With their tremendous descriptive and explanatory power, books such as Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), a study of American business syndicates and trusts, Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), and Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (1904), an expose of municipal corruption and the ties between government and business in six American cities, had a significant impact on public debate, turning uncertainty into indignation and despair into outrage. Combining rigorous research and firsthand reporting with moralistic rhetoric, these works revealed how the contemporary world worked, how businesses were being transformed into empires, and how these empires were bleeding the public in an exploitative relationship starkly delineated by Lloyd on the first page of Wealth against Commonwealth (see “For Further Reading”): “Holding back the riches of earth, sea, and sky from their fellows who famish and freeze in the dark, they [the syndicates and trusts] ... assert the right, for their private profit, to regulate the consumption by the people of the necessaries of life, and to control production, not by the needs of humanity, but by the desires of few for dividends.”

Energized by their sense of mission, these journalists also understood that at that moment, when magazines and books were reaching wider audiences than ever before, there was no more powerful means at their disposal than the written word. They had a confidence in the power of their medium that writers seldom experience today. Not yet competing with motion pictures, either dramatic or documentary, these writers seemed to understand that, for the moment at least, the written word was the document of truth. Even photographs could not vie with narrative for getting at what was real. Consider, in this regard, the reader’s first exposure to the packing yards in The Jungle, when Jurgis and his family take a tour. As spectators, outsiders, what they see is an immensely impressive system; Jurgis himself is full of admiration; the family is “breathless with wonder” at the magnitude, the efficiency; “it seemed to them impossible of belief that anything so stupendous could have been devised by mortal man” (p. 45). This first impression, like a panoramic set of photographs, lacked narrative dimension. As the novel unfolds, we discover, along with Jurgis, that only through time and its unraveling—that is, through narrative—can the real meaning of these impressive images be disclosed and comprehended.

Given the great success of the muckraking journalists, and Sinclair’s admiration for them (including his friend Lincoln Steffens), it is worth examining why Sinclair did not choose to write his Packingtown book as a journalistic expose, especially considering that he had written a series of articles on the failed meatpackers’ strike of 1904. In choosing fiction over a journalistic account, Sinclair was responding to a moment when novelists were also taking on the real and exploring new techniques for storytelling, and as a consequence enjoying a heady period of reinvigoration and a renewed sense of their own persuasive power. Frank Norris, whose highly successful The Octopus (1901) was based on an actual clash in 1880 between farmers in California’s San Joaquin valley and the Southern Pacific Railroad, wrote in a 1902 essay:

Although Sinclair portrays the crushing, machine-like force of a man-made hell, he turned for his title to an image from the natural world (as Frank Norris had done in choosing the octopus to describe the spread of the railway), to a place that, particularly in this period, evoked a sense of primal fear, a “heart of darkness.” The jungle represented a setting inhospitable to human life, where “civilized” man does not thrive, where life is an unrelenting and ultimately a dehumanizing battle. From our perspective, at the other end of the twentieth century, Sinclair’s world had yet to arrive at the shared symbolic reference points for man-made horror provided for us by systematic genocide, concentration camps, and industrial warfare.

For many writers of this new school of realism (or what some describe as Naturalism, which I discuss below), there was a sense of liberation from the requirement to tell a story; now the conditions of life were the story. (If for postmodernist writers, reality is no longer realistic, for writers of this period, reality was a new frontier, vivid and legible.) Exploring new narrative structures, novelists, following Émile Zola’s lead, were hanging their narratives on the framework not of an individual life, but of an industry or the history of a commodity. Zola had built his novels around coal mines, the emergence of the department store, stock market speculation, even a Parisian laundry. But when Sinclair determined to write a novel about the packing yards, he hit upon more than an apt framing device, more even than an industry that needed to be exposed for its heinous practices; consciously or not, he hit upon the subject that would give his novel its most enduring quality. The Jungle is, arguably, the only muckraking novel of its era that is still read for more than historical interest. In the slaughterhouse Sinclair found both the symbol and the objective correlative for the condition of the worker in that moment, as well as a trope for the entire twentieth century.

