents to rob the ignorant immigrant, saloons to entice him in and poison him, and a system of police and politics which either grinds him in a mill of callous injustice or robs him of his self-respect by making him its tool. Mr. Sinclair drags his poor Lithuanian, a brave and honest fellow at heart, through all the mire; shows his wife forced to sacrifice her very honour in order to get work, and dying after all of poverty and neglect; shows his only son killed through municipal carelessness and corruption. Rudkus falls from good work to bad, from bad to none; from self-respect to crime, from health to disease; but after roaching the lowest depths he is raised again and filled with a new hope and a new reason for endeavour, the doctrine of Socialism. The book ends with a manifesto of the aims and hopes of Socialism. But the close cannot—it is not intended to—take away the taste of what went before. Seldom, we believe, if ever, has so hideous a state of things been exposed so fearlessly and so thoroughly. Buried in a Blue-book, the revelation might have passed unnoticed; published in this form, it will be recognized far and wide for what it is—a most important sociological document; and the practical effect of it should be great.
—June 1, 1906
THE BOOKMAN
Our twentieth century philosopher, Bernard Shaw, tells us that “up to a certain point illusion—or, as it is commonly called by Socialists, enthusiasm’ —is more or less precious and indispensable; but beyond that point it gives us more trouble than it is worth.” It is a sage remark, and nicely applicable to the queer document of Socialist propaganda which Mr. Sinclair has promulgated under the inappropriate title,
The Jungle.
The author has enthusiasm; and up to a certain point—to be precise, up to page 252—it is, as the philosopher avers, precious and indispensable. It has enabled Mr. Sinclair to present, in the first half of his book, a study of social conditions which, if substantially true, should have been made long ago; but it has also carried him off into the wildest rhapsodizing concerning an alleged remedy for these conditions. The faults of
The Jungle,
like those of most writings designed to tell us how evil is the world in which we live, are multitudinous and plain; its great possible virtue is solely dependent on the question of its truth.
Of so much of the book as has any serious significance, the truth or falsity is at least ascertainable. It purports to be a plain, straightforward statement of the lives of workers in the Chicago packing houses, and of the methods by which those enterprises flourish. It is not a pretty story. Those amateur critics who have amused themselves and bored others by taking Mrs. Wharton to task for uncovering plague spots in the body of “high society” ought to find in Mr. Sinclair’s book an occupation for many days and nights. It would be unfair to the book to cite only a few of the least offensive details of the “exposé.” Their effect is cumulative, and simple justice to Mr. Sinclair demands that you read him at first hand—so long as you can stomach him. Here is our first thorough-going American disciple, on one side at least, of Zola: a novelist with little of the insight and imagination the Frenchman possessed at his best, but with all his industry and no little of his ingenuity in gaining an effect by piling detail on detail, directing attention so persistently to parts that the whole loses all perspective.
There is too much of it to be wholly true. Undoubtedly the impression that persists is that the horrors of the life are exaggerated, that the catalogue of crimes laid at the door of the packers is carried beyond the limits of mere strict, prosaic justice. But another impression remains with equal persistence: that even with very liberal allowances made for the prejudiced statements of a partisan observer, the conditions here described are intolerable, a disgrace to everyone who contributes, directly or indirectly, to their perpetuation.
This, of course, provided the indictment is substantially true. In the end it must be accepted as such or thoroughly, searchingly explained. For the present opinion must rest mainly on internal evidence. And the evidence would be more conclusive if the author had been less ambitious. So long as Mr. Sinclair writes about the stock-yards it is difficult to escape the conviction that he has informed himself of his subject; when he betakes himself to other scenes, and attempts to let his characters breathe the air of a more familiar life, it is impossible not to recognize his ignorance. About the middle of the book the leading character, a young Lithuanian, runs away from the hopeless struggle for existence in the stock-yards. In turn he becomes “hobo,” thief, political “heeler,” strikebreaker and street beggar. Whether or not with intention on the part of the author, the emphasis shifts from
milieu
to character; it is no longer the story of the stock-yards, but the story of Jurgis Rudkus. Nor is it any longer Zolaesque, in spite of a delusion to that effect apparently existent in the mind of the author. A mere fondness for speaking of rather disgusting matters, and particularly for discussing the most sordid facts concerning prostitution in extremely plain terms, scarcely entitles an author to a place beside the French exponent of naturalism. No, Mr. Sinclair’s most obvious literary affinity here is the gentleman who once wrote a book entitled “If Christ Came to Chicago.”
