It was fellow socialist author Jack London who showed a clear grasp of Sinclair's aspirations when he called The Jungle "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery." The novel opens with Redkus at his wedding party, embedded in a warm and vividly depicted community. The subsequent series of dehumanizing experiences in Packingtown reduces the protagonist to an isolated and desperate individual who is at last reborn within a political movement for a "Cooperative Commonwealth" of democracy and equality.
It is this narrative of The Jungle that is closest to Sinclair’s intentions. It is the work of an author possessed of the hope that life will imitate his art.
Regulations and Restlessness
The Jungle’s cumulative aesthetic impact derives from Sinclair's attempt to generate sympathy (heart), disgust (stomach), and ideological fervor (head). In 1905, the combination was volatile. By 1912, membership in the Socialist Party was six times what it had been when Sinclair joined it. Only part of this growth can be attributed to The Jungle: The party's presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, was both charismatic and a uniquely gifted public speaker. All those Appeal Army volunteers surely played their part.
Indeed, the novel's immediate influence and its lasting reputation have relatively little to do with its effectiveness in spreading the gospel of proletarian revolution. Many a reader over the years has grown restless with the book’s final chapters. Redkus himself all but disappears. The narrative peters out. New characters enter, discoursing at length on the origins, goals, and methods of the socialist movement.
In The Industrial Republic (1907) — a nonfiction work written as The Jungle was at the peak of its success — Sinclair was confident that the United States was on the verge of a radical transformation. He assured readers that the Cooperative Commonwealth could be established within about a year of the 1912 presidential election. His passion, however unmistakable, clearly did not prove contagious.
High-school American history usually identifies a key role for The Jungle in inspiring regulations to bring the noxious aspects of capitalism (its hog-eat-hog phase, if you will) under control. But the author himself knew better than this.
Individual states had been trying to protect their citizens from unhealthy and dishonestly advertised foodstuffs for decades before Sinclair moved to Packingtown. Calls for federal inspection of meat began no later than the 1880s, when European countries began to ban U.S. beef and pork because of contamination. (Meat imported from Argentina proved safer.)
The first federal meat inspection laws were passed in the 1890s, with the support of the same major packing houses that dominated the Chicago portrayed in the novel. Indeed, these companies urged stricter enforcement — not to protect customers but to reduce competition by driving smaller producers out of the business. By the turn of the century, five American meat-packing companies slaughtered eighty percent of the country's cattle.
Federal inspection was "maintained and paid for by the people of the United States," Sinclair wrote in 1906, "for the benefit of the packers. … [M]en wearing the blue uniforms and brass buttons of the United States service are employed for the purpose of certifying to the nations of the civilized world that all the diseased and tainted meat which happens to come into existence in the United States is carefully sorted out and consumed by the American people."