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Upton Sinclair’s powerful novel The Jungle exposed the plight of Lithuanian andPolish immigrant workers in the slaughterhouses and stockyards of Chicago.Sinclair’s objectives were to “set forth the breaking of human hearts by a systemwhich exploits the labor of men and women for profits . . . and blow the top offthe industrial tea-kettle.”

As you read the excerpt below, think of why Sinclair’s book became an international bestseller.

Horrors of the Meat-packing Industry

LITERATURE ACTIVITY

Now the dreadful winter had come uponthem. In the forests, all summer long, the

branches of the trees do battle for light, and someof them lose and die; and then come the ragingblasts and the storms of snow and hail, and strewthe ground with these weaker branches. Just so it was in Packingtown; the whole district braceditself for the struggle that was an agony, andthose whose time was come died off in hordes.All the year round they had been serving as cogsin the great packing machine, and now was thetime for the renovating of it and the replacing of damaged parts. There came pneumonia andgrippe, stalking among them, seeking for weak-ened constitutions; there was the annual harvestof those whom tuberculosis had been draggingdown. There came cruel, cold, and biting winds,and blizzards of snow, all testing relentlessly forfailing muscles and impoverished blood. Soonerof later came the day when the unfit one did notreport for work; and then, with no time lost inwaiting, and no inquiries or regrets, there was achance for a new hand.

The new hands were here by the thousands.All day long the gates of the packing houses werebesieged by starving and penniless men; they came,literally, by the thousands every single morning,fighting with each other for a chance for life.Blizzards and cold made no difference to them,they were always on hand; they were on handtwo hours before the sun rose, an hour before thework began. Sometimes their faces froze, some-times their feet and their hands; sometimes theyfroze all together—but still they came, for theyhad no other place to go. . . .

And if it was bad for the men, one may imag-ine how the women and children fared. Somewould ride in the cars, if the cars were running;

but when you are making only five cents anhour, as was little Stanislovas, you do not like tospend that much to ride two miles. The childrenwould come to the yards with great shawls abouttheir ears, and so tied up that you could hardlyfind them—and still there would be accidents.One bitter morning in February, the little boywho worked at the lard machine with Stanislovascame about an hour late, and screaming withpain. They unwrapped him, and a man beganvigorously rubbing his ears; and as they werefrozen stiff, it took only two or three rubs tobreak them short off. . . .

“And if it was bad for the men, onemay imagine how the women andchildren fared.”

There was no heat upon the killing beds; themen might exactly as well have worked out ofdoors all winter. For that matter, there was butvery little heat anywhere in the building, exceptin the cooking rooms and such places—and it wasthe men who worked in these who ran the mostrisk of all because whenever they had to pass toanother room they had to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on abovethe waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On thekilling beds you were apt to be covered withblood, and it would freeze solid; if you leanedagainst a pillar, you would freeze to that, and ifyou put your hand upon the blade of your knife,you would run a chance of leaving your skin onit. The men would tie up their feet in newspapersand old sacks, and these would be soaked in bloodand frozen, and then soaked again, and so on,

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until by night-time a man would be walking ongreat lumps the size of the feet of an elephant.Now and then, when the bosses were not looking,you would see them plunging their feet andankles into the steaming hot carcass of the steer,or darting across the room to the hot-water jets.The cruellest thing of all was that nearly all ofthem—all of those who used knives—wereunable to wear gloves, and their arms would bewhite with frost and their hands would grownumb, and then of course, there would be acci-dents. Also the air would be so full of steam, fromthe hot water and the hot blood, so that you couldnot see five feet before you; and then, with menrushing about at the speed they kept up on thekilling beds and all with butcher knives, likerazors, in their hands—well, it was to be counteda wonder that there were not more men slaugh-tered than cattle. . . .

There was another interesting set of statisticsthat a person might have gathered in Packingtown—those of the various afflictions of the workers.When Jurgis had first inspected the packingplants with Szedvilas, he had marvelled while he listened to the tale of all the things that weremade out of the carcasses of animals, and of all

the lesser industries that were maintained there;now he found that each one of these lesser indus-tries was a separate little inferno, in its way ashorrible as the killing beds, the source and foun-tain of them all. The workers in each of them hadtheir own peculiar diseases. And the wanderingvisitor might be skeptical about all the swindles,but he could not be skeptical about these, for theworker bore the evidence of them about on hisown person—generally he had only to hold outhis hand. . . .

Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer-men, and those who served in the cooking rooms.These people could not be shown to the visitor,for the odour of a fertilizer-man would scare anyordinary visitor at a hundred yards; and as for theother men, who worked in tank rooms full ofsteam, and in some of which there were open vatsnear the level of the floor, their peculiar troublewas that they fell into the vats; and when theywere fished out, there was never enough of themleft to be worth exhibiting—sometimes theywould be overlooked for days, till all but thebones of them had gone out to the world asDurham’s Pure Leaf Lard!

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(continued) LITERATURE ACTIVITY

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The year is 1906 and you are a book publisher. Design an advertisementannouncing the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or write a bookreview for Book World, the literary section of the Sunday newspaper.

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