How Should We Teach 'The Jungle'?
By CHRISTOPHER PHELPS

I first encountered Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, his influential novel set in the meatpacking industry, in a classroom. So do most readers, I suspect. A study published last year by Daniel J. Cohen in The Journal of American History finds The Jungle to be among the top five supplementary texts assigned in the U.S. undergraduate history survey, ahead of Thomas Paine's Common Sense and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

My initial encounter with the novel took place in a literature class at Iowa City West High in the late 1970s. My classmates and I found The Jungle evocative of another America, a very distant past. That was then, this is now, to riff on the title of an adolescent novel by S.E. Hinton popular among my peers at the time. The Jungle was definitely then. Few traces of the world it depicted survived around us, or so it seemed, after the postwar convergence of cultural assimilation, ethnic tolerance, middle-class affluence, and rational regulation in the public interest.

Originally published by Doubleday, Page in 1906, and celebrating its centennial in February, The Jungle describes a callous America in which the dollar trumps justice. It famously exposed the American meatpacking industry's loathsome practices and prompted federal consumer-protection laws. It is, however, primarily a sympathetic sketch of the foreign born, those fabled "masses yearning to breathe free" that Americans welcome in our poetry and disdain in the breach. Sinclair declared The Jungle the first American "proletarian novel," and he may have been right. What major work before it focused upon an immigrant worker's quotidian efforts to keep head above water?

The hard-knock experiences of the Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus in turn-of-the-century industrial Chicago seemed at far remove from my and my classmates' experience. Jurgis's misery was as foreign to us as the agonies of Ivan Denisovich, the fictive Soviet prison-camp victim whose bleak predicament Alexander Solzhenitsyn portrayed in a novella we also read.

Even as The Jungle appealed to the social conscience, then, it fostered complacency. Our teacher framed the novel within a comforting narrative of liberal progress. Enlightened social policies and economic growth had checked corporate abuses and widened the country's range of economic beneficiaries.

Teachers have not been alone in positioning the novel within a mythos of progress. Sinclair himself did. "There is now," he wrote in 1956, "adequate inspection of all meat products, and the workers in all the stockyards have strong unions and are able to protect their rights."

Already by the 1950s, however, the gains won by the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s were being undermined as union density and wages began to erode with the first plant closings. By the 1970s, working-class incomes had flatlined. In Mansfield, Ohio, where I now teach, a steel mill and a GM plant remain, but the employment horizon is dominated by the Wal-Mart model: low wages, few benefits, and rapid turnover.

Symbolic was the 1971 closing of Chicago's Union Stock Yards, that immense maze of pens described in The Jungle where cattle and hogs were unloaded and run through chutes to the top floors of the giant meatpacking concerns. The shutdown, however, did not herald "deindustrialization" or "postindustrial" America. It merely signified a change of venue.

As companies abandoned urban packinghouses, they erected state-of-the-art plants in rural locales in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. The objective was to break the unions, drive down wages, and speed up processing. Trailblazing this "competitiveness" of the 1960s and 1970s was Iowa Beef Processors (now absorbed into Tyson Foods).

None of this was visible to me when I — in Iowa, no less — first read The Jungle as a tale from some America long extinct.

What's more, President Ronald Reagan and succeeding Republican presidents gutted the interventionist state by deregulating the meat industry. Today inspection is at an all-time low, and agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture are difficult to distinguish from the agribusiness conglomerates they oversee.

The result is a reversion to the conditions of The Jungle. Processing lines now move 350 heads of cattle per hour, a rate far faster than Sinclair witnessed. Consequent splattering of fecal matter increases the occurrence of E. coli and other food-borne threats. Meatpacking is the most dangerous factory job in the country, with workers suffering high rates of laceration and disabling injury.

Today the meatpacking work force once again consists largely of vulnerable new immigrants, arriving from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, in contrast to the Eastern Europe of Sinclair's time. Were The Jungle written today, the name Jurgis Rudkus would have to be replaced by José Ramirez. Would much else need to be changed?

The frequent assignment of The Jungle in university history courses today has two obvious sources. First, students love it. Captivated by the plot, engrossed in (and grossed out by) the brutal details, even undergraduates who consider history "boring" respond to The Jungle. Second, The Jungle provides a window onto the social conditions and political impulses of the Progressive Era.

After all, The Jungle is as much reportage as literature. Sinclair's searing, graphic revelations were based on close observation. He spoke to workers and infiltrated the giant packinghouses, carrying a lunch pail in hand to make it seem he belonged there. Although a work of fiction, The Jungle is often classified as "muckraking," exposé journalism that blends revealed fact with moral indignation in the pursuit of social reform.

Most readers in 1906 were moved not by the desperate plight of the "workingmen of America" to whom Sinclair dedicated The Jungle but by the book's nauseating details. "I aimed at the public's heart," wrote Sinclair, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Readers were appalled to think that their breakfast sausages might contain putrid meat disguised with chemicals, that workers racked with tuberculosis would spit into processing vats, that diseased cattle condemned by inspectors were being processed routinely, and that pork piled in storage rooms could be found coated with "the dried dung of rats."

Meat sales plummeted, creating a powerful impetus for reform. Deluged with mail from upset readers, President Theodore Roosevelt read The Jungle and dispatched two independent investigators to Chicago. Their report, forwarded by the president to Congress, contained passages as disgusting as any in The Jungle: "Some of the privies are situated at a long distance from the workrooms, and men relieve themselves on the killing floors or in a corner of the workroom. ... We saw a hog that had just been killed, cleaned, washed, and started on its way to the cooling room fall from the sliding rail to a dirty wooden floor and slide part way into a filthy men's privy. It was picked up by two employees, placed upon a truck, carried into the cooling room and hung up with other carcasses, no effort being made to clean it."

