[In the following essay, Homberger analyzes The Jungle as Sinclair's first novel after his conversion to socialism.]

‘American literature today’, wrote Gertrude Atherton in 1904, ‘is the most timid, the most anaemic, the most lacking in individualities, the most bourgeois that any country has ever known.’¹ A modestly successful and highly industrious lady scribbler, with over fifty books under her belt in a career which continued for a half-century from 1892, Mrs Atherton waved the banner of a high and serious art. She advised her contemporaries to abandon the snug and the conventional; writers must learn to ‘fight unceasingly’ for literature, and face the prospect of having ‘to stand absolutely alone’. Cynics, as is their wont, quickly pointed out how much easier it was for Mrs Atherton at forty-seven, the widow of a wealthy and socially prominent San Francisco landowner, to preach such austere integrity than it was for young writers like Upton Sinclair and Jack London, who had to support themselves by their writing. But Mrs Atherton had a splendid case to make, and her analysis of American culture at the turn of the century (echoed by Martin Eden: ‘The bourgeois is cowardly’) anticipates the attitudes of figures such as Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford and Matthew Josephson in the 1920s. She answered her question, ‘Why Is American Literature Bourgeois?’, through a scathing analysis of the domination of ‘magazine taste’ in America. In her opinion, the magazines of the day rejected originality in the subject-matter of the stories they printed, and wanted only acceptable subjects treated in conventional ways. They allowed only a censored view of human nature which, among other things, excluded adult sexuality.² Editors preferred works which lacked either vitality or audacity; their magazines were contemptuous of the intellect. Their ideal story was one which would not disturb those with delicate nerves. The American bourgeoisie was basically responsible for this situation: ‘magazine taste’ was, Mrs Atherton felt, ‘the expression of that bourgeoisie which is afraid of doing the wrong thing, not of the indifferent aristocrat; of that element which dares not use slang, shrinks from audacity, rarely utters a bold sentiment and as rarely feels one’. The appearance of Kate Douglas Wiggins's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Gene Stratton-Porter's Freckles on the bestseller lists in 1903-4 would have been greeted by Mrs Atherton with a disdainful nod. These were the sorts of books the editors wanted. But the appearance of The Call of the Wild, The Pit, The Sea-Wolf and The Jungle on American bestseller lists for 1903-6 suggests she was making a partial case.³ She seems to have been unaware of the challenge which realistic and naturalistic novels were offering to contemporary taste.

Among the flurry of replies to Mrs Atherton's article, easily the most passionate was by Upton Sinclair in Collier's Weekly of 8 October 1904. Sinclair was then twenty-six, and had published four undistinguished novels. His contempt for the bourgeoisie was no less real than Mrs Atherton's, but it lacked her haughty and aristocratic disdain. The bourgeois, he wrote,

is well fed himself, his wife is stout, and his children are fine and vigorous. He lives in a big house, and wears the latest thing in clothes; his civilization furnishes these to everyone—at least to everyone who amounts to anything; and beyond that he understands nothing—save only the desire to be entertained. It is for entertainment that he buys books, and as entertainment that he regards them; and hence another characteristic of the bourgeois literature is its lack of seriousness. The bourgeois writer has a certain kind of seriousness, of course—the seriousness of a hungry man seeking his dinner; but the seriousness of the artist he does not know. He will roar you as gently as any suckling dove, he will also wring tears from your eyes or thrill you with terror, according as the fashion of the hour suggests; but he knows exactly why he does these things, and he can do them between chats at his club. If you expected him to act like his heroes, he would think that you were mad.⁴

