Finished: July 11, 2024
Why I read this
Although I was able to avoid it as an assignment in high school, I’ve been hearing about this book and its immediate ability to initiate change for years. Finally getting a worn out paperback copy from my mom I decided to tackle it over a transatlantic flight back to the US, and I have to say after a slow start the horrors present in the life of an immigrant in the early years of the 1900’s continued one after another in a depressing yet enthralling spiral to the bottom that had me turning the dense pages almost non stop until I was done.
What I learned
First and foremost I was absolutely shocked by how bad someone’s life can be. Day after day after day our Lithuanian family was ground down by the unbeatable system built by the great robber barons of the gilded age of American capitalism, each day taking more and more away from them leaving the reader to ask “can it even get worse?” And each time the question is answered with yes. Whether the horrors were physical (frigid cold, caustic floors, ) or mental (brutal hours, ,) it is amazing that the human body is even capable of withstanding such attrocities. It was incredible this past week where I had the chance to spend a great deal of time around a baby and the smallest of things could be a problem. There would be constant questions about whether the baby had eaten enough, or slept enough, or needed a change, whether their weight was normal at this time in their life, or how much time they should be spending on their stomach. All this as if to say that without absolutely perfect conditions a baby will not grow up to be a normal healthy adult. All of this while reading about mothers unable to feed their baby children in the frozen winters of Chicago with utterly horrendous conditions for hygiene and safety. It is true that the infant and child mortality at this time was dramatically higher (google shows in 1900 the infant mortality in the US was approximately 157/1000, a terrifying figure, and only 5.5/1000 in 2024), but the conditions still beg the question of how humanity managed to live through the industrial revolution. If I have a minor fever these days I work reduced hours from home and enjoy tea on the couch while plugging excel, I doubt I would survive even one 1900’s work day at a meat packing plant. All of this to say that this story, for me, put into perspective just how incredible the industrial revolution and the progress of humanity over the past 100 years has been. In terms of working conditions, health, and happiness of the general population we are living in the best period of history, ever and by far. So the next time I think about that “hard” work week, where I put in 55 hours, I’m going to think back to Jurgis and thank him and his generation for going through all those horrors to establish the society we have today.
Beyond the appaling conditions present in industrial facilities a century ago, The Jungle shows a lot about the corruption of the period. The simple arrangement of the factories and their absolute monopoly on an essential product such as food or steel showed quickly how out of hand things can get without anti-trust laws, how human nature paired with a system of perfect unregulated capitalism can create incredible production, but fails to protect the people who create or use said product. However, the idea of corruptability gets much more interesting as Jurgis finally breaks from his ethical values (he’s quite the optimistic hero until about the 10th extraordinarily tragic event in his life) and joins the politcal scene around the stock yards. The way he joins (through a thief he meets in prison), immediately shows that our current politcal crooks are nothing but a shadow of their 20th century predecessors. The buying of votes, threatening of political enemies, bribery, ballot stuffing, and any other number of political crimes were boldly prevalent in this period. Once again I had to ask myself if we aren’t so much better today, despite the constant griping you hear from just about everyone about how the world is going to hell. But unlike infant mortality, political corruption is not so easily measured or compared, and in one of the most divided moments of American history (with similar situations arising in many European countries) it is unclear what might be happening behind the scenes of our political machines. Good political corruption is inherently hidden, so maybe people are not less corrupt, they are just much better at hiding it.
Another option is that the corruption has simply changed. In the 1900s everything had been vertically integrated and those with power had all the power, everywhere. Politics as well as companies. Now we appear to be creating a system where the politicians are constantly roadblocked by each other, leaving paths for the new wave of technological robber barons to run the country. Jeff Bezos and his Amazon delivery service essentially owns the post office. Elon Musk owns the electric charging infrastructure with Tesla and is vying for telecommunications infrastructure with Starlink, even going after controlling the news by buying Twitter. Bill Gates owns computing systems (which we recently saw in a global crash that almost nothing can operate without these systems). Warren Buffet owns the real estate market with his behemoth Berkshire Hathaway. Maybe these magnates are visionaries and pushing the will of man to its furthest reaches, but at the same time, maybe we are opening the door to a new age of corruption where the few can squeeze the many and the many will be trapped in a race to the bottom like the legions of meat packers who in their opressed state simply redirected that oppression to the person one rung down on the ladder.
