Slaving For Industry

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" fired public opinion, and is thought to have been one of the catalysts that sparked the Civil War, but literature has done much more than simply heat public opinion and debate. Sometimes its easy to forget that writers like Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, Helen Hunt Jackson, Elizabeth Gaskell, and John Steinbeck helped to improve the living and working conditions for millions of people.

A Hit in the Stomach

In 1908, Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle," as a protest against the meat-packing industry. Under a commission from "Appeal to Reason" to document the living and working conditions in the Chicago stockyards, he traveled to Chicago for seven weeks to research his book. Even before the novel was completed, the story was serialized in 1905.

Despite the immense popularity of the serialized version, publishers were reluctant to publish the manuscript. As one consultant said, "I advise without hesitation and unreservedly against the publication of this book which is gloom and horror unrelieved." He was on the verge of publishing the text out of his own resources when Doubleday finally accepted the manuscript for publication in 1906, and immediately sold more than 150,000 copies.

The public response, journalistic muckraking, and Presidential pressure combined to force the issues of food safety and working conditions to be addressed. The real-world influence of "The Jungle" was seen almost immediately with the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act (1906) and the Meat Inspection Act (1906). Sinclair had hoped for much more, as he said: "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

The Humanity Factor

For the novel, Sinclair wove the sickening realities of Chicago's stockyards together with his imagistic depictions of a young immigrant family--full of hope, a belief in the American Dream, and the resolution to work to hard and make their dreams come true.

More is represented in the novel than Sinclair's imagination and documentary details. Sinclair wove the fabric of his own life into the novel. As he explained in "American Outpost,"

"I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all that pain which life had meant to me. Externally the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in winter time in Chicago? I only had to recall the previous winter in the cabin, when we had only cotton blankets, and had rags on top of us. It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book."

Sinclair recognized the devastating side-effects of poverty: hunger, disease, madness, death, and more. Of his childhood, he remembered: "my life was a series of Cinderella transformations; one night I would be sleeping on a vermin-ridden sofa in a lodging house, and the next night under silken coverlets in a fashionable home."

His voice of protest is all the more powerful because it is so personal.