The Jungle

For other uses, see Jungle (disambiguation).

The Jungle
1st edition
Author(s)	Upton Sinclair
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Political fiction
Publisher	Doubleday, Jabber & Company
Publication date	February 28, 1906
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	475
OCLC Number	149214

The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel with the intention of portraying the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion of the book pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early 20th century, and the book is now often interpreted and taught as a journalist's exposure of the poor health conditions in this industry. The novel depicts in harsh tones poverty, absence of social programs, unpleasant living and working conditions, and hopelessness prevalent among the working class, which is contrasted with the deeply-rooted corruption on the part of those in power. Sinclair's observations of the state of turn-of-the-twentieth-century labor were placed front and center for the American public to see, suggesting that something needed to be changed to get rid of American wage slavery.

The novel was first published in serial form in 1905 in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. It was based on undercover work done in 1904: Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering information while working incognito in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards at the behest of the magazine's publishers. He then started looking for a publisher who would be willing to print it in book form. After five rejections by publishers who found it too shocking for publication, he funded the first printing himself. A shortened version of the novel was published by Doubleday, Page & Company on February 28, 1906 and has been in print ever since.

Plot summary

Panorama of the beef industry in 1900 by a Chicago-based photographer

An extended family of 12 emigrates from Lithuania to the United States, settling in Chicago. From the beginning, they have to make compromises and concessions to survive. Due partly to illiteracy in English, they quickly make a series of bad decisions that cause them to go deep into debt and fall prey to con men. The most devastating decision comes when, in hopes of owning their own home, the family falls victim to a predatory lending scheme that exhausts all their remaining savings on the down-payment for a sub-standard slum house that (by design) they cannot possibly afford. The family is evicted and their money taken, leaving them truly devastated.

The family had formerly envisioned that Jurgis alone would be able to support them in the United States, but one by one, all of them—the women, the young children, and Jurgis' sick father—have to find jobs in order to contribute to the meager family income. As the novel progresses, the jobs and means the family uses to stay alive slowly and inevitably lead to their physical and moral decay.

They faced a cruel world of work in the Chicago Stockyards, where everyone has his or her price, where everyone in a position of power, including government inspectors, the police and judges, must be paid off, and where blacklisting is common. A series of unfortunate events—accidents at work, a number of deaths in the family that under normal circumstances could have been prevented—leads the family further toward catastrophe. Jurgis Rudkus, the book's main character, is young, strong, and honest, but also naïve and illiterate; he is no match for the powerful forces of American industry and he gradually loses all hope of succeeding in the New World. After Ona dies in childbirth—for lack of money to pay for a doctor—and their young son drowns in the muddy street, he flees the city in utter despair. At first the mere presence of fresh air is balm to his soul, but his brief sojourn as a hobo in rural United States shows him that there is really no escape—even farmers turn their workers away when the harvest is finished.

Men walking on wooden rails between cattle pens in the Chicago stockyard (1909)

Jurgis returns to Chicago and holds down a succession of jobs outside the meat packing industry—digging tunnels, as a political hack, and as a con-man—but injuries on the job, his past and his innate sense of personal integrity continue to haunt him, and he drifts without direction. One night, while looking for a warm and dry refuge, he wanders into a lecture being given by a charismatic Socialist orator, and finds a sense of community and purpose. Socialism and strong labor unions are the answer to the evils that he, his family and their fellow sufferers have had to endure. A fellow socialist employs him, and he resumes his support of his wife's family, although some of them are damaged beyond repair.

The book ends with another socialist rally, which comes on the heels of several recent political victories. The speaker encourages his comrades to keep fighting for victories, chanting "Chicago will be ours!"

Major characters

• Jurgis Rudkus is a strong-willed Lithuanian who wants a better life for his family. He hears about the freedoms of the United States and decides to emigrate. He works hard, knowing that the welfare of his family and friends depends on him.
• Ona Rudkus is Jurgis' sixteen-year-old wife. She had a child named Antanas and heard of the greatness of The United States from her husband, who had never before let her down. Later in the story, while giving birth to her second child, she dies from blood loss.
• Marija Berczynskas, a masculine woman, who is Ona’s cousin, has a dream to marry a musician and tour with him around the United States. After Ona’s death, and Jurgis's abandonment, she gives up and becomes a prostitute to help feed the few children left.
• Elzbieta, Ona’s stepmother, is not very fond of Jurgis. She takes care of the children.

