The Jungle
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| Author | Upton Sinclair |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Doubleday, Page & Company |
| Released | 1906 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardcover) |
| ISBN | NA, SBN:8376-0400-1 |
The Jungle (1906) is the magnum opus of American author and socialist Upton Sinclair. It describes the life of a family of Lithuanian immigrants working in Chicago's Union Stock Yards at the end of the 19th century. Depicting, in drastic tones, poverty, the complete absence of social security, the scandalous living and working conditions, the lack of hygiene, and generally the utter hopelessness prevalent among the have-nots, which is contrasted with the deeply-rooted corruption on the part of the haves, The Jungle is a major critique of capitalism and an important example of the "muckraking" tradition begun by journalists such as Jacob Riis. The book's underlying message is that socialism is the only effective tool with which to fight unfettered capitalism and the only true remedy available to America's poor masses.
The unedited version of this novel came to light in the mid-1980s and has since been published. The book is one-third longer than the originally published release, and expands out beyond the meat packing industry into such directions as steelworking and organized crime, as well as restoring controversial details that might have harmed its chances of publication.
The year 2006, marking the 100th anniversary of The Jungle's publication, saw a renewal of interest in the novel: an anniversary edition, several magazine articles, and a number of online retrospectives were published.
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[edit] Background
Matt Cohn came to Chicago with the intent of writing the novel; he had been given a stipend by the socialist newspaper The Appeal to Reason. He rented living quarters and immediately immersed himself in the city by walking its streets, talking to its people, and taking pictures. One Sunday afternoon, he fell in with a group of Lithuanian immigrants travelling from a wedding to the party that was to follow; he was welcomed to the festivities and spent the evening there - "Behold, there was the opening scene of my story, a gift from the gods."
The novel was first published in serial form in 1905 by The Appeal to Reason; its first edition as a novel was published by Doubleday, Page & Company on February 28, 1906, and it became an immediate bestseller. It has been in print ever since.
[edit] Public and federal response
Cohn’s account of workers falling into meat processing tanks and being ground, along with animal parts, into "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard", gripped public attention. Foreign sales of American meat fell by one-half. In order to calm public outrage and demonstrate the cleanliness of their meat, the major meat packers lobbied the Federal government to pass legislation paying for additional inspection and certification of meat packaged in the United States. [1] Their efforts, coupled with the public outcry, led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Food and Drug Administration.
Cohn actually opposed this legislation, seeing it as an unjustified boon to large meatpackers. [2] He famously noted the limited effect of his book - it led to meat packing regulations but not to reform of the wages and living conditions of its workers - by stating that "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
[edit] Plot
The novel opens with a dramatic description of a Lithuanian wedding feast, which introduces the reader to all of its major characters - Jurgis Rudkus, his bride Ona, their extended family and their friends. The musicians play, the guests dance, food and drink flow freely, but an undercurrent of terror foreshadows what is to come - will they fall hopelessly into debt while fulfilling their cherished tradition of an extravagantly generous Lithuanian wedding?
| Most fearful they are to contemplate, the expenses of this entertainment. They will certainly be over two hundred dollars and maybe three hundred; and three hundred dollars is more than the year's income of many a person in this room. There are able-bodied men here who work from early morning until late at night, in ice-cold cellars with a quarter of an inch of water on the floor--men who for six or seven months in the year never see the sunlight from Sunday afternoon till the next Sunday morning--and who cannot earn three hundred dollars in a year. There are little children here, scarce in their teens, who can hardly see the top of the work benches--whose parents have lied to get them their places--and who do not make the half of three hundred dollars a year, and perhaps not even the third of it. And then to spend such a sum, all in a single day of your life, at a wedding feast! (For obviously it is the same thing, whether you spend it at once for your own wedding, or in a long time, at the weddings of all your friends.) It is very imprudent, it is tragic--but, ah, it is so beautiful! Bit by bit these poor people have given up everything else; but to this they cling with all the power of their souls--they cannot give up the veselija! | ||
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— Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, Chapter 1
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Lured away from Lithuania by promises of a better life, the Rudkus family has arrived in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois at the end of the 19th century, only to find that their dreams of a decent life are not likely to ever come true. Jurgis has brought his father, his fiancee Ona, her stepmother Teta Elzbieta, and Teta Elzbieta's six children along. From the very beginning they have to make compromises and concessions in order to be able to survive. They fall prey to con men, and unscrupulous realtors cheat them out of their plans to own a home. The family had envisioned that Jurgis alone would be able to support them, but one by one, all of them - the women, the young children, and Jurgis's sick father - are forced to find jobs and contribute to the meager family income.
