Review of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
President Theodore Roosevelt coined the term muckrakers. A popular term used to describe journalists during the Progressive Era who exposed corrupt leaders and corporations. They had the intent to show the public how these companies eliminated competition, set high prices, and treated workers as “wage slaves”. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is a famous example of a “muckraker” book, which sought to expose the inhumane working conditions for workers as well as the unethical treatment of animals in the meatpacking industry. However, the public reacted differently than Mr.Sinclair had imagined and focused more heavily on the horrible conditions in the meatpacking industry instead of the conditions of the workers. This is embodied in Sinclair’s most famous quote “I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident, I hit it in the stomach”. Meaning that Sinclair wrote the book to appeal to the public's heart and feelings for the workers and working conditions. But, instead appealed to the public's stomach, the idea that “they used everything but the squeal” and maybe even bits of humans too. Ultimately, the main theme of The Jungle is the idea that capitalism is evil and is the main source of corruption, poverty, and workers' mistreatment. As well as promoting the socialist ideology and trying to persuade people to join socialism and highlight the unjust of capitalism.
Although, this was the case it did have its positive effects. President Theodore Roosevelt used this opportunity of publicity to pass the “Pure Food and Drug Act” in 1906 which instituted the FDA: the Food and Drug Administration. Whose purpose was to prevent the misbranding or selling of any poisonous food, drinks, drugs, or liquors. The Meat Inspection Act of 1907 followed the creation of the FDA, which stated that the federal government and the Department of Agriculture could inspect meat packaging factories and make sure they were up to date on sanitation and safety procedures. Before this act was passed many immigrants at the time were coming to America to live out the “American Dream” the belief that if you work hard enough you can move your way up in the social hierarchy. However, the capitalist had outsmarted the system, with such a massive surplus of workers the bosses were able to hire new fresh workers for cheaper and fire the old ones. Then, continue this process once they needed to boost production again. This process made the company's profit grow exponentially but, led to the working class bearing an immense strain. Such as a huge gap in wealth, and extremely high mortality rates in the factories, with crime and corruption leading to poverty throughout the city.
The Jungle, although under the genres: of social criticism, political fiction, and muckraking fiction, highlights the story of a family from Lithuania moving to Chicago to live out the American Dream. Taking place in 1905-1906 in Princeton and Chicago, New Jersey. However, this idea of working hard will result in you moving up in society is completely misleading and deceiving. As the family struggles to find and keep work as they face problems of illegal and unjust labor practices. Debe dies first from sickness, followed by Ona’s son later in the story. Ona then gives birth to Antanas and returns to work a week later while Jurgis the protagonist is unable to work due to a sprained ankle and the family’s stability takes another hit. Elizabeth’s child then died of food poisoning, and Jurgis takes a job at a fertilizer plant, which is extremely dangerous because of the deadly chemicals the workers are exposed to on a daily basis. Afterward, the rising action begins when Ona gets pregnant again after being raped and blackmailed by her boss, Phil Conner, into becoming his mistress. This is the first appearance of the antagonist. Jurgis goes and fights Conner in search of justice but, ends up in jail the next day meeting and befriending Jack Duane. He leaves prison to find his family evicted from their house and Ona dead from the intensity of labor leaving her baby, Antanas in the hands of thirteen-year-old Katrina. Until Jurgis is able to find another job at a steel mill, before his luck seems to turn around he comes home to find Antanas dead face down in a puddle. Which marks the climax of the story. As it drives Jurgis to the breaking point because, Antanas symbolizes resilience, strength, and the ability to adapt and overcome. This is portrayed in his contraction of measles, scarlet fever, mumps, and whooping cough. Unfortunately, his downfall is his curiosity and lack of supervision, all his resilience to disease means nothing when you’re drowning in a pothole. Jurgis then leaves town and travels homelessly. He finds work digging freight tunnels and eventually becomes a beggar. Ironically, he gets a hundred-dollar bill one day and a warm meal from the son of the packing factory. After trying to get change for it at a saloon the bartender steals his money. Jurgis then tries to fight the bartender, this ends up with him spending ten days in jail and being charged with assault and drunkenness. Finally, Jurgis gives in to the life of crime after seeing Jack Duane in prison again. Jurgis and Jack jump a rich man and rob him dry. Later finding out that he almost died and is suffering from injuries. As time passes Jurgis’s guilt and shame fade away from each victim. After Duane gets caught and abandoned by his associates Jurgis meets Harper, she works for Mike Scully, a corrupt Democrat who wants the Republican candidate to win. Her job is to rig elections by buying votes and has Jurgis join a union in the stockyard. When the voting day comes, “He voted half a dozen times himself, and voted some of his friends as often; he brought bunch after bunch of the newest foreigners—Lithuanians, Poles, Bohemians, Slovaks—and when he had put them through the mill he turned them over to another man to take to the next polling place” (272). Resulting in the Republicans winning the election and Jurgis getting paid $300. Jurgis then wanders home drunk that night and stumbles into Ona’s old boss, Phil Conner. He then tries to beat him up again and ends up in jail, getting cheated out of all of his money because his lawyer is a friend of the powerful and influential Mr.Conner. Jurgis then becomes a strikebreaker or scab, which are the people a company brings in while the workers are on strike. Therefore, making the strike pointless and putting all the people on strike out of their jobs. After the strike ends Jurgis is jobless and homeless again. Trying to find work but isn’t physically fit enough. Winter comes and he begins to hunt for shelter, otherwise, he’ll freeze to death. He then finds the location of Marija and the second he enters the building the police raid the building which turned out to be a brothel. Marija has become addicted to morphine and a prostitute in order to support her children, Stanislova fell asleep in a storage room and died from being attacked by rats. Jurgis then attends a socialist speech and is captivated by the idea of socialism. He meets Ostrinksy who teaches him about the need for a “class consciousness” and the evils of “wage slavery”. As a result, ending the novel on an optimistic note that socialism will save the working class and help bring about social justice and equality.
