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NLA News - home January 2006 Volume XVI Number 4

Aiming for the Heart

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Upton Sinclair, portrait bust, studio at 56 Fifth Ave, N.Y.
glass negative; 5.0 x 7.0 inch
George Grantham Bain Collection
Library of Congress

Barry York describes how Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, shocked the American public and forced changes in legislation

Upton Beall Sinclair jnr (1878–1968) was one of America’s most important writers. He wrote 90 books over a 90-year life span, but it is for one book, The Jungle, that he will always be remembered.

Published in 1906, The Jungle so shocked the United States’ reading public with its description of conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry that Congress enacted legislation to rectify the problems. President Theodore Roosevelt coined the term ‘muckraking’ as a result of Sinclair’s book. Intended as disparagement, Sinclair wore it as a badge of honour. In 1906, he said: ‘What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of art-for-art’s-sake than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin. He thinks of getting ashore—and then there will be time enough for art.’

The Jungle is a classic work of socialist realism. Critic Christopher Hitchens has described it as ‘the most fully realized instance of the genre, more telling and more moving than even the works of Dickens and Zola’. Sinclair’s objective was to expose the ways in which the capitalist class, in pursuit of maximum profit, exploits and discards the working people. Jack London called the book ‘the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage-slavery’.

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Cover of The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair (London: Penguin, 1936)

To convey his message, Sinclair based the story on a family of Lithuanian immigrants who were part of the influx into America of millions of Europeans at the turn of the 20th century. At the beginning, Jurgis Rudkus, the main character, believes enthusiastically in the ‘American dream’.

The opening chapter captures Jurgis’ optimism through Sinclair’s description of his wedding to Ona Lukoszaite. The Lithuanian veselija is a joyous, giddying event in which a three-hour dance, known as the acziarimas, takes place. During the acziarimas, guests donate money into a hat for the bride and groom. This is meant to help the couple pay for the feast and help them through their first year together. However, there are guests who cheat the newlyweds, others who cannot afford to contribute, and the saloon keeper with political connections who overcharges for the event.

The guests at the wedding share a dependency for survival on employment in the slaughterhouse and meat packing plant of Chicago’s Packingtown district. They are all impoverished, overworked and suffer varying degrees of illness arising from their occupations. The wedding costs the equivalent of a year’s wage. Jurgis and Ona start married life in debt, but this is a minor problem compared to what is before them: acute poverty, unemployment, hunger, illness, rape, crime, imprisonment and premature death.

At the start of the story, Jurgis responds to problems with the mantra that he must ‘work harder’. For Sinclair, Jurgis is representative of the working class: an essentially decent man whose social and family values are rendered impracticable by the capitalist system. The literary quality of the book sometimes suffers through the technique of using characters to represent larger social forces and attitudes, but its significance definitely does not.

Jurgis’ confusion, desperation and alienation are overcome in the book’s final chapters when he joins the Socialist Party. These chapters tend to be overly didactic, as Sinclair acknowledged in his autobiography (1963) when he said: ‘I ran wild at the end, attempting to solve all the problems of America.’ None the less, for those who sympathise with the book’s message, as I do, the closing lines are stirring indeed: ‘Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!’

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Title page of Dragon’s Teeth, by Upton Sinclair (New York: Viking Press, 1945)
In 1943, Upton Sinclair won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Dragon’s Teeth
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Cover of A Plea for Russia: A Boycotted Article, by Upton Sinclair (Melbourne: Andrade’s, 1918)

The Jungle was a bestseller in the United States and Britain, and its translation into 17 languages made Sinclair an international literary figure. The Jungle inspired scores of other successful social protest writers, including Iceland’s Halldor Kiljan Laxness (1902–98) who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. Sinclair was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1932 by George Bernard Shaw, but without success. He did, however, receive the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for his anti-Nazi novel, Dragon’s Teeth.

Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, on 20 September 1878. His father, an alcoholic, moved the family to New York in 1888. His parents were extremely poor but his grandparents, with whom he spent extended periods, were wealthy. He claimed that experiencing these extremes pointed him in the socialist direction. His outlook was influenced by the books of English Fabian Robert Blatchford, Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, American radicals Jack London and Frank Norris, and the investigative journalism of proud ‘muckrakers’ Ida M. Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker.

From the age of 15, Sinclair financed his studies at New York City College by writing ‘dime novels’. He kept writing during studies at Columbia University and had his first novel, Springtime and Harvest (reissued as King Midas), published in 1901. Three other books preceded The Jungle, but none were commercial successes.

