Chapter X: The Jungle

I.

In 1905 there began to appear, in a Socialist weekly, the _Appeal to Reason_, published in Girard, Kansas, a novel of the Chicago stockyards, by an almost altogether unknown writer: _The Jungle_, by Upton Sinclair. I can remember, as a boy of eighteen, reading in my _Appeal_ that first chapter describing the wedding party of Jurgis and Ona, and my delight in the rich, full-blooded humanity of that scene. It was the happy prelude to what was to be, as week after week the story unrolled itself, a tragic panorama of working-class life, true, terrible, and magnificent....

The story was simple enough; it related the fortunes of a group of immigrants who lived and worked in the stockyards district--their struggle to get ahead, to own a home, to bring up their children decently, while all the time they are brutally exploited, preyed upon, robbed, outraged, by the unscrupulous forces which find in their poverty and ignorance and helplessness mere opportunities for enrichment. The group is crushed, one by one, in the struggle; the old men are thrown on the scrapheap to starve, the women are drawn into prostitution to keep body and soul together, the children die; Jurgis himself goes to prison for smashing the face of a brutal boss, and when he comes out his little world had been destroyed as if by an earthquake--and he is left to wander, getting wisdom as he wanders, and coming at last to believe in a Socialist reconstruction of this hideous world. At every point the story is enriched by the most vivid and relentless realistic detail; one is immersed in the filth and stench and cruelty of the stockyards, and one feels the sublime human aspirations which even there burn unquenchably in humble hearts.

For a while the knowledge that a great new novelist had appeared in America was almost confined to the readers of that Socialist weekly--no small audience, however, for the “_Appeal_ army” of enthusiastic subscription-getters had drummed up half a million readers for that publication. The first public, therefore, of this astonishing novel, was of farmers resting in stocking feet beside the stove of winter evenings, and of discontented workingmen in a thousand cities and towns--an audience which, whether rural or urban, understood the truths of human suffering which it so vividly portrayed. That was its first success--its recognition and acclaim by a proletarian audience. Then came recognition by fellow-writers, who heard of this strange and powerful novel being published in a Socialist weekly, and sent for back numbers. David Graham Phillips wrote to the author: “I never expected to read a serial. I am reading _The Jungle_ and I should be afraid to trust myself to tell you how it affects me. It is a great work. I have a feeling that you yourself will be dazed some day by the excitement about it. It is impossible that such a power should not be felt. It is so simple, so true, so tragic, and so human. It is so eloquent, and yet so exact.” And, of course, Jack London, his comrade in the Socialist movement, did not fail to acclaim this achievement. “The _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ of wage slavery”, he called it; and with that legend on the jacket and in the advertisements it was brought before the general American public in book form in 1906. It was an immediate and enormous success. It became a “bestseller” in America, England and the British colonies. It was translated into seventeen languages, and the world became aware that industrial America in its toil, its misery and its hope had found a voice.

II.

But the literary sensation in America had already become secondary to the shock of its readers in learning of the conditions under which their meats were prepared in Packingtown, not as affecting the workers but as affecting their own health--for the story dealt incidentally with the use of condemned meat. The author later remarked that he had aimed at the public’s heart and by accident had hit it in the stomach. His deepest concern had been with the fate of the workers, and he realized with bitterness that he had become a celebrity not because the public cared anything about the workers, but because it did not want to eat diseased meat.

The public was more or less prepared for such charges against the packers, on account of the “embalmed beef” scandal during the Spanish-American war. President Roosevelt, responding to a widespread popular demand, sent a commission to Chicago to make an investigation of conditions in Packingtown. This commission was assisted, at Sinclair’s expense, by Ella Reeve Bloor, who had been familiar with conditions there and had helped him in his seven weeks’ investigation preliminary to the writing of the novel; and the researches of this commission appear to have confirmed the chief charges made in the book.

