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Summary
Summary
In this powerful book we enter the world ofJurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrivesin America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom,and opportunity. And we discover, with him, theastonishing truth about "packingtown," thebusy, flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, wherenew world visions perish in a jungle of humansuffering. Upton Sinclair, master of the"muckraking" novel, here explores the workingman'slot at the turn of the century- the backbreakinglabor, the injustices of "wage-slavery,"the bewildering chaos of urban life. TheJungle , a story so shocking that itlaunched a government investigation, recreates thisstartling chapter if our history in unflinchingdetail. Always a vigorous champion on political reform,Sinclair is also a gripping storyteller, and his1906 novel stands as one of the most important --and moving -- works in the literature of socialchange.
Author Notes
Upton Sinclair, a lifelong vigorous socialist, first became well known with a powerful muckraking novel, The Jungle, in 1906. Refused by five publishers and finally published by Sinclair himself, it became an immediate bestseller, and inspired a government investigation of the Chicago stockyards, which led to much reform. In 1967 he was invited by President Lyndon Johnson to "witness the signing of the Wholesome Meat Act, which will gradually plug loopholes left by the first Federal meat inspection law" (N.Y. Times), a law Sinclair had helped to bring about. Newspapers, colleges, schools, churches, and industries have all been the subject of a Sinclair attack, analyzing and exposing their evils. Sinclair was not really a novelist, but a fearless and indefatigable journalist-crusader. All his early books are propaganda for his social reforms. When regular publishers boycotted his work, he published himself, usually at a financial loss. His 80 or so books have been translated into 47 languages, and his sales abroad, especially in the former Soviet Union, have been enormous.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 6-12-The video provides background information as well as video clips of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Initially Sinclair had published an article in the newspaper, Appeal to Reason. Editors asked him to do additional research on labor in the meat industry. Disguised as a worker, Sinclair was appalled at what he discovered. He combined the tragedies he found into those experienced by one fictional family. The novel, as well as Sinclair's continued fight, resulted in the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. In addition to a brief description of the book's characters and plot, the program gives biographical information about Sinclair. Commentary by consumer and industry advocates as well as labor historians explain why the book had such a major impact. The use of film clips and "snapshots" is well done. Lots of valuable information is packed into a short time, but is more than cursory. Discussion questions appear onscreen at the end of the video. It could be used prior to a class reading of The Jungle or in classes in American history at the secondary level where muckraking is covered.-Kathy Akey, Clintonville Senior High School, WI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Around 1995, Father Damian Zuerlein noticed a disturbing trend among his mostly Hispanic parishioners at Our Lady of Guadalupe church in south Omaha, Nebraska. When he went to shake the hands of his congregation at the end of the service, he noticed their grips were not as firm as they might have been. Some would wince; others would shift their torsos awkwardly so as not to trouble a painful shoulder; a few even had fingers missing. Since half of his flock were involved in some way in the meat-packing industry, it didn't take long for him to work out the root of the problem. A century after Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle , arguably one of the most politically influential American novels of the past 100 years, the ethnicity of the protagonists and the location of the story have changed, but the basic narrative of poor working conditions for immigrant labourers in the meat-packing industry and public concern over food quality remains constant. Working in the meat-packing industry is the most dangerous job in America. The Jungle tells the story of a young Lithuanian couple, Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite, who move to Chicago's Packingtown at the turn of the century, where Jurgis finds work in the stockyards. At the outset Jurgis, full of youthful vitality and the optimism of a recent immigrant, goes to the gates of the stockyards and compares himself favourably to others waiting for work. "Do you want me to believe that with these arms" - and he would clench his fists and hold them up in the air, so that you might see the rolling muscles - "that with these arms people will ever let me starve?" But his American dream of self-reliance soon crashes on the rocks of American reality. Inside he sees how the rigours of the production line put those muscles to work. He "watched the men on their killing beds, marvelling at their speed and power as though they had been wonderful machines . . . The pace they set here, it was one that called for every faculty of a man, from the instant the first steer fell to the sounding of the noon whistle." Cheated by swindlers and overwhelmed by bleak living and working conditions, low pay and poverty, he soon begins to resemble the "broken-down tramps" he saw on his first day at the gates. Sinclair's descriptions of conditions in the meat-packing industry are particularly shocking. Filthy meat is scraped off the floor and thrown into mixers and rendered into