The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

The last category I have left to complete for my Back to the Classics Challenge this year is my "banned or censored classic." For this category, I decided to read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.  This novel is famous for its graphic description of the unsanitary practices of the Chicago meat processing industry in the early 1900s. Although the plot of the story is fictional, the description of what was going on in the factories was real; Sinclair meticulously investigated it himself. Upon publication, so many people were sickened by what they read that new laws concerning food safety were drafted and passed. In fact, The Jungle is credited with a long-term drop in the meat consumption of Americans that lasted for decades. A novel that had such an impact on the country is powerful indeed.

However, it wasn't the shocking truth of what was going on in the meat industry that earned this book its banning. Instead, it was Upton Sinclair's open advocacy for socialism that caused countries like Yugoslavia, East Germany, and South Korea to pull this one from library shelves. Curiously, the city of Boston also banned the book for its socialist views. From my research, it appears to be the only American city that did so.

Indeed, in writing The Jungle, Sinclair was explicitly aiming to bring people into the socialist fold. He was not trying to advocate for food safety. As a dedicated socialist, he wrote The Jungle as a way to show readers the abuses of a capitalist system. However, the public largely ignored that. Instead, they really latched onto the idea that rat feces and little bits of dead people were being processed into their cooking lard. In response to the public's reception of this novel, Sinclair once famously said, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

The Jungle follows Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, his fiance Ona, and his ten other assorted family members as they try to seek out a better life in America. They arrive in Chicago excited to make a new start for themselves, away from the poverty and political corruption of their homeland. At first, they are very impressed with the scale of the meat processing factories in the district where they settle and are proud to be living in such a modern and efficient country. Most of the adults in the group are able to find factory jobs right away. However, it doesn't take long for their visions of wealth and prosperity in the United States to crumble. They are swindled by corrupt businessmen and law enforcement at every turn, are forced to work under unsanitary and dangerous conditions, and are barely able to scrape together enough money to survive day to day despite performing back-breaking labor from dawn to dusk six days a week. They become, "...harried all day and nearly all night by worry and fear." Sinclair goes on to observe that, "[they were] in truth not living; [they were] scarcely even existing...They were willing to work all the time; and when people did their best, ought they not to be able to keep alive?" Inevitably, injuries, illness, and deaths begin to take a toll on the family and they gradually sink into total despair. It's a grim depiction of "The American Dream" indeed.

Jurgis quickly learns the way of life in America and becomes jaded after only a few months in Chicago, thinking,

He had learned the ways of things about him now. It was a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost. You did not give feasts to other people, you waited for them to give feasts to you. You went about with your soul full of suspicion and hatred; you understood that you were environed by hostile powers that were trying to get your money, and who used all the virtues to bait their traps with. The storekeepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of lies to entice you; the very fences by the wayside, the lampposts and telegraph poles, were pasted over with lies. The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country--from top to bottom is was nothing but one gigantic lie.

His pessimistic point of view is continually justified throughout the novel, as one disaster after another befalls his family. Jurgis moves through many different ways of life, from working in a factory, to being sent to jail, to living as a tramp, to settling into a life of crime. This is a difficult story to read, because it's literally page after page of abject human suffering and injustice. To make matters even more poignant is the realization that what Sinclair describes for the working class of the time period was all true. The unskilled laborers living during this time, especially newly-arrived immigrants, were continually abused by a corrupt capitalist system designed to exploit them. They lived unimaginably awful lives, and The Jungle serves to shine a spotlight on that. As a protest novel, it is very effective.

Of course, also worth noting are the horrific descriptions of what went on in the meat packing plants. This is what the novel is most famous for, and Sinclair doesn't hold back on the gruesome details. For example, take this description of what went on in the sausage department of the plant:

There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one--there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.  

It's a miracle humanity survived into the 21st century eating meat processed in such a way. The passages about food (of which there are many) are still stomach-churning to read and definitely make you think twice about what you put into your mouth at dinnertime. It's not surprising that after The Jungle was published, people started paying much more attention to food safety and passed new laws concerning food purity.

However, despite its social importance, the novel falls down in the area of character development. Jurgis and his family could have been anyone. They had no real discernible character traits of their own. They were simply a generic immigrant family trying to make it in America. Sinclair was more interested in describing their suffering than in giving them their own personalities and desires. This is excusable, perhaps, when you consider the ultimate purpose of his novel, but as a reader, this left me a bit dissatisfied. At times, this felt less like a literary narrative and more like an informational article describing immigrant life in the 1900s.

Another low point in the novel is its ending. The socialism for which the book was banned in some countries takes center stage in the last fifty or so pages when Jurgis stumbles into a socialist meeting and becomes a diehard follower after listening to a rousing speech. Once he becomes a socialist, everything seems to turn around for him. He finds a job, his money problems become bearable, and he is able to start over in his life with a new sense of optimism and hope for the future. The last several pages consist entirely of transcripts of socialist speeches and ideological conversations. Jurgis mostly drops out of the story and the novel turns into a straightforward piece of propaganda featuring random political players that don't appear in the novel until these final pages. After reading over 300 pages of Jurgis' struggles, it felt odd, and disappointing, to end things this way. 

Nevertheless, I have a lot of respect for The Jungle after reading it. It is an important novel in the American literary cannon for its political impact, and I very much liked that aspect of it. This is a book that helped change the world for the better in concrete ways, and that's a pretty rare feat for a work of fiction. It definitely has flaws in some of its more literary elements, but Sinclair's writing is solid overall and the novel is well worth a read for its historical significance.