Sinclair's argument in ‘Our Bourgeois Literature: The Reason and the Remedy’ attributed bourgeois timidity to the knowledge of the possibility of revolution. A ‘mighty revolution’ was coming in America from the ‘under-world of the poor’, but was not yet grasped by Americans, because socialism, as they observed it, had not yet impinged upon culture. In Europe there was a substantial socialist literature (though the figures mentioned by Sinclair were in most cases not socialists at all: Bjørnsen, Maeterlinck, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Zola and Gorky are paraded as examples), but writers in America who were socialists were generally forced to send their socialistic writings to ‘some obscure Socialist paper that you never heard of’ because the editors of bourgeois magazines were hostile to their message. The writers he mentions (Bliss Carman, Richard LeGallienne and Jack London) were, with the exception of London, established men of letters, hardly likely to threaten the social order, and London's most important socialist writings had not yet appeared. Where Mrs Atherton blamed bourgeois timidity, Sinclair argued that Americans have a capitalist culture, obedient to the interests of capital. The very idea that great art, or a high civilization, could be nourished by an unjust and exploitative society, brings forth from him a moral cry of indignation. Sinclair was an idealist in matters of culture. The arts belonged to a higher and purer realm of human endeavour than money-grubbing capitalism; but a corrupt society dragged down its highest impulses and cultural ideals:

there can be among us neither political virtue, nor social refinement, nor true religion, nor vital art, so long as men, women, and little children are chained up to toil for us in mines and factories and sweatshops, are penned in filthy slums, and fed upon offal, and doomed to rot and perish in soul-sickening and horror.

In 1904 Sinclair was a recent convert to socialism, and showed all the convert's passionate conviction. There was little in his background to suggest the likelihood of such a conversion: he grew up in Virginia and New York, where he was a student at City College in the 1890s.⁵ Sinclair's father was a wholesale whisky salesman, and appeared to his wife and son mainly as a troublesome drunk. Sinclair describes his mother as a long-suffering, puritanical woman who scrupulously avoided artificial stimulants like coffee, tea or alcohol. Brewers and saloon-keepers were the source of unmitigated evil to the young Sinclair, but while at City College he was exposed to other kinds of corruption:

I can remember speculating at the age of sixteen whether it could be true that women did actually sell their bodies. I decided in the negative and held to that idea until I summoned the courage to question one of my classmates in college.

The truth, finally made clear, shocked me deeply, and played a great part in the making of my political revolt. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty I explored the situation in New York, and made discoveries that for me were epoch-making. The saloonkeeper, who had been the villain of my childhood melodrama, was merely a tool and victim of the big liquor interests and politicians and police. The twin bases of the political power of Tammany Hall were saloon graft and the sale of women. So it was that, in my young soul, love for my father and love for my mother were transmuted into political rage, and I sallied forth at the age of twenty, a young reformer armed for battle.⁶

By 1902 Sinclair had written a vast quantity of popular ephemeral literature (stories, articles, serials, thousands of jokes, etc.), and three novels, two of which had been published. He described himself as being ‘in revolt against Mammon’. ‘… I was intellectually a perfect little snob and Tory. I despised modern books without having read them, and I expected social evils to be remedied by cultured and well-mannered gentlemen who had been to college and acquired noble ideals.’⁷ In the autumn of 1902, while calling upon the offices of the Literary Digest, Sinclair met ‘a tall, soft-voiced, and gentle-souled youth’ by the name of Leonard D. Abbott. He was soon impressed by the sincerity of Abbott's socialist beliefs, and took away several pamphlets and magazines to read. Abbott brought Sinclair along to meet John Spargo, editor of the International Socialist Review, and the young writer was soon drawn into the party. The effect of meeting socialists seems to have been electrifying: their doctrine, he discovered, was very congenial to his own; socialists also gave Sinclair the possibility of becoming part of a community, a brethren of fellow-believers:

It was like the falling down of prison walls about my mind; the amazing discovery, after all those years, that I did not have to carry the whole burden of humanity's future upon my two frail shoulders! There were actually others who understood; who saw what had gradually become clear to me, that the heart and centre of evil lay in leaving the social treasure, which nature had created and which every man has to have in order to live, to become the object of a scramble in the market place, a delirium of speculation. The principal fact the socialists had to teach me was that they themselves existed.⁸

One of the tracts which Abbott gave Sinclair was by George D. Herron, the Indiana congregational minister and socialist writer whose sensational divorce and remarriage to Carrie Rand in 1901 had ended his career in the ministry.⁹ Herron was a leading proponent of Christian Socialism, and his criticism of the damaging effects of money upon organized Christianity, in his famous sermon ‘The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth’, delivered in Minneapolis in 1890, was likely to receive a sympathetic hearing from Sinclair, still strongly influenced by his mother's Episcopalian piety. ‘In no nation on the earth is there such abject submission to mere money in both church and state as there is in America’: which might just as easily have come from Sinclair in 1904 as it did from Herron a decade earlier.¹⁰ Herron's new wife had money, and he was able to help Sinclair throughout 1903, when he was writing Manassas, a heavily-researched novel about the Civil War. Herron made Sinclair a cash gift of several hundred dollars, and a small sum each month until the project was completed. It enabled Sinclair to keep afloat as a writer, and relieved him of the hack work by which he had supported himself in the past. Manassas did not reflect Sinclair's conversion to socialism, but his next book, The Jungle, became the most famous and influential novel written by a socialist in America.