sausages. "This is no fairy story and no joke," wrote Sinclair. "The meat will be shovelled into carts and the man who did the shovelling will not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one." Over at the fertiliser plant workers occasionally fall in and get ground up with the rest of the meat. Bad luck, corruption and ill health gradually wear the family away. Death and abandonment finish them. Jurgis becomes a tramp only to return to the slums, where he overhears a socialist orator while he finds shelter in a doorway. Eager to hear more, Jurgis becomes a convert to socialism. Sinclair was an unlikely candidate to write a bestseller, and The Jungle was an unlikely work to become one. His previous books had produced little in the way of either fame or money, and he declared himself ready to make "a definite attempt to write something popular". The magazine Appeal to Reason gave him a $500 advance, and with that he went to Chicago to record work in the meat-packing industry for seven weeks. According to his biographer, Leon Harris, access to down-at-heel workers was not a problem for Sinclair because he fitted right in. "So shabby were [his] clothes that by no more elaborate a disguise than the carrying of a dinner pail and armed with a few simple lies appropriate to the area in which he was investigating, he had no trouble going everywhere and noting everything." With its documentary prose style and polemical tone, the original manuscript was rejected by several publishers. A reader for Macmillan described it as "Gloom and horror unrelieved . . . As to the possibilities of a large sale, I should think them not very good." Doubleday finally bought it, and its success was instant. Translated into 17 languages within months, The Jungle sold 5,500 copies in just one day. "Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of worldwide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair," wrote the New York Evening World. Among its admirers was Winston Churchill, who wrote two essays praising the novel: "It pierces the thickest skull and most leathery heart." George Bernard Shaw gushed: "When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to [Sinclair's] novels." President Theodore Roosevelt read and was deeply affected by it, so much so that Sinclair embarked on a feverish correspondence with the president. Too feverish - in the end, Roosevelt wrote to Frank Doubleday, the head of the publishing house: "Tell Mr Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while." The politicians were so interested because the book's release sparked a public outcry both nationally and internationally. When word got around that human beings could become an accidental ingredient in "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard", foreign sales of American meat halved that year. There was huge domestic pressure from consumers too, which in turn prompted demands from meat manufacturers to protect the integrity of their product. Sinclair's revelation that "They use everything about the hog except the squeal" did not sit well at the dinner table. Public revulsion over some of the scenes in the book sparked a rare event in American industrial history. The meat-packing industry implored the government for the kind of legislation that would renew confidence in meat. Given Sinclair's socialist leanings, Roosevelt was suspicious of the veracity of his research. To confirm the findings, he sent the labour commissioner Charles Neill and social worker James Reynolds to make surprise visits to meat-packing houses in Chicago and write an independent investigation. Their report concluded that the meat-packers of Chicago worked "under conditions that are entirely unnecessary and unpardonable and which are a constant menace not only to their own health, but to the health of those who use the food products prepared by them". Before the year was out the Meat Inspection Act was passed, authorising the secretary of agriculture to inspect meat and condemn any found unfit for human consumption. On the same day, the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed, which prohibited the manufacture, sale or transport of adulterated food products or poisonous patent medicines. The latter paved the way for the Food and Drug Administration that still exists today, regulating everything from cosmetics to blood products. It is difficult to think of a book, let alone a novel, that has forced the state to respond in such a comprehensive manner. And yet, while Sinclair was delighted with both sales and fame, it was not quite the response that he intended. He had dedicated the book to the "Workingmen of America" and had set out to make an emotional appeal to the nation over the plight of the working poor and the prospects of a socialist alternative. Instead he had generated a public panic about food quality. "I aimed for the public's heart," he wrote in his autobiography, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach." The Jungle was very much a novel of its time - an era of mass migration, US military expansion and rapid economic and technological transformation. It earned its place in the US literary hall of fame not for its aesthetic qualities but for its practical effects. Thanks to its polemical style, formulaic narrative and, at times, propagandistic language, it has more currency as a work of literary journalism than of great fiction. Those publishers who discarded the manuscript had underestimated not only the potential breadth of its appeal, but the political and journalistic context that made that breadth possible. Middle-class Americans, concerned that the concentration of capitalism in a few hands would leave them at the mercy of trusts and monopolies, began to revolt. The social commentator Randolph Bourne described it as a period when "a whole people" woke up "into a modern day which they had overslept . . . they had become acutely aware of the evils of the society in which they had slumbered and they snatched at one after the other idea, programme, movement, ideal, to uplift them out of the slough in which they had slept". These concerns gave birth to the Progressive movement, which found its literary expression in a more aggressive and socially responsive style of journalism. Roosevelt called these writers muck- rakers after the Man with the Muck-rake in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress . The dreary realism of these writers "who could look no way but downward" made Roosevelt depressed. But as he himself became disenchanted with the Republican party and embraced the Progressive movement, so he came to hail their contributions and muck-raker became a term of endearment in praise of dogged, investigative journalism. "There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them," he said. "I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful." Back at Our Lady of Guadalupe, Father Damian tried to raise the problems faced by the heirs of Jurgis Rudkus. He made an announcement at mass and the litany of complaints, both big and small, came in. Father Damian's anecdotal findings were backed up last year by a report entitled "Blood, Sweat and Fear" from the New York-based Human Rights Watch on conditions in the US meat and poultry industry. "Nearly every worker interviewed for this report bore physical signs of a serious injury suffered from working in a meat or poultry plant," it argued. "Meat and poultry industry employers set up the workplaces and practices that create these dangers, but they treat the resulting mayhem as a normal, natural part of the production process, not as what it is - repeated violations of international human rights standards . . . A century [after the publication of The Jungle ] abusive working conditions and treatment still torment a mostly immigrant labour force in the American meat-packing industry." Caption: article-jungle05.1 A century after Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle , arguably one of the most politically influential American novels of the past 100 years, the ethnicity of the protagonists and the location of the story have changed, but the basic narrative of poor working conditions for immigrant labourers in the meat-packing industry and public concern over food quality remains constant. Working in the meat-packing industry is the most dangerous job in America. Cheated by swindlers and overwhelmed by bleak living and working conditions, low pay and poverty, he soon begins to resemble the "broken-down tramps" he saw on his first day at the gates. Sinclair's descriptions of conditions in the meat-packing industry are particularly shocking. Filthy meat is scraped off the floor and thrown into mixers and rendered into sausages. "This is no fairy story and no joke," wrote Sinclair. "The meat will be shovelled into carts and the man who did the shovelling will not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one." Over at the fertiliser plant workers occasionally fall in and get ground up with the rest of the meat. The politicians were so interested because the book's release sparked a public outcry both nationally and internationally. When word got around that human beings could become an accidental ingredient in "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard", foreign sales of American meat halved that year. There was huge domestic pressure from consumers too, which in turn prompted demands from meat manufacturers to protect the integrity of their product. Sinclair's revelation that "They use everything about the hog except the squeal" did not sit well at the dinner table. Public revulsion over some of the scenes in the book sparked a rare event in American industrial history. The meat-packing industry implored the government for the kind of legislation that would renew confidence in meat. - Gary Younge.
Library Journal Review
This angry novel created a furor when it was originally published in 1906. The author painfully details the sorrows of a Lithuanian immigrant family working in Chicago's meat-packing plants during the bad old days before worker's compensation and disability, unemployment insurance, social security, fair labor practices, and court-appointed lawyers. In addition to losing their home, the family endure the deaths of a grandfather, an uncle, a child, a mother and her second child (in childbirth), the older children (to the streets), and finally the cherished firstborn son. By exposing the horribly unsanitary practices in the plants, this novel prompted federal legislators to protect the public from unsafe meat. While this story is emotionally draining to listen to, the audio version provides an excellent production of a classic novel. Reader George Guidall turns in another fine performance. Recommended.-Luana Ellis, Jamestown Community Coll. Lib., Olean, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter I It was four o'clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. There had been a crowd following all the way, owing to the exuberance of Marija Berczynskas. The occasion rested heavily upon Marija's broad shoulders--it was her task to see that all things went in due form, and after the best home traditions; and, flying wildly hither and thither, bowling every one out of the way, and scolding and exhorting all day with her tremendous voice, Marija was too eager to see that others conformed to the proprieties to consider them herself. She had left the church last of all, and, desiring to arrive first at the hall, had issued orders to the coachman to drive faster. When that personage had developed a will of his own in the matter, Marija had flung up the window of the carriage, and, leaning