The young novelist accepted, as a Socialist, the opportunity which this situation provided for agitation. But the packers, and large business interests in general, were aroused, and all their power and influence was used to keep this agitation from reaching the public, and to represent the young agitator as an irresponsible sensation-monger. He set up a publicity bureau, worked twenty hours a day, wrote articles, sent telegrams, and gave interviews to roomfuls of reporters; but so thoroughly had the newspapers been mobilized by the business interests as a medium of defense that the publicity he actually achieved for the workers’ cause was slight; and on the other hand, his own reputation, in genteel literary and critical circles, and among the public at large, was seriously damaged. In the course of these efforts, President Roosevelt said to him: “Mr. Sinclair, I have been in public life longer than you, and I will give you this bit of advice; if you pay any attention to what the newspapers say about you, you will have an unhappy time.” He might have taken this as a warning that his temperament was not suited to public life, for he could not get used to being lied about in the newspapers; but he persisted in his efforts, and he did have a very “unhappy time”.

Nothing in particular was done about the workers’ conditions. Even the President’s meat-inspection law, as finally passed, had, in the opinion of those behind it, all its teeth drawn first. Sinclair continued his attempt to agitate the question, but the public had been reassured, and the effort was futile. In _The Brass Check_, where the complete story of this period is told vividly, he says: “I look back upon this campaign, to which I gave three years of brain and soul sweat, and ask what I really accomplished.” He had taken, he says, a few million dollars away from the Chicago packers, “giving them to the Junkers of East Prussia, and to the Paris bankers who were backing enterprises to pack meat in the Argentine”. He had also added a hundred thousand readers to the circulation of a popular magazine, which speedily repudiated its early muck-raking habits and became a defender of big business; and he had made a fortune for his publishers, who immediately became conservative and devoted their profits from _The Jungle_ to promote a kind of writing hostile to everything in which he believed....

III.

_The Jungle_ was in fact the climax of a literary movement in America which had aroused the fear and anger of large business interests. The great middle-class reform movement, marked in the political field by the careers of Bryan, Roosevelt and the earlier Wilson, had produced an audience sympathetic to the telling of unpleasant truths about American political and business conditions. In the magazine field this was called “muck-raking”; there were sensational revelations of the inside workings of Wall Street by Tom Lawson, of municipal corruption by Lincoln Steffens, of Standard Oil history by Ida M. Tarbell, of Beef Trust finance by Ray Stannard Baker. In the fictional field there was a corresponding literature, written by such men as Robert Herrick, Frank Norris and David Graham Phillips. This literature had its social revolutionary fringe: Jack London was an avowed revolutionist, and such Socialist critics of society as W. J. Ghent, John Spargo, Robert Hunter, Charles Edward Russell and William English Walling, had a wide hearing. A professor named Thorstein Veblen had written a devastating book called _The Theory of the Leisure Class_, and phrases from it passed into general intellectual currency. These conditions were sufficiently alarming, in a country where every year, in one great industry or another, there was a bitter struggle between employers and men, in which bullets were the decisive factor. And now a young man, by writing a book, had put a great industry on the defensive before the whole public. It was necessary to tighten the grip of business upon the intellectual world. The newspapers were already well in hand; but there was a group of free magazines which were making money out of “muck-raking”--the very center of the intellectual rebellion. Big business struck at this group of free magazines, effectively, through the medium of advertising. The magazine policies were changed. Writers were called off from investigations of industrial conditions. An immense campaign of optimism was begun, and a cheerful outlook upon American industrial conditions was preached and made synonymous with patriotism. The writers for the most part changed with the times, and adapted their views to the new editorial demand; the others were silenced or discouraged. A few prominent radical journalists, unable to tell the truth any longer in the magazines, bought one of their own; but they, too, presently succumbed to the spirit of the times.... Sinclair quotes, in _The Brass Check_, the titles of some representative articles from a recent issue of that once-daring magazine: “How We Decide When to Raise a Man’s Salary”, “The Comic Side of Trouble”, “Interesting People: A Wonderful Young Private Secretary”, “From Prize-Fighter to Parson”....

