Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle

Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, originally serialized in 1905 and published as a book the next year, was the single most notable work from the age of "Muckraking" progressive journalism in the early years of this century. Although presented in the form of a novel, its intent was essentially journalistic; it is a rather thinly fictionalized account of conditions among immigrant workers in the Chicago meat packing industry just after the turn of the century.

The storm of public reaction which followed the publication of The Jungle, with its revelations of shockingly unsanitary conditions in the packing houses, was directly responsible for the enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (Sinclair, 1981, p. v). It must be recognized that Sinclair's actual intent in writing the book was much more sweeping than to call for stricter standards for the inspection of meat. Upton Sinclair was a socialist, and the intent of the book was to make a general indictment of corporate capitalism.

Sinclair's focus was only incidentally on abuses peculiar to the meat-packing industry, and in the course of it, he calls attention to a broad range of the working and living conditions to which immigrants and other workers were subjected at the time. It was, however, the sanitary abuses which most immediately captured public attention; for example, rotten pork was ground up and mixed into "good" meat in sufficiently small quantities as not to call attention to itself by its odor (

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to take this questionable document at face value, while the very sporadic and casual state inspections are plainly ineffectual at rooting out violations. Unionization, and companies' responses to "labor agitation," are a major theme throughout The Jungle. The early union experience of the book's protagonist, Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkis, is indifferent, but later, as a result of knocking down a supervisor, due to an incident to be related below, he finds himself blacklisted: "They had him on a secret list in every office, big and little, in the place ... he was condemned and sentenced, without trial and without appeal; he could never work for the packers again" (Sinclair, 1981, p. 196). The practice of blacklist lies ultimately behind the body of case law that has sharply limited the right of employers to request previous employers' references for prospective hires (McAdams, Freeman, and Pincus, 1995, pp. 509-510. In some respects, however, Sinclair was very much a man of his own times, and this shows for example in his characterization of strikebreakers: As very few of the better class fo workingmen could be got for such work, these specimens of the new American hero contained an assortment of the criminals an

Category: Literature - U