Upton Sinclair

’S Cry For Socialist Reform In His Novel, The Jungle Essay, Research Paper

Upton Sinclair’s Cry for Socialist Reform in his Novel, The Jungle

The Jungle is usually associated with the federal legislation it provoked. Americans were horrified to learn about the terrible sanitation under which their meat products were packed. They were even more horrified to learn that the labels listing the ingredients in tinned meat products were full of lies. The revelation that rotten and diseased meat was sold without a single consideration for public health infuriated the American public. They consumed meat containing the ground remains of poisoned rats and sometimes unfortunate workers who fell into the machinery for grinding meat and producing lard. Within months of The Jungle’s publication, the sale of meat products dropped dramatically. The public outcry of indignation led to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, less than a year after the novel’s publication (Harris 81).

However, contrary to what many people believe, Sinclair did not write The Jungle to incite the American government into regulating the sanitation of the meat packing industry. The details regarding the unsanitary and disgusting conditions in meat packing factories are background details of a much larger picture. Sinclair wrote his novel to provoke outrage over our country’s apathetic attitude toward the miserable working conditions of industrial wage labor by big business profiteers. He detailed the lack of sanitation in the factories in order to provoke sympathy and outrage for the impoverished factory workers. The germs and disease inside the meat packing establishments were indeed a public health concern, but it was far more of a concern for the workers. “The horrors in the packing plants that Upton described in the nauseating detail were almost endless. The hogs that arrived already dead of cholera and tubercular steers were processed and sold for human consumption” (Harris 73). Inevitably, Sinclair wrote his novel as an appeal to Socialism, because democracy failed to neither protect families and community values nor prevent the exploitation of wage labor from the hands of industry.

The novel follows Jurgis’s Lithuanian immigrant family into the disgusting tenements and meat packing factories of Chicago. There, they suffer the loss of all their dreams of success and freedom in America. They find themselves leashed to the grinding poverty and misery of the city slums despite all their best efforts. Sinclair’s purpose is to display the evils of capitalism as an economic system. “…had given to the thought to a struggle by the America’s working class to free themselves from their enslavement under capitalism, and to the creating of a new and classless society controlled collectively by all the people in their self interest” (Harris 57). Sinclair was bemused by the public reaction to his phenomenally successful novel. “He said that he had aimed for America’s heart, but had ended by hitting it in the stomach” (Harris 82).

The novel opens with a Lithuanian custom, the veselija, a wedding celebration. However, Sinclair emphasizes that the foreign custom demonstrates that the immigrants share a great many social values. The central values expressed in the veselija are family, community, and charity. According to custom, the community shares in the expense of the celebration and donates money to help the new couple start out in life. The celebration is an expression of commitment to community as well as to the institution of marriage. However, the young people are losing their commitment to the culture of the old world. They attempt to appear as assimilated as possible. In their assimilation to American culture, they become the primary predators at the celebration. They are the ones who largely avoid sharing in the cost of the veselija. Moreover, the saloon keepers take advantage of the celebrations as well. They lie and scheme to cheat the family out of as much money as possible

Sinclair wishes to inspire sympathy for the immigrant family by getting his readers to identify with their social values. The young con artists and the corrupt saloon-keepers have assimilated the brutal, predatory values of consumer capitalism. They represent dishonesty and thievery. They value their personal gains, their “profits,” above the social values of family, community, and charity. Wilson writes, “Capitalism is exposed as a system of both exploitation and of corruption: society as a whole is debased, degraded, infested” (367). Hence, Sinclair identifies capitalism as an attack on American values

Moreover, Jurgis and Ona’s family immigrates to America in search of the American dream, the advertisement by which America sells itself as the land of freedom and opportunity. The myth promises them that hard work and commitment to good social values will win them success (ie. “From Rags to Riches”). “…that one might dwell within the cave and gaze upon the shadows, provided only that once in his lifetime he could break his chains, and feel his wings, and behold the sun…” (Sinclair 18) However, they were mistaken. From the moment they arrive in the country, they fall prey to various greedy individuals who profit unfairly from their ignorance. Sinclair means to portray these events as a betrayal of the very values on which the American identity is based. Jurgis’s response to the con arti