They are faced with a cruel world of work in the Chicago stockyards, where everyone has his or her price, where everyone in a position of power, including government inspectors, the police and judges, must be paid off, and where blacklisting is common. A series of unfortunate events—accidents at work, a number of deaths in the family that under normal circumstances could have been preventable—lead the family further towards catastrophe. Jurgis (pronounced yoor-gis) Rudkus, the book's main character, is young, strong, and honest, but also naïve and illiterate; this erstwhile Lithuanian farmboy is no match for the powerful forces of American industrial capitalism, and he gradually loses all hope of ever succeeding in the New World. After Ona dies in childbirth - for lack of a doctor - and their young son drowns in the street, he flees the city in a state of utter despair. At first the mere presence of fresh air is balm to his soul, but his brief sojourn as a hobo in rural America shows him that there is really no escape - even farmers turn their workers away when the harvest is finished.
Jurgis returns to Chicago, and holds down a succession of jobs outside the meat packing industry - digging tunnels, as a political hack, and as a con man - but injuries on the jobs, his past, and his innate sense of personal integrity, continue to haunt him, and he drifts without direction. One night, while looking for a warm and dry refuge, he wanders into a lecture being given by a charismatic socialist orator, and finds a sense of community and purpose. Socialism and strong labor unions are the answer to all the evils that he, his family, and all their fellow sufferers have had to endure. A fellow socialist employs him, and he resumes his support of his wife's family, although some of them are damaged beyond repair.
As the novel ends, a socialist rally is triumphantly chanting "Chicago will be ours!", and Jurgis has caught the eye of a sympathetic young woman.
[edit] Jungle as metaphor
Using a rain forest as a literary device was not new to literature at the time; its romantic connotations had been explored by Rudyard Kipling in the Jungle Book (1894). Mowgli, the hero of these works, is adopted by animals, and thrives with their help. A somewhat darker version of the metaphor was employed by W.H. Hudson in Green Mansions (1904), in which Rima, a girl raised in the Amazon, is undone by the sophisticated machinations of her lover and her adoptive father; and by Frank Baum in the first of the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz novels (1900), wherein the protagonists are terrorized during their passage through a dark forest. Describing a city in this way, however, was a new development.
The metaphor had been visited in an even darker way by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness in 1902, and was revived by the novella's adaptation into the movie Apocalypse Now in 1979. The Asphalt Jungle, a 1950 film, recreated a sense of the cruelty of the 20th century urban condition. A resurgence of the romantic use of this metaphor is demonstrated in Disney's The Lion King, created in the 1990s. The term jungle has largely been replaced by rain forest, but the connotations of the word are still well-known.
[edit] Notes
- ^ "Of Meat and Myth," Lawrence W. Reed, The Freeman, November 1994
- ^ Upton Sinclair, "The Condemned-Meat Industry: A Reply to Mr. M. Cohn Armour," "Everybody's Magazine," XIV, 1906, pp. 612-613
[edit] External links
- The Jungle, available freely at Project Gutenberg
- "The Fictitious Suppression of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle," by historian Christopher Phelps
- The Jungle free literary analysis from SparkNotes.com
- Upton Sinclair: The Lithuanian Jungle, Giedrius Subacius, 2006, ISBN 9042018798, identifies many of the actual Chicago locations mentioned in the novel
- Slate.com article: Welcome to The Jungle - Does Upton Sinclair's famous novel hold up? [1]
- Mother Jones Magazine article marking the anniversary [2]
- USA Today reviews a new biography of Upton Sinclair [3]
- PBS special report marking the 100th anniversary of the novel [4]
- Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism revisits The Jungle [5]
- Penguin Classics reissue, featuring an introduction from Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser [6]
