I just read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. I’ve been meaning to read it for quite some time because I’ve always heard it was such a shocking expose of the meat-packing industry, the uproar it caused at the time pushed T. Roosevelt and Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and in turn was largely responsible for the creation of the FDA.
However, I just don’t get it. To me, I found it to be more of a condemnation of laissez-faire capitalism and corruption in the unions and government, and a call to socialism as the solution. I believe the book could have been based around any turn-of-the-century industry to similar effect, since working conditions and corporate abuses at the time were pretty much universally poor.
So, how is it I’m missing the point of the book by so much? I guess I can see how certain passages could have startled a contemporary audience (one in particular reportedly disturbed Roosevelt so much that upon reading it, he tossed his breakfast sausage out the window). Is it that I’m so jaded by hard-core, modern-style violence that it’s just not that shocking to me, so I’m only picking up a secondary underlying subtext?
workers falling into grinding machines and being made into ground meat which is then sold and consumed by people
to be just a tad gruesome?
It had previously been assumed by most Americans that the meat they were eating came from more conventional sources and was prepared under sanitary conditions. After The Jungle was released, ground beef sales went down by more than 50%. In reaction, meat packers radically cleaned up their act, even going so far as to opening their facilities to public tours so that people could reassure themselves that their hamburger came from something with 4 legs. (This information brought to you by The History Channel’s special yesterday on American Food.)
I suppose one could argue that conditions were no worse for the workers than in other industries, but the ick factor for those consuming the product was much higher. And it was those consumers (and voters) who ultimately put enough pressure on both the meatpackers themselves and their government to do something about the problem. I mean, hearing a small child may have died threading the shuttle on the machine that wove the fabric that was used to make your t-shirt is one thing. Hearing you may be eating Uncle Jonas is another!
That’s what it is. That’s what Sinclair was trying to do. It’s just, when it was published, most of his middle class readers didn’t care too much about corporate abuses of the working class (because it didn’t affect them personally) and more about the unsanitary slaughterhouse practices (which did). Like Sinclair said about tha book, “I aimed for their hearts and hit their stomachs.”