The Jungle (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

I first read Upton Sinclair's 1905 novel "The Jungle" about seven years ago. The author, a dedicated socialist during the turbulent times of industrial upheaval in America, wrote this novel to show the American public how bad the working conditions actually were in the packinghouses of Chicago. He also hoped to expose the poor treatment of immigrants and the shameless greed of big business. For all intensive purposes, Sinclair did succeed in raising awareness about the dangers of eating canned beef and other meat products that supposedly underwent rigorous government inspection and quality controls. "The Jungle" even inspired then President Theodore Roosevelt to institute stricter laws and greater administrative controls on the beef industry. Now, with the release of "The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition," it is possible to discover that Sinclair not only wished to show exactly how bad the meat supply really was, but that his most important goal involved revelations about the plight of the working poor struggling under the crushing weight of laissez-faire capitalism.Jurgis Rudkos is Sinclair's protagonist here, a recent Lithuanian immigrant alighting on the shores of Chicago in search of the American dream of wealth and prestige. Jurgis brings several relatives and his fiancée with him, certain that with a new job in the city he will soon wed and raise a family. Rudkos and company soon learn the reality of their situation upon reaching Packingtown, the slums that surround the beef factories like concentric rings of misery that even Dante could not have foreseen. The Rudkos clan doesn't speak English, so they are at the mercy of nearly everyone around them. Jurgis and several of his relatives manage to land jobs at the factories, but soon discover that these jobs are nightmares of depravity involving insanely long working hours, cruel bosses, low pay barely adequate for basic human needs, and filthy conditions. At first, Jurgis doesn't care how bad it is; he knows if he and the members of his family work hard they may eventually afford to purchase a house. This they do, but soon discover that the costs of insurance, interest, and taxes will keep them in a constant state of turmoil. If even one person in the family loses their job, the whole clan faces eviction and eventual doom. As the years pass, Jurgis and those he loves face one calamity after another. Lost jobs, dishonest government and vendors, disease, crime, and debt all take a devastating toll. There is little happiness residing in the pages of this book.Sinclair's purpose with this book is to tout the panacea of socialism in a world that many increasingly saw as controlled by rampant big business. The last half of the story is essentially a socialist pamphlet singing the praises of the working class and how the people need to take back their institutions by reining in corporations. The author rebuts standard arguments favoring capitalism while presenting socialism as salvation incarnate. Whether you agree with socialist dogma or not, it is not difficult to understand why people favored such a worldview in an era when government regulation was non-existent or nearly so. Not surprisingly, unions get a fair amount of support from Sinclair to the extent that they are about the only organization willing to oppose the greed of the meatpackers. In short, "The Jungle" takes business to task while championing the little guy.This new edition culled Sinclair's original text from a socialist organ entitled "Appeal to Reason." The author later tried to publish this version but ran into numerous obstacles from mainstream publishers who worried about lawsuits from the beef trust, the unsettling descriptions of factory life, and the author's unwavering support for immigrants. Sinclair eventually made the changes to the text in order to get the book published, figuring it was important to get some of the message out there then none at all. An introduction in this edition argues that the restored changes show how the author's focus was really on foreign workers, not necessarily the grotesque atmosphere of the slaughterhouses. Sinclair himself stated that he "aimed for the public's heart but hit them in the stomach instead." After reading this version of "The Jungle," it does seem as though the primary intention of the book was to emphasize the plight of Jurgis and the millions of other poor souls trapped in the insanity of a greedy industry. However, it is hard to read this book and not cringe over the lengthy passages outlining the disgusting practices that led to tainted meat and the spread of disease through such products as tinned beef. Arguably the most powerful section of the book discusses in depth the results of a strike in Chicago involving all of the meatpacking houses. Sinclair is at the height of his descriptive powers as he takes the reader on a tour of the factories locked in the throes of scab warfare and even more disgusting factory conditions. This is powerful stuff.Nearly one hundred years after "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair remains the best remembered muckraker of the era. Having read both versions available, I have to conclude that reading either edition is equally effective. I only read this new treatment because I like to read unabridged or uncontaminated copies of any book. The uncensored edition adds about five chapters to the story, but it doesn't really make it that much longer since the chapters are all relatively short. Upton Sinclair fans will most certainly want to acquire this edition of the book to see what they have been missing all these years.