However, the civil war novel, Manassas, published in 1904, was pivotal to his later success. It caught the attention of Fred D. Warren, editor of the socialist magazine Appeal to Reason, and Sinclair was paid an advance to write a serialised novel that would portray ‘wage slavery’ rather than ‘chattel slavery’.

Sinclair decided on the Chicago stockyards as the setting because of a recent strike there. He went to Chicago in October 1904 and, as he put it in his autobiography, ‘lived among the wage slaves’. The conditions of life deeply affected him. He wrote: ‘I went about, white-faced and thin, partly from under-nourishment, partly from horror.’ He immersed himself into the working-class community, learning from their experiences, and he infiltrated the plant to see things for himself. He wrote: ‘So long as I kept moving, no one would heed me.’ He sought out and learned from ‘every sort of person’, not just the workers but also ‘lawyers, doctors, dentists, nurses, policemen, politicians, real estate agents’.

He spent three months incessantly writing, ‘with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all the pain that life had meant to me’. In 1905, the book was serialised in the Appeal. Efforts to have it published as a book initially failed, with six publishers rejecting it. A consultant at Macmillan’s suggested that ‘what is at the bottom of his fierceness is not nearly so much desire to help the poor as hatred of the rich’. Sinclair decided to publish the book himself, appealing to readers of the Appeal to Reason for advance orders. When nearly one thousand responded, the publisher Doubleday was persuaded to take the manuscript on board.

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Unknown photographer
Author Upton Sinclair picketing Rockefeller Building 1914
gelatin silver photograph
George Grantham Bain Collection
Library of Congress

In 1915, Sinclair moved to California with his wife, Mary Craig, and in 1934 he won the Democratic Party’s pre-selection to contest the state’s election. The ruling class waged a vicious media campaign against him, which is documented in Greg Mitchell’s The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (1992) and in Sinclair’s I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935). He was called a communist and accused of wanting to ‘sovietize California’ and introduce ‘free love’. For most of his life Sinclair defended communists, but his socialism was in the social-democratic mould. He parted company with Marxists in his belief that socialism could be achieved through electoral processes in America, without the need for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. After World War II, in the Cold War years, he became increasingly anticommunist.

He was an incredibly prolific novelist, essayist, playwright and short story writer. Many of his works are lengthy and based on intricate research and investigation; it is hard to comprehend how one man could have accomplished so much. His ‘Lanny Budd’ series, published between 1940 and 1953, consisted of 11 historical novels, totaling four million words.

The Sinclair Collection at Indiana University’s Lilly Library contains about nine tons of material, including more than 250 000 letters. Correspondents include Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Sinclair Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi and both Presidents Roosevelt.

The National Library holds nearly all of Sinclair’s books, including a first edition of The Jungle and four subsequent editions (1936, 1946, 1949 and 1971). Other works include Samuel the Seeker (c.1910), King Coal (1917), The Profits of Religion (1936), The Brass Check (1970), Oil! (1927), Boston (1928), World’s End (1940), Dragon’s Teeth (1945) and The Cup of Fury (1957).

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‘Upton Sinclair for Governor’, reproduced from I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, by Upton Sinclair (New York: Farrar, 1935)

The Library also holds hard copies of EPIC (‘End Poverty in California’), the newspaper Sinclair published while campaigning for election as governor of California in 1934. And there is an Australian pamphlet, published by Andrade’s of Melbourne in 1918, titled A Plea for Russia: A Boycotted Article. In it, Sinclair protests the mainstream media’s failure to print an article by him in defence of the Russian Revolution.

Upton Sinclair has been the subject of several biographies and critical studies. The Library’s collection includes those by Floyd Dell (c.1927 and 1970), Leon Harris (1975), Jon A. Yoder (1975) and William A. Bloodworth (c.1977). Mary Craig Sinclair’s Southern Belle (1957) also provides insights into her husband. Suk Bong Suh’s Upton Sinclair and The Jungle was published by Seoul University, South Korea, in 1997.

In his autobiography, Sinclair expressed satisfaction that The Jungle had helped clean up the meat industry, but he was disappointed that readers and politicians were more concerned with unhygienic conditions than with the exploitation of the workers. He said: ‘I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.’

Upton died on 25 November 1968, and is buried at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington DC.

BARRY YORK is a researcher and writer based in Canberra. His email address is: garocon@pcug.org.au

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