The idea for a study of wage slavery came from the editor of a right-wing socialist weekly, The Appeal to Reason. The paper would stake Sinclair for ＄500 in return for serial rights to the book. Sinclair would be free to make his own arrangements for book publication, translation and foreign rights. He set out for Chicago in October 1904, where he spent seven weeks talking to workers, walking around the plants where butchery had been developed into an industrial technique. The simple act of carrying a lunchpail seemed to grant him unrestricted access to the stockyards. One of the first people he spoke to was Algie M. Simons, who knew Chicago in great detail and who had written about conditions in the canning factories.¹¹ The stockyards had been for two decades the scene of intense labour struggles, but Sinclair seems to have known nothing of the background of the situation in 1904. There had been two general strikes. One, in 1886, was led by the Knights of Labor and resulted in the complete destruction of the union movement in the stockyards and packing houses. For fifteen years union members were hounded and eliminated from the industry. The second major strike, in 1894, was spontaneous and unorganized. The unions began to return to the stockyards by the turn of the century, and in 1904 the skilled butchers went on strike on behalf of the unskilled labourers, specifically over a claim for a combined scale of pay for all departments and classes of labour. This was a remarkable show of class consciousness and solidarity, particularly since the skilled workers were mainly immigrants from Ireland, Germany and Bohemia, whereas the unskilled were Lithuanians, Slovaks, Poles and Blacks. The strike lasted from May to September 1904, under the leadership of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmens' union. It was finally defeated when men were brought in from the five major packers' other factories, and when Greeks and Blacks were brought in for the unskilled jobs.¹² When Sinclair arrived in Chicago the strike was fresh enough to have suggested that a ‘strike novel’ could have been quickly put together. In 1914 Sinclair travelled to Colorado with a similar purpose. But Sinclair seems to have preferred to take a long-term view of the stockyards, and particularly of the substitution of ethnic groups which had led, by the turn of the century, to the arrival of great numbers of Lithuanians in Chicago to work in the stockyards. It was from the most recent immigrants that Sinclair chose his characters, and their experiences in Chicago constitute his story. All that survives in The Jungle of the 1904 strike is told through Jurgis's eyes at a time when he was a strike-breaker and agent provocateur; neither the specific issues nor the history of the struggle of the workers appear in his novel. Sinclair was, however, highly impressed by racist accounts of the behaviour of black strike-breakers, and described ‘black bucks’ going wild.

The most complete account of his activities in Chicago appeared in an interview he gave to Frederick Boyd Stevenson in Wilshire's Magazine in August 1906. ‘I went to Chicago and spent seven weeks studying the stockyards and the conditions there’, he explained:

I really had no need to study the lives of the people, for the poverty of the characters in the book are the experiences of my own life, only metamorphosed. Three times I went through the packinghouses. The first time I went through with ordinary visitors and saw just what the proprietors cared to show us. On the next occasion I went through with the correspondent of the London Lancet [Adolph Smith], who is an expert sanitarian, and has been through the abattoirs of all the important cities of the world. He told me that never in all his life had he seen such abominations as he had witnessed in the Chicago slaughter houses. He said he would not believe that such horrible atrocities had existed since the Dark Ages. He afterwards wrote in the Lancet that these conditions in Packingtown were ‘a menace to the health of the civilized world’ … The people whom I talked with there were settlement workers, doctors, policemen, saloon keepers, workingmen and packers' representatives. But the key that opened the most doors to me was Socialism.

