Book Review,Upton Sinclair, The Jungle.

Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, is an historical fiction novel based around a family of Lithuanian emigrants in Chicago. This controversial book shows the despicable working and living conditions that most newcomers faced. Sinclair was an ardent socialist and it comes across clearly in his writing. He uses simplistic language and relatively flat characters to point out that capitalism is the root of all evil and it destroys even the strongest of men. Although the novel was an attempt to convert many to socialism, it accomplished much more in the field of sanitation reform. After the book was published people became disgusted, not at the way the working class lives, but at the condition of the meat they put in their bellies. Sinclair once said about the novel, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”(Dickstein vi). The bias towards capitalism is basically the main point of the novel and Sinclair may have unfairly stereotyped some aspects in the novel in an attempt to mar the image of capitalism even more. Through the eyes of the idealistic Jurgis Rudkus the reader sees the horrors capitalism can create.
The novel starts out with the veselja, (wedding ceremony), of little Ona Lukoszaite and Jurgis (pronounced yoorghis) Rudkus in a bar in an area of Chicago called Packingtown. The two and their relatives had come to America from Lithuania in search of the American Dream, unfortunately Packingtown is a dirty, dangerous place full of predators looking to part them with their money. Jurgis’ answer to this is, “I will work harder.” (Sinclair 19).
The young and strong Jurgis easily finds a job in one of the slaughterhouses pushing all the blood into grates in the floor. Ona’s cousin, Marija also finds work painting cans. Ona’s stepmother, Teta Elzbieta agrees to purchase a small home with everyone chipping in, but the house turns out to be a swindle and soon hidden costs are found and paying for the house takes all the family’s effort. So Jonas, Teta’s brother, also finds work, even Teta’s oldest son Stanislovas who’s 14 and Ona have to find work. The jobs in Packingtown are back-breaking and often hazardous to the worker’s health. Jurgis’ father dies because of the horrible conditions he was forced to work in.
For a little while things seemed to be going alright for the family and it apearered as if they could survive in the unforgiving land, until winter rolled in. Winter is a terrible season for all and it soon becomes clear that social Darwinism is in affect as the weak are weeded out. The rush season was over and factories started to lay off workers. Marija lost her job at the canning factory and Jurgis suffers a reduction in hours at his job and so all the wage earners of the family joined unions. Here Jurgis learned first hand of the corruption that runs the city when he takes part in a vote-buying scheme. He learned about all the graft and greed that infests the factories, how they sell the diseased meat in sausages and all the tidbits go in the cans and get fancy names like “deviled ham”.
Marija regains her job in springtime only to lose it soon after when she vocalizes her discontent with the management. She finds a job as a beef trimmer a month later. Ona soon gave birth to a son who they named Antanas after Jurgis’ father. Unfortunately Ona has to go back to work only a week after giving birth so the baby is fed the bluish milk from the corner store.
In chapter 11 Sinclair describes how the workers are forced to work at an even faster pace and received numerous pay cuts. One day on her way to work Marija sees a large crowd at the bank where she recently deposited her money, learning that it was a rush at the bank she forced her way to the front only to discover she didn’t have her bank statement. So she had to walk home, retrieve it and return to the line. By the time she arrived back at the bank the police had made everyone get in line and Marija had no choice but to join the back. She finally made it to a teller who gave her money in silver dollars. With her confidence restored, she attempted to redeposit it but the bank wouldn’t let anyone who had partaken in the rush do that. Sinclair than makes her plight symbolic by having her sew the coins into her clothes until she can deposit them in another bank, but she is afraid she will sink down in the mud with the money weighing her down.
The family then suffers a horrible tragedy when Jurgis sprains an ankle dodging an injured steer in the slaughterhouse. The bad ankle puts him out of work for months in which time the only thing Jurgis could do was watch his new born son and beat Stanislovas out the door to go to work. Jonas becomes fed up with the misery of home and abandons the family, basically just disappearing. The family sort of suffers another loss when Teta’s youngest son dies from eating a poisoned sausage. It’s only a little tragedy to them because he was handicapped and could never be a producer. Jurgis finally recovers but finds his old job taken so he has to search for a new one. The only job he can find is at the fertilizer factory, the most horrendous smelling place in Packingtown. Jurgis drowns his sorrows with alcohol for a while until Teta convinces him to stop for the sake of Antanas.
Ona again becomes pregnant and one day doesn’t return home all night. Jurgis questions her and finally gets her to admit that her boss Phil Connors raped her and has forced her to become his mistress lest she wants her entire family to be blacklisted. Jurgis becomes infuriated beyond sanity and attacks Phil, he grabs his throat and almost rips it off. It takes half a dozen men to pry Jurgis off Phil. He’s arrested and after an unfair trial is sentenced to a month in prison. While in prison he befriends his cell-mate Jack Duane who helps him later on. Upon Jurgis’ release he finds his family has been evicted form their house after failing to pay the mortgage and they went back to live in the run down boarding house they had first lived in.
When he arrives at the boarding house he finds Ona prematurely in labor. He goes out and finds a midwife for her but there’d not much that could be done and She and the baby both die. After her death Jurgis goes out on a drinking binge.
