The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
350 pages
published in 1905
Few novels, no matter how good or worthy, can be said to change the world other than metaphysically. The Jungle is one of the rare few which has managed that honour. It was thanks to this novel and its exposure of the meatpacking industry, that in America the first truely effective food laws, the Pure Food and Drugs Act and the Beef Inspection Act were passed, within six months after The Jungle had first appeared in bookform. And yet Sinclair did not set out to mount a crusade for better, safer food; in fact only a small number of scenes in his novel deal with this side of the meatpacking industry, but they were so powerful that they gripped the public's imagination, as well as president Teddy Roosevelt's and changed the way meat was handled in the US.
What Sinclair wanted to achieve was not revulsion at the scandalous practises of the meatpacking industry, but sympathy and support for the workers employed in it, whose abuse at the hands of the industry was even greater than that of the meat processed by it. Sinclair was a socialist and he wanted The Jungle to be a socialist wakeup call. In this he largely failed, though the meatpacking industry in Chicago would with time become unionised, cleaner and safer until it was deliberately destroyed and moved elsewhere in order for the exploitation to begin again (as shown in Fast Food Nation).
If at this point you're skeptical on how good a novel The Jungle can be if it is written for such a didactic purpose, I don't blame you, as most didactic novels (including such classics as Uncle Tom's Cabin) are pretty unreadable. Happily, The Jungle manages to largely escape this fate. While Sinclair does not hesitate to rub your nose in the injustices his characters undergo, for the most part he doesn't preach. What he does instead is pointing out that the events that happen to them are not at all unique, but are shared by almost all of the workers of the meatpacking industry.
Sinclair starts The Jungle at the high point for his main character Jurgis Rudkus, his wedding feast to Olga, his childhood sweetheart.. Jurgis is a recent immigrant from Lithuania for whom life in the United States was always portrayed as the promised land; the reality he soon learns is different, yet he and his family remain optimistic, buying a house together, finding different jobs in the meat industry. Jurgis himself is young, strong and confident in his own powers. He believes that as long as he works hard everything will be alright and he rejects the warnings of other, more experienced workers. For Jurgis and his family life may be little more than work and sleep, but they're making enough money to pay off their mortgage and even save a little. With time they will slowly improve their position, is their hope.
It's from this highpoint that Jurgis' life slowly disintegrates. The mortgage turns out to be much higher than they expected and the work suddenly dries up as the great seasonal rush is over. Then things get from bad to worse with people getting ill and losing their jobs altogether, Jurgis' wife being assaulted by her boss and forced to prostitute herself after which Jurgis attacks him and gets sent to jail. When he comes back it's to find his wife in labour with their second baby, in which both she and the baby die. When his oldest child later drowns in a mudpool in their street, Jurgis can't take it anymore and flees Chicago to live as a bum.
From there he drifts into the criminal underworld, and does a lot of work for the Democratic Party machine during the elections. However a chance encounter with the man who ruined his wife puts an end to that. Jurgis sinks lower and lower until one day he visits a political meeting, just for the warmth. This turns out to be a socialist meeting and despite himself Jurgis becomes a convert. From that moment his redemption starts as he begins to work for the movement...
This barebones summary does of course no justice to Sinclair's writing, which at times is incredibly powerful. The unending stream of horrors he pours out over Jurgis and his family never become numbing or gauche; a deep sense of humanity shines through. Nor does he ever become preachy, though the last part of the book, with Jurgis led into the new dawn of socialism does come close in places. In all, Sinclair manages to do what he set out to: make the crimes of the meatpacking industry come alive.
Why then did the Americna public only respond when it came to how their meat was handled and not in how the meat workers were handled? Perhaps it was because the first was of importance to them personally, while who cared about what happened to scruffy immigrant meatpackers who didn't even speak English? Added to this disappointing if understandable reaction is the simple fact that the scenes dealing with how the meat was processed, few and throwaway as they are, were very disturbing. I'm not one to be easily affected physically by what I read, but one scene, dealing with how diseased sheep were turned into a high grade of lard almost had me heaving...Despite its age, The Jungle is still relevant, even if the great meatpacking factories of Chicago have long gone. The circumstances described in the novel are still reality for uncounted numbers of people in America and elsewhere. Beyond that, The Jungle is also an excellent example of how a novel can be political, can be written to agitate and still be good art.
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