I’ve been thinking about what and how I would write about my recent experience reading Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle. I did not read The Jungle in high school or college as many others did. If I had I might have been most powerfully moved by the disgusting descriptions of moldy meat and the spectacle of unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry of the early Twentieth Century. This seems to be the legacy of novel; it led to investigations and public outcry, and, according to the introduction in my copy, the passage of two food safety laws. Yet little came of the novel’s condemnation of the way workers are used by industry, especially immigrant workers. At every turn these workers and their families are swindled, robbed, poisoned and killed in the service of a great machine. In the style of early industrialization, the metaphor of the machine is used often in the novel, to describe the mechanisms of the stockyard (both in the processing of meat and the overall system) and also the machines of politics and power in the United States. Much of the novel is devoted to the awesome exploitative power of these machines. Some debate or another led my partner and I to look up the origin of the word ‘machine,’ as if our popular usage had staled the word’s imaginative power. In every definition we found the same descriptor came up: contrivance. The word ‘machine’ is interesting in that contained in its definition is its origin as something created; there is no natural or inherent machine. However, when we think about omnipresent machines, like those describing the workings of economics, we lose sight of the machine as something that was designed and created. We are disempowered by a belief that the machine is out of our hands. Obviously, it is in the interest of groups who benefit from the workings of the machine to emphasize the machine’s natural and ‘right’ existence. Even once the immigrants in The Jungle have realized that the machine (either that of the stockyards or larger United States) is exploiting them they feel they are powerless to stop it, must even take part in its exploitation of others.
I am reminded of the danger of become too amazed with our imaginative contrivances. When first reaching the stockyards of Chicago, new immigrants Jurgis and his family tour the hog-processing plant in amazement. The reader cringes while Jurgis sees it all as “a wonderful poem” of efficiency. Sinclair is careful to construct for us the mentality of the newly arrived worker, a person who views the animals without “metaphors of human destiny” and whose mind is still somewhat baffled by the experience of the foreign. What is large, what is noisy, what has been set up to involve many pieces, requiring the organization and manpower that can only come from having a great number of people gathered together in one place. These are the things that still have the power to inspire awe (military operations are often impressive in this way, also cities). So why does the reader cringe, what is there to temper our own self-congratulating pride? There can be no space to doubt that the machines of The Jungle abuse every bit of life they touch. The stockyards of The Jungle are marked not only for the intensity and danger of the work performed but also the downright illegality of the work. The workers have no protection from theft, of their work or their money, nor do they have any authority to appeal to for crimes such as injury, murder or rape. They are expendable because there are hundreds of other workers outside the gates of the factories. And indeed, it is in the best interest of the factories to work a person as hard as they can, for when they die, there will be a new worker to replace them. They are a piece of the machine, and, like a metal part, they will be replaced when they wear out.
The Jungle has a place in contemporary times to be reread. Perhaps there will be many who say that a novel from a hundred years ago could say little about the modern treatment of workers, that conditions have improved so much in the United States as to render the novel irrelevant. Maybe in a world of globalization we bear a responsibility for conditions beyond our political borders. We certainly benefit from the exploitation of millions around the globe. But even within our country we cannot ignore the legacy of how this country’s economic power was created. The (semi-)fair wages, work hours, ‘safe’ working conditions were not born out of the machine but from the protest of workers who had to demand them. The political and legal recourse of workers, that is, the very right of workers to receive a paycheck when it was due and to have a way to demand it when it was withheld, is something that had to be fought for. For those willing to think more abstractly, the novel has much to say about the ‘naturalization’ of power and rights disparities. Even with my interest in food systems, it is a shame to read the novel merely for the meat.
