Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was published 100 years ago. It remains a gripping and topical treatment of worker exploitation.



The novel follows a family of Lithuanian immigrants as they leave the old country to seek their fortune in the meatpacking district of Chicago. Seduced by the American dream, they soon find the dream is a lie. Their jobs work them to death (quite literally); they're paid a pittance and are mired in debt; they live in a pressboard house above a sewage pool, and they navigate waist-high snow drifts to get to the hellish factories. Sinclair spares no grisly detail in showing the squalor they endure. Here's Stanislovas, a 13 year old, on his way to work:

"The children would come to the yards with great shawls about their ears, and so tied up that you could hardly find them - and still there would be accidents. One bitter morning in February the little boy who worked at the lard machine with Stanislovas came about an hour late, and screaming with pain. They unwrapped him, and a man began vigorously rubbing his ears, and as they were frozen stiff, it took only two or three rubs to break them short off. As a result of this, little Stanislovas conceived a terror of the cold that was almost a mania." (83)

The horrors of the 'killing floors', the wretched conditions in which the workers barely subsist - Sinclair makes it come alive. It's not an easy book to get through.



Yet it's not solely sensationalist: Sinclair has a political point to make. The goal of 'making it' that draws the family to Chicago is simply a tool which allows the rich to exploit them. Democracy, charity, the work ethic - none of it makes any difference. From chapter 28, describing the rich:

... the sweat and tears and blood of the human race! It is all theirs – it comes to them; just as all the springs pour into streamlets, and the streamlets into rivers, and the rivers into the oceans – so, automatically and inevitably, all the wealth of society comes to them. The farmer tills the soil, the miner digs in the earth, the weaver tends the loom, the mason carves the stone; the clever man invents, the shrewd man directs, the wise man studies, the inspired man sings – and all the result, the products of the labor of brain and muscle, are gathered into one stupendous stream and poured into their laps!

The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, takes 300 pages of degradation, starvation and poverty to reach this conclusion. But when he does, the consequence is inescapable. He comes to class consciousness - hardly a 'happy ending', but the only possible way out.



Some call "The Jungle" a cliche. Its characters are too downtrodden, the horrors they endure too garish, their emotions too maudlin. And perhaps they're right. But I find more distasteful the way Sinclair's passionate narrative is treated today: as an object of ridicule. I haven't read U.S.!, by Chris Bachelder. But it purports to be a sympathetic satire on the foibles of the far left. He takes aim at Sinclair's excessive use of exclamation points: "The Sinclair is a unit of hysteria equal to 2.92 exclamation points per page." Whatever Bachelder's intentions, reviewers are quick to join in on the joke. The Village Voice writes: "Is this decomposing cipher [Sinclair] a pamphleteer or a prophet, a talentless hack or a tragic hero? (Survey says: all of the above.) And, implicitly: Is the book in your hands even worth writing anymore?" Complete Review adds:

Sinclair is an almost perfect timeless figure because he is not in the least bit attuned to the times. Part of his problem is that he was practically never relevant. As even a character relatively sympathetic to Sinclair tells him:

"You misjudged everything. That's what you are, a misjudger. An epic American misjudger with a bad ear for dialogue and an exclamation point problem. You've misjudged an entire century. {...} Your record is spotless. You've not gotten one thing right. You were a prohibitionist for God's sake. Socialism, telepathy, fasting, the metric system. Your books don't make your wishes come true."

Yet Sinclair's book had a huge impact, both on sanitation conditions and as part of the burgeoning voice of American socialism. It is impossible to read this book without reflecting on the meteoric growth of the Socialist Party, which captured millions of votes up to WW1, before being crushed by the U.S. government. Jack London, Eugene Debs pass through Sinclair's narrative, yet its heroes are the workers themselves.



Today's writers, who wish to exhume that legacy just to malign it, would do well to read Fast Food Nation or Mike Davis' Planet of Slums. They'd see that urban squalor, worker exploitation, and the vast profits they produce, are still with us. Their irony is a symptom of the growing divide between intellectuals and the mass of poor people today, one that reveals critics' hip detachment as no more than privileged sneering. Sinclair, on the other hand, lived undercover for 7 weeks as a meatpacker to research his work. His prose suffers from flights of emotion common to all popular literature of the time, but it's also poignant, stripped to reveal the bare dimensions of power:

Everywhere that he turned were prison bars, and hostile eyes following him... the hurrying throngs upon the streets, who were deaf to his entreaties, oblivious of his very existence – and savage and contemptuous when he forced himself upon them. They had their own affairs, and there was no place for him among them. There was no place for him anywhere – every direction he turned his gaze, this fact was forced upon him: Everything was built to express it to him: the residences, with their heavy walls and bolted doors, and basement windows barred with iron; the great warehouses filled with the products of the whole world, and guarded by iron shutters and heavy gates; the banks with their unthinkable billions of wealth, all buried in safes and vaults of steel.

Chicago slum

My only problem with the book was a few pages towards the end, where his portrayal of African-American scabs verges on racist caricature (though always remaining sympathetic to their plight.) But his central message remains liberation, written about and for men and women who wouldn't be considered 'white' for another 50 years. The Jungle's social message packs a punch missing from most literature. Unfortunately, Sinclair's work is still a matter of burning necessity, 100 years on.