Upton Sinclair is one of those authors that I missed in college, so now in retirement, I'm choosing these "neglected" authors I never got around to. Even early into the book the ground Sinclair covers and its relevance today is striking. Written in 1906, it deals with immigration, horrific labor conditions, class warfare, animal slaughter, unregulated commerce, corruption, and rampant disease. The roots of the failure of the American Dream extend back that far. It would fit in neatly with Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Orwell's 1984, the past holding up a mirror to our present."...his was a work of fiction that followed one family over a period of years and, in the process, detailed unsanitary food preparation, exploitation of workers, sleazy real-estate practices, political corruption, and much more."http://www.gilderlehrman.org/…/e…/jungle-and-progressive-eraThe main character, Jurgis (pronounced "Yurgis") arrives with various family members, seeking a relative in Chicago. Here, the only remote chance of employment is the stockyards and meat processing plants, work that is difficult to get and almost impossible to live on. They endure unspeakable working conditions (that seem like something out of Dante's Inferno) and swindles. Jurgis marries and his infant son is raised in abominable squalor. Eventually, his wife, Ona after losing her job sells herself to one of the plant foremen. When Jurgis finds out, he beats the man savagely and is tossed in jail. After he is released he cannot find work. When we think that things can't get any worse, more tragedy strikes again. His infant son drowns in the muddy streets.Jurgis, in shock and grief simply walks out of the city, as though he must turn his back on all the city represents. He tries "tramping" for a while and the change seems restorative. But, realizing this life will not do in the winter, he returns to the city. Eventually he becomes involved with corrupt union officials and politicians and manages to save $300. Through a series of mishaps he is returned to destitution: begging, sleeping in alleyways.Jurgis a believable "Everyman," innocent and naive, pure-hearted, but human and subject to temptation. Up to this point the narrative makes sense until he becomes involved with and enamored of socialism and party meetings. Sinclair, a proponent of socialism, frames this as the main character's salvation, if not panacea. It may be cause for hope, but it is an unproven solution and ignores that practicing socialists are not above the character flaws exhibited in other social orders.But wait. AP History students in Texas must now read textbooks that whitewash anything ugly about the America's past. If this is applied to AP English, what American literature of value would be left standing? Wait, I know. In this case, simply start the story with "Once upon a time in a faraway land..." Then replaces all occurrences of "America" with a made-up name.

The most important novel written by Upton Sinclair, which is not even mentioned in the description of the author by Amazon.It deals with adulterated food, corruption, monopoly, and lack of oversight- all things that corporations love.If should be read by every American

Jurgis Rudkis was a young Lithuanian with a dream of betterment - a dream better met in America than where he lived. At the start of the 20th century, he and a group of similarly hopeful Lithuanians made their pilgrimage to the beating heart of capitalism, only to find the heel of its boot. After navigating their way to Chicago’s meat packing district, the families endure extreme hardship and the brutal underside rather than uplifting promise of capitalism.The Jungle draws comparison to other tales of hardship – for example Faulkner’s The Grapes of Wrath – but Sinclair offers a twist. Rather than a study of characters caught up in an epic event such as the Depression-era Dust Bowl, Sinclair uses his characters’ hardship to critique the setting itself. More specifically, the characters are a vehicle to highlight the uneven and immoral impacts of capitalism, and to deliver a lesson in left-leaning (socialist?) economics and politics.Sinclair advances his theme in four stages. First, in the largest section, he chronicles the dehumanizing work in Chicago’s meat packing district and the revolting methods the plant owners use to pass off inedible meat to unwitting consumers. If it’s not enough to make readers question the balance of power between labor and capital, it will certainly make them rethink what they eat.The second, shorter stage shows Jurgis via a scrape with the law up against the broader industrial/political/media complex. It’s not so much that the law is stacked against Jurgis; the justice is perfunctory and with the barest standards of due process. Rather, it is the systemic intertwining political and industrial connections of others accused and acquitted, and of those meting out justice that rankles Sinclair. “Government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one got the office which bought the most votes.”The third stage - an interlude, really - follows Jurgis as a hobo after turning his back on Chicago, capitalism, and the social contract. He lives by his wits when a chance encounter permits him inside a meat packing industrialist’s mansion. The unneeded, undeserved and unproductive wealth stands in stark contrast to laborers’ deprivation and drives home Sinclair’s message about unfettered capitalism. Jurgis’ life as a hobo, outside the capital/labor struggle, harkens back to an idyllic (Edenic, not Hobbesian) time before capitalism, and foreshadows the possibility of another path … but not before Jurgis takes a turn working within the power structure, which proves less punishing than as a laborer but equally unfruitful.The fourth stage reconciles the plot elements of the first three stages and presents a socialist alternative. “In America everyone had laughed at the mere idea of Socialism then — in America all men were free. As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!” The Hobbesian bargain had metastasized under the natural power imbalances of capitalism, just as Marx had warned a few decades earlier, and the promise of socialism offered Jurgis a third path. He need not choose between the perpetually antagonistic labor and capital, but rather from a third option, in which one could select a job and receive remuneration based upon his or her contribution (labor hours and skill), all of which would advance broader societal goals. Government (rather than the oppressive capitalists) would establish the value of labor contributions. Sinclair envisioned a workers’ movement which would gently rule, and progress would be guided by ‘an invisible hobo hand’.Written after both Adam Smith’s and Marx’s theorizing but before the Russian Revolution, history has since shown the weakness of Sinclair’s concluding sermon, and even the labor theory of value that Sinclair touts was being supplanted when the book was written. Still, The Jungle is a seminal and cautionary tale of the power struggle between capital and labor. It applies equally well to the disposability of labor in today’s era of globalization and automation, and perhaps to intellectual capital in the coming era of Artificial Intelligence.Sinclair’s plot is straightforward – simply a vehicle to critique the capitalist system – and offers none of the rollicking twists in Dickens’ working-class novels. Nor does it feature the robust character development of other authors. What it does offer is one of the first literary indictments of unfettered capitalism, and for this it should be read by all with an interest in politics and economics.

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The conditions of the meat works are no doubt better, the workers there have more protections, thee are social services in place, minimum wage stipulations, hospitals and half decent policing. But the fundamental struggle, the inherent inequalities and oppression is still there to be fought. It remains to this day a book well worth reading, and not just for Sinclair’s unerring eloquence.