JUNGLE, THE

Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle tells the epic tragedy of a Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and a group of his friends and relatives. Penniless and unable to speak English, they are mercilessly exploited by employers, foremen, police, political bosses, and others with access to power in Packingtown. Women are forced into prostitution; older men, unable to work, are left to starve. Jurgis loses his wife in childbirth, and his infant son drowns in a pool of stinking water outside their shack. The novel also includes gruesome descriptions of food production: tubercular beef, the grinding up of poisoned rats, and even workers falling into vats and emerging as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard.

Published in January 1906, The Jungle unleashed a storm of public indignation. The scene had already been set by the "embalmed beef" scandal in the Spanish-American War of 1898 (concerning the quality of food supplied to U.S. troops) and the muckraking exposés of journalists like Samuel Hopkins Adams on patent medicines and Charles Edward Russell on the "Beef Trust." But the impact of The Jungle was probably decisive. Within six months of its publication a Pure Food and Drug Act and a Meat Inspection Act had been passed.

The irony is that Sinclair included the horrific details on meat production only in order to bolster his main theme, the exploitation of immigrant labor and the need for socialism. As he later wrote: "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit it in the stomach." Undeterred, Sinclair invested the proceeds from his masterpiece in the Helicon Hall colony, an experimental socialist community at Englewood, New Jersey.

See also Progressivism; Pure Food and Drug Act.