Again the thought of his son forces him to search for a job, and a wealthy woman soon approaches him and offers him a job in a new steel mill. The mill is located far away from his home so he is forced to stay there and only returns home on Sundays. Life seemed to be looking up for Jurgis and Antanas was beginning to speak, but he returned from work one day only to discover a freak accident had occurred in which Antanas had drowned in the mud.
Jurgis is completely devastated by the death of his son and wanders off to the country side in despair. Here he finds some kind farmers who give him work and sell him food but when winter comes around again he returns to Chicago. When he gets hurt digging a tunnel he’s unable to find replacement work and becomes a beggar. Here he meets Freddie Jones who gives him a 100 dollar bill and a feast at his house. This odd scene is used to show the difference in the two classes of people, the rich and the proletariats. Jurgis then goes out and tries to get change for the bill but gets cheated by a bartender who Jurgis then beats up.
He gets arrested and meets Jack Duane again who hooks him up with the corrupt leaders and criminal jobs. He becomes a scab and a strikebreaker, and one day sees Phil Connors at a strike and proceeds to beat him, unfortunalty Phil was one of Jurgis’ boss’s cronies and so Jurgis had to get out of the town fast and does so by moving to the other side of the city. He decides to reconnect with his family and searches for Marija and Teta and learns that Marija has become a morphine-addicted prostitute to support Teta and the family.
Jurgis goes about looking for another job even though he’s completely fed up with the whole situation, by chance he walks into a socialist rally and hears what he’s been wanting to hear the entire time. He finds comrades here and gets a job as a porter for a hotel. The last to chapters of the book are mainly just socialist propaganda, the characters become flatter and nearly hollow and are just symbols for entire classes of people. The novel ends with a socialist speech that concludes with “Chicago will be ours”.(Sinclair 346).
The historical accuracy of the novel has been greatly debated. It caused such a shock when it was first published that it caused the foreign sale of American meat to be cut in half. Teddy Roosevelt was so upset by the novel that he called in a formal investigation of the stockyards. He sent Charles P. Neill and James B. Reynolds to check the sanitation of the factories. Sinclair was disappointed by the tunnel-sighted investigation because it didn’t address the wage and working conditions of the people that actually worked there. Even though the factory owners had ample time to clean up before the two men arrived, the conditions were described as being “revolting”.
In the novel The Jungle Sinclair tries to make the argument that socialism is the cure for capitalism, that capitalism is an evil, greedy, and unfair system that needs to be abolished. The only way for it to be abolished is if everything supports socialism and the only way for that to happen is if everyone realizes the plight the workers go through. On page 315 Sinclair wrote, “To Jurgis the packers had been equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying upon the people.” This shows that Jurgis’ mind is changing to adopt socialism and as a result the reader is supposed to realize this too and see socialism as answer to all problems.
The bias of Sinclair can be seen on almost every page when he describes the factories or living conditions of the workers. He uses nauseating descriptions to evoke sympathy from the reader like on page134 and 135 where he describes the meat that made into sausages. Just line after line of disgusting information like, “…but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of dried dung of rats.”
Upton Sinclair was a socialist journalist, not a novelist, and his writing can for the most part confirm this. He rights with a very clear diction and doesn’t use to much sophisticated language, mainly because he was trying to appeal to a very large crowd. The simple language can be seen on any page really but one example is found on page 212, “Finally he got up and walked on again. It was about sunset, and he went on and on until it was dark,…”.
Sinclair’s sources for this novel were his own observations when he visited Chicago and the stockyards and a Lithuanian family he met there. He conducted many interviews with workers and got his beginning from visited a veselja on his first day in the city. There is a bibliography in the Bantam Classic version. It has a list of works by Upton Sinclair, other fiction by him, nonfiction and it says he wrote two autobiographies. There was a lack of multimedia in the book, but it wasn’t needed
It’s interesting to judge the success of this novel. He first tried to publish it five times before he finally did it himself and then it became an instant must-read. The novel struck a chord in everyone who read it but it may not have been the one Sinclair was going for. His intention for the novel was to cause a social reform in America and have everyone sympathize with the poor workers, then they would over-power the rich leaders and create a socialist utopian society. Proof for this can be found in the last few pages during the speeches, especially with the last line, “ CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” So was Sinclair successful, no, not in his mind, but in the eyes of the nation and world and the changes it brought about like the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Meat Inspection Act which significantly rose the standard of food in the U.S.
Upton Sinclair set out to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Labor Movement by writing a novel that anyone could read which exposed capitalism as the evil cause of all hardships. He proposed that capitalism can and will destroy all that is held dear to the American people like family values, honesty, integrity, and kindness. He set out to disprove all aspects of capitalism like social Darwinism and laissai-faire economics. What the novel did accomplish though was bring about reforms that saved countless lives and led to a better standard of living for all. Upton Sinclair has left a big footprint in the field of muckraking and The Jungle goes down in history as one of the most important pieces of socialist propaganda the United States has ever embraced.