Meatpacking and Muckraking (The Jungle, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, we welcome editor Kenneth W. Warren to discuss Sinclair's background, how his political commitments informed his literary endeavors, The Jungle's effect on regulatory efforts in the United States, and the techniques the novel uses to achieve its engrossing effect.

Kenneth W. Warren is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (1993), So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (2003), and What Was African American Literature? (2011).

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Jungle, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/TheJungleNL.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/nortonlibrary.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today, we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, as we interview its editor, Kenneth W. Warren. In Part One, we discuss how this muckraking novel came to be, the effect that this novel has had on the food we eat, and how Sinclair's politics inform this great novel. Kenneth W. Warren is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of What was African American Literature?; So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism; and Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Kenneth W. Warren, welcome to the Norton Library Podcast.

[Kenneth:] Uh, Mark, it's great to be here. Thank you.

[Mark:] Such a pleasure to have you on to discuss Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. And Ken, maybe we should start by talking about Upton Sinclair himself: who was he and where did he come from, what was his background, what do we need to know about him?

[Kenneth:] He, um, described his early childhood as a member of a – a poor branch of a fairly wealthy Southern family as – as crucial to the development of his sensibility and his outlook. Um, he, um, lived with a father who was actually an alcoholic who struggled with, um, keeping the family afloat, and he was able to see, uh, what it was like to be in proximity to wealth, even when he didn't have any. He said, uh, um, was his, uh, fate from his earliest childhood to live in the presence of wealth that belonged to others, and he attributed that experience as, in essence, making him a socialist before he ever became aware of what socialism was.

[Mark:] So, did this manifest itself—this ide – these ideas about class and wealth—through writing, through activities, his personal life, or did he mostly just explore this as a writer?

[Kenneth:] Through every phase of his life—that's one of the things that's really kind of remarkable about him—certainly, through his writing. Uh, Sinclair was extraordinarily prolific. Although we know him, uh, now, um, most prominently from – from The Jungle, he wrote over a hundred novels, um, and he actually won the Pulitzer Prize, um, in, I think, 1943 for a novel, Dragon's Teeth, which was actually focused on the rise of, uh, national socialism in – in Nazi, uh, Nazi Germany. But all of this writing, in some sense, was concerned with inequality: the problem that the poor and the working, uh, faced in relation to, uh, to great wealth. This was not merely his literary passion, it was a political passion, and he was, you know, as we say, a card-carrying socialist and early supporter of, uh, Eugene, uh – uh, Debs. And, uh, by the, um, the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s, he was running himself as a candidate on a socialist ticket.

[Mark:] Right. 

[Kenneth:] When he moved to California, he actually ran, um, as a socialist, uh, for a campaign that actually garnered national, uh, as well as international attention. So, his pol – his political views were pervasive: they defined his writing, they defined his politics and his actions and his relationships with his family.

[Mark:] Ken, where did Upton Sinclair grow up and around what time?

[Kenneth:] You know, he, uh, grew up in Baltimore, um, his family was from Virginia, he spent time, um – um, in New York, and his early, uh, adult life was – was basically in the, uh – uh, in the Northeast. And this was in the latter part of the, uh, of the 19th century. And among the things to keep in mind about this moment when he was growing up is that this was, uh, part of the moment that we know as the Gilded Age, which meant the, uh, vast rise of economic inequality. Uh, the number of millionaires in the United States, uh, grew dramatically during the course of his, uh, youth and early, uh, early childhood. And the identity of the nation—you know, the democratic nation—became almost, um – um, inseparable from the identity, from the claim about, uh, dramatic economic prosperity.

[Mark:] So, when he publishes The Jungle, is Sinclair already established as a prominent writer or is it really The Jungle that turns him into a literary celebrity?

