The World of Upton Sinclair

BY HARVEY SWADOS

ON THE first of July, 1960, an era came to an end. It was hardly marked by historians, even by those hasty historians who write for the newspapers; but on that day the federal humane slaughter law went into effect, and the nation became a little less hectic. Probably the sudden quiet was noticed by almost no one but the workers in the slaughterhouses, where cattle and pigs, calves and lambs had been shoved, screaming, squealing, grunting, howling in fear and terror, to be shackled, clubbed, stabbed, slashed, and hacked into edible portions for the dinner tables of America.

The insensate shrieking of the terror-stricken beasts, ringing through the old brick walls of the Chicago stockyards, which could still be heard until the summer of 1960 brought unconsciousness followed by painless death, was in a sense the final echo of those dreadful days that you can read about in The Jungle, which Upton Sinclair wrote in 1905. Today the scene has changed, almost — but not quite — beyond recognition.

For one thing, Chicago is no longer the “Hog Butcher for the World.” As automobiles arc now being put together not just in Detroit but in California, Wisconsin, and New Jersey, so are pigs being killed in great new slaughterhouses in Wichita, Des Moines, and Omaha. T hose packing houses still in Chicago arc by comparison small and even old-fashioned, half forgotten by the teeming millions of America’s second largest city, who depend for their livelihoods on other, newer enterprises. The stockyards remain, vast buying and selling marts, as a tumble-down, noisy, noisome relic of an earlier day; but they too will disappear when the redevelopers have their way and housing projects spring up on soil fertilized by many millions of doomed animals. Then, indeed, the era about which Sinclair wrote with such passion will have passed into history.

In the meantime, the curious visitor can still follow the pigs as they trot, nose to tail, througn the pens of a Chicago packer to their death and their destination on the breakfast table. He will observe, after his initial surprise at Lhe comparative smallness of the entire operation, that 90 per cent of the people involved in the killing and cutting at a typical plant are Negroes. Almost all of the Lithuanians, Poles, Croatians, and Slavs, who fill the pages of The Jungle, have moved on to other employment. No longer immigrants, no longer victimized as greenhorns by unscrupulous loan sharks, foremen, and rental agents, they have scrambled up and out, leaving the room at the bottom of the heap to the Negroes.

Not only is the killer, alone with death in his high-walled blood-soaked cell, still “a great burly Negro” as he was sixty years ago; his less well-paid fellow workers are too, for the most part. They still work in a building marked by great shifts in temperature, from close and airless rooms to great freezer storage vaults; they are still surrounded by blood and stench, entrails and excrements, death and dissection.

But the conditions of their work are, happily, better than those described in The Jungle. Protected against discrimination and the grosser forms of exploitation by their union, the United Packinghouse Workers of America, they work and live better than their forerunners, just as the animals now die better than their forebears. Seasonal employment, the scourge of all laboring people from the auto workers of Detroit to the sugar workers of Cuba, has been all but overcome in the packing industry, thanks to improved methods of raising, feeding, and shipping, and unemployment insurance helps to take up the slack when work does fall off.

Electric saws have replaced the axes of the splitters and cleaver man, and no one need work at a dangerous or exhausting rate of speed. Killing and cutting are sometimes done at the same plant by the same people, who thus learn a variety of operations and vary their day with different jobs. Women workers need hardly fear that demands will be made on their bodies in order that they may continue to sell the power in their hands and backs. Children are debarred from laboring alongside their elders, who make enough to be able to dream that when their offspring come of age, they will be doing something else, something better.

For, while this is a good job, working in a packing house, it is only relatively a good job. It is good for someone whose parents were tenant farmers and never had the chance for more than a year or two of school, never made enough to buy a car or decent furniture or occasional entertainment, never had the hope of looking forward to a better future for their children. It is so good that workers of such a background will come to feel a vested interest in it — it is their job, they have earned it by virtue of steadiness and skill and loyalty — and will fight hard to hold on to it against the incursions of scabs, as one meat packer discovered in a recent strike. But it is not a good job to most Americans. It cannot be challenging or fascinating or glamorous or lucrative to anyone much more sophisticated than a sharecropper, willing to trade away the dusty cabin for the city flat and the noisy, bloody job that bespeaks change and opportunity.

