The Jungle - Chicago Will Be Ours
"Their home! Their home! They had lost it! Grief, despair, rage, overwhelmed him - what was any imagination of the thing to this heart-breaking, crush reality of it ... Only think what he had suffered for that house - what miseries they had all suffered for that house - the price they had paid for it!"
"The Jungle", by Upton Sinclair, gives a heart breaking portrayal of the hardships faced by the countless poverty stricken laborers in the slaughter houses of Chicago. As in the quote above, a struggling family underwent months of back breaking labor only to loose their house at the drop of a hat. It was a desperate and unmerciful time when an accidentally fractured ankle cost a man his job and his family food and shelter.
In the early 1900's, strikes, riots, labor unions, and new political parties arose across the country. The government, with its laissez-faire attitude, allowed business to consolidate into trusts, and with lack of competition, into powerful monopolies. These multi-million dollar monopolies were able to exploit every opportunity to make greater fortunes regardless of human consequences. Sinclair illustrates the harsh conditions in Packingtown through a Lithuanian immigrant family and their struggles to survive. Ona, a young and frail woman, and Jurgis, a hardworking and strong man and the husband of Ona, come to America with some of their family to find work and to make a new and better life for themselves. With everyone finding employment right away, the family begins their lives in America with optimism, enthusiasm, and ignorance. Taking a huge risk, they purchase a small rickety house. Slowly, they awaken to the harsh realities of their surroundings. There's the mortgage to pay, interest on the mortgage, food, clothing, shoes, and coal that needs to be bought, but there just wasn't enough money to pay for it. Antanas, the father of Jurgis, and the women and children trudged out into the cold and heartless streets, through five feet of snow, to beg for work and money. Still, the family lacked the sufficient income necessary to make ends meet. The old man, Antanas, later succumbs to tuberculosis from the cold cellar he worked in where the chemicals soaked through his shabby boots. Through the duration of the novel, disaster after disaster strike this unfortunate family. After a tragic accident, Jurgis is fired and turns to drinking to drown his sorrows. Then after a fit of rage, he beats the man forcing sex upon his wife, Ona. So, he is imprisoned and without his income, the family looses their sole possession, their house. When released from jail, Jurgis rushes back to find his wife lingering an agonizing death with child birth. With nothing left to weigh him down, Jurgis flees to the country to lead the life of a vagabond. He eventually finds himself back in the city and finds salvation in a new political party called socialism.
To expose the injustice of the beef trust and the capitalistic government, Upton Sinclair uses an illustrative method to express his views and beliefs. His characters tend to be less human and more stereotypical. However, it is with great pain and detail that the scenes and events are described. He uses vivid and strong language. As his life flashes before him, Jurgis stutters along "tearing up all the flowers from the garden of his soul, and setting his heel upon them." This powerful language causes for the reader to stop and really think about Jurgis's anguish. Likewise, Sinclair uses a graphic style to shock the reader to understand the plight of the workingman. For example, the author depicts the working conditions in the Packinghouse, "As for the other men who worked in tank rooms full of steam ... they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting ... all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard." It is through these techniques, that Sinclair advocates the change from capitalism to socialism.
Not only does the author expose the monstrosities of the Beef Trust and other monopolies, he advocates the need for change by offering a possible solution. To Upton Sinclair, this solution is socialism. He craftily weaves this in through the voice of a powerful speaker in a large convention hall in Chicago from which Jurgis was ejected the night before. Jurgis is deeply inspired from his speech and instantly converts to socialism. This method works well because a speech has persuasive qualities that written words just can't capture effectively. While talking, the speaker refers to the "ravening vultures" and the "fierce wolves" thereby producing an image of a jungle to which he is comparing the capitalistic society in which millions of workingmen must labor day after day to support a few idle, wealthy people. Sinclair makes capitalism seem primitive and backward. He suggests that the only hope for the workingman is common ownership and democratic management of production. Schliemann, a socialist, explains that "anyone would be able to support himself by an hour's work a day." Sinclair goes even further by referring to socialism as the "new religion of humanity" to oppose the "jungle" in which the workingman slaves. Finally, Sinclair tries to convert his readers to socialism and reject capitalism by using numbers. At the end of the novel, he shows the increasing popularity of socialism as the number of votes increase. In Chicago, the number of votes for socialism started at next to nothing and, by the end of the book, there were nearly fifty thousand votes. Leaving the reader with a sense of optimism that socialism may one day triumph, Sinclair ends the novel with hope for the workingman as he zealously writes, "Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours!"
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