[Kenneth:] The Jungle does, uh, really mark the, um, advent of his celebrity as such, but he was – he did – he had written novels, uh, before that moment, um, that – novels that didn't quite catch on, um, the most prominent being a novel called, uh, Manassas, which was a Civil War, uh, novel that he thought and felt, uh, was, uh, continuing in the vein, um, that, you know, the vein of literature and social criticism that – that, um, Harriet Beecher Stowe had established in, uh, in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The novel didn't get – produce the kind of interest and excitement that he had expected, so he was, uh, as a novelist who had real ambition, uh, somewhat disappointed by that – by that. But really, it was The Jungle that put him on the map as a, uh, as a novelist. He was, however, I guess the other thing to keep in mind, um – um, identified as a socialist wri – wri – writing The Jungle, which accounts for – for the fact that it was a book that was published, um, by, um, in the socialist journal, Appeal to Reason.

[Mark:] Can you put into context what Sinclair being a socialist at around the turn of the 20th century would mean as opposed to what it would mean if a novelist con – called himself a socialist in the 21st century?

[Kenneth:] Uh, that's really good – a really good question and a really good thing to think about. Among the, um – um, features of the moment when, uh, Sinclair is becoming a – a socialist is that there is a heightened attention at this moment to – to economic inequality. This was also, by the time he's writing, a moment that we call the Progressive Era, when liberal reformers were becoming, um, you know, crucially aware that without some check on the growth of American, uh – um, industry, the plight of working people, um, and their capacity to, uh, you know, live decent lives, I mean, was – it was difficult, and there was – there was reason for a great deal of pessimism. So, socialism, in some sense—even though it was connected with a certain amount of radicalism—it existed in the Progressive Era as, um, you know, part of a broader sensibility that, uh, American society did have to do something about its working class, uh – uh – um, its working class as a whole, the number of immigrants who were coming into the country, uh, to fill the ranks of a growing, uh – uh, growing industry, and who were, um – um, you know, being clustered—whether it was in New York or Chicago or other industrial centers—in slums, uh, that were, you know, noxious and, um, not, uh, conducive to living a – living a decent life. 

[Mark:] So, it’s possible that Sinclair's novel—an unapologetic socialist, uh, view—it wouldn't be dismissed in 1906 out of hand, it would be considered just as having a particular political bent as opposed to, let's say, today.

[Kenneth:] Uh, yeah, absolutely, because one of the in – interesting features of The, uh, of The Jungle as a literary and a political phenomenon was, uh, the interest that people like, uh, uh, uh, President, uh, Theodore Roosevelt showed in the novel. Roosevelt was a, uh, you know, understood himself to be a progressive. Um, he had been, he had actually taken a particular interest in the quality of, uh, meat, uh, that was being – was available to the American public, um, as a result of his, um, um, um, military career where he, uh, purportedly saw, um, meat that was, um, intended for the troops...

[Mark:] Uh huh.

[Kenneth:] ...exposed on the, I think it was on the – the deck of a ship and obviously spoiling. And the question, uh, was raised about how many troops, um, in the – the, U.S. troops in the Spanish-American War, had been sickened by, uh, uh, inferior or spoiled, uh, me – meat products. And so, Sinclair was someone who could send a copy of The Jungle to Roosevelt with the expectation that it wouldn't be dismissed out of hand, which it wasn't, and wou– could be used in some respects to bring to bear some degree of regulation on the meat industry, Roosevelt felt, without necessarily embracing—well, I shouldn't say necessarily—without at all embracing the full implication of what, uh, of – of what Sinclair's socialist politics were. So, Roosevelt was not someone who had to run immediately kicking and screaming from his association...

[Mark:] Right.

[Kenneth:] ...with Sinclair, although he did have to manage that very, um, acutely in the effort to actually get some – some measure of, um, regulation pass.

[Mark:] I'd like to talk to you a little bit about Roosevelt and how this novel landed in just a minute, but before we do, is there any information about how Sinclair happened upon this topic as fertile for exposing a wrong in society and making it the substance of a novel?

