The Jungle (1906)

AUTHOR: Sinclair, Upton

KEYWORDS: diet, food, health, immigration, labor rights, socialism

Alcott, Louisa May
Allen, James Madison
Bellamy, Edward
Child, Lydia Maria
Clubb, Stephen Henry
Fiske, Minnie Maddern
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Howells, William Dean
Lane, Charles
Lovell, Mary Frances
Moore, J. Howard
Trine, Ralph Waldo
Twain, Mark
Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
White, Ellen Gould Harmon

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

Dedicated “To the Workingmen of America,” Sinclair's novel depicts the plight of largely immigrant labor in the Chicago meat-packing industry in the early twentieth century. Sinclair exposes the unsanitary conditions in which meat was produced as well as the suffering of the animals in the stockyards. His detailed and relentless representation of the workers' daily lives created such an uproar that legislation was introduced to improve sanitary and working conditions. At one point, the narrator even compares the meat industry to “the system of chattel slavery” (126). While the novel focuses on labor rights, Sinclair documents in vivid detail the cruelties and violence perpetrated against animals. He catalogs the many ways in which meat products were adulterated with – often poisonous – additions for the sake of profit and exposes how foul, diseased, or otherwise spoiled flesh was used rather than discarded. The novel has thus become a frequent reference in Vegan Studies.

The first description of the stockyards focuses on their size and the sheer number of cattle awaiting their death: "There is over a square mile of space in the yards, and more than half of it is occupied by cattle-pens; north and south as far as the eye can reach there stretches a sea of pens" (37). The narrator notes that “there were two hundred and fifty miles of track within the yards” that “brought about ten thousand head of cattle every day, and as many hogs, and half as many sheep – which meant some eight or ten million live creatures turned into food every year” (38). Soon after, the machinery of killing is described in painful detail: 

It was a long, narrow room, with a gallery along it for visitors. At the head there was a great iron wheel, about twenty feet in circumference, with rings here and there along its edge. ... They had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft. ... There was a long line of hogs, with squeals and life-blood ebbing away together; until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water.
    It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests – and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretence at apology, without the homage of a tear. ...
    Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some were young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it – it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life (39-41).

The “killing of beef – where every hour they turned four or five hundred cattle into meat” – proceeds in an equally gruesome manner.

Along one side of the room ran a narrow gallery, a few feet from the floor; into which gallery the cattle were driven by men with goads which gave them electric shocks. Once crowded in here, the creatures were prisoned, each in a separate pen, by gates that shut, leaving them no room to turn around; and while they stood bellowing and plunging, over the top of the pen there leaned one of the “knockers,” armed with a sledge-hammer, and watching for a chance to deal a blow. The room echoed with the thuds in quick succession, and the stamping and kicking of the steers. The instant the animal had fallen, the “knocker” passed on to another; while a second man raised a lever, and the side of the pen was raised, and the animal, still kicking and struggling, slid out to the “ killing-bed.” Here a man put shackles about one leg, and pressed another lever, and the body was jerked up into the air (44).

The novel emphasizes that this violence perpetrated on the animals in the slaughterhouse seeps into everyday life: “There is but scant account kept of cracked heads in back of the yards, for men who have to crack the heads of animals all day seem to get into the habit, and to practise on their friends, and even on their families, between times” (20).

The facilities and working conditions are extremely unhygienic. No part of the animals remains unprocessed. The narrator notes, for example, how “[t]o another room came all the scraps to be 'tanked,' which meant boiling and pumping off the grease to make soap and lard” (43). Similarly, “feet, knuckles, hide clippings, and sinews” are made into such “products as gelatin, isinglass, and phosphorus, bone-black, shoe-blacking, and bone-oil” (46); and “the ill-smelling entrails” are turned into “violin strings” (47). Even the pipes of the floor sinks, “where all the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught” were cleaned out “every few days” in order then to “shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat!” (72). The account of the making of sausages is particularly revolting:

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white – it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together (161).

The most disconcerting account concerns workers “in tank-rooms full of steam” sometimes falling “into the vats; and 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!” (117)

Finally, the novel brings together the plight of workers and of slaughterhouse animals in an extended simile when the immigrant protagonist, turned socialist agitator, reminisces about his first experiences in the stockyards:

Jurgis recollected how, when he had first come to Packingtown, he had stood and watched the hog-killing, and thought how cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just what he had been – one of the packers’ hogs. What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the working-man, and also that was what they wanted from the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the purchaser of meat (376).

The novel presents the meat industry as symptomatic of capitalism; the "Beef Trust" is likened to “a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs; it was the Great Butcher – it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh” (377). On the final pages of the novel, Dr. Schliemann, a self-proclaimed “philosophic anarchist” (401), lectures on the advantages of socialism, including for health and diet: “it has been proven that meat is unnecessary as a food; and meat is obviously more difficult to produce than vegetable food, less pleasant to prepare and handle, and more likely to be unclean” (409). Given the cost and “debasing” labor involved in the production of meat, Schliemann prposes that meat should become increasingly expensive. However, under socialism, he imagines that “as the citizens of our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year the cost of slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing – and how long do you think the custom would survive then?” (409).