Minor characters

• Bobby, a judge

• Grandmother Swan is the only other Lithuanian in the Immigrant section of Chicago and tells Jurgis everything about the people and the house that Jurgis is moving into.
• Dede Antanas, Jurgis’s father, is at a very old age and insists to help Jurgis and the family pay for the house and food, but the working conditions get too hard for him and he dies from a lung infection.
• Jokubas Szedvilas, a fellow Lithuanian immigrant who owns a deli on Halsted Street
• Edward Marcinkus, a fellow Lithuanian immigrant and a friend of the family
• Tamoszius Kuszleika, a fiddler who, for a while, becomes Marija's fiancé
• Jonas Lukoszas, he is Ona’s blood related brother, and the one who encouraged the family to go to America in the first place. He leaves the family during bad circumstances and is never heard from again.
• Stanislovas Lukoszas,a young 13 year old boy, he is Elizibetas last son, he works in one of Durhams factories and get locked in after falling asleep, and gets eaten alive by rats.
• Mike Scully (originally Tom Cassidy), the Democratic Party "boss" of the yards (and indirectly responsible for Jurgis's suffering)
• Phil Connor,a boss at the factory where Ona works. He is attacked by Jurgis after raping Ona.
• Miss Henderson, Ona's superintendent at the wrapping-room and Connor's former mistress
• Antanas, a small boy,otherwise known as “baby” Antanas Rudkus and Jurgis and Ona’s only son, as a toddler, he falls off an elevated sidewalk and drowns in a deep mud puddle.
• Vilimas and Nikalojus, two of Elzbieta's other children
• Kristoforas, a crippled son of Elzbieta
• Juozapas, another crippled son of Elzbieta
• Kotrina, Elzbieta's daughter
• Judge Pat Callahan, a crooked, xenophobic judge who sentences Jurgis to jail time after he beats Connor
• Jack Duane, a thief that Jurgis meets in prison, he later introduces Jurgis to Chicago's criminal world.
• Madame Haupt, a midwife who is unable to save Ona's life
• Freddie Jones, the son of a wealthy beef baron who, in a drunken stupor, brings Jurgis to his mansion for food and drink, and who gives Jurgis a $100 bill
• Buck Halloran, an Irish "political worker" who oversees vote-buying operations
• Bush Harper, a man who works for Mike Scully as a union spy
• Ostrinski, a Polish immigrant. A socialist, he befriends Jurgis and teaches him the tenets of socialism, and how it can overcome the evils of capitalist society.
• Tommy Hind, the socialist owner of Hind's Hotel. He employs Jurgis and encourages him to tell his story of working in the packing plants to guests.
• Mr. Lucas, a socialist pastor and itinerant preacher
• Nicholas Schliemann, a Swedish philosopher and socialist
• Durham a business man, he is Jurgis’s first employer and takes immigrants and gives them low paying jobs where most of them die because of the horrible working conditions.

Public and federal response

Chicago meat inspectors in early 1906

Upton Sinclair originally intended to expose "the inferno of exploitation [of the typical American factory worker at the turn of the 20th Century]," but the reading public instead fixated on food safety as the novel's most pressing issue. In fact, Sinclair bitterly admitted his celebrity rose, "not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef".

Sinclair's account of workers falling into rendering tanks and being ground, along with animal parts, into "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard", gripped public attention. The morbidity of the working conditions, as well as the exploitation of children and women alike that Sinclair exposed showed the corruption taking place inside the meat packing factories.

President Theodore Roosevelt considered Sinclair a "crackpot" and wrote to William Allen White, "I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth." The President was leery of aligning himself with Sinclair's politics and conclusions in The Jungle, so he sent Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds, men whose honesty and reliability he trusted, to Chicago to make surprise visits to meat packing facilities. Despite betrayal of the secret to the meat packers, who worked three shifts a day for three weeks to clean the factories prior to the inspection, Neill and Reynolds were still revolted by the conditions at the factories and at the lack of concern by plant managers. Their oral report to Roosevelt tentatively supported Sinclair, failing only to substantiate the claim of workers falling into rendering vats and being left to be sold as lard. Neill testified before Congress that they had reported only "such things as showed the necessity for legislation" and that he did not think it was also necessary to "praise things where they were worthy of praise." A report by the Bureau of Animal Industry rejected Sinclair's severest allegations, characterizing them as "intentionally misleading and false," "willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact," and "utter absurdity."

Roosevelt, not in favor of the heavy regulation the public outcry would have caused, did not release the findings of the Neill-Reynolds Report for publication. Instead, he helped the issue by dropping hints from the report, alluding to disgusting conditions and inadequate inspection measures.^{[citation needed]} Roosevelt submitted the Neill-Reynolds report to Congress on June 4, 1906. Public pressure led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Bureau of Chemistry that would become the Food and Drug Administration in 1930.

Sinclair rejected the legislation, as he viewed it as an unjustified boon to large meat packers partially because the U.S. taxpayer, rather than the packing companies, were to bear the costs of inspection at $30,000,000 a year. He famously noted the limited effect of his book by stating, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

See also

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
• Chew on This, an adaptation of Fast Food Nation for younger readers
• Deconstructing Dinner
• Eating Animals
• Fast Food Nation
• The Future of Food
• King Corn
• Million Calorie March: The Movie
• The Omnivore's Dilemma
• Food Inc.
• Our Daily Bread (2005 film)
• Super Size Me
• We Feed the World

Footnotes

• Young, James Harvey, "The Donkey That Fell into the Privy: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Meat Inspection Amendments of 1906," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 59, 1985, 467-80.
• Arthur, Anthony. Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair. New York: Random House, 2006.
• In The Brass Check, Sinclair relates that the New York Herald commissioned a follow-up story, "Packingtown a Year Later." The reporters spent two months undercover and found conditions worse than ever; the Herald's publisher killed the story before publication.

External links

• The Jungle, available at Internet Archive (scanned books first edition)
• The Jungle at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• The Jungle available in Audiobook through Lit2Go: An online service of Florida's Educational Technology Clearinghouse via University of South Florida.
• The Jungle serialized in The Sun newspaper from the Florida Digital Newspaper Library
• "Defense of The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition" by novelist Earl Lee
• "The Fictitious Suppression of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle," by historian Christopher Phelps
• The Jungle free literary analysis from SparkNotes.com
• Upton Sinclair: The Lithuanian Jungle, Giedrius Subacius, 2006, ISBN, identifies many of the actual Chicago locations mentioned in the novel
• Slate.com article: Welcome to The Jungle - Does Upton Sinclair's famous novel hold up? [1]
• Mother Jones Magazine article marking the anniversary [2]
• USA Today reviews a new biography of Upton Sinclair [3]
• PBS special report marking the 100th anniversary of the novel [4] * Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism revisits The Jungle [5]