Classics Revisited
Myths of failure
BY RAVI VYAS
Sinclair set out to write a book that would do for workers what Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for slaves earlier.
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair, first published 1906, this edition published in Penguin Books, 2006, $14.
For forty years Elihu Wilson... had owned Personville, heart, soul, skin and guts. He was President and majority shareholder of the Personville Mining Corporation, ditto of the First National Bank, owner of the Morning Herald and Evening Herald, the city's only newspapers, and at least part owner of nearly every other enterprise of any importance. Along with these pieces of property he owned a United States senator, a couple of representatives, the governor, the mayor, and most of the state legislature. Elihu Wilson was Personville, and he was almost the whole state.
Dashiell Hammett:
The Red Harvest
FOR all the American political rhetoric about the virtues of the free market, is there any such a thing as a free market? After all, everything merges into everything else, prices and wages, interlocking corporate and financial monopolies that conspire to destroy labour unions. These huge conglomerates go by the name of trusts: steel trusts, coal trusts, sugar trusts — you name it. Markets were never free but trusts were — free to make the working class work 60 to 70 hours a week, free to hire private armies, to bribe the politicians, to sell what they wanted at whatever price they wanted. This is what Upton Sinclair's masterpiece, The Jungle, first published in 1906 and never out of print since then, tells us in a gripping story that puts into sharp moral focus the social, political and economic problems that lurked below the cheerful surface of American life at the turn of the century — and still does.
For a cause
Sinclair, who was a socialist, set out to write a book that would do for workers what Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for slaves half a century earlier. Tom's Cabin had played a pivotal role in creating public outrage toward slavery and mustered considerable support for a war to liberate the slaves: Sinclair wanted to do the same for Chicago meat-packing workers who were controlled by the beef trust with an iron first. The trust had recently crushed a strike by union workers who were seeking a pay raise of less than three cents an hour.
Sinclair chose the meat-packing industry to embody what was wrong with American society, operating largely in secret, wielding unchecked powers, threatening the health of workers and consumers who were fobbed off with contaminated food. As Sinclair argued in The Jungle, "the beef trust was the incarnation of blind, insensate greed...the Great Butcher...the spirit of capitalism made flesh."
The Jungle is the story of a Lithuanian migrant, Jurgis Radkus, his family and his friends. It describes the terrible working conditions in meat-packing plants, housing conditions, the sexual harassment, alcoholism and prostitution. It depicts a world where honest human beings are turned into cogs in a large industrial machine. It is a story of downward social mobility; not of rags-to-riches. With relentless pressure to increase production, the immigrant is exploited to the hilt and then tossed aside like an orange peel. At a time when the American novel concentrated on the existential problems of the middle and upper classes, Sinclair focused on life at the bottom of the heap. Hence the dedication, "To the Workingmen of America". (In some ways, in style and substance, The Jungle reminds you of George Orwell's two classics, Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.)
There are stories within stories in The Jungle that tie us unforgettably with the wretched of the earth. It is impossible to touch on any of the numerous stories here but basically they merge into one big story: the fall of the House of Rudkus, of how a peasant family from Lithuania comes to America determined to make a better life and how it is sucked into the gears of competitive capitalism, and chewed up by what Sinclair called "predatory greed". It is a story of disappointed expectations — the familiar American story of failure, of soured hopes, of emotional alienation and cultural confusion in place of community and identity. The story of Rudkus' myth of failure is the other side of the myth of success, of the fulfilment of the great American Dream.
The cheerful view
But failure, it is said, is a kind of luck as long as it doesn't kill you. At least that is how it is in the great American novels: Ishmael in Moby Dick eludes disaster as an orphan by riding on a coffin; Huck Finn escapes the drift into the heart of darkness by moving out for the Territory or the world beyond. (There are happy endings because America as a social and political organisation is deeply committed to a cheerful view of life.) Here, Jurgis is renewed by the promise of the coming victory of socialism. A bit unconvincing after all the agonies and suffering of the immigrant family but The Jungle lives on in our imagination for its sympathy of the down and out.
The Jungle has been described as the most powerful proletarian novel, not least because the conditions it protested against have been duplicated as industrialisation, across the world.
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