A final thought I had while reading this was how impossible the lives of different people were in this period of history. Some examples of these lives include, the wonderfully rich Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby living in New York, the poor (although owning a home/farm and never needing to worry about starving to death) Celie in The Color Purple living in Georgia, the rich southern boy Lucius who experienced his coming of age in The Reivers in Mississippi, even the persecuted nameless protaganist in Invisible Man in New York City, and finally our poor immigrant family with Jurgis at the head from The Jungle in Chicago. All of these books are placed in a 20-30 year time frame (Invisible Man being the latest around the 1930’s, so maybe an outlier here), yet the lives are so drastically different for each of the characters. Poor in an industrial community meant to be ground down by the machine until you essentially died, while being poor in a rural community appeared to produce ignorance more than it produced misery (for example I think there is an argument that white immigrants working in Chicago had much worse lives in 1900 than the children of slaves living in the South, which would not have been apparent to me before reading these books). It further goes to show that America is a country with a dramatically complicated past and a regionality that I believe is rarely seen in other nations. Sure, the history is short, but the technological advancements of this period were unmatched by any other in history, an evolution that appears to be speeding up. All this time America grew at the same speed rapidly needing to address things like drastically increased territory or becoming the global super power after two wars devastated Europe in a time frame that was unreasonably short, there were people alive who owned slaves and saw airplanes, people who were born before the X-Ray was invented that lived past the first organ donations. This rapid rise did not allow for spreading of equality, and all these stories show something that I believe to be the case still today, that the US has the rare status of being a country where the best and the worst can exist either door to door, state to state, or coast to coast. The American dream can exist, but at the same time, the countless millions can live in fear of bankrupcy if the event of a large medical emergency (just like losing your job if you missed a day of work due to a workplace injury in The Jungle).
To conclude, much like how 1984 or Brave New World still strike a chord today for their political and phiolosphical relevance, I believe that the criticisms of centralized, corruptable (human) people and the systems they create prevalent in The Jungle remain extremely relevant to the modern era, and will probably continue to be so well after I am gone. Sinclair, like Huxley and Orwell seems to have spotted something in human nature, and immortalized himself by writing about it.
What I didn’t like
As so often happens in these books the end twists from a historic narrative of a specific era, to a political manifesto. It’s the same in 1984 and Brave New World. It was the same with the protagonist in Invisible Man with his encounter with the communist party, and it was the same here with The Jungle. I know that Upton Sinclair was one of the great propaganda writers of the 20th century, but I did not imagine the end of a book so involved with the life of an immigrant would be 30 pages on the benefits and ideals of perfect socialism. I was left without a conclusion of the fate of poor Jurgis and the pivot to political ideology felt forced and unrelated to the overall theme of the book. The fact that it was the conditions for immigrants that could lead to the successful rise of the socialist movement at the time was not lost on me, I just wished the transition had been done more smoothly and ended more clearly related to Jurgis specifically, and not just a recollection of a dinner where he was present and said nothing.
Questions I asked
How could conditions get so bad in the first place in industries like this?
How are modern political and corporate systems compared to these regarding corruption? Are we really much better, or is it more well hidden?
Why on Earth did Jurgis go back to Chicago after being successful living in the country?
My Favorite Quote
“It was not the pleasantest work one could think of, but it was necessary work; and what more had a man the right to ask than a chance to do something useful and to get good pay for doing it.”
Upton Sinclair
Books I liked like this one
Invisible Man : Ralph Ellison (for an inside look at a system built against a group of people, leaving them virtually no chance for success)
The Road : Cormac McCarthy (for a continuous descent into misery for our heroes)
Book Reviews for Mom 