The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1927-02-12
The Aftermath of "The Jungle

This is chapter from book on the life of Upton
Sinclair, by Floyd DELL which will be published on
May 10Th of this year.-ED.
TN 1905 there began to appear, in socialist week
i ly, 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. | can remember, 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 -booded humanity of that
scene. 1t the happy prelude to what was to be,
as week after week the story unroled itself,
tragic panorama of working life, true, terrible,
and magnificent.
The story simple enough; it related the for
tunes of group of immigrants who lived and
worked in the stockyards distrct-their struggle to
get ahead, to a home, to bring up their chill
dren decenty, while all the time they brutally
exploited, preyed upon, robbed, outraged, by the
INSCRIPTIONS forces which find in their poverty and
ignorance and helplessness more opportunities for
enrichment. The group is crushed, one by one, in
the struggle; old men thrown the scrap-heap
to starve, the women drawn into prostitution
to keep body and soul together, the children die;
Jurgs himself goes to prison for smashing the face
of a brutal boss, and when he out his little
world had been destroyed as if by an earthquake
and he is left to wander, getting wisdom he
wanders, and coming at last to believe in socialist
reconstruction of this hideous world At every point
the story is enriched by the most vivid and reent-
less realistic DETAIL is immersed in the filth and
stencil and cruelty of the stockyards, and feels
the sublime human aspirations which even there
burn unquenchaby in humble hearts.
For while the knowledge that great new
novelist had appeared in America was almost con-
fined to the readers of that socialist weeky-no
small audience, however, for the appeal army" of
enthusiastic neutrality-suspicious. had drumned up
half 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 disconnected workingmen
in thousand cities and towns-an audience which,
whether rural urban, understood the truths of
human suffering which it so wildly portrayed That
was its first successits recognition and acclaim by
a proletarian audience. Then recognition by
fellowwriters, who heard of this strange and pow
erful novel being published in a socialist weekly,
and sent for back numbers. David Graham Phillips
wrote to the author: II expected to read a
serial l reading '"The Jungle" and / should
be afraid to trust myself to tell how it affects me.
1t is great work. have feeling that you your
self will be dazed some day by the excitement about
it. 1t is impossible that such power should not
be felt 1t is so simple, true, so tragic, and
human. 1t 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 Toms Cabin of wage slavery" he called
it; and with that legend on the jacket and in the
advertisements it brought before the general
American public in book form in 1906 1t
immediate and enormous success 1t became best
seller" in America, England and the British col
onies 1t translated into seventeen languages,
and the world became that industrial America
in its TOLL its misery and its hope had found voice.
2.
But the literary sensation in America had already
become secondary to the shock of it's readers in
ming of the conditions under which their meats
prepared in Packington, not as affecting the
workers but affecting their own heath-for the
story dealt incidentally with the use of condemned
meat. The author later remarked that he had aimed
at the pubc'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 bitter
that he had become celebrity not because the
public cared anything about the workers but be-
cause it did not want to eat diseased meat.
The public was more or less prepared for such
ch against the packers, on account of the "em-
balmed beef scandal during the Spanish American
war. President Roosevelt, responding to a wide
spread popular demand, sent commission to Chi.
cago to make Investigation of conditions in