Yet all of Mr. Sinclair’s plain speaking would be justified and even welcomed if it signified anything. Unfortunately it all comes to naught. We do not need to be told that thievery, and prostitution, and political jobbery, and economic slavery exist in Chicago. So long as these truths are before us only as abstractions they are meaningless. Mr. Sinclair has pretended to reduce them to concrete experience, but the pretence is too shallow. His chief character is a mere puppet. He is too obviously manipulated, his experiences are too palpably made to order, to signify anything one way or the other. Jurgis Rudkus is neither individual nor type. He is a mere jumble of impossible qualities labelled a man, and put through certain jerky motions at the hands of an author with a theory to prove. The whole performance shows how much Mr. Sinclair has yet to learn. And the worst of it is that his large ignorance of life throws doubt even on his competence as an observer and recorder of conditions in a special field.
And after all this there is yet a third section of the book—happily a brief one—which adds the crowning touch of unreality. Probably the author would describe it as the third period in the life of Jurgis Rudkus. The young man strays into a Socialist mass meeting one night and hears one of their great orators. He “gets Socialism” exactly as a backsliding brother in a Methodist camp meeting “gets religion,” and the effect is equally revolutionary as to character. At last the true purpose of the book comes to light. Unlike Mr. Lawson of Boston, Mr. Sinclair gives his “expose” and his remedy in a single volume. For forty or fifty pages he discourses of Socialism as the social panacea, and quotes statistics of the voting strength of political parties to show how near the millennium is. It is impossible to withhold admiration of Mr. Sinclair’s enthusiasm; and yet many socialists will regret his mistaken advocacy of their cause. His reasoning is so false, his disregard of human nature so naive, his statement of facts so biassed, his conclusions so perverted, that the effect can be only to disgust many honest, sensible folk with the very terms he uses so glibly. It is a misfortune that a book which displays genuine talent, and which is likely to be widely read, should contain so much error to nullify the effect of its merits.
—April 1906
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
A book which spoilt the entire nation’s appetite for its Sunday roast beef could hardly fail of an audience. Consequently there is a natural inclination to rate
The Jungle
as a sensational document devoid of other merit than timeliness and a knowledge of Packingtown. Oddly enough, the success of this book has stood in the light of its appreciation. Taking it on its own merits as a story, no one who has followed Mr. Sinclair for the past five or six years can fail to see the progress he has made in thought and expression. The crudity of his earlier books and the heaviness of
Manassas
are here replaced by a finer imagination and a simpler method of expression. If it were possible to cut out the slaughterhouse and merely give the experience of the immigrant family struggling to find its level in a cruel new country, it would at once be clear that Mr. Sinclair’s work had reached a new plane of sincerity. At the very first he strikes the note of his bewildered Lithuanians, and the note never varies. He conveys the sense of his peasant family in the great city, the suffering, the horror of it. Still, so much might be done by any skilled journalist; but he gives the effect of a mental condition with clear strokes—and this is his achievement. In fact, the part of the book which depends upon imagination, upon divining the state of mind of people whose mental processes he could only guess at, as literature, is far superior to the exact descriptions of scenes entirely obvious to the eye of any one who chanced to be on the spot. Also it is no small achievement that, in spite of piled-up horrors, the book should still be interesting, and, up to a certain point, not monotonous.