Representatives of the packing houses, and their interests, immediately attempted to discredit Sinclair's account of the unsanitary conditions. In reply, Sinclair prepared affidavits, eye-witness accounts, legal records and other circumstantial material. He defended The Jungle in terms of verifiable truth. In the Wilshire's interview Sinclair explained how he heard of some of the more gruesome details:

One night I sat in the kitchen of a Hungarian cattle-butcher whose hands were so slashed with deep knife-cuts that he could not use his thumbs, and he gave to me all the details of a man's daily life on the killing beds. And the next night I sat in the back room of a saloon and listened to the story of a man who had worked in the fertilizer mill where, in the month of November, out of 126 men, only six had been able to continue.

The claims he made for the book were unequivocal. The Jungle does not assert a ‘poetic’ or artistic truth, but a literal one: ‘Every statement of importance in the book is based on some actual occurrence, either something I myself saw or something that was told to me by eye-witnesses.’ Akin to the work of reforming journalists like Riis, Steffens and Tarbell, the ‘literary’ dimension of The Jungle was at the service of its documentary purpose. For many years Sinclair's novel was a model of what literature ought to be in the eyes of radicals. In the interview in Wilshire's he denied that there was anything imaginary or invented about the characters. He had seen them all at a Lithuanian wedding party in Chicago: ‘Now that is the story of The Jungle, and that is the way I created the people of The Jungle—in fact I did not create them at all, for they are real people.’

When Sinclair began work on his novel on Christmas day, 1904, the conditions in the stockyards were about to become an international concern. While in Chicago Sinclair met the ‘Special Sanitary Correspondent’ of the Lancet. This man, identified by Sinclair as Adolph Smith, was engaged in a similar exercise in investigative reporting. His reports in the Lancet for two years, beginning with the issue of 24 December 1904, were of such detail and seriousness that the United States government issued a formal reply (which Smith rebutted in the issues of 14 July and 29 December 1906). The Lancet could not be silenced or discredited in the fashion the meatpacking industry sought to do with Sinclair, and Smith's reports were believed to have resulted in legislation banning meat and especially pork imports from Chicago: they constitute a parallel effort, justifying Sinclair, but belonging to a higher level of ‘public health’ seriousness. Sinclair had the Lancet reports available to him while writing The Jungle, and in follow-up articles on 9 June and 29 December 1906, the Lancet referred to Sinclair's role as reinforcing their own, prior indictment. Smith's reports constitute an important and hitherto unnoticed ‘source’ for the novel.

But the Lancet was not the first to bring to public notice the conditions in the stockyards. Nor were Smith's reports, especially those published in January 1905, the only source available to Sinclair. In 1899 Algie M. Simons, who had been assigned the stockyard district by the Bureau of Charities in Chicago, published a propaganda tract, Packingtown, which may have suggested some aspects of Sinclair's approach. Simons discussed the stockyards as a visitor might experience them, and tried to explain the industrial process which they represented. (Simons defended The Jungle in the International Socialist Review in June 1906). Ernest Poole published a sketch of the experiences of a Lithuanian immigrant who settled in Chicago and worked in the stockyards (Independent, 4 August 1904). Sinclair, in fact, turns out not to have been the discoverer of the problem so much as a successful dramatizer of the issues. It would be unkind to suggest that he exploited the conditions in the stockyards, because the problems were of such magnitude that any definition of the public interest would accept the legitimacy of his interest.