[Kenneth:] One of the things to keep in mind was that Sinclair was hardly alone in, you know, turning, um, um, you know, the – the lens of exposé on, uh, American industry. This was the era of the, uh, muckraker, muckraking, uh, journalist, you know: Lincoln Steffens and Shame of the Cities, um, Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives being such some examples of this. And other, uh, writers, um—activists, you know, as we would call them now—had been very much aware of, um, the, you know, the horrible state of the, uh, meatpacking industry, and, um, Sinclair had actually written, um, an exposé that caught the attention of the editor of the Appeal to Reason and so, um, in some sense the writing of The Jungle was actually a kind of, uh, uh, you know, writing on spec to, uh, uh, to a certain extent: can you do something, can you fictionalize this in a way that will have some real effect on the, uh, on the American public?

[Mark:] So, it started as journalism or an editorial?

[Kenneth:] Yes, it's journalism, yes.

[Mark:] And he fictionalized it to become The Jungle?

[Kenneth:] Yes. 

[Mark:] When we're thinking about The Jungle as exposé, doesn't it seem like Sinclair is exposing a lot of wrongs, not just the ills of the meatpacking industry and the quality of the meat, but also labor conditions and the way immigrants are treated and women and on and on and on? It seems like there's quite a lot of things in this entire cosmos that Sinclair is describing that need to be reformed.

[Kenneth:] Well absolutely, and he was, I mean, and he was adamant in turning his attention to, you know, the lens of his criticism on the meatpacking industry. He was not making a, uh, an argument about the singularity of meatpacking as an ill within American society. It was in his mind, um, you know, a particularly sort of graphic instance of the problem of – of capitalism, and he had intended to and indeed did go on to looking at, um, uh, you know, uh, mining, looking at journalism, and other industries, uh, in terms of their corruption and their role in, um, reproducing the horrible inequality that was characterizing the life of working people in what was, um, a – an increasingly wealthy nation—that wealth being distributed dramatically – dramatically upward. So yes, meatpacking was in some sense just an example. 

[Mark:] It seems like, Ken, when you're writing a novel like this with Sinclair's motive in mind, that one of the worst things you could do would be to exaggerate your point, because if your novel then had the reputation of being sensationalistic, it would lose all credibility. So, do we have a sense of how realistic the depiction of the meatpacking plants and all of the practices of those businesses actually were?

[Kenneth:] Yeah, absolutely. Sinclair was aware that the meat packing industry, um, and the politicians that supported that industry were, um, on the lookout for any criticism, widespread criticism, of their labor practices but particularly of their, um, quality control or – or their lack – lack thereof. And so, they were more than, uh, ready and actually worked very, very hard to discredit the account of their practices, uh, that were, uh, depicted and fictionalized in the – in The Jungle. So, Sinclair spent an extraordinary amount of time, he was a great journalist, um, documenting every charge that went into the book. Um, when the book first came out and there was a concern, was when the book was being published and there was a concern about its accuracy, the publisher sought to, um, you know, verify what Sinclair had – had written, and in the first instance a, um, an, you know, quote unquote “independent investigator” came back with charges that—well most of the charges that the book had made were – were egregious and exaggerated—um, um, and but – but a truly independent investigator came back and showed that everything that was in The Jungle— with the exception of the implication that – that on occasion a worker who had fallen into a, you know, a vat that was rendered into lard, that – that, uh, actually happened, there was no evidence for that—but for all of the charges that the book leveled against the – but all, you know, for – for all those charges, um, there was ample evidence of the accuracy of the – the depictions within the Jungle.

[Mark:] So when the book is published in 1906, is there significant blowback or lawsuits? Did the beef trust collaborate to have a public relations campaign, or did they know that they were beaten by all of these observations and by the power of this narrative?

[Kenneth:] They fought back. Um, there was no – no conc – you know, no simple conceding to the accuracy. They fought back in every way that they, uh, uh, uh, in every way that they could, even, uh, when, um, it became clear that the, uh, public outrage at the, you know, quality of meat products was gonna demand that there be some level of government or Congressional, um, um, action. Um, and the battle in both the House and the Senate to actually, uh, put in place regulation was, um, you know, fought tooth and nail, um, [Coughs] excuse me, um, over the course of the, uh, the year after the – after The Jungle was, uh, published. Uh, the, you know, you could say one, um, clear success with respect to changing practices was the, um, um, passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act – uh – Drug – Drugs Act of 19, uh, 1906. So, there was some real legislation that had an immediate positive effect on the meatpacking industry as a result of the debates and the inability of the meatpacking, um, industry to simply to sweep all of this under the rug.

