Upton Sinclair

7 Key excerpts on "Upton Sinclair"

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  eBook - ePub

  Study Guide to The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

  • Intelligent Education(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Influence Publishers

    (Publisher)

  “In a wheelchair, attended by a nurse, daughter, and son-in-law, Mr. Sinclair . . . stood with assistance through a special tribute to his own efforts at the start of the century and shook hands warmly after Mr. Johnson gave him one of the pens used in the signing.”

  And so President Johnson had carefully arranged to give Upton Sinclair the official recognition that an earlier president had deprived him of. This ceremony occurred just eleven months before Sinclair, an author admired the world over, died in November 1968.

  Passage contains an image INTRODUCTION TO Upton Sinclair

  THE JUNGLE: ITS PLACE IN AMERICAN HISTORY AND LITERATURE

    DUAL FAME OF THE JUNGLE

  Few works of fiction leave their stamp on political as well as literary history. In this connection, an American might think of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In its serial appearance in a magazine (1851), in its publication as a book (1852), and in its long run as a stage play, Uncle Tom’s Cabin stirred America’s conscience, helping to bring about the abolition of slavery. A European would think of Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook (1852), which so dramatized the plight of Russian peasants that it induced Tsar Alexander II to emancipate the serfs.

  And in discussing fiction that has achieved such double impact, both Europeans and Americans would think also of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle . A literary sensation in both its serialized version (1905) and its book version (1906), this novel has exerted tremendous influence on American life. Historians regard the exposes contained in The Jungle

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  Studies in Sensory History

  Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers

  • Adam Mack(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of Illinois Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4

  A REVOLUTIONARY AND A PURITAN

  Upton Sinclair and The Jungle

  The Jungle is the best-known literary evocation of industrial Chicago. One hundred years after the novel first disgusted readers with its descriptions of the city’s meatpacking plants, it continues to inform discussions about food politics. Upton Sinclair’s gastric prose and his eye for revolting detail echo in contemporary exposés about industrially produced meat.1 Much like those exposés, The Jungle shocked readers’ senses, famously turning their stomachs with descriptions of rats tossed into sausage hoppers. However, Sinclair’s novel also had much to say about how the meatpacking industry robbed the senses of workers. This chapter analyzes The Jungle to explore the sensory politics of its author and the indictment of industrial capitalism he proposed. It traces how the author drew lines of class, ethnicity, and race in sensory terms in order to simultaneously express sympathy and solidarity as well as repulsion and social distance from immigrant workers in Back of the Yards.

  A good example of Sinclair’s discussion of how work in the meat factories dulled the senses of workers takes place about halfway through The Jungle , when the protagonist, the immigrant laborer Jurgis Rudkus, decides that his mother-in-law must take work in a sausage factory. Life and labor in Chicago’s stockyards district is tougher than Jurgis imagined when he left Lithuania, and things keep getting worse. It is a regrettable decision, but necessary, as more and more members of the extended family are forced to take jobs in the packing plants to help make ends meet.

  Elzbieta is no stranger to hard work, but she is tested when she becomes, as Sinclair put it, a “servant to the sausage machine.” The job requires her to stand in the same place for ten hours, with only a forty-five-minute break in the middle of the day. Worse, the room where she works amounts to a “dark hole,” lit dimly by electricity and constantly wet. “There were always puddles of water on the floor,” Sinclair wrote, “and a sickening odor of moist flesh in the room.” The meatpackers allowed tourists to pass through, but quickly. The machinery impressed tourists, especially the stuffing machines and their multiple nozzles, over which female workers like Elzbieta held casing. With the simple pull of a lever, the ground meat shot out into the casings like a “wriggling snake,” to be caught and twisted into links, an operation the women executed “so fast that the eye could literally not follow.”2

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  The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction

  Journalists as Genre Benders in Literary History

  • D. Underwood(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Introduction

  I was enlisted then on my side of an undeclared war between those modes of perception called journalism and fiction. When it came to accuracy, I was on the side of fiction. I thought fiction could bring us closer to the truth than journalism, which is not to say one should make up facts when writing a story about real people. I would endeavor to get my facts as scrupulously as a reporter.