Inevitably, these people too will come to understand, even from looking at movies and picture magazines, that what they are doing to earn a living is not generally considered worthy of a modern, sensitized human being, no matter how much union security and how much government supervision; and then the whole cycle will start up again. Either new strata of hitherto submerged populations will move in to replace the Negroes, as the Negroes moved in on Upton Sinclair’s Lithuanians (and the Puerto Ricans took over the bottom-dog jobs formerly held only by Negroes in New York City), or the character of production will have to change radically to make the atmosphere attractive to ambitious young people.

The truth seems to be that the meat-packing industry in Chicago has not kept pace technologically with many other industries. The workers, as I have said, look different from the way they must have to Sinclair — they no longer have the appearance of creatures moving through a living nightmare; but aside from the humane slaughter, the improved cleanliness, the better light, the careful government supervision, the electric saws, and the umbrella of their union, what they do docs not seem to have changed so remarkably in these last sixty years. With The Jungle fresh in your mind, you could still tour a Chicago packing house today and have a reasonably good idea of the process of production.

IT IS worth noting that the packing house industry was perhaps the first in the country to adopt modern mass-production methods. At any rate, Henry Ford was much impressed by its use of the conveyer-belt system to move carcasses before stationary workmen who could attack them with their tools, performing the same set of operations repetitively; thus the disassembling of animals served as the inspiration for the assembling of automobiles, while the utilization of “everything but the squeal” may perhaps have served as the inspiration for Ford’s celebrated penurious techniques in the design, production, and sale of the Model T.

But the conveyer belt and the stationary workman in the packing house were dependent on a gravity operation: the beast had to be hoisted up as high as possible in order that his innards, skin, blood, and the rest could be funneled and channeled down from floor to floor. Hence the tall old buildings, which seem now so hopelessly obsolescent in an architectural economy whose landscape is increasingly punctuated with the dashes and hyphens of long, low industrial plants housing one-level, continuous-flow, mechanized and automated operations, and which, even with their occasional up-to-date made-in-Germany sausage-stuffing machines, still have the look of movie sets for a somewhat expurgated and mildly modernized version of The Jungle.

Is that, however, why we persist in reading this book? Surely, if we want only to find out what the packing industry was like in order to compare the picture with what it is like now, we can turn as readily to any substantial reference work. Just as surely, this book does not continue to live because of its unique literary values or aesthetic virtues.

It must be nearly forty years now since Van Wyck Brooks blasted Upton Sinclair for coming to the writing of novels from the wrong set ol preconceptions. And nothing that has happened in the world of fiction since then has served to weaken Brooks’s case. It was his contention that it is folly, and the death of art, for the would-be novelist to think that he can write with full effectiveness about lumberjacks only by becoming one himself and living in the woods for years on end. Such misunderstanding of the author’s role can only create one more bad lumberjack and one more bad novelist. The novelist must maintain a certain reserve, a certain distance from nis characters in order to see them and know them most fully; otherwise he will inevitably collapse into the stammering sentimentalism of the overinvolved.

Unquestionably, subsequent developments in American fiction have in general sustained the Brooks thesis. The false identification of writer with class in the proletarian novel of the thirties, or of writer with uniform in the war novel of the forties, resulted largely in nothing more than flatulent overvaluing of human beings as types or models. Those novels which in turn have stood out from the ruck have been the products of writers whose primary devotion was not to their class or their credo but to their craft.

Besides, the more we examine a work like The Jungle, the more difficult it is to defend its specifically literary merits and the more it becomes obligatory for the commentator to make a pious listing of Sinclair’s inadequacies and exaggerations. Very well. No one could deny that the style of the book is undistinguished at best. No one could deny that he drags out the agony and piles horror upon horror until we want to cry, Stop! Enough! No more! No one could deny that structurally it is a broken-backed book, with most of the intensity concentrated in the first two thirds, which is concerned with the struggle of the immigrants to sustain themselves in Packingtown, and most of the propaganda concentrated in the last third, during Jurgis Rudkus’ conversion to socialism and after the dissolution of his family.

If what the reader wants is a fictional rendering of the psychological effect of prolonged association with the killing of helpless animals, then he should read the unforgettable story by Pierre Gascar, “The House of Blood.” This tale, which deals with the life of a little boy apprenticed to a sadistic provincial French butcher, is to be found in Gascar’s Beasts and Men and is in its own way definitive. If what the reader seeks is an allegorical revelation of some of the overtones of the endless parade of cattle to the abattoir, he must read James Agee’s stunning story, “A Mother’s Tale,” which begins like a bedtime story, complete with talking beasts, and becomes a Christian parable as it grows to encompass a world of millions marching meekly to death camps.