[Mark:] Yeah, you say immediate; it's the same year that it's pu – that The Jungle is published, which is unheard of that a novel would cause the United States government to act this quickly. Could you distill what the specific complaints, uh, were that were addressed in that legislation because The Jungle, it seems to expose lots and lots of things that you wouldn't wish would happen in that industry.

[Kenneth:] I can't enumerate all, um, all of them from the, uh, you know, I probably should have listed them from off the top of my head but a couple of things that stand out had to do with, um, um, regulating practices for, um, disposing of injured or diseased, uh, animals—um, making sure that those animals were not included in the, um, you couldn't just sort of sweep them into the pile with everything else. Um, and among the other things, uh, that the Act a – addressed was the question of dating of products, um, um, as well. So, it was moving in – in some sense you could say it was, uh, uh, the Act addressed those matters of meat production and canning and distribution that struck the public as most, uh, most unacceptable. This was, um, and – and, uh, Sinclair realized as you know sort of in the, uh, the aftermath of what he was able to achieve through The Jungle, that this was the moment when the American consumer really becomes – begins to emerge in U.S. political life as a, uh, you know – you know, super powerful force. If industry is going to, uh, expand, it needs to be able to, uh, sell its products to an expanding market, and the question of whether people would buy inferior products is something that, uh, industry couldn't be, um, indifferent too. So for Sinclair, among the ironies of, um, the reception of The Jungle was that it produced reform with respect to the practices in meat industry; it did not move the, um, political meter in the way that he wanted. And he's famously, um, known for saying that in, you know, in writing The Jungle he ai – you know, he aimed at the heart of the American public but instead hit its stomach. [Laughter]

[Mark:] Yeah.

[Kenneth:] Uh, and I didn't quote that exactly, uh, which is, you know, to my discredit because among the things that Sinclair is known for is his capacity to, um, sum up, uh, political reality, uh, very, very effectively.

[Mark:] That's so interesting, Ken. And about the difference between the heart and the stomach, it's – we were talking that one of the dangers of writing a muckraking novel like this would be to be inaccurate.

[Kenneth:] Yes.

[Mark:] Another track that Sinclair could have fallen into, I think, would be to be excessively emotional or sentimental. If we can talk about the specific family that Sinclair uses as kind of an avatar to guide us through this industry and the process of immigration and labor and class, and do – do you first of all, do you think Sinclair falls into that trap where he is really trying to tug on our heartstring to the disadvantage of the novel itself?

[Kenneth:] Yeah that's a really, really good and a really important question. Um, I've already mentioned Uncle Tom's Cabin, and this is a novel, uh, Stowe’s novel, which is known, you know, by a lot of people as a sentimental novel—um, a novel that, as you say, pulls on, you know, the heartstrings of its, uh, readers. A pejorative of account of sentimentality is that it’s unearned emotion. That is to say, you use stock incident, stock characters that you know will, um, evoke tears from readers, and you don't have to do anything really to create the, you know, the complexity of the reality of the moment. Uh, Sinclair actually did not have, um, a highly negative opinion of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In fact, he saw it was very, very effective, and so in trying to write a novel that would have, uh, do for socialism what he felt that, uh, Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for, uh, for slavery, he was, you know, willing to use the entire arsenal of, um, you know, uh, uh, characterization, uh, and incident, uh, to put his audience in the, uh, um, in the correct position. That being said, I don't think that I would, uh, uh, you know, describe the power—particularly the early part of the novel, as he focuses on you know the family the, uh, the Lithuanian family with Jurgis and Ona at – at its center—as described by sentiment – sentimentalization as such. The power, the early power of the novel, I think, has to do with actually his, um, his capacity to render accurately, again, and effectively the lives of the family and the extended family and the workers around them as they sought to try to create, you know, a place of decency for themselves and their, you know, and their children, you know, under the horrible conditions that, uh, the meatpacking industry and its control over the American political apparatus and over the, um, um, ancillary industries—including housing—made impossible. So, um, what we're being asked to feel, I think, is not unearned emotion at any point along the way, it really is emotion that is, um, actually, uh, it's, you say, the outrage the, you know, the sadness of that one feels as a reader is actually justified at every step of the way.

