Book Review (One of my favorite assignments as a Journalism major at Mount Mercy College in 2007.)

“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair

Review by Sara McDermott

Upton Sinclair’s moving chronicle of human misery strikes at the heart of the political corruption and brutal working conditions rampant in turn of the century Chicago.  In “The Jungle” Sinclair takes us along a path of betrayal and deceit experienced by one Lithuanian family in their quest for a better life in America in 1904.  Sinclair tells us in vivid detail the heartbreaking journey the family takes from the streets of Chicago’s “Packingtown” to the final fragmentation of the family in Chicago’s seedy red light district.  Sinclair, a newly converted socialist, makes the case for the working man as victim when the protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, turns finally to socialism after years of betrayal and abuse from those in power in the meatpacking industry.

Immigrants who came to America in the early part of the twentieth century did not know the language or the ways of a city such as New York.  They could be easily herded here and there by unscrupulous policemen and city officials who coveted the meager amount of money they had carefully pinned inside their clothes for the crossing.  When New York finished fleecing the Rudkus family they were unceremoniously put on a train for Chicago and the thriving industry of meat processing and packing.  The bosses in the killing plants and packing rooms were provided with an endless supply of pseudo slaves who streamed innocently into the workplace for the pittance offered them.  They had nowhere else to go and no other way of making a living.

Living conditions were another matter.  The net widened long enough for Jurgis to be taken in by tricky real estate agents who sold him a home on time without explaining the terms of the loan.  The family spent the better part of the next few years trying to eke out enough for payments and taxes that exceeded their ability to pay.

One reads the book in fascinated horror at the never ending trials the family is put through.  Workers are obliged to be on the job, period.  There is no provision for sickness and no sympathy for weakness.  Ona, the wife of Jurgis, lives in fear that she will lose her place if she cannot make it to work.  In a scene that will live in my memory, Jurgis has to carry her to the plant in a snowstorm because the trolley cars are not running and they need the dollar or two she makes each day.

Women and children in Packingtown are expendable.  On the job the superintendent, Connor, is nothing more than a pimp.  Woman who resist his advances are either fired or sent to a brothel to break their rebellious ways.  Children put to work selling newspapers learn the brutalities of the street on their own.  No one, it appears, cares if these people live or die, and they often die unattended and are buried as paupers.

The description of the industry itself caused a drop in meat consumption for several years after the book was published, according to the introduction by Morris Dickstein.  Even one scene describing the abysmal neglect of sanitation, such as diseased cattle being butchered and added to the commercial meat, was most likely enough to open the eyes of the reading public.

The politicians of the time redefined corruption.  The old joke, vote early and often, was a reality in Chicago in the early twentieth century.  Jurgis, much later in the book, joined the fray and finally earned enough money to be comfortable by helping to rig elections and working as a scab in the meatpacking strike.  But he trusted the wrong leaders.  When he got into trouble and was taken to jail, the bosses couldn’t really remember him long enough to pay the $300 bail.  He ended up on the street, his wife and child dead, and the rest of the family scattered or dead.  Even cousin Marija, the mover and shaker of the family, was reduced to working as a prostitute.

“The Jungle” pivoted around the injustices surrounding poverty stricken immigrants who had no resources through the government and no help from the well-off.  Socialism in America was a reaction to the wage slavery practiced by the big corporations who paid workers just enough to sustain them and not enough to let them become a threat.  Sinclair, in order to further his own interest in socialism, took the reader from disbelief to outrage at the way the Rudkus family was treated.  He wanted to rouse the population to the plight of the worker.  In doing so he exposed the treachery and brutality of those in the higher echelons of capitalism.

An account of a fictional family enduring such gruesome, gut-wrenching poverty must have touched the consciousness of any citizen who read it.