On the 120th anniversary of The Jungle’s publication as a novel, The Communist revisits Upton Sinclair’s exposure of the rotten Beef Trust in South Side Chicago.

Today, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is remembered for its stomach-churning descriptions of Chicago’s meatpacking factories. Diseased cattle, spoiled meat, corrupt inspectors, and filthy slaughterhouses horrified readers and turned the novel into an American classic.

But Sinclair intended The Jungle—first published in 1905 as a serial in the socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason—to be an exposé of the brutal exploitation of immigrant workers, the growing power of industrial monopolies, and the barbarism of the capitalist system. He later expressed frustration with the novel’s reception: “I wished to frighten the country by a picture of what its industrial masters were doing to their wage slaves; entirely by chance I had stumbled on another discovery—what they were doing to the meat supply of the civilized world.”

Jurgis Rudkus, the novel’s hero, is a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives with his family determined to build a better life. Jurgis is physically powerful, optimistic, and willing to work—qualities that the “American Dream” supposedly rewards. When his family begins to worry about money, his answer is simple: “I will work harder.”

The family settles in Packingtown, a poor neighborhood around Chicago’s Union Stock Yards. They encounter overcrowded housing, poor sanitation, and widespread poverty. Sinclair had spent seven weeks investigating conditions in Packingtown, living “among the wage slaves of the Beef Trust.” He based the tragedy of Jurgis’s family on the real conditions faced by thousands of workers on Chicago’s bloody, sulfurous South Side in the early 1900s.

Straight beef, no trust

The Union Stock Yards represented an immense concentration of productive power. Railroads, slaughterhouses, machinery, livestock, and thousands of workers were brought together in one industrial district, allowing meat to be processed and distributed on a scale impossible only a generation earlier.

Meatpacking companies developed vast distribution networks, using refrigerated railcars to transport meat across the country without the expense of shipping live animals. The largest packers were able to outcompete smaller slaughterhouses, driving competitors from the market and concentrating the industry into a cartel known as the “Beef Trust.” The trust fixed wages, production standards, and prices across the industry.

The concentration of capital brought about enormous advances in production. Work that once took a skilled butcher hours was now divided among dozens of disassembly line workers and took only minutes.

Far from improving wages and conditions, advances in machinery and the division of labor allowed bosses to squeeze even more profits out of workers, while making them more expendable. A worker trained to perform a single repetitive action could be easily replaced. Management selected the most skilled workers to set the pace of production, a practice known as “speeding up the gang.” For anyone who couldn’t keep up, “there were hundreds outside begging to try.”

The Beef Trust had a seemingly endless supply of cheap labor, and they consciously exploited divisions between immigrants. As Sinclair wrote, “The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands, had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians were giving way to the Slovaks.” Drawn to America by the promise of higher wages, these “rats in a trap” quickly found that the high cost of living and miserable working conditions made life nearly impossible.

While working, Jurgis discovers that his exceptional physical strength is no match for the grinding tempo. Once his body breaks down, he is useless to the bosses.

Early in the novel, Jurgis sees the unemployed men waiting outside the factory gates as lazy and unambitious. But after his incapacitating injury, he finds himself in the job lines with them.

Meanwhile, his family faces parasitic swindling and tragedy at every turn. They attempt to buy a house, only to be tricked into a money-hemorrhaging rental contract. One by one, the family’s women and children are pulled out of school and the home to help make ends meet. The horrific and unsanitary conditions of both the neighborhood and the workplace cause disease, only made worse by adulterated foods and medicines. The women face sexual assault and forced prostitution at the hands of their employers.

Jurgis realizes his livelihood depends upon the whims of the bosses, and eventually descends into alcoholism and homelessness.

Dead meat over living flesh

Despite Sinclair’s emphasis on the exploitation of Packingtown’s workers, the public reaction to The Jungle focused on his vivid descriptions of the unsanitary conditions in meat production. Sinclair showed workers using the bathroom in open troughs next to the disassembly lines, rats and bugs defecating on raw meat, while government inspectors are bribed to turn a blind eye. Production doesn’t stop when a worker falls into a lard-processing vat or a finger is sliced off by a blood-slick machine. Human flesh is mixed in, chopped, boiled, and packaged all the same.

Public outcry was massive. Within weeks, The Jungle became a bestseller. It’s estimated that domestic meat consumption fell by more than 50%, and there was a temporary ban on the importation of American meat into Europe.

In 1906, Congress passed the Federal Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act to restore public confidence in the industry. Despite these minor reforms, the conditions facing workers like Jurgis remained largely unchanged until the 1930s, when the CIO used militant class-struggle methods to organize meatpacking workers across divisions of race, nationality, and craft.

“Chicago will be ours!”

By the time Jurgis encounters socialism, he has exhausted every individual solution available to him. His strength and willingness to work have failed to keep him from injury and unemployment, and he has lost his entire family to disease and death.

But events change consciousness, and Jurgis abandons his individual ambition for collective struggle. At a socialist meeting, he learns that the capitalist system is responsible for the horrors he has suffered. Afterwards, Jurgis lies awake imagining the workers of Packingtown taking possession of the stockyards, with its enormous productive apparatus placed under their collective democratic control.

The Jungle ends with Jurgis at a Socialist Party rally, joining the crowd in the chant: “Chicago will be ours!”