The American public was selective and intermittent in its attention to the complaints of reformers and muckrakers. There was a major scandal during the Spanish-American War over the quality of tinned beef shipped to the army in Cuba. Shrewd bribery and effective public relations, though on a less scientific basis and on a smaller scale than that conducted on behalf of the Rockefeller interests (described in Chapter 3), kept the public profile of the meatpacking industry generally below the horizon of concern. Henry Demarest Lloyd did much to publicize the operation of the Beef Trust in his book Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894). The Trust was undoubtedly a mighty force in Chicago life, and, when Lloyd was writing, was becoming an increasingly potent factor in national politics. The industry was a comparatively new one, made possible by the invention of the refrigerator car in the 1870s. The ability to transport cut and trimmed or ‘dressed’ sides of meat across the country enabled butchery for the whole nation to be centralized in Chicago. The major packing houses arranged a cartel to push down the prices paid for the best grade of beef cattle. At the same time the Trust undermined competitors who continued to butcher their own cattle by undercutting prices, threatening to open rival businesses, and by the usual forms of intimidation employed by cartels. They negotiated preferential terms with the railroads which were denied to shippers of live cattle.¹³ The Trusts were a power in the land; by taking them on so boldly and so devastatingly, Sinclair came close to the real sources of power in the United States. But the idea that the packing houses were blankly hostile to inspection would seem to be incorrect. They saw the inspection of meat as a desirable protection against foreign competition, especially from Argentina; it was also to the advantage of the Beef Trust as against their smaller competitors within America. But inspection would cost money, and they were concerned that some of the cost was picked up by the government.¹⁴ The campaign to discredit The Jungle was an aspect of the attempt by the Beef Trust to sustain and extend its dominance in the industry. It would be too flattering to Sinclair to suggest that the novel was either responsible for the moves to reform the industry or to improve conditions. As with the elimination of flogging in the United States navy and the powerful anti-flogging case made by Herman Melville in White-Jacket (1850), the cause-and-effect relationship is elusive and probably unprovable. Which is not to deny that for many people Sinclair's novel had an overwhelming impact, and that the sentiment for President Roosevelt's reform legislation owed a great deal to the climate in part created by the novel.

At the heart of The Jungle, permeating the human reality of Packingtown, is the idea that sudden transformations of life were always possible. For the characters in the novel there are two major transformations. The first changes Jurgis and Ona from healthy, optimistic young immigrants into degraded ‘beasts’ destroyed by their work. The second phase begins after the death of Ona. Jurgis's picaresque career takes him from the life of an ex-convict and fertilizer worker to his later experiences as a smart thief, political operator and labour scab. He is saved from this corrupting life by the discovery of socialism. For Sinclair, socialism was embodied in the liberation and transformation of human nature. Solidarity was the goal of socialism, not its prerequisite. (Like Jurgis, Sinclair found community with the discovery of socialism.) The structure of the book, so often brutally criticized, becomes more comprehensible in view of Sinclair's vision of the possibilities of transforming human nature. The first part of the book is naturalistic, the second picaresque: an uneasy conjunction. But within the conditions of work in the slaughterhouses, how could the decline of Jurgis be reversed? How in those conditions could his health recover? How could he be made to gain a broader grasp of the way the system works, and thus be led to socialism? As Sinclair saw the matter, it was hardly possible for the slaughterhouses to reform themselves. He was sufficiently sceptical of Progressivism and reformism generally to doubt whether that sort of change was at all plausible in American conditions. But the book was locked into a Naturalism which seemed to point relentlessly towards Jurgis's defeat and death. Yet belief in the capacity for change, so much a central feature of the socialist imagination in America, kept Sinclair by main force from a Zolaesque conclusion. If Sinclair's belief that work and housing conditions could not, under capitalism, be meaningfully altered, then Jurgis's subsequent career makes a little more sense. The structural problem of the novel was solved by ideology and temperament: Sinclair was a deeply hopeful person. Jurgis's sudden conversion to socialism has often left critics dissatisfied, and in some respects did not please Sinclair himself. We live in a political climate more sceptical of such conversions, more cynical of their likely endurance; and for this reason find it harder to share fully the optimism of a novelist in 1905 about socialism and American politics, and about socialism as such. It is impossible to foresee a time when the gap between our own wizened realism and Sinclair's blazing hopefulness will ever be reduced.¹⁵

Analysis of The Jungle should begin with the long passage describing the butchery of hogs, the way they were hoisted by chains upon an iron wheel:

At the same instant the ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek; the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back. The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing—for once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing down the room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy—and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous to the eardrums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to hold—that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony; there would come a momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever, surging up to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the visitors—the men would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand with hands clenched, and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears starting in their eyes.

Meantime, heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors made any difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs, and one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long line of hogs, with squeals and life-blood ebbing away together, until at last each started again and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water.

It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so human in their protests—and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it, and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretence at apology, without the homage of a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.

One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some were young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it—it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life. And now was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog-personality was precious to whom these hog-squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice? Perhaps some glimpse of all this was in the thoughts of our humble-minded Jurgis, as he turned to go on with the rest of the party, and muttered: ‘Dieve—but I'm glad I'm not a hog!’