out, proceeded to tell him her opinion of him, first in Lithuanian, which he did not understand, and then in Polish, which he did. Having the advantage of her in altitude, the driver had stood his ground and even ventured to attempt to speak; and the result had been a furious altercation, which, continuing all the way down Ashland Avenue, had added a new swarm of urchins to the cortège at each side street for half a mile. This was unfortunate, for already there was a throng before the door. The music had started up, and half a block away you could hear the dull "broom, broom" of a 'cello, with the squeaking of two fiddles which vied with each other in intricate and altitudinous gymnastics. Seeing the throng, Marija abandoned precipitately the debate concerning the ancestors of her coachman, and, springing from the moving carriage, plunged in and proceeded to clear a way to the hall. Once within, she turned and began to push the other way, roaring, meantime, "Eik! Eik! Uzdaryk-duris!" in tones which made the orchestral uproar sound like fairy music. "Z. Graiczunas, Pasilinksminimams darzas. Vynas. Sznapsas. Wines and Liquors. Union Headquarters"--that was the way the signs ran. The reader, who perhaps has never held much converse in the language of far-off Lithuania, will be glad of the explanation that the place was the rear-room of a saloon in that part of Chicago known as "back of the yards." This information is definite and suited to the matter of fact; but how pitifully inadequate it would have seemed to one who understood that it was also the supreme hour of ecstasy in the life of one of God's gentlest creatures, the scene of the wedding-feast and the joy-transfiguration of little Ona Lukoszaite! She stood in the doorway, shepherded by Cousin Marija, breath- less from pushing through the crowd, and in her happiness painful to look upon. There was a light of wonder in her eyes and her lids trembled, and her otherwise wan little face was flushed. She wore a muslin dress, conspicuously white, and a stiff little veil coming to her shoulders. There were five pink paper-roses twisted in the veil, and eleven bright green rose-leaves. There were new white cotton gloves upon her hands, and as she stood staring about her she twisted them together feverishly. It was almost too much for her--you could see the pain of too great emotion in her face, and all the tremor of her form. She was so young--not quite sixteen--and small for her age, a mere child; and she had just been married--and married to Jurgis,1 of all men, to Jurgis Rudkus, he with the white flower in the buttonhole of his new black suit, he with the mighty shoulders and the giant hands. 1. Pronounced Yoorghis. Ona was blue-eyed and fair, while Jurgis had great black eyes with beetling brows, and thick black hair that curled in waves about his ears--in short, they were one of those incongruous and impos- sible married couples with which Mother Nature so often wills to confound all prophets, before and after. Jurgis could take up a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound quarter of beef and carry it into a car without a stagger, or even a thought; and now he stood in a far corner, frightened as a hunted animal, and obliged to moisten his lips with his tongue each time before he could answer the congratulations of his friends. Gradually there was effected a separation between the spectators and the guests--a separation at least sufficiently complete for working purposes. There was no time during the festivities which ensued when there were not groups of onlookers in the doorways and the corners; and if any one of these onlookers came sufficiently close, or looked sufficiently hungry, a chair was offered him, and he was invited to the feast. It was one of the laws of the veselija that no one goes hungry; and, while a rule made in the forests of Lithuania is hard to apply in the stockyards district of Chicago, with its quarter of a million inhabi- tants, still they did their best, and the children who ran in from the street, and even the dogs, went out again happier. A charming informality was one of the characteristics of this celebration. The men wore their hats, or, if they wished, they took them off, and their coats with them; they ate when and where they pleased, and moved as often as they pleased. There were to be speeches and singing, but no one had to listen who did not care to; if he wished, meantime, to speak or sing himself, he was perfectly free. The resulting medley of sound distracted no one, save possibly alone the babies, of which there were present a number equal to the total possessed by all the guests invited. There was no other place for the babies to be, and so part of the preparations for the evening consisted of a collection of cribs and carriages in one corner. In these the babies slept, three or four together, or wakened together, as the case might be. Those who were still older, and could reach the tables, marched about munching contentedly at meat-bones and bologna sausages. The room is about thirty feet square, with whitewashed walls, bare save for a calendar, a picture of a race-horse, and a family tree in a gilded frame. To the right there is a door from the saloon, with a few loafers in the doorway, and in the corner beyond it a bar, with a presiding genius clad in soiled white, with waxed black mustaches and a carefully oiled curl plastered against one side of his forehead. In the opposite corner are two tables, filling a third of the room and laden with dishes and cold viands, which a few of the hungrier guests are already munching. At the head, where sits the bride, is a snow-white cake, with an Eiffel tower of constructed decoration, with sugar roses and two angels upon it, and a generous sprinkling of pink and green and yellow candies. Beyond opens a door into the