Two landmark pieces of Progressive legislation were promptly signed into law in 1906: the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

That role in spurring reform, combined with The Jungle's vividness, explains its popularity with history teachers. The Jungle exemplifies the crusading spirit of the Progressive Era, invites students to enter vicariously into the immigrant experience, and makes working-class history come alive.

Through Jurgis's eyes, students today can sense the vastness of the stockyards, stretching as far as the eye could see. They enter the industrial plants, hear the din of squeals and screams, see the whirling mechanized chain, smell the overpowering odors, and slip around on the bloody kill floor. They grasp the division of labor into hundreds of functions, from splitters to can painters to sausage trimmers. They are introduced to the dizzying array of product lines — lard, soap, hair cushions, tanned leather, glue, fertilizer, and bone combs — that use up "everything but the squeal."

Students achieve, in other words, a tactile sense of industrial production in an epoch of corporate consolidation far beyond the capacity of standard economic treatises to impart.

Dangers abound, however, in drawing historical inferences fromThe Jungle, even if that pedagogical pursuit is not as obviously flawed as the self-contented narrative of progress that has often framed classroom interpretations of the work.

In an interesting, if disregarded, article published in American Studies in 1991, "The Problem With Classroom Use of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle," Louise Carroll Wade, a social historian, finds the novel entirely without historical merit. Because Sinclair was a member of the Socialist Party, she maintains, he "loaded the dice" by ignoring "how millions could consume Chicago meat without ill effects." The demise of the Rudkus family, she argues, is far-fetched, given the statistically improbable series of disasters that befall it within a few years' time. Finally, she objects, the novel overlooks religious and ethnic institutions such as the Catholic Church that provided a safety net for working-class immigrants.

While few historians share Wade's categorical dismissal of The Jungle, her article serves as a helpful reminder of the distortions that will result from literal-minded readings of a document that is, after all, a novel. Wade is entirely correct, for example, that no single worker would experience every calamity that besets Jurgis. If, however, we consider Jurgis a literary personification of the whole immigrant working class, then The Jungle illuminates social history. Scholars of Lithuanian culture admire the opening scene in which Jurgis marries his childhood sweetheart, Ona, because it poignantly conveys the difficulty of preserving Old World traditions in the New World. Labor historians find the book insightful about such very real phenomena as mass production, cyclical employment, disease, disability, low wages, weak labor unions, and explosive strikes.

The Jungle, to be sure, is far from flawless. Sinclair portrayed African-Americans in a racist manner typical of his time, making them mainly into strikebreakers. Similarly, Sinclair's temperance outlook, shaped by his childhood trauma of watching his father descend into drunken oblivion, renders alarmist his treatment of alcohol. Finally, as literary critics note, the novel suffers from undue sentimentality and political didacticism.

How, then, should we teach The Jungle today? If we grasp that history need not imply an unbroken arc of progress, and if we accept that realism is constructed, we should be able to present the novel to students in more sophisticated ways. It ought to be possible to consider The Jungle as both a transcription of social life and a work of literary imagination, as both reportage and social criticism.

That The Jungle is fictional does not make it "untrue." It does, however, complicate our teaching of it, especially in history courses. The silver lining of this complication is the opportunity it presents to sharpen students' abilities to read with greater discernment.

Since historians are rarely trained in the fine points of literary analysis, literature professors are better equipped to explore the formal dimensions of The Jungle. They could compare Sinclair to Harriet Beecher Stowe, especially since Sinclair intended The Jungle as the Uncle Tom's Cabin of "wage slavery." They might trace the influence on Sinclair of the dime novel, knowing that he turned out reams of boys' adventure tales during his adolescence. They could, above all else, delve into close textual readings of its naturalism, aided perhaps by commentary such as Matthew J. Morris's "The Two Lives of Jurgis Rudkus," a brilliant analysis of allegory in the novel published in American Literary Realism in 1997.

Even history teachers, however, must treat The Jungle as a work of literature, not simply as a mirror of an economic, political, and social world. The Jungle should be studied not just for what it reveals about its time, but for the traces of its time upon it and its author. Our discussion of The Jungle should reach beyond its descriptive power to make its authorial assumptions explicit.

Cast in this way, discussion might include these kinds of questions:

How could Sinclair have squared his derogatory references to African-Americans with his sympathy for immigrants or advocacy of a classless, egalitarian society?

Did the novel, despite showing extraordinary sympathy for immigrants, nonetheless carry traces of condescension in its treatment of Jurgis, who seems not only vulnerable and innocent but gullible?

Is Sinclair's criticism of capitalism persuasive? Is his brief for socialism persuasive? Do radical (or, for that matter, conservative) aims interfere with artistic or literary quality, or are they legitimate in a novel?

Can any work of fiction like The Jungle be taken as a transcript of historical reality? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using literature to comprehend history?

If history teachers contemplate The Jungle in this manner as a literary work, not merely a referential document, our students may acquire a higher level of analytical skill. First-year students in the U.S. history survey may not recognize words like "genre" or "realism" immediately, but they will grasp their meaning and significance if The Jungle is compared to, say, Law & Order or The West Wing. Then a novel of obvious social and political significance may provide a pathway to intellectual and cultural understanding, and students whose interest is piqued by Jurgis's predicament may also come to appreciate the novel as a creative text.

Accomplish all of this, and we just might transcend impure meat to generate food for thought.

Christopher Phelps is an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University at Mansfield and editor of a 2005 edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (Bedford/St. Martin's).

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