(Chap. 3)

Herman Melville had not yet been rediscovered when Sinclair wrote this passage early in 1905. The description in Moby-Dick of the cutting up and rendering of whales might have taught Sinclair how to make this description more economical, and also more serious. Sinclair's sincerity is obvious; his intense concern to make his readers participate in the pig-holocaust leads him into sentimentality, repetition and naïveté.

The slaughterhouses transform living animals into meat products (and into profits for the packing houses). During the slaughtering the animals are endowed with human reactions (‘they were so very human in their protests’) while the men in the slaughterhouse are like remorseless machines, ‘a horrid Fate’, indifferent to the tragedy of the hogs. Human beings have lost their humanity. It is the hogs who have the sensitivity and imagination not customarily associated with animals. The ‘signified’ attributes of animal and man have become, in the process of industrializing the slaughterhouse, detached from their customary ‘sign’ and reattached to its opposite. This passage tells us something important about Sinclair's humanism. He retains the knowledge that there is another arrangement available to mankind, in which human nature was not alienated from the human subject. (Though what form of butchery would provide a similar service to the hogs is unclear; more to the point, the humane answer to this passage is the end of butchery in any form, a complete vegetarianism.) In current social and economic conditions, as Sinclair viewed them, the dream of integral wholeness is denied, and only with the transformation of human nature made possible by socialism is it possible to think once again of the reintegration of the human subject.

The novel begins with a traditional Lithuanian wedding. Justly praised as one of the best scenes in the whole of Sinclair's fiction, the wedding scene has a cultural specificity and symbolic resonance which is destroyed by the economic reality of life in Packingtown. At the core of the wedding is the veselija, the symbolic compact which binds Ona and Jurgis to each other and to the community. But already the elders, Teta Elzbieta and Dede Antanas, fear that the force of the ties was weakening. Some guests at the wedding have given less money to the young couple than they should have done; others sneak out without giving anything, or spend their time at the bar, ignoring everyone else. The ‘subtle poison’ in the air, which seemed especially to affect the young men, comes from America itself. Traditions like the veselija, which the immigrants brought with them from the old world, seem somehow starved for oxygen in the new. Such rituals could not put down roots in the American soil. The communal sanctions seem to the elders less secure or final. The failure of the veselija is the first in a series of disappointments and cruel twists which turn Ona into a ‘hunted animal’ and Jurgis into a ‘dumb beast of burden’.

There is no need to retrace here the precise sequence of events. They are related with considerable effectiveness and pessimism by Sinclair. The young couple seem caught ‘like rats in a trap’. They are victims, guilty only of being poor and foreign: and they are seen as ‘victims of a relentless fate, cornered, trapped, in the grip of destruction’. Jurgis is ‘the victim of ravenous vultures that had torn into his vitals and devoured him’. Sinclair gives a very plausible account of the mechanisms of fraud, from the tricksters to deceitful manufacturers; sheer ill-fortune is seen to play an important role in transforming Ona and Jurgis into victims. A close student of the petty commercial deceptions which consumed the resources of the poor, Sinclair emphasizes the destructive and degrading work conditions which left the workers exhausted, demoralized and unable to think for themselves, or even to defend their interests. The decline of Jurgis's strength, and the corruption of his moral character, are painfully recited. The animal imagery, for victim and victimizers, was by 1905 part of the intellectual luggage of Sinclair's and London's generation. They thought in Darwinian terms, as did almost the entire American intelligentsia.

Precisely at the middle point in the novel, when he has been imprisoned for attacking Connor, the boss who tricked Ona into a whorehouse, Jurgis feels himself flung aside ‘like a bit of trash’. He goes over, almost without being fully aware of what was happening, to the cause of rebellion, outlawry and unbelief. Jurgis's home is repossessed while he is in prison, and his wife dies in childbirth. Their son drowns, and Jurgis finds that he has been blacklisted in Packingtown. The iron determinism of his plight, in which his physical decline is closely related to the impossible pressure of economic circumstance, has been swept away. Jurgis is thus enabled to enter a more fluid environment in which rapid changes of fortune become possible. Jurgis's health is restored by weeks on the tramp, but on his return to the city in the autumn Jurgis sinks down to drunkenness and begging. Befriended by a rich young drunk who gives him ＄100, Jurgis is easily tricked out of the money. A further spell in prison brings him to crime, graft and political corruption. He is set up in a political career and helps fix the defeat of a ‘sheeny’ Democrat. He next appears as a scab worker in the slaughterhouses, but this turn of fortune is cut short when he again assaults Ona's former boss. He is advised to jump bail, and returns to life on the tramp. The suddenness of changes in his life, the variety of incident and scene, suggest the picaresque. The shift from one literary mode to another, from the naturalistic novel to the picaresque adventure story, is effected with little difficulty, although at the expense of the traditional novelistic qualities of coherence and consistency.