Critics have noted that Sinclair draws analogies between the fate of the cattle and the fate of the meatpackers, how the worker, like the doomed animal, is slowly processed by the plant until there is nothing left of him (except, like the hog, his squeal). Now that we read this novel across the great span of the twentieth century, with our knowledge of the trench warfare of World War I and the even greater horrors of Stalin’s Gulag and Hitler’s death camps, Sinclair’s description of the systematic “using up” of human beings along a conveyer belt that step by step deprives them of their hope, dignity, and finally their humanity, takes on an even darker significance. The sign above the entrance to Auschwitz—Arbeitmacht frei, “work makes you free”—seems cruelly anticipated in The Jungle, where laborers arrive in a condition of health and strength, and we see them increasingly reduced in strength and spirit; once they have been depleted—in fact, “used up”—by the conditions in which they live and work, they are discarded. We watch the systematic dehumanization of the worker, like that of the concentration camp inmate. When Jurgis takes up work with the “fertilizer men,” his body becomes infused with a stench that cannot be washed away. He moves through the world as a pariah; he cannot separate himself from his degradation; he is marked. In the scene in the city jail, when Jurgis is forced, after his bath, to walk naked in front of the other prisoners, the link between shame and dehumanization is complete.

The analogy between the exploited worker and the animal brought to slaughter is most horribly drawn in two unspeakable images, presented in the text only secondhand, and mercifully not described in detail. The first is of the child, Stanislovas, being eaten by rats; the child laborer becomes flesh for vermin. And we find the second in the narrator’s account of men who have fallen into the open vats in the tank rooms: “When they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!” (p. 109). (This was the only assertion in the novel that could not be independently verified after the book’s publication. Sinclair responded that the employers made sure to send the widows of the men killed in such accidents back to their countries of origin in order to hide the atrocious manner of their deaths.)

Our repulsion at the gruesomeness of the tasks the meatpacking workers are called upon to perform activates another level of meanings in the text. That is, not only is this work relegated to a vulnerable immigrant population, but, symbolically, capitalism hides its bloodied foundations; just as we’d rather not dwell upon where our meat really comes from, and how it reaches us, so capitalism disguises the sources of modern wealth, derived from the degradation of the laboring class. When Sinclair takes Jurgis into the grand mansion of one of the packing yard owners, we recoil at the recognition of what this lavish luxury is built upon—the gore of the slaughterhouse as well as the lives of tens of thousands of workers. In this act of separation of cause from effect, the reader is further called upon to consider our genteel treatment of the meat we consume. As Norbert Elias has noted in his majestic history of western manners, The Civilizing Process (1939; translated 1978), “Reminders that the meat dish has something to do with the killing of an animal are avoided to the utmost.” In contrast to the medieval practice of bringing the entire animal to the table, sometimes with hoofs or feathers still attached, in more recent times, “the animal form is so concealed and changed by the art of its preparation and carving that while eating one is scarcely reminded of its origins.” The iconoclasm of The Jungle is in part achieved in its relentless insistence that we dwell upon what we don’t wish to dwell upon, that we recognize that just as we have distanced ourselves from the slaughter of animals (once a quite ordinary part of life), so we have distanced ourselves from the hard lives of these workers. Indeed they are hidden from us by our own choice. Sinclair demands that we draw the connections, that we remember the origins of both meat and wealth.

The first central slaughterhouse, built to cater to a population of millions, was La Villette, designed by George Eugene Haussmann, in 1867. (Haussmann himself compared this project with another engineering accomplishment of his, the great sewer system of Paris.) In this grand structure, located at the outskirts of Paris, gigantic halls of glass and iron dominated the long rows of low slaughterhouses. While La Villette provided enough meat for Parisian consumption over a period of days, each ox still had a separate stall in which it was felled: there were no cogwheels or conveyer belts. It was in the United States that the innovation of the assembly line was first introduced to the process of animal slaughter. The assembly line system, architectural historian Siegfried Giedion has argued in Mechanization Takes Command (1948), imparts a distinct neutrality to the act of killing. He argues that the broader influence of this neutrality “does not have to appear in the land that evolved mechanical killing, or even at the time the methods came about. This neutrality toward death may be lodged deep in the roots of our time.” But Giedion also observes that the killing of animals, unlike the production of cars, cannot be completely mechanized. “Only the knife, guided by the human hand, can perform the transition from life to death in the desired manner.” This tension, between mechanized process and the demands of the variable organic being at the center of the process, is also poignantly explored in The Jungle. In the scene in chapter eleven where the steer breaks loose and has to be shot we see the slippage that occurs between living creature and machine. With the men dodging for cover (this is when Jurgis sprains his ankle), we are also reminded of how far this mechanized killing is from the killing done by the hunter who pits his wits against those of his prey.