STILL, I should assert that there are certain human values which do not find complete expression in either of these stories and for which one must turn to a book like The Jungle. And so, as I would hope that the educated person would read all three, I must now say what it is about tnis book that docs make us persist in reading it.

For me, it is the furious passion with which Upton Sinclair here apotheosizes the sweat and agony of an essential generation of Americans, an entire generation without which this country could not possibly have achieved what it has. If he had done nothing more, Sinclair would have justified, as one way of functioning, the method not of immolation in the working class but of observation and creation which has gone so far out of fashion in recent years among Western novelists. We need not go through his complete works, so much of his enormous output being cranky or banal, to sustain such a statement about The Jungle, any more than we should feel compelled to justify all of Zola’s immense output in order to come to a similar conclusion about Germinal. Both books were the products of men who proceeded, notebook in hand, to research a new territory and then retired to write, not in tranquillity but in the heat of anger and hope, about the price paid by countless thousands to build what is known as a civilization.

Zola’s brutalized coal miners of northern France and Sinclair’s immigrants of Chicago’s Packingtown can nevermore be fully forgotten. They take their place in history as the cruelly used builders of the modern era, along with all the other untold millions who gave up their lives on the altar of production in the strange and terrible rites of the new industrial age.

This was not exactly what Sinclair had in mind. Judging from his own testimony, as well as from the internal evidence of the book itself, he (and many of his contemporaries, like Jack London) thought of The Jungle as a tract that would help win many converts to the ideas of socialism and to the growing Socialist Party. No doubt it did — at least the years following its serial publication in the mass-circulation Socialist weekly, Appeal to Reason, were the period of maximum growth and influence of American socialism — but over the generations the book’s impact has been quite different. In fact, as a result of the disgust and outrage that swept not only this country but virtually the entire world, once it became clear that The Jungle was not simply the invention of an overheated mind, remedial reform legislation was enacted which did much to halt the revolutionary upsurge that Sinclair had been hoping to implement.

Indeed, when I came to reread The Jungle I found that I had forgotten quite completely the lengthy propagandist passages with which the last portion of the book is so replete, but that I had retained from boyhood an ineradicable memory of the wretchedness of the residents of Packingtown and of the horror of the industry in which they slaved. It is my impression that this is a common experience, and my guess is that no one who reads The Jungle will ever be able to erase from his memory its opening chapters.

No writer, not even the most ardent propagandist, can predict the consequences once he sets his pen to paper. If socialist agitation in the United States was to some degree blunted by the passage of such legislation as the Pure Food and Drug Act, in large part immediately inspired by the reaction of Theodore Roosevelt and others to The Jungle, the ultimate effect of this book on many thousands of minds cannot now be measured, nor will it ever be measurable.

It seems to me precisely now, as this country emerges from the mindless euphoria that has gripped it for at least a decade, that The Jungle must renew its hold on the imaginations of an entirely new generation of readers. For a time Americans of the vast middle range appeared hypnotized by the advertising mentality into believing not only that we “had it made,” but that the American standard of living had been achieved at the cost of certain human expenditures which were at worst a trifle distressing and at best glamorous in a liberal patriotic kind of way. The sacrifice of millions of lives, of millions of proud and hopeful and bravely pioneering spirits, to the accumulation of capital, even though it took place within the memory of many Americans still alive and even though it continues in certain backward areas of American society, became something hardly to be believed, to be relegated to obscurity, to be mentioned, if at all, only jocularly, as with the abominable exploitation of women and children in factories, fields, and sweatshops.

But now we are entering a new time. We sense uneasily that we do not have it made, that with a war-economy prosperity have come new and staggering problems, and that there is a vast suffering world beyond our national boundaries, struggling in a variety of ways to accumulate capital and thus to move, as we have moved, up into the twentieth century. We sense, too, that throughout this world, no matter how the capital is accumulated and no matter whether it be in the Western sector, in the Communist zones, or in the burgeoning new nations of the formerly colonial areas, it is being done at a stupendous cost in human suffering. There is a close parallel between the payment in hunger, blood, and agony of the peoples of the underdeveloped world and that extracted from the immigrant builders of the American empire.

It is a parallel that we will neglect only at our own peril; it is one that should fill us with humility and compassion for all who must strain like beasts of the field to bring the world to the next epoch; it is one that The Jungle will help to sustain in the forefront of our consciousness, which is where it belongs. To the extent that it fulfills this function, this book now begins a new and vital existence as a force in the spiritual and social lives of a new and, it is to be hoped, a responsible generation of readers.