I was surprised to see emblazoned across the front cover, ‘The Uncensored Original Edition’, which has apparently been lost for over 80 years (the copy I had is published by Sharp Press in 2003); the original was first published in 1906. Sinclair had struggled to find a publisher because of the book’s unpalatable and shocking content, and had self-censored considerably to get it into print at all. Apparently this original is a third longer than the censored commercial version.
It is apparent from the very start just why in the past there might have been thought there was a need for such a large degree of (self) censorship before the book could/would be published. Sinclair’s novel is a no-holds-barred exposé of the terrible conditions of the stockyards and meatpacking factories of Chicago of the early 1900s, which some would call a condition of industrial slavery. The story follows the Rudkos, Jurgis and his father, and Ona whom he hopes to marry, and her extended family – 12 migrants in all, 5 adults and 6 children and Ona, about 14 or 15, all formerly peasants, migrating from Lithuania to USA. When they arrive, they only know one word, ‘Chicago’. Arriving in Chicago, they do not speak English, and look for employment only knowing one other word, ‘job’. Very quickly, they find jobs in the meatpacking industry, from sewing hams to making sausages to the much rougher work of splitters, knockers, shovelers, etc.
They are part of a big wave of migrants, of Lithuanians, Slovaks, Poles, Bohemians, who have all flooded the market with labour when unscrupulous capitalists falsely promised migrants the American Dream, callously creating a situation where demands for jobs far outstrips supply, which means employers can act with impunity, creating extremely hostile, dangerous, and unfair conditions for workers. These conditions are what Sinclair describes so eloquently and which he explains in careful, horrifying detail. Men work in freezing or else stupefyingly hot spaces, literally risking life and limb, awash with blood and gore, with not even a bench to sit on to eat lunch, with not even water to clean their hands before eating, earning a pittance, desperate to hold onto those jobs, wearing themselves to the bone and to an early grave. And these are the lucky ones. Needless to say, the women and the children fare even worse. They are all victims of capitalism that seeks profits at any cost, creating the jungle which the book is named for.
Sinclair depicts the migrants as hapless, at the mercy of cruel capitalistic practises which they know nothing about, and who are exploited, ravaged, and eventually discarded by a system which treats humans as disposable working machines. The Rudkos have brought a little money, all their pooled life savings, which they use as a 300 dollar deposit on a 1500 dollar house. They budget for being able to make repayments by pooling the income from their jobs, but they have not heard of interest, insurance, and all the other costs, which rapidly eat up all their joint earnings and reduce them to penury. The 1500 dollar house, which was built for 500 dollars, was sold to them as new, when in fact 6 owners have already come and gone, and the primary business seems less in selling houses, than in foreclosing, and reselling.
However, Sinclair celebrates the human spirit by starting the novel with the wedding of Ona and Jurgis, who are very much in love, and go to great lengths and into debt to have a veselija with the rituals they brought from Lithuania.
Bit by bit these poor people have given up everything else, but to this they cling with all the power of their souls- they cannot give up the veselija! To do that, would mean not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat – and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going (p10).
The writing style is declamatory and eloquent. Sinclair tries to describe horrors he imagines people (read the general public) would seldom know of, painting the situation with words, many words:
the kind of anguish that comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating – unredeemed by the slightest touch of dignity, or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into the vocabulary of poets – the details of it cannot be told in polite society at all (p68).
The book is riveting even if desperately sad, getting into the mind of Jurgis in particular, a simple man, uneducated and illiterate, but a hard hard worker who does not spare himself and is unafraid of pain and toil, a man who gives selflessly to his family and does not ask for much in return, and gets even less. The system treats him with disdain and injustice, visiting punishments and calamities on him despite his best efforts, and tragedy follows tragedy as the Rutkos slide deeper and deeper into the morass of failure set up for them by the system.
Their home! Their home! They had lost it! Grief, despair, rage, overwhelmed him…The whole long agony came back to him. Their sacrifices in the beginning, their three hundred dollars that they scraped together, all their owned in the world, all that stood between them and starvation. And then their toil, month by month to get together the twelve dollars, and the interest as well, and now and then the taxes, and the other charges, and the repairs, and what not! Why, they had put their very souls into their payments on that house, they had paid for it with their sweat and their tears – yes and more, with their very life-blood. Diedas Antanas had died of the struggle to earn that money…and Ona, too, had given her health and strength to pay for it – she was wrecked and ruined because of it; and so was he, who had been a big, strong man three years ago, and now sat here shivering, broken, cowed, weeping like a hysterical child. Ah! They had cast their all into the fight; and they had lost, they had lost! All that they had paid into it was gone – every cent of it. And their house was gone – they were back where they had started from, flung into the cold to starve and freeze! […]
Ah, God, the horror of it, the monstrous, hideous, demoniacal wickedness of it. He and his family, helpless women and children, struggling to live, ignorant and defenseless and forlorn as they were – and the enemies that had been lurking for them, crouching upon their trail and thirsting for their blood. […] all the tricks of the packers, their masters, the tyrants who ruled them; the shut-downs and the scarcity of work, the irregular hours and the cruel speeding-up, the lowering of wages, the raising of prices! The mercilessness of nature about them of heat and cold, rain and snow, the mercilessness of the city, of the country in which the lived, of its laws and customs they did not understand!” (p162-3).
We follow the story of Jurgis as he sinks from this low to even further lows. Sinclair then goes into an exploration of the justice system and prisons, countryside tramping, politics and unions, prostitution, and eventually wraps up with a long spiel on socialism. The last third of the book indeed needs a lot of editing, having mostly departed from the plotline, and used mostly as a platform for political pontification. Although the last third of the book was lacking direction and shape, the book is nevertheless an eye opening read.
In the Introduction, Kathleen de Graves explains how in the self-censorship for the purpose of getting the book published, Sinclair had to cut out many passages which would have cast the migrants in a more sympathetic light, but that the author tried to retain as much of the material as he could. In the time it was published, as the Foreword by Earl Lee explains, there were a lot of naysayers who at first refused to even countenance there could be truth to these claims of industrial slavery, and that President Roosevelt went from objecting to the book, to discovering in iniquities of the system – by launching his own investigation through the Bureau of Commerce and Labour – which apparently led to the first comprehensive Pure Food and Drug laws. For this alone Sinclair’s novel could be commended, but in addition, it is highly readable; slightly histrionic perhaps for 21st century tastes, but with good and justifiable reason to be, given the atrocities it is depicting.
Note: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle has an expired copyright, and so is available for free on the Internet Archive. The title of this review is from Sinclair’s own description.
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