Mr.Sinclair spent 7 weeks incognito in the meat packaging plant himself as well as questioning the workers, doctors, lawyers, etc. All to expose the meat packaging industry, especially in Chicago. The US’s largest meat packaging town, where the workers had gone on strike in 1904 in a rebellion against horrible conditions and wages. However, the company just brought in more strikebreakers. Mr.Sinclair was sent to investigate and write a novel on the conditions and events that had just occurred from the editor at the Socialist magazine Appeal to Reason. To whom he had been working for under a year. The public’s reaction was more than anything he could’ve imagined. The people bombarded the white house with complaints about the meatpacking industry and demanded reforms. But, Sinclair’s popularity rose to an all-time high at the time, he didn’t like to be considered a muckraker. He liked to view himself as a novelist but was seen by the public as one of the most iconic muckrakers of all time.
But before Mr.Sinclair was a famous muckraker he had humble beginnings, growing up in Baltimore post-Civil War. He was born in 1878 and died in 1968. He graduated from Columbia in 1897 and spent some time working for the Socialist magazine Appeal to Reason to finish and publish his most famous work The Jungle. However, his career did not end there. He then formed a new group called “The Intercollegiate Socialist Society” which was composed of highly intellectual socialist thinkers. Then, in 1913-1914 he went to the coal fields in Colorado to do the same thing again and report on the horrible working conditions of the coalfields in his book “Coal King”. He then tried to follow up with the sequel called “The Coal War” but was rejected from publishing due to a lack of publishing interest. After his writing career died down he then tried to pick up a career in politics. He formed the American Civil Liberties Union in California 1920s. Then unsuccessfully ran for Congress and the House of Representatives as a socialist candidate. After spending some time in LA supporting radical ideals, he then tried his luck running for the democratic party as a socialist. Surprisingly he was elected by the democratic party to represent them in the California Gubernatorial Election which he lost due to the fact that many Hollywood directors disliked him. They then released propaganda and encouraged their actors to vote against him. He was then known as one of history’s first democratic socialists.
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Throughout all of Sinclair’s accomplishments, The Jungle is one of the most memorable and important things he has done. The title itself symbolizes the state of Packing Town. The chaotic nature, the struggle to survive, and an attack on the idea that only the “fittest” can survive and thrive, aka the rich capitalist. Although this is true it shows how the rich capitalist are only the strongest and richest because they make their wealth by working the working class to death. As well as illuminating how the richest capitalist is the most corrupt and evil rather than the strongest and most fit. Ultimately leading to a cycle of usage where the factory owners are cycling through all the workers until the workers are all old, used up, and burnt out. Then, they bring in new workers in the form of immigrants. “There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside, and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside (291). This illustrates the idea that poor workers are trapped behind the bars of capitalism and that wealth and prosperity are on the opposite side of the bars. Symbolizing that capitalism is caging the workers in from achieving wealth and prosperity.
Another major usage of symbolism similar to the theme of confinement of capitalism is the premise of the stockyard. The usage of symbolism occurs in the idea of herding and slaughtering animals in a messy inhumane way. Having the animals being bred for the sole purpose of being slaughtered. Reflecting the same way the factory owners would use the workers up and end up slaughtering them in a slower prolonged way, as well as caging them into a system where their children are born into the same poor conditions being forced to work the same jobs as their parents continuing the inescapable cycle of the slaughterhouse. This cycle
It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests--and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense at an apology, without the homage of a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory. (39-40)
Satire is used to illuminate the cruelty of the treatment of animals as well as symbolize the same cruel treatment of the workers. Personifying the pigs with human attributes of protest and innocence as well as giving them rights. This is important because it helps visualize the similarities between the pigs and the workers. Ultimately, bringing to light the injustice of it all, saying that whatever lawless or inhumane actions occurred in the factory, whether seen or unseen, has gone unpunished and forgotten. This important theme of corruption and injustice is also embodied within Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard.
These people could not be shown to the visitor,—for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! (105)
Durham’s cans of lard contain rotten meat and even human bodies with the exception of their bones. To compare how although the cans are decorated nicely and look enticing ultimately, they fabricate a counterfeit image of a well-produced product. The cans represent the idea that capitalism and the American dream are enticing and decorated nicely on the outside. However, on the inside, it’s rotten, packed with lies, deception, and a high chance of death or disease. To emphasize how the workers are being cheated and lied to while being given false hopes of the American dream.
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