The public, deprived of the intellectual stimulant of unpleasant truth before it had quite got used to it, was easily trained in more cheerful tastes. Those writers who sought to revive the art of muck-raking found themselves with an indifferent audience. “People aren’t interested in that sort of thing any more.” While as for fiction, the old genteel tradition reasserted itself, the standard of non-controversiality became identical with the standard of decency, and any author who dared to violate this standard ran the risk of finding himself removed in critical esteem beyond the pale of literary respectability.

The measure of the wrath of the masters of America and the docility of its intellectual class during this period may be taken from the Gorky incident, which happened in the spring of 1906, coincident with the _Jungle_ agitation. The great Russian novelist, Maxim Gorky, had come to America to raise funds for the cause of Russian freedom--a cause long since made popular among even the respectable American intelligentsia by the writings of the American journalist, George Kennan. A great welcome was prepared for him. But it happened that two radical union leaders, Moyer and Haywood, were on trial for their lives in a Western state in the course of an industrial war between the miners and the coal-barons. Their cause had been espoused by the Socialists, who now asked Gorky to sign a telegram of sympathy to Moyer and Haywood. He did so. A White House reception to Gorky was immediately canceled. And then the American papers, at the instance of the Czarist embassy, began to denounce Gorky, on the pretext that he had “insulted” the American people by bringing with him as his wife a woman to whom he was not married. It was known to those who made the charge that Russian revolutionists married without the churchly processes which alone were “legal” in Russia, and that Madame Andreieva was his wife according to the revolutionary code; they had known that all along, and had not made use of the fact. Now they unloosed upon him the furies of a hypocritical moralistic journalism. He was hounded out of New York hotels, denounced in pulpit and newspaper throughout the country; his mission was destroyed. And the American men of letters who had been proud to be invited to dine with this Russian giant, were afraid to brave that storm: one and all, the respectable writers turned tail and fled, not daring to call their souls their own--a black day in the calendar of American letters. Great reputations fell that day, Mark Twain’s among them, in the minds of boys and girls, now grown up, who saw that humiliating and cowardly action with the clear eyes of youth and were ashamed for their country. If American literature is now less timid about sex, that young indignation may have something to do with it. But those boys and girls did not know why America and American men of letters had suddenly become so prudish: they did not know that Maxim Gorky’s influence had been destroyed in that sudden journalistic whirlwind, not because of the lack of churchly blessings upon his union with Madame Andreieva, but because he had rashly intruded into an American economic struggle on the unfashionable side. He, and the writers of America, must be taught a lesson, and made to realize who was running this country and what happened to anybody who tried to interfere with them.

The stage of Upton Sinclair’s literary career, immediately ensuing upon his immense celebrity as the author of _The Jungle_, falls within this period when “muck-raking” was being outlawed and editors and writers taught a lesson by those in control of American business. He was one of the few who dared to brave this Thermidorian reaction, and he was chief of those to suffer from it. It is his temerity which explains the fact that his reputation in America as a novelist fell during that period to zero, or lower. He missed, by remaining a “muck-raker”, his chance of regaining literary respectability. His next novel, _The Metropolis_, published in 1907, was an attack on New York society; and _The Moneychangers_, published in 1908, was an exposé of Wall Street. Nor is this explanation to be discounted by the fact that _The Metropolis_ and The _Moneychangers_ were not very good novels.

The point is worth laboring. Novels far inferior to those two would, in that period, have maintained Upton Sinclair in American critical esteem, if they had been of a different tendency; not to realize that is to be ignorant of American criticism and its fashions. It was the fashion to sneer at Upton Sinclair, and to accept the yellow-journal pictures of him, in which he was represented as a mere sensation-monger and fool to boot. Georg Brandes, generally accounted the world’s greatest modern critic, was astonished at this American neglect of one of its greatest writers; on visiting this country in 1914, he took pains to say to the reporters who met him at the steamer that there were three American novelists whom he found worth reading, among these being Upton Sinclair. The statement, as it generally appeared in the press, referred only to Frank Norris and Jack London, omitting Upton Sinclair’s name altogether. Doubtless it was naïvely regarded as incredible that anyone should really take this disreputable “muck-raker” seriously.... And it was not until a new rebellious literature and criticism emerged after the war, under the leadership of Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, that Upton Sinclair was again mentioned among American writers by any reputable native critic who was not a Socialist.