kitchen, where there is a glimpse to be had of a range with much steam ascending from it, and many women, old and young, rushing hither and thither. In the corner to the left are the three musicians, upon a little platform, toiling heroically to make some impression upon the hubbub; also the babies, similarly occupied, and an open window whence the populace imbibes the sights and sounds and odors. Suddenly some of the steam begins to advance, and, peering through it, you discern Aunt Elizabeth, Ona's stepmother--Teta Elzbieta, as they call her--bearing aloft a great platter of stewed duck. Behind her is Kotrina, making her way cautiously, staggering beneath a similar burden; and half a minute later there appears old Grandmother Majauszkiene, with a big yellow bowl of smoking potatoes, nearly as big as herself. So, bit by bit, the feast takes form--there is a ham and a dish of sauerkraut, boiled rice, macaroni, bologna sausages, great piles of penny buns, bowls of milk, and foaming pitchers of beer. There is also, not six feet from your back, the bar, where you may order all you please and do not have to pay for it. "Eiksz! Graicziau!" screams Marija Berczynskas, and falls to work herself--for there is more upon the stove inside that will be spoiled if it be not eaten. So, with laughter and shouts and endless badinage and merriment, the guests take their places. The young men, who for the most part have been huddled near the door, summon their resolution and advance; and the shrinking Jurgis is poked and scolded by the old folks until he consents to seat himself at the right hand of the bride. The two bridesmaids, whose insignia of office are paper wreaths, come next, and after them the rest of the guests, old and young, boys and girls. The spirit of the occasion takes hold of the stately bartender, who condescends to a plate of stewed duck; even the fat policeman--whose duty it will be, later in the evening, to break up the fights--draws up a chair to the foot of the table. And the children shout and the babies yell, and every one laughs and sings and chatters--while above all the deafening clamor Cousin Marija shouts orders to the musicians. The musicians--how shall one begin to describe them? All this time they have been there, playing in a mad frenzy--all of this scene must be read, or said, or sung, to music. It is the music which makes it what it is; it is the music which changes the place from the rear-room of a saloon in back of the yards to a fairy place, a wonderland, a little corner of the high mansions of the sky. The little person who leads this trio is an inspired man. His fiddle is out of tune, and there is no rosin on his bow, but still he is an inspired man--the hands of the muses have been laid upon him. He plays like one possessed by a demon, by a whole horde of demons. You can feel them in the air round about him, capering frenetically; with their invisible feet they set the pace, and the hair of the leader of the orchestra rises on end, and his eyeballs start from their sockets, as he toils to keep up with them. Tamoszius Kuszleika is his name, and he has taught himself to play the violin by practising all night, after working all day on the "killing beds." He is in his shirt sleeves, with a vest figured with faded gold horseshoes, and a pink-striped shirt, suggestive of peppermint candy. A pair of military trousers, light blue with a yellow stripe, serve to give that suggestion of authority proper to the leader of a band. He is only about five feet high, but even so these trousers are about eight inches short of the ground. You wonder where he can have gotten them--or rather you would wonder, if the excitement of being in his presence left you time to think of such things. For he is an inspired man. Every inch of him is inspired--you might almost say inspired separately. He stamps with his feet, he tosses his head, he sways and swings to and fro; he has a wizened-up little face, irresistibly comical; and, when he executes a turn or a flourish, his brows knit and his lips work and his eyelids wink--the very ends of his necktie bristle out. And every now and then he turns upon his companions, nodding, signalling, beckoning frantically--with every inch of him appealing, imploring, in behalf of the muses and their call. For they are hardly worthy of Tamoszius, the other two members of the orchestra. The second violin is a Slovak, a tall, gaunt man with black-rimmed spectacles and the mute and patient look of an overdriven mule; he responds to the whip but feebly, and then always falls back into his old rut. The third man is very fat, with a round, red, sentimental nose, and he plays with his eyes turned up to the sky and a look of infinite yearning. He is playing a bass part upon his 'cello, and so the excitement is nothing to him; no matter what happens in the treble, it is his task to saw out one long-drawn and lugubrious note after another, from four o'clock in the afternoon until nearly the same hour next morning, for his third of the total income of one dollar per hour. Before the feast has been five minutes under way, Tamoszius Kuszleika has risen in his excitement; a minute or two more and you see that he is beginning to edge over toward the tables. His nostrils are dilated and his breath comes fast--his demons are driving him. He nods and shakes his head at his companions, jerking at them with his violin, until at last the long form of the second violinist also rises up. In the end all three of them begin advancing, step by step, upon the banqueters, Valentinavyczia, the 'cellist, bumping along with his instrument between notes. Finally all three are gathered at the foot of the tables, and there Tamoszius mounts upon a stool. From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpted from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
