Jungle Name-Check

100 Years Later, the Food Industry Is Still "The Jungle"

Nothing in “The Jungle” sticks with the reader quite like what went into the sausages. There was the rotting ham that could no longer be sold as ham. There were the rat droppings, rat poison and whole poisoned rats. Most chilling, there were the unnamed things “in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”

Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” as a labor exposé. He hoped that the book, which was billed as “the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of wage slavery,” would lead to improvements for the people to whom he dedicated it, “the workingmen of America.” But readers of “The Jungle” were less appalled by Sinclair’s accounts of horrific working conditions than by what they learned about their food. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he famously declared, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

“The Jungle,” and the campaign that Sinclair waged after its publication, led directly to passage of a landmark federal food safety law, which took effect 100 years ago this week. Sinclair awakened a nation not just to the dangers in the food supply, but to the central role government has to play in keeping it safe. But as the poisonings of spinach eaters and Taco Bell customers recently made clear, the battle is far from over — and in recent years, we have been moving in the wrong direction. . . .

To Conclude

Way back at the beginning of this conversation in August, I posted about the book jacket blurb and author introduction in my copy of the book. One of the main points was Sinclair’s disappointment with the response to his book. It raised a public outcry and lead to more legislation than probably any other book has, but that effect missed the target. After its exposure in The Jungle, people got fired up about the meatpacking industry and cried out for reform, which led to the first regulation of the industry and led to much safer meat handling and procedures. The book brought about real change. But Sinclair’s target was capitalism itself, and the particular industry was used just as an example of capitalism’s evils. Which is what I definitely got from reading the book. If you really look at it, the gross treatment of food plays a fairly minor role in the book. Much more omnipresent, I felt, was the overall system of graft and corruption. From Jurgis’s perspective, I got more fired up about that than his more isolated experience with Packingtown.

So why didn’t the general public? It goes back to what I wrote in that earlier post. People are generally self-centered beings. Most people didn’t live in Chicago, fewer were poor Chicagoans, and even fewer were workers in Packingtown. The general public didn’t really care about corruption in Chicago or even improving the plight of the meatpacking labor force. No, all they saw was what affected them directly: the food they had to eat. They wanted the industry cleaned up so they could trust the food coming out of it, and nothing else. They cared only about themselves.

The book didn’t miss its mark, Sinclair just overestimated the inherent goodness of people and their energy for caring. I’m sure everyone felt bad for Jurgis, but translating that emotion into action was more than most people could muster (regardless of his point that it would help them, too).

(Cynicism lesson over.)

The American Dream

These days I get the sense that when people use the phrase “American Dream” they tend to mean winning the lottery or a reality show or in some way realizing “the easy life” without having to earn it. Originally, though, it related more to the U.S. as a land of opportunity. It was definitely something you earned, but the possibility of class mobility existed here in a way that it didn’t anywhere else. If you worked hard enough and persevered, you could eventually go from a life of poverty to a more relaxed middle class life. It’s the drag-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality. Anything is possible if you just work at it hard enough.

So I think Sinclair is very deliberate about Jurgis’s pat response to every adversity at the start of the book: “I will work harder.” According to the American mythology, that will do the trick. But we see that Jurgis--and the whole family--works as hard as humanly possible only to find it’s not enough to save them. Their disadvantages are too great, the obstacles stacked against them too powerful, to simply be overcome by hard work. Sinclair uses Jurgis’s story to deconstruct the idea of the American Dream, to show that it is more myth than mythology. There is an element of truth to the concept, of course, but the reality is much more complex than the “blame the victim” approach that’s generally espoused.

(Or, as someone much less eloquent than Sinclair once said, the “American Dream is only a dream.”)

Finally

Chapter 26

The police, and the strikers also, were determined that there should be no violence; but there was another party interested which was minded to the contrary--and that was the press.

How little things change . . .

As very few of the better class of workingmen could be got for such work, these specimens of the new American hero contained an assortment of the criminals and thugs of the city, besides Negroes and the lowest of foreigners--Greeks, Roumanians, Sicilians, and Slovaks. They had been attracted more by the prospect of disorder than by the big wages; and they made the night hideous with singing and carousing, and only went to sleep when the time came for them to get up to work.

. . . a throng of stupid black Negroes . . .

The Negroes and the "toughs" from the Levee did not want to work, and every few minutes some of them would feel obliged to retire and recuperate. In a couple of days Durham and Company had electric fans up to cool off the rooms for them, and even couches for them to rest on; and meantime they could go out and find a shady corner and take a "snooze," and as there was no place for any one in particular, and no system, it might take hours before their boss discovered them.

Sinclair's issue, obviously, is classism. He seems oblivious to his own racism, though. That is too often the case, that somone focuses on one form of oppression while perpetuating another. An example of a reaction to this is the recent Womanist movement. Women of color felt that feminists left out the race piece and civil rights left out the gender piece, so they started their own movement that included both. I was surprised when I ran across these stereotypes and racist prejudices in The Jungle, but I guess I shouldn't have been.

Chapter 27

And also he labored under another handicap now. He had acquired new standards of living, which were not easily to be altered. When he had been out of work before, he had been content if he could sleep in a doorway or under a truck out of the rain, and if he could get fifteen cents a day for saloon lunches. But now he desired all sorts of other things, and suffered because he had to do without them. He must have a drink now and then, a drink for its own sake, and apart from the food that came with it. The craving for it was strong enough to master every other consideration – he would have it, though it were his last nickel and he had to starve the balance of the day in consequence. . . .

All these horrors afflicted Jurgis all the more cruelly, because he was always contrasting them with the opportunities he had lost.

How true.