IV.

_The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_, though better as propaganda than as art, are nevertheless of interest to us for what they reveal of their author’s psychology at this period. The former novel grew out of his observations of the life of the idle rich during his fame as the author of _The Jungle_. His celebrity made him naturally an object of curiosity and interest to these rich people; and its secrets, such as they were, were readily exposed to him. It happened to be within his power, if so he chose, to remain in such a life. A group of capitalists had come to him, as he relates in _The Brass Check_, “with a proposition to found a model meatpacking establishment; they had offered me three hundred thousand dollars worth of stock for the use of my name”; and he adds: “if I had accepted that offer and become the head of one of the city’s commercial show-places, lavishing full-page advertisements upon the newspapers, I might have ... been invited to be the chief orator at banquets of the Chamber of Commerce and the National Civic Federation, and my eloquence would have been printed to the extent of columns; I might have joined the Union League Club and the Century Club, and my name would have gone upon the list of people about whom no uncomplimentary news may be published under any circumstances. At the same time I might have kept one or more apartments on Riverside Drive, with just as many beautiful women in them as I wished, and no one would have criticized me, no newspaper would have dropped hints about ‘love-nests’.” This opportunity, no temptation in reality, appears nevertheless to have intrigued his imagination sufficiently to make such a “temptation” the theme of his new novel. Its hero comes to New York and undergoes the temptation of wealth and luxury. It is a kind of ironic sequel to the unfinished trilogy of the Civil War; its hero is the son of the man who fought in _Manassas_ to save the Union from destruction. The Union had, by that epic agony, been saved--for what? For this, says the disillusioned author, pointing to the waste and vulgarity and triviality of the life of the “Four Hundred”.... It will be seen that the theme psychologically precedes that of _The Jungle_; and it is not surprising to find the book revelatory of an actually less mature point of view than is shown in that masterpiece. Its emotional effects are of a juicelessly ethical character. The young hero turns his back upon these temptations, and resolves to earn an honest living! One remembers Jurgis in _The Jungle_; he could not turn his back on Packingtown--he had to live its life; and only thus are we enabled to know what Packingtown was. Yet, through some identification of himself with his young aristocrat in this later book, the author is unable to imagine his surrender to metropolitan luxury, even for a moment; so that we never learn, in any emotional sense, in any sense but that of factual detail, what metropolitan luxury means. The _dégringolade_ of a high-souled young man under such influences--and possibly his eventual revolt under other influences--was the story called for by the theme. It was never written; only the surface details are presented. So meager a use of the vast powers displayed in _The Jungle_ suggests some internal conflict in connection with this theme, and we may perhaps be permitted to look there for the answer to this literary riddle--if it is permissible at all to inquire why a writer does not always remain at his best.

_The Moneychangers_, a sequel to _The Metropolis_, had the same central character. The book was based upon the panic of 1907, of which it undertook to give the “inside story”. It might have been treated as an epic theme; but it was viewed in too narrow and factual a way, through the eyes of this aristocratic young moralist-hero, who, as the total upshot of these events, is merely surprised and shocked that people can be so bad--and refuses to dine at the house of one of the scoundrels. There was to have been a third volume; it was written as a play, _The Machine_, and in it the hero falls in love with the scoundrel’s daughter, who has in the meantime taken up settlement work and renounced her father’s riches. It was, then, toward this grand event that that creation moved!

