Treasures of the Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University: A Progressive American Novel

The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in history, literature, education, political science, Asian studies, and related subjects.

Among them is the book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

Upton Sinclair was an American author and political activist, known for his efforts to expose corruption in government and business in the early twentieth century.

In 1906, Sinclair won fame for his novel, The Jungle, which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry in Chicago, Illinois, the United States of America.

The book, by exposing health violations and unsanitary practices, inspired new laws to be passed: the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

The TU Library collection also includes a number of other books by Upton Sinclair.

In 1904 Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering information while working in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards for a newspaper, Appeal to Reason, which published the novel in serial form.

The novel was later published in book form in 1906.

The book describes working-class poverty, lack of social support, difficult living and working conditions, and hopelessness among many workers.

These aspects are contrasted with the deep corruption of people in power.

A review by Sinclair’s contemporary, writer Jack London, called the novel the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery.

The Jungle tells the story of Jurgis Rudkus and his family, Lithuanian immigrants who struggle with the dangerous, low-paying work in the stockyards.

They are also cheated by the rich and poor alike.

Over a relatively short time, Jurgis, who was once strong and confident, is injured and imprisoned.

He finally becomes involved in progessive politics to resolve social injustices.

The novel was translated into seventeen languages.

Among its enthused readers was the future Conservative British prime minister Winston Churchill, who, in one of two essays devoted to the novel, wrote that it pierces the thickest skull and most leathery heart.

George Bernard Shaw expressed his respect for Sinclair and The Jungle in his preface to the play Major Barbara.

In the Jungle of the Cities and St. Joan of the Stockyards, plays by the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, appear to be influenced by the novel.

United States President Theodore Roosevelt, although not as progressive as Sinclair, shared his rejection of the arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist.

Roosevelt wrote to Sinclair that although they did not agree politically, But all this has nothing to do with the fact that the specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have power, be eradicated.

Sinclair’s aim was to highlight the sufferings of the lowest levels of workers in a capitalist economy.

But The Jungle brought more reform about meatpacking than to wage slavery.

Even today, American workers in the meat and poultry industry often face severe disability and death on the job.

The fast pace of the work is one of the contributing factors to unsafe working conditions.

One report cited inadequate training and equipment, long hours and unsanitary work environments as factors that increase the danger for workers.

One recent critic of The Jungle dismissed its author as a touching and curious symbol of a certain old-fashioned idealism and quaint personal romanticism that have vanished from American writing forever.

Here is an excerpt from the novel, which is now out of copyright:

Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told him stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterward—stories to make your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been there four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten. “That is well enough for men like you,” he would say, “silpnas, puny fellows—but my back is broad.”

Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country. He was the sort of man the bosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they cannot get hold of. When he was told to go to a certain place, he would go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was in him. If he were working in a line of men, the line always moved too slowly for him, and you could pick him out by his impatience and restlessness. That was why he had been picked out on one important occasion; for Jurgis had stood outside of Brown and Company’s “Central Time Station” not more than half an hour, the second day of his arrival in Chicago, before he had been beckoned by one of the bosses. Of this he was very proud, and it made him more disposed than ever to laugh at the pessimists. In vain would they all tell him that there were men in that crowd from which he had been chosen who had stood there a month—yes, many months—and not been chosen yet. “Yes,” he would say, “but what sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings, fellows who have spent all their money drinking, and want to get more for it. Do you want me to believe that with these arms”—and he would clench his fists and hold them up in the air, so that you might see the rolling muscles—“that with these arms people will ever let me starve?”

“It is plain,” they would answer to this, “that you have come from the country, and from very far in the country.” And this was the fact, for Jurgis had never seen a city, and scarcely even a fair-sized town, until he had set out to make his fortune in the world and earn his right to Ona. His father, and his father’s father before him, and as many ancestors back as legend could go, had lived in that part of Lithuania known as Brelovicz, the Imperial Forest. This is a great tract of a hundred thousand acres, which from time immemorial has been a hunting preserve of the nobility. […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)