The Jungle (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (58 page)

—So spoke an orator upon the platform; and two thousand pairs of eyes were fixed upon him, and two thousand voices were cheering his every sentence. The orator had been the head of the city’s relief bureau in the stockyards, until the sight of misery and corruption had made him sick. He was young, hungry-looking, full of fire; and as he swung his long arms and beat up the crowd, to Jurgis he seemed the very spirit of the revolution. “Organize! Organize! Organize!” —that was his cry. He was afraid of this tremendous vote, which his party had not expected, and which it had not earned. “These men are not Socialists!” he cried. “This election will pass, and the excitement will die, and people will forget about it; and if you forget about it, too, if you sink back and rest upon your oars, we shall lose this vote that we have polled today, and our enemies will laugh us to scorn! It rests with you to take your resolution—now, in the flush of victory, to find these men who have voted for us, and bring them to our meetings, and organize them and bind them to us! We shall not find all our campaigns as easy as this one. Everywhere in the country to-night the old party politicians are studying this vote, and setting their sails by it; and nowhere will they be quicker or more cunning than here in our own city. Fifty thousand Socialist votes in Chicago means a municipal-ownership Democracy in the spring! And then they will fool the voters once more, and all the powers of plunder and corruption will be swept into office again! But whatever they may do when they get in, there is one thing they will not do, and that will be the thing for which they were elected! They will not give the people of our city municipal ownership—they will not mean to do it, they will not try to do it; all that they will do is give our party in Chicago the greatest opportunity that has ever come to Socialism in America! We shall have the sham reformers self-stultified and self-convicted; we shall have the radical Democracy left without a lie with which to cover its nakedness! And then will begin the rush that will never be checked, the tide that will never turn till it has reached its flood—that will be irresistible, overwhelming—the rallying of the outraged working-men of Chicago to our standard! And we shall organize them, we shall drill them, we shall marshal them for the victory! We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us—and Chicago will be ours!
Chicago will be ours!
CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!”
³³

1
(p.5)
“Eik! Eik!
Uzdaryk-duris!”: Much of Sinclair’s Lithuanian is slang, mixed with Polish, German, and Russian words and spellings.

2
(p. 7)
quarter of a million inhabitants:
Sinclair’s figure is higher than that cited by historians, who estimate the population of the stockyard district at approximately 60,000 in this period.

3
(p.29)
Now, sitting in the trolley car:
Packingtown was 3 or 4 miles from downtown Chicago.

4
(p. 34)
thoughts about “germs”:
Louis Pasteur had developed his germ theory of disease in the mid-1800s, but it was still an unfamiliar concept for many people, which is perhaps why Sinclair places the word in quotation marks.

5
(p. 38)
Brown’s ... Durham’s:
Competitors Brown’s and Durham’s are fictional names for the two meat industry giants Armour and Swift. Both companies produced a wide array of meat and ancillary products.

6
(p. 41) government
inspector:
The first Meat Inspection Act was passed in 1891, but as Sinclair suggests in the text that follows, it was not rigorously enforced.

7
(p. 62)
“laissez-faire”:
This French term means “Let people do as they please.” It refers to a system of economics whereby owners of industry and business set rules of competition and conditions of labor without government regulation or regard for the public interest.

8
. (p.62) Malthus: Political economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) blamed the decline in living conditions in nineteenth-century England on overpopulation and the irresponsibility of the lower classes, and urged that the family size of the poor be regulated. Sinclair suggests that even those who are tough-minded in theory are less so in practice.

9
(p. 72)
“War Whoop League”:
Sinclair perhaps names this political organization to make reference to other political “machines,” such as the Republican Party’s Wigwam, in Chicago, and the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall, in New York; both names have Native American associations.

10
(p. 72)
no law about the age of children:
In fact, child labor laws were already on the books, but the industry found ways to circumvent them. In this period, 27 percent of stockyard families depended on earnings by children under sixteen.

11
(p. 77)
children who are now engaged in earning their livings:
Census figures for 1900 show 186,358 children between ten and thirteen years of age, and 501,849 fourteen and fifteen years old employed in nonagricultural occupations. These figures exclude children who worked less than half-time.

12
(p.80)
doctored... colored:
In 1899 and 1900 the Pure Food Investigating Committee found many of the adulterations described here, and recommended a ban on such additives. However, there was a lack of scientific evidence to prove that preservatives, coloring agents, and other additives were harmful.

13
(p. 98)
an oath of which he did not understand a word:
Naturalization procedures were reformed in 1906, and knowledge of English became a basic requirement.

14
(p. 102)
a Dante or a Zola:
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Emile Zola (1840-1902) were authors known for their vivid descriptions of the extremes of human misery, from the
Inferno
section of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
to Zola’s lurid representations of poverty and degradation in nineteenth-century France.

15
(p. 117)
one great firm, the Beef Trust:
As early as May 1888, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution providing for an investigation of the “beef trust.” The findings were credited with influencing Congress to pass the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. However, no direct action was taken against the monopolized meatpackers until 1917.

16
(p. 122)
the old story of Prometheus bound:
In Greek mythology, Zeus commanded that Prometheus be chained and girded to the summit of a mountain, as punishment for bringing fire down from heaven and teaching mortals how to use it.

17
(p. 137)
on the “Lêvée”:
More than 200 brothels and scores of saloons, gambling houses, and peep shows operated within Chicago’s southside Levee district. Reformers ultimately had this vice district closed down.