  —Norman Mailer

  The Jungle is a book whose “facts” about the abuses in the meatpacking industry set the United States on a new course of health and safety regulation: the “muckraking” author Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks in 1904 investigating the sanitary and workplace conditions in the Chicago meatpacking yards; his publisher, Doubleday, Page and Company, would not publish the book until a group of legal detectives had checked out Sinclair’s allegations; President Theodore Roosevelt was so moved by the book that he set up a presidential investigatory commission; and finally Congress, acting upon the commission’s findings that confirmed most of Sinclair’s claims, passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. As a result, The Jungle has been deemed, along with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s pro-abolition Uncle Tom’s Cabin , to have had more political impact than any other novels in American history.1 However, for all this, it is sometimes forgotten that The Jungle

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  A Narrative History of the American Press

  • Gregory Borchard(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  When he returned from his trip, an American financier reportedly asked Steffens to provide an account of what he had witnessed, and, as popularly told, Steffens said, “I have seen the future, and it works.” Steffens later wrote in his Autobiography that what he said was “I have been over to the future, and it works.” 11 Steffens’ optimism was short-lived. A global economic collapse brought on by the Great Depression followed by the rise of dictatorships throughout Europe contributed to Steffens loss of idealism. He in fact grew cynical about the role socialism and reform in general might play in improving the conditions of workers and lives in general. He died August 9, 1936, without seeing—similar to a number of other muckrakers—the reform he had hoped to achieve. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and the Pure Food and Drug Act Upton Sinclair, born in Baltimore, September 20, 1878, both shared the socialist philosophy of Steffens and took an understanding of corruption to a new level. Sinclair concerned himself primarily with the inequalities brought about by capitalism in a system he described as “wage slavery” in which workers received only enough money to survive. His most famous piece, The Jungle, examined the sickening realities of this system through the experiences of laborers in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. He had prepared his report as a form of documentary fiction by first acting as a reporter who visited the stockyards, taking notes, and then writing in a third-person form of fiction that too closely resembled reality. While his goal in the piece was to awaken the American public to the inherent problems of economic oppression at the time, he instead awoke their awareness of the filthiness involved in creating the meat and food products they ate on a daily basis. Reform did ensue from The Jungle, but it came in the way of hygiene, not money

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  Cases in Public Policy and Administration

  From Ancient Times to the Present

  • Jay M. Shafritz, Christopher P. Borick(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Tarbell (1857–1944), who exposed the monopolistic practices of John D. Rockefeller and forced the breakup of Standard Oil; and Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), whose exposure of the poisonous practices of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Today, anyone who writes an exposé of governmental corruption or incompetence might be called a muckraker. Today’s muckrakers avoid the term, preferring to be called investigative journalists, but they continue the practice. Muckraking reached its height during the first decade of the twentieth century, but its practices went back decades and came about because of two parallel developments: massive government corruption and the advent of mass-circulation periodicals such as big city newspapers and national magazines. The most famous muckrakers all published chapters of their now classic books in magazines such as McClures, Collier’s, and Cosmopolitan. The first two of these general-interest magazines are long gone, but Cosmopolitan lives on, having reinvented itself as a journal of romance and sexual adventure for young women. Contemporary cartoon from the Utica, New York, Saturday Globe, of President Theodore Roosevelt taking hold of the investigating muckrake while holding his nose. The original caption read, “A nauseating job, but it must be done.” The stink of the meat scandal originated with Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). The book exposed the meatpacking industry’s tendency to put rotten, putrefying meat, along with rats who had died from poisoning, into sausage that was sold to the public. For flavoring, large globs of rat dung, filthy water, and the occasional human finger, sometimes a whole arm, were added to the mix. This expose caused such a sensation that, within months, the federal government was forced to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which initiated federal government inspection of food sold in the United States