Jack London had written of _The Jungle_: “It is alive and warm. It is brutal with life.” No one would say that of _The Metropolis_ or _The Moneychangers_. They are emotionally thin performances. Ill-health, and poverty after the Helicon Hall experiment (see next chapter), doubtless partly account for this inadequacy. In both novels the hero remains essentially untouched by all that goes on about him, scarcely more than an observer--a disembodied ghost, as it were, of the author himself, looking on and taking note of all that happens with an admirable journalistic faculty, but capable of no depth of human emotions. In _The Brass Check_ the author remarks that the critics were cross with his hero, saying that he was “a prig”, and that he “ought to have been really tempted by the charms of the lovely ‘Mrs. Winnie Duval’,” and he goes on to say: “It has happened to me, not once, but several times, to meet with an experience such as I have portrayed in the ‘Mrs. Winnie’ scene, and I never found it any particular temptation. The real temptation of the Metropolis is not the exquisite ladies with unsatisfied emotions; it is that if you refuse to bow the knee to the Mammon of Unrighteousness you become an outcast in the public mind. You are excluded from all influence and power, you are denied all opportunity to express yourself, to exercise your talents, to bring your gifts to fruition. One of the reasons _The Metropolis_ had a small sale was because I refused to do the conventional thing--to show a noble young hero struggling in the net of an elegant siren. The temptation I showed was that of the man’s world, not of the woman’s; the temptation of Wall Street offices, not of Fifth Avenue boudoirs. It was a kind of temptation of which the critics were ignorant, and in which the public, alas, was uninterested.” Indeed, an interesting theme. And a pity it is that these novels did not actually deal with it. But we are now perhaps in a position to make at least a guess at the psychic conflict which held the author’s emotions so tight-locked during the composition of those two books: it might well have been, no vulgar conflict of worldly ambition with his high ideals, but a conflict involving his old aristocratic emotions--for he had been offered, Tantalus-like, the opportunities of public leadership, only to have them snatched out of his grasp--a conflict between the poet-prophet, the Shelleyan “unacknowledged legislator of mankind”, and the newer humbler rôle of the imaginative novelist who identifies himself with weak, suffering, stumbling, pitiful humanity itself. For a moment he had taken the latter rôle, and produced a masterpiece of prose fiction. But the poet in him demanded another destiny; and in that conflict he became neither poet nor quite novelist, but journalist-agitator.

In the meantime, in 1907, he had published a book entitled _The Industrial Republic_. Its dedication, “To H. G. Wells, ‘the next most hopeful’,” is an allusion to an inscription written by Wells in a book presented to him: “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from the next most hopeful!” The Wells book was _A Modern Utopia_; and in this book Sinclair goes him one better. It is sub-titled: “A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence”. It is a Socialist America that is thus described, though its Socialism is of so mild a sort that even the American Socialists of those days must have found it a somewhat watery potion. “If Mr. Bryan would only procure and read a really authoritative treatise upon modern scientific Socialism (say Vandervelde’s _Collectivism and Industrial Evolution_) he would understand that his programme is so close to that of the Socialists that the difference would require a microscope to discern.” And this Bryanesque government-ownership Socialism was to be brought about by the election, in 1912, of a radical Democratic President, probably William Randolph Hearst. “It may be, of course, that some one else will get the Democratic nomination in 1912; that matters not at all in my thesis--the one thing certain is that it will be some man who stands pledged to put an end to class-government. Following it there will be a campaign of an intensity of fury such as this country has never before witnessed in its history.” This is a remarkably accurate, if somewhat exaggerated, foreshadowing of the Wilson-Roosevelt-Taft campaign of 1912, which was fought out fiercely on social issues. But he goes on to predict an industrial crisis, a new “Coxey’s Army” marching on Washington, a panic, and then the Revolution: needless to say a peaceful one. The captains of industry will have been told by the President that, “since they can no longer run their business, they must allow the Government to take possession and run it--the price to be paid for their stock being a matter for future negotiation, and a matter of no great importance to them in any case, because of the income and inheritance laws just then being rushed through Congress.” The revolution, thus defined, was to take place “within one year after the Presidential election of 1912”. It was a youthful guess that one need not be ashamed of having made, though one may smile at the youthful rashness of putting it on record in print; it was based on some quite widespread Social Revolutionary expectations of the period, and its immediacy seemed natural enough to a young Utopian in a great hurry.

But, with a revolution coming in six years, there might have seemed the less reason for him to discipline his imagination to the novelist’s difficult and humble task of representing human nature. If this young writer was to be henceforth of distinguished use to American literature, he had to suffer more hurts and disillusionments.