[Mark:] So, the plight that this family goes through, and they go through so many different travails as the novel goes along, uh, I mean is this just one, a microcosm of the tragedy of everything that Sinclair saw in this process?

[Kenneth:] Yes, it is. I think – I think that's a good way to – to describe it. I mean he – the, uh, the wedding, um, that occupies so much of the...

[Mark:] Yeah.

[Kenneth:] ...first part of the novel, when we get introduced to our major characters, was, uh, the result of him sitting—as he said, he des – used – he had the facts, um, he – he had done the research and he had the facts, what he didn't quite have, as he said, was the story that he wanted to tell—and seeing a wedding feast as it was taking place, um, and just watching the people involved in it and how they were interacting with one another and trying, you know, at this moment because a wedding – a wedding is a moment of social affirmation. It is the new generation coming together with the support of the older generation and the support of the community in order to start, um, um, in order to start a new life. It's a place where traditions that have existed in the past are renewed as a way of guiding people into the present and into the future. And Sinclair was absolutely able to see that it was this, you know, was the sort of the substance of what it is to sort of produce a kind of human and communal life that was being at every instance undermined by the shadow of: how we're going to pay for this? What is it going to take for, uh, you know each individual who's taking time out of their life to affirm life in order to make up for what they're losing by virtue of trying to be fully human in the way that they understand themselves?

[Mark:] Yeah, that wedding is an unforgettable sequence in the novel. Uh, I'm also wondering about the way Sinclair characterizes women, and can you tell us a little bit about the women in the family and what they go through and how they add to Sinclair's presentation in The Jungle?

[Kenneth:] Yeah, it's – it's really interesting. I mean he, um, you know there's Jurgis’s wife, Ona, and then, um, uh, the cousin, uh, Marija Berczynskas, who represent the, I'd say, the possibility of sort of, you know, you'd say, goodness, truth, a certain kind of indominable character. Um, Marija at the wedding, I mean, she ends up, uh, becoming engaged to the fiddler, Tamoszius, who's a – who seems almost like a comical character in some sense, because he's described as sort of just vigorously and almost violently playing the songs that the wedding, um, you know, wedding feast requires and poking people [Laughter] with his bow as he's, uh, as he's playing. But Sinclair is actually able to, um, uh, uh, make us feel the dignity of what he's actually trying to do and he – what he's actually able to do, because in the moment that he and his fellow musicians are – are playing the songs, they're able to lift people like Marija out of the sordidness of their surrounding into a sense of belief, tradition, and, uh, um, uh, uh, and community. And that's in some sense what the women, you could say, what they represent as a – as a possibility, which makes them the fact that for all of these families, women have to work. They have to work in the same industry; their work in that industry makes them subject to the predatory behavior of supervisors around them, and despite their desire to be good, you know, good wives and good mothers, they find it virtually impossible if they want to, um, contribute to the success of their families not to violate the oaths and the norms that, um, they are – they're deeply committed to. So, they – they become, in some sense, one of the instances where one can see how thoroughgoing, um, the, um, oppression of an unbridled capitalism is, uh, because they show that no human relation, or no set of human relations, can be held sacrosanct under the conditions that, um, you know, these Lithuanian and other immigrants are being subject to as they try to become successful, uh, American um, uh, citizens.

[Mark:] Kenneth Warren, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your new edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Thanks, Ken.

[Kenneth:] Thanks, Mark. 

[Mark:] The Norton Library Edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, edited by Kenneth W. Warren, is available now in paperback and e-book. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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