"I aimed at the public's heart," Upton Sinclair ruefully said after the initial publication of "The Jungle" 100 years ago, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
Few novels, no matter how best-selling or classic, can be said to have changed our national life. Probably the greatest example of one that did is Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which Abraham Lincoln credited, only half-jokingly, with starting the Civil War.
A close runner-up is the novel to which it has been compared — "The Jungle," about the horrifying conditions in Chicago's stockyards and meatpacking industry. Published Feb. 26, 1906, the book was an immediate sensation, and four months after that Congress passed and President Theodore Roosevelt signed the nation's first Pure Food and Drug Act.
Which is the point of the Sinclair quotation above. He had set out to make his fellow citizens outraged over the inhumane working conditions in the meatpacking industry — the novel is dedicated "To the Workingmen of America" — and instead he got them nauseated over the repulsive foodstuffs they were putting down their throats.
As a teen, Sinclair, who was born in Baltimore in 1878, was supporting himself by writing. After a string of ho-hum novels, he was groping for his proper subject matter and growing in his newfound faith of socialism. The two merged in "The Jungle."
Intrigued by a failed 1904 Chicago stockyard strike, he got a socialist weekly, Appeal to Reason, to commission him to write about the industry. Actually, the weekly published his writings first in serial form starting in February 1905; book publication did not come until the next year, and only after a struggle.
Everything about "The Jungle" and its author is remarkable. Sinclair spent only seven weeks in Chicago, but he learned a trainload of stuff and got it down with an accuracy that proved impervious to savage criticism.
"The Jungle" is the story of Lithuanian immigrants, Jurgis Rudkus and his wife, Ona, and their extended family. Right from the time they first set foot in Packingtown — Sinclair's name for the residential area known locally as Back-of-the-Yards — their lives become a downward spiral of despair and death.
Henry James he was not; one critic later said Sinclair's distinguishing trait as an author was "a sub-literary belligerence." Nevertheless, "The Jungle" is compelling reading, partly because of the passionate, vigorous narration, but mostly because of what is being narrated.
There is scarcely a page that does not contain something to turn your stomach or inflame your anger, or both. Packingtown itself is a festering sump of land made from a city garbage dump, where sickness seems to sprout from the very soil.
Jurgis earns 17.5 cents per hour (by no means the lowest wage) as a "shoveler of guts." Through him we discover the revolting ingredients that make their way into breakfast sausages and pickled meats: cows with tuberculosis and hogs with cholera, floor sweepings, rats and their droppings, insalubrious chemicals — even, Sinclair claimed, the occasional Lithuanian rendered into lard.
That is not even a beginning of the disgusting litany. It extends to the tarting-up of spoiled meat with borax and glycerine to make it salable, and to lax government inspectors willing to look the other way.
Employees, living in filth and working without recourse to sanitary facilities, introduce diseases. The plant is a honeycomb of graft, jealousies and hatreds, where decency and honesty are nowhere to be found; "from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie."
Sinclair skillfully throws a new ingredient into (or under) the pot now and then to keep it boiling, such as Ona's being forced by her boss into prostitution. Horror follows upon horror, yet nothing seems unreal. The author, remember, has seen it all.
There are some really memorable touches. In a scene at a Lake Shore Drive mansion, for instance, the insouciant scion (a stage drunk, admittedly) of a meatpacking magnate exposes the emptiness of his family's existence. Another is Sinclair's description of the well-oiled Chicago political machine — six decades on and he could be describing the administration of the first Mayor Daley.
Perhaps the most poignant and revealing touch of all, however, is a moment when Jurgis, in utter despair, goes out as a tramp after the death of his wife and son. A farmer refuses to sell him food, and so Jurgis, once out of sight, vindictively pulls up a row of 100 newly planted peach trees. Decent, honest, hard-working Jurgis has learned his lesson well.
The world was, then, literally a jungle, with everyone at everyone else's throat — a world the narrator says, "in which nothing counted but brutal might." What was the answer?
In a word: socialism. Jurgis stumbles into a socialist meeting, becomes converted, and the final 50 pages form a sort of socialist tract. "CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!" are the book's closing, happily defiant words.
A limp ending, but somewhat fitting for the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of wage slavery. Here, however, the redemption is not spiritual but socialist.
Roger K. Miller, a journalist for many years, is a free-lance writer and reviewer for several publications, and a frequent contributor to the Deseret Morning News.