Chapter 30

In Massachusetts the percentage of white illiteracy is eight-tenths of one per cent, while in South Carolina it is thirteen and six-tenths per cent

Evidence of the north-south divide. Still seen in politics today.

The power which really governs the United States today is the Railroad Trust. It is the Railroad Trust that runs your state government, wherever you live, and that runs the United States Senate. And all of the trusts that I have named are railroad trusts – save only the Beef Trust! The Beef Trust has defied the railroads – it is plundering them day by day through the Private Car; and so the public is roused to fury, and the papers clamor for action, and the government goes on the warpath! And you poor common people watch and applaud the job, and think it's all done for you, and never dream that it is really the grand climax of the century-long battle of commercial competition – the final death grapple between the chiefs of the Beef Trust and 'Standard Oil,' for the prize of the mastery and ownership of the United States of America!

What's the buzzword today? Multinational corporations: Very large multinationals have budgets that exceed those of many countries. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are multinational corporations. They can have a powerful influence in international relations, given their large economic influence in politicians' representative districts, as well as their extensive financial resources available for public relations and political lobbying. Almost everything that's come out against global warming in the last decade has been funded by oil companies. Again, has anything changed?

"I'm not interested in that – I'm an individualist!" And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was "paternalism," and that if it ever had its way the world would stop progressing. It was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like that; and yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out – for how many millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what freedom was! And they really thought that it was "individualism" for tens of thousands of them to herd together and obey the orders of a steel magnate, and produce hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for him, and then let him give them libraries; while for them to take the industry, and run it to suit themselves, and build their own libraries – that would have been "Paternalism"!

The concept of individual liberty is one of the controlling ideas in the U.S. mindset. It defines us in contrast to other countries more than anything else. Lately I'm especially disturbed by the trend of individuals feeling that their personal rights take precedence over the common good. We seem to be getting even more selfish and individualistic in our thinking than ever before.

Chapter 31

His interests were elsewhere, in the world of ideas. His outward life was commonplace and uninteresting; he was just a hotel-porter, and expected to remain one while he lived; but meantime, in the realm of thought, his life was a perpetual adventure. There was so much to know – so many wonders to be discovered!

Was Sinclair describing blogging? :-)

There's too much to try quoting, but if you want to you can read the Socialist discussion of the wastes of Capitalism, beginning with And then Schliemann went on to outline some of the wastes of competition: . . . It makes you think. I've been told (by those who get paid to know) that hunter-gatherer societies actually spent very little of their day working, on average. Some of our modern advances are wonderful, but it also makes you wonder how much of what we do is excess that we could do away with. Of course, I think history has proven that his alternate vision of a Socialist world that follows is completely unrealistic, too. Still, it seems like there ought to be something we can take from the book, when I don't see it having really changed a thing. Most disheartening.

the plight of immigrants

I watched a movie this weekend called Dirty Pretty Things, starring Audrey Tautou of Amelie. It reminded me in many ways of The Jungle because it is another story about the struggle of immigrants, both legal and illegal, to survive. The movie, though it is set in modern day London, shows the same manipulations of immigrants by those in power. Made me very angry at times. It was an interesting parallel (and a good suspense movie).

BL

hey all. i want you to know that I've picked up the book again. And while I'm only 30 or so pages in, I plan to pursue it as time allows.

And the Grand Finale

In the Star's series on local food talks about how it gets from the farm to your local grocer.

Another Long One

Chapter 20

All day long his man would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy; though there are a few other things that are great among us including our drink-bill, which is a billion and a quarter of dollars a year, and doubling itself every decade.

Everything I’ve read/come across about the particular American paradigm is that we tend to work harder and play harder than almost anyone else. The drag-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps attitude that anything is possible through hard work and our massive consumption of alcohol seem to be two of our defining characteristics as a nation.

Chapter 22

. . . to be suddenly set loose beneath the open sky, to behold new landscapes, new places, and new people every hour! . . . and to now be his own master, working as he pleased and when he pleased, and facing a new adventure every hour! . . . What with plenty to eat and fresh air and exercise that was taken as it pleased him, he would waken from his sleep and start off not knowing what to do with his energy, stretching his arms, laughing, singing old songs of home that came back to him. . . . He never asked where he was nor where he was going; the country was big enough, he knew, and there was no danger of his coming to the end of it.

Did these passages make anyone else want to become a hobo?

Chapter 23

All of this might seem diabolical, but the saloon-keeper was in no wise to blame for it. He was in the same plight as the manufacturer who has to adulterate and misrepresent his product. If he does not, some one else will; and the saloonkeeper, unless he is also an alderman, is apt to be in debt to the big brewers, and on the verge of being sold out.

Chapter 24

He saw the world of civilization then more plainly than ever he had seen it before; a world in which nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised by those who possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not. . . . He had lost in the fierce battle of greed, and so was doomed to be exterminated; and all society was busied to see that he did not escape the sentence.

Chapter 25

Since it was Jurgis' first experience [of mugging], these details naturally caused him some worriment; but the other laughed coolly--it was the way of the game, and there was no helping it. Before long Jurgis would think no more of it than they did in the yards of knocking out a bullock. "It's a case of us or the other fellow, and I say the other fellow every time," he observed.
"Still," said Jurgis, reflectively, "he never did us any harm."
"He was doing it to somebody as hard as he could, you can be sure of that," said his friend.

Each of these three passages illustrates in my mind the harmful attitude that develops in the face of a competitive world. The idea that I have to cheat, rob, and steal to keep up because everyone else is. It’s really not that bad that I do so, because I’m just being like everyone else. And, in fact, I have to be better at it than them to really get ahead. There is no thought given to helping others or even the pain I might be causing them, because they will hurt me in the same way if given the same chance.