As Schlosser’s book makes eminently clear, consumer anxieties that in Sinclair’s day were focused on the killing and processing of the animal now extend well beyond that to the production (through genetic engineering, feeding, and injecting of hormones, etc.) and preparation of the meat. Schlosser also informs us that, as in Sinclair’s day, the current meatpacking workforce is made up largely of immigrants, many illegal, many illiterate, from Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia. They are a short-term, often migrant workforce (the average worker quits or is fired after three months), and they are performing the most dangerous job in the United States, with a rate of injury and job-related illness three times greater than that of the average factory.

And again, as in Sinclair’s day, most public concern with regard to the meat industry remains focused on the condition of the meat, now with regard to hormones and other additives. In recent years, the public has expressed a growing concern for the experience of the animal, its quality of life, how much room it is given on a daily basis, and how it is fed. With all this newfound concern, however, someone, as in Sinclair’s day, is being left out—the human worker.

Sinclair also eschewed the sentimentality that often shaped novelistic representations of the poor. In order to arouse compassion and encourage social reform, writers such as Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among many others, portrayed the poor as excessively virtuous. These novelists seemed convinced that their middle-class readers would be moved to sympathize with the plight of the poor only if they approved of their moral character. In stark contrast, Sinclair wanted to arouse not sympathy, and certainly not pity, but indignation and outrage. He refuses to sentimentalize his characters; indeed, he sometimes goes to the opposite extreme, as when Jurgis takes work as a scab. The suffering of Sinclair’s characters is not unjust because they are virtuous; it is unjust because it serves a system that exploits the many for the profit of the few.

At the same time, Sinclair is interested in showing that virtue is a luxury that the poor can’t afford. While striving to dignify their suffering, he wants also to explore the ways in which poverty robs individuals of the life of the mind, of spiritual comfort, and of the consolations of intimacy and emotional bonds. In the course of the first half of the novel, Jurgis becomes increasingly despondent; he is unable, for example, to respond to or even think about what might be the cause of Ona’s anguish and her frantic weeping. (It is provoked, we discover with Jurgis, by her sexual exploitation at work.) The narrator observes, “It was only because he was so numb and beaten himself that Jurgis did not worry more about this. But he never thought of it, except when he was dragged to it—he lived like a dumb beast of burden, knowing only the moment in which he was” (p. 147).

Indeed, not only thought but also, it seems, feeling or any semblance of interior life seem to be denied the protagonist. When Jurgis does experience moments of interior awareness, as when the sound of church bells—heard from his jail cell—brings back to him memories of Christmas in Lithuania, his recollections and feelings become instruments of torture. Thinking does not alleviate his torment, but intensifies it. It is better, the text suggests, not to think; better to acclimate to the insensate state that a grueling life demands.

Some readers have taken the view that if Sinclair had given Jurgis more of an interior life by way of richer, fuller responses to his experiences, he would have aroused greater empathy and made us more interested in his fate. Perhaps Sinclair felt that there was more truth and force in showing how the combination of brutal labor and crushing poverty stultifies the mind. But it could be that Sinclair was also attempting to keep the reader mindful that Jurgis’s is not a unique story, that he is a representative figure, standing in for thousands like him. And perhaps Sinclair did not want to individualize Jurgis, to allow his story to fall into the category of the bourgeois novel or the bildungsroman (novel of education), in which a man’s fate is mostly in his own hands, a matter of character and self-knowledge, rather than determined by economic and institutional forces. In this regard Sinclair’s socialist perspective intersects with that of Naturalist writers such as Emile Zola, George Gissing, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane. Focusing on the effects of environment and heredity on behavior, as distinct from personal history or psychological characterization, the Naturalists held to a pessimistic materialist determinism. Naturalism, according to Malcolm Cowley in an essay entitled, “Not Men: A Natural History of American Naturalism,” is “not what we have learned to call literature ‘in depth’ ”; it concerns itself with what can be observed rather than what takes place unseen, internally. After fifty years of American novels of interior life, the limited interiority of Sinclair’s novel may be what is most foreign to contemporary readers.

One last turn of the screw: Perhaps the reason we get relatively little exposure to Jurgis’s thoughts and feelings beyond “Dieve, I’m glad I’m not a hog,” is that Sinclair believes that it is only after Jurgis discovers socialism, after his conversion experience, that he finds the key to understanding his life, the ability to reflect on what he sees, to put two and two together, to recognize feelings as his own. In this interpretation, socialism not only removes the scales from his eyes but finally enables him to attach meaning to the world.

Upton Sinclair—with his ninety published books, his countless articles and causes, his tireless activism, his unsuccessful run for governor of California, his contribution to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal economic policies, and what critic Walter Rideout called his “curiously impersonal egoism”—had far less interest in influencing literary history than in influencing the history of the world. And he did.