Book Review
Welcome to the Jungle
Reviewed by Charles R. Meyer, M.D.
Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel describes the horrors of Chicago’s meatpacking houses and prompted regulation of the food industry.
Work has always been treacherous, and novelists have mined the pathos of its perils for their stories. Harriet Beecher Stowe dramatized the plight of the slave in the American antebellum South, Charles Dickens memorialized the downtrodden worker in 19th century England, and, in his 1906 novel, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair exposed the brutality and inhumanity of Chicago’s meatpacking industry at the turn of the 20th century.
Born in 1878 during America’s Golden Age, Sinclair became an ardent socialist and joined Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens in raking out the muck from industry’s worker-unfriendly morass. Unlike Tarbell and Steffens, who wrote journalistic exposes, Sinclair chose fiction to portray an industry that treated its workers only slightly better than its carcasses. In The Jungle, he told the story of Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and his extended family, who came to Chicago at the end of the 19th century, seduced by the promise of the limitless American dream. What Rudkus found was Packingtown, blocks of squalor surrounding Chicago’s stockyards that were dominated by one employer, Durham Meats, who held Packingtown’s residents in near-servitude. The welfare of hogs and humans seemed irrelevant in Durham’s hellish slaughterhouse, “And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests—and so perfectly within their rights!... but this slaughtering-machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.”
Rudkus and his fellow workers inhabited this dungeon. The work was dirty and dangerous, and every job entailed risk. Sinclair spares no gruesome details in describing jobs like that of the beef-boner. “He is a beef-boner,” he wrote, “and that is a dangerous trade, especially when you are on piecework and trying to earn a bride. Your hands are slippery, and your knife is slippery, and you are toiling like mad, when somebody happens to speak to you, or you strike a bone. Then your hand slips up on the blade, and there is a fearful gash. And that would not be so bad, only for the deadly contagion. The cut may heal, but you never can tell.” Or the killing-beds: “On the killing-beds you were apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving your skin on it.” Rudkus’ story moves from life-threatening injuries to the death of his wife and children to imprisonment to drunkenness to itinerant vagrancy. Rudkus’ family tries to exist in a world peopled by villains who scam them on their house agreement, adulterate their milk, and lie to them about the sewage beneath their home. Sinclair makes it clear that the meatpacking industry not only subjects its workers to abysmal conditions at a paltry wage, it also destroys their lives and the lives of their families.
Rudkus does survive and becomes “politicized,” first as a lackey of political bosses and then as a committed socialist who discovers that he is no better than the hog, slashed and used by the powerful corporate forces, who “what they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the working-man, and also that was what they wanted from the public.” The novel ends with Rudkus joining a Socialist rally to “take Chicago back” from the immoral industrial bosses.
By today’s standards, The Jungle seems almost a comical melodrama that browbeats the reader with its themes and hyperbolic tragedy. Yet it was widely influential after its publication, prompting President Theodore Roosevelt to promote the Food and Drug Act of 1906, which initiated regulation of the food industry and proved the power of a story well-told. MM
Charles Meyer is editor in chief of Minnesota Medicine.