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  Reframing Critical, Literary, and Cultural Theories

  Thought on the Edge

  • Nicoletta Pireddu(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Shortly after his unsuccessful bid to join Parliament himself, Trollope portrayed a fallible yet well-intentioned young Irish parliamentarian in Phineas Finn (1867–1868), the second novel in his Palliser series (also known as the Parliamentary novels). The Palliser novels provide a richly textured account of British political life that is neither idealistic nor merely cynical. Phineas Finn addresses voting reform and portrays the title character’s education in political life, including his fumbling attempts to make his maiden speech to Parliament. Finn’s ability to forge ahead with his reform efforts, in spite of his failure to achieve Ciceronian heights of eloquence, reflects Trollope’s overall message of competence over celebrity and incremental progress over revolutionary transformation. 10 Upton Sinclair gave voice to the woes of industrial capitalism in The Jungle (1906), which he expressly modeled on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and envisioned a political solution in the form of democratic socialism. The tensions between traditional republicanism and industrialized societies run through The Jungle, where Sinclair portrays the exploitation and political awakening of a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis Rudkus. Late in the novel, after a series of degrading experiences, Rudkus undergoes a conversion that Sinclair stages in contrasting scenes of oratory : one by a politician representing the Republican Party, the other by a Socialist modeled on Eugene Debs. Rudkus falls asleep and is thrown out of the Republican gathering, but he is electrified and transfigured—indeed, enchanted—by the Socialist speaker. His political conversion is completed when he attends a meeting where a Christian Socialist and an anarchist debate the best form of socialism, leading to the development of a platform based on their areas of agreement

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  The Jungle

  The Uncensored Original Edition

  • Upton Sinclair, Earl Lee(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • See Sharp Press

    (Publisher)

  NTRODUCTION

  I . In 1905 Upton Sinclair wrote a powerful book, full of impassioned rhetoric against the excesses of capitalism, deeply empathizing with the immigrant worker, and boldly naming the perpetrators of crime. In 1906 a lesser book was published—one that certainly rocked the nation in its gruesome detail about meat processing, but that skirted the realities of disease and death among the poor, apologized to the rich and powerful by its silences, and pictured the immigrant worker as responsible in large part for his own degradation. Both of these books are called The Jungle . The 1906 version has been taught in the schools, sits on library shelves, and is easily available at the bookstore in the local mall. The original, 1905, version came out piecemeal in a socialist newspaper and a quarterly magazine at the time Sinclair wrote it, but essentially disappeared until 1988, when it was reprinted as a hardback book. That edition quickly went out of print under odd circumstances (see Foreword). Now, in 2003, the true first version of The Jungle comes to us again. Can we handle the truth this time?

  Both versions of The Jungle feature the story of Jurgis Rudkos and his wife Ona, Lithuanians who have come to Chicago to pursue the American dream. They work hard and try to make the best of bad living conditions, but they are beaten down relentlessly. Both versions show disturbing details of the turn-of-the-century meatpacking industry: meat processed amid blood and dirt, diseased animals cut up for food, inspectors letting rotten meat go by. At the same time, it is clear that there is a major difference between the two versions of the novel. The 1906 novel has 31 chapters, whereas the original has 36. In all, the newer version is about one-third shorter than the original (DeGruson xxvii). Of course, cutting text often happens when a writer revises a work, to tighten the style and eliminate redundancy of scene and character. Usually the second, more artful version is the one that gets published, and this is considered the official, final text. However, if a revision is not driven by a desire for artistic economy but is instead produced under coercion, directly or indirectly, for political or economic reasons, we must question which version should be the final and definitive text. In the case of The Jungle , two versions were published: one in 1905 as a serial by The Appeal to Reason , a socialist newspaper (and again in several issues of the quarterly One-Hoss Philosophy

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