18
(p. 175)
the “Bridewell”:
The original Bridewell Prison took its name from the London area in which it was located until 1863. “Bridewell” later came to be used as a general term for a prison.

19
(p. 211)
She was a “settlement-worker”:
The “settlement idea” originated in the mid-nineteenth century in England, where university students “settled” in working-class neighborhoods to help relieve poverty and despair. In the United States, settlement-workers, many of whom were women, helped immigrants adjust, providing classes and recreation, and acting as advocates.

20
(p. 232)
system of railway freight-subways:
Chicago’s freight-subways, which ran on 60 miles of track, became operational in 1904 and functioned until 1959.

21
(p. 239) the harlot’s progress: William Hogarth’s famous series of engravings
The Harlot’s Progress
(1732) portrays a young woman’s arrival in London, her seduction, and her subsequent decline from virtue to prostitution, ending with her death from venereal disease.

22
(p. 250)
the head of an Antinous:
Antinous was a beautiful young man beloved by the Roman emperor Hadrian. After the early death of Antinous, Hadrian deified him and built temples and statues to honor him.

23
(p. 265)
kept prisoners for weeks:
The coercive practices Sinclair describes here were known as “white slavery.” A vast literature describing and protesting the traffic in women proliferated in this period. In 1910 Congress passed the Mann Act, which prohibited the interstate traffic in women for purposes of prostitution.

24
(p. 283)
“green” negroes
from...
the far South:
The practice of bringing black workers up from the South to break strikes was not limited to Packingtown; in 1905 black workers were brought to Chicago to break a Teamsters’ strike. During these strikes, blacks frequently became targets of white violence.

25
(p. 295)
the Republic’s future in the Pacific
and in
South America:
The phrase refers to U.S. hegemony in the Philippines and Cuba around the turn of the century, and to the growing presence of U.S. business interests in South America.

26
(p. 313)
‘the insolence of office and the spurns’:
Sinclair quotes from a section of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy
(Hamlet,
by William Shakespeare; act 3, scene 1):

27
(p. 313) two hostile
armies are
facing each other: The Russo-Japanese War (1904—1905) developed out of the rivalry between Russia and Japan for dominance in Korea and Manchuria. Japan defeated Russia.

28
(p. 324)
Bismarck ...
the
“International”:
In 1878, seven years after the Franco-Prussian War, Prince Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s first Chancellor, introduced an “anti-socialist law,” hoping to weaken the Communist movement, also known as the International. The law made all social democratic organizations illegal.

29
(p. 331)
Granger,...
a
“middle-of the-road” Populist:
The Granger movement, as part of its mission to work on behalf of farmers, sought to regulate railroad rates for passengers and freight. The Populist Party was formed primarily to express the protests of farmers; “middle-of-the-road” Populists opposed merger with other political parties.

30
(p. 343)
Mazeppa-ride:
The hero of Lord Byron’s poem of the same name, Mazeppa was discovered in a love intrigue with the young wife of a count. As revenge, the count had him tied to a wild horse that was then turned loose—hence, the Mazeppa-ride.

31
(p. 352)
“On the other hand, if wage-slavery were abolished ... and the establishing of divorce by mutual consent”:
This intriguing list of ideas popular with radicals and feminists includes reference to nutritionist Horace Fletcher, who was known as the Great Masticator for advocating the thorough chewing of food.

32
(p.353) “the
books of Mrs. Gilman; and then take Kropotkin’s ‘Fields, Factories, and Workshops’ ”:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a feminist and an author. Russian geographer and revolutionary Piotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) published the work Dr. Schliemann mentions in 1901.

33
(p. 357) end of the text: Sinclair made many changes and omissions when the serial version of
The Jungle
was republished in novel form—among them, the elimination of a final paragraph that read: “All of which was at one o‘clock on the morning of the day after election; and at one o’lock of the afternoon of the same day Jurgis was handcuffed to a detective, and on his way to serve a two-years’ sentence in a state’s prison for assault with intent to kill.”

—George Bernard Shaw, from a letter to Upton Sinclair

 

At the beginning of the twentieth century, industrialization was forcing its way through urban America at an astounding rate, leaving little time for a popular social .conscience to evolve. This conscience had to be developed and delivered to the public by a group of journalists, including Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, David Graham Phillips, Ray Stannard Baker, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and Upton Sinclair. The carefully documented findings of these writers exposed the monopoly and corruption lurking in the big corporations and trusts, and shed light on the atrocious working conditions at the heart of industrialization.

The scandals produced by such provocative writing spurred imitators to publish sensationalistic articles that were deliberately calibrated to arouse public outcry. The writing of these imitators, which resembled modern tabloid copy, prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to publicly condemn irresponsible journalism while giving lip service to soothing social unrest. Citing John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Pro
gress, Roosevelt likened sensationalistic journalists to the Man with the Muck Rake—“the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.” The term “muckraking” soon came to be used for all writers who attempted to expose corruption, and
The Jungle
became the paradigm of the genre.

Seeking to raise public awareness of the inhuman working conditions within the meatpacking industry, the socialist weekly
Appeal
to Reason hired Upton Sinclair to research Chicago’s meatpacking plants. Fueled by the assignment and his own growing reputation, Sinclair relentlessly chronicled the atrocities suffered by a family of immigrant workers at the hands of the unfeeling meatpacking bosses. After
The Jungle
was serialized in the weekly, Sinclair was unable at first to procure a deal for the book version and was forced to publish it himself; he even asked his friend and collaborator Jack London to generate publicity for his novel based on the latter’s socialist convictions and compassion for laborers.