The novel that shocked a nation

IN May 1903, the ambitious 24-year-old novelist Upton Sinclair feared that he was a failure, “a would-be singer and penniless rat.” Less than three years later, almost immediately after the publication of “The Jungle” on Feb. 26, 1906, his renown was so widespread that the New York Evening World marveled: “Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.” Sinclair’s name and his novel are familiar after a hundred years, long after competing bestsellers have turned to dust. And yet even admirers must concede that “The Jungle,” though still a powerful expose of worker exploitation by the Chicago beef trust, is something less than a work of perfect art: one part melodrama, one part propaganda and one part compelling literary achievement.

What, then, keeps Sinclair and “The Jungle” among the living?

One source of Sinclair’s enduring appeal as a writer is his unquenchable energy, coupled with his irrepressible self-assurance. Another is his quixotic sense of epic destiny, the feeling that he had been singled out for great deeds. These qualities continue to infuse “The Jungle,” accounting in no small part for its resonance with younger readers. Both his energy and his ambition were in evidence on the day in late October 1904 when Sinclair checked in to the Transit House, opposite the Union Stock Yards in Chicago. The hotel was a favorite hangout for writers on the prowl for good stories and local color. Among these was the novelist Ernest Poole, who was amused and charmed when, he would later write, “in breezed a lad in a wide-brimmed hat, with a loose-flowing tie and a wonderful warm expansive smile. ‘Hello! I’m Upton Sinclair!’ he said. ‘And I’ve come here to write the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the Labor Movement!’ ”

Sinclair was a recent convert to socialism, as were many thoughtful Americans in those times. But he was not visibly a rebel and certainly not a bohemian -- he never smoked or drank, avoiding even tea and coffee. He also rejected the then-fashionable intellectual arguments for “free love” as banal, though liberated women frequently let him know they liked his wavy brown hair and intense blue eyes, his physical grace (he played tournament-level tennis for many years) and his way of carrying himself as a Southern gentleman. Indeed Sinclair’s conduct was commonly described as courtly; even many of his antagonists, flayed by Sinclair in print, agreed with his friend Charlie Chaplin that in person he customarily spoke “through a smile.”

But he did have the driven writer’s intensity of vision and purpose. He was a “super-reporter,” one admirer wrote later, on “a one-way thoroughfare leading from purpose to achievement.” And he was impelled by a moral sense that made him “a cause in action, a living Crusade.” Another acute Sinclair observer was Jerry Voorhis, who would serve five terms in Congress before losing his seat to Richard Nixon in 1946, and who got his start in politics as a volunteer during the writer’s 1934 campaign for governor of California. Sinclair was then at the pinnacle of “a life-long crusade to rout out wrong and reveal its perpetrators,” Voorhis wrote. His “razor-sharp mind” left no room for doubt. “Even as his mind shot, bullet-like, from one point to the next, so his very lithe body seemed to jump and pulsate with his ideas.”

But successful novels also need emotional involvement, which Sinclair was able to summon up with remarkable power. Near the end of his stay in Chicago, he chanced upon an immigrants’ wedding celebration in a tavern “back of the yards.” By dawn he had his main characters, Jurgis Rudkus and his bride, as well as his theme firmly in mind. He would tell a story of personal tragedy brought about by the excesses of capitalism -- and of redemption through socialism, which for Sinclair was “the religion of humanity.”

For the first three months of 1905, he wrote “incessantly,” with “tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all that pain which life had meant to me. Externally, the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family,” which had suffered so much in the last year from poverty, hunger and illness. “Ona” was his young wife, Meta, “speaking Lithuanian, but otherwise unchanged.” David, “our little boy,” nearly died of pneumonia, “and the grief of that went into the book.”

An early, longer version of “The Jungle” appeared serially in 1905 in a radical Midwestern newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, and was modestly successful. But Sinclair had a more ambitious goal, a real book put out by a proper New York publisher. The potential for lawsuits by the meatpackers, not to mention Sinclair’s growing reputation as brilliant but unyielding, made both him and his book tough sells. Fortunately, he found an advocate in Isaac Marcosson, a young publicist with Doubleday Page, to whom he handed his manuscript late one November afternoon in 1905. Marcosson took Sinclair’s bulky package home with him. Spellbound by the novel’s power, he finished reading it at dawn and told his boss Walter Page a few hours later that they should “have guardians appointed” for them if they failed to publish this book.

On Jan. 6, 1906, Sinclair signed his contract with Doubleday Page. Marcosson was given, as he put it, “the responsibility of launching and exploiting ‘The Jungle,’ ” which was published a scant seven weeks later, capitalizing on the public’s interest in the scandal-plagued meat industry and pending legislation to control the beef trust. Marcosson said he worked hard to sell Upton Sinclair as a commodity, grandly claiming that they stood “shoulder to shoulder in the front-line trenches of publicity,” directing the campaign that “now interested the whole world.”

There had been nothing like this scenario, or like Sinclair himself, in American literary history. Congratulating himself for successfully exploiting Sinclair’s subject and his authorial persona, Marcosson wondered later whether “publishing history has ever developed such a strenuous and continuously dramatic situation as was brought about by ‘The Jungle.’ ” No shrinking ingenue, the star of this drama was soon to enter onto a much larger stage.

In mid-March, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Sinclair to have lunch with him at the White House. Their meeting, as Sinclair later described it, was cordial, with the president doing most of the talking. Soon, however, Sinclair was complaining vigorously in letters and telegrams to Roosevelt that Congress and the president were dragging their feet on the proposed legislation to curb the meatpackers. He was particularly upset about smears on his reputation in the press and about rumors that Roosevelt was going to attack “The Jungle” in a forthcoming speech.

Roosevelt gently mocked the young writer for being upset at personal slurs, saying, “Really, Mr. Sinclair, you must keep your head.” He also denied any intention of attacking “The Jungle” in his upcoming speech. But that speech turned out to be Roosevelt’s famous accusation that muckrakers were meddlers who caused more trouble than they cured. “There is filth on the floor” that must be attended to, Roosevelt said; but the man “who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing,” is not merely misguided; he “speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces of evil.”

Though neither Sinclair nor his book was named in Roosevelt’s speech, the wrongheaded attack on muckrakers led to intensified (and largely unjustified) criticism of “The Jungle” as biased and inaccurate. At the same time, the meatpackers’ allies in Congress had bottled up the reform legislation. Sinclair struck back over the next two months with a blizzard of telegrams and letters to Roosevelt and to sympathetic legislators; he also slipped documents from his voluminous files to the New York Times that stirred further public outrage. Exasperated, Roosevelt urged “The Jungle’s” publisher to “tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country.” When he signed the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act on June 30, 1906, he did not acknowledge Sinclair’s contribution to arousing indignation against the beef trust that had measurably helped create support for the new law.

For the rest of his long life -- he died at 90 in 1968 -- Sinclair noted wryly that he had failed to achieve his purpose with “The Jungle” He hoped to rouse sentiment against “wage slavery,” the contemporary equivalent to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “chattel slavery” in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Instead, he won fame and fortune by making his readers sick to their stomachs.

The final and, in some ways, most touching instance of that fame came in 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson invited the old crusader to pay one last visit to the White House. The occasion? The signing of an updated meat inspection act. *

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From The Jungle

THERE was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausages; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy 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.... These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them, and they would die, and then the rats, bread and meat would go into the hoppers together.