On impulse Jurgis attends a political meeting. Exhausted and hungry, he soon falls asleep. A prosperously-dressed woman addresses him as ‘comrade’ and gently suggests that Jurgis might be interested in the speeches if he stayed awake. He struggles to pay attention, all the while observing the reactions of the young lady to the speech:

There was a look of excitement upon her face, of tense effort, as of one struggling mightily, or witnessing a struggle. There was a faint quivering of her nostrils; and now and then she would moisten her lips with feverish haste. Her bosom rose and fell as she breathed, and her excitement seemed to mount higher, and then to sink away again.

(ch. 28)

The speech raises the young lady to a higher spiritual and emotional plane. She has quite literally been transformed by what she has heard. The speaker is described as tall, gaunt and haggard, with a thin black beard and a rapid manner of speech. ‘His voice was deep, like an organ.’ Sinclair claimed in a letter in 1958 that the orator was based on Algie M. Simons, who had been a charity worker in the stockyards (and from whose 1899 pamphlet, Packingtown, Sinclair had borrowed a number of details on stockyard conditions for The Jungle).¹⁶ Sinclair also said that the speech was one that he himself had made shortly before leaving Chicago. It seems possible that the speaker included certain qualities of Sinclair's patron, George D. Herron. Certainly there is very little political content in the speech, and a great deal of sermonizing rhetoric. The speaker's tactic is to implore his listeners to open their eyes, and thus to ‘shake the most sluggish soul to action!’ ‘I am here to plead with you, to know if want and misery have yet done their work with you, if injustice and oppression have yet opened your eyes!’ The word ‘socialism’ is not mentioned in this message of salvation. The appeal is specifically aimed at those for whom religious salvation was a familiar phenomenon:

I feel sure that in the crowd that has come to me tonight, no matter how many may be dull and heedless, no matter how many may have come out of idle curiosity, or in order to ridicule—there will be some one man whom pain and suffering have made desperate, whom some chance vision of wrong and horror has startled and shocked into attention. And to him my words will come like a sudden flash of lightning to one who travels in darkness—revealing the way before him, the perils and the obstacles—solving all problems, making all difficulties clear! The scales will fall from his eyes, the shackles will be torn from his limbs—he will leap up with a cry of thankfulness, he will stride forth a free man at last!

(ch. 28)

Listeners to this lay sermon are repeatedly urged to ‘realize once in your lives this world in which you dwell’. The effect on Jurgis is to leave him ‘smitten with wonder’. He listens motionlessly, completely seized by the spiritual meaning of the speech:

It was his presence, it was his voice … that gripped the listener like a mighty hand about his body, that shook him and startled him with sudden fright, with a sense of things not of earth, of mysteries never spoken before, of presences of awe and terror.

There are wild shouts of joy, and a spontaneous singing of the ‘Marseillaise’ at the end of the meeting. Jurgis remains, to have a word with the speaker:

‘You want to know more about Socialism?’ he asked. Jurgis started. ‘I—I—’ he stammered. ‘Is it Socialism? I didn't know. I want to know about what you spoke of—I want to help. I have been through all that.’

Sinclair soon rectified the absence of politics with a simplified exposition of socialist teaching about capitalism, class conflict and the coming revolution:

It was a slow and weary process, but it would go on—it was like the movement of a glacier, once it was started it could never be stopped. Every Socialist did his share, and lived upon the vision of the ‘good time coming’—when the working class should go to the polls and seize the powers of government and put an end to private property in the means of production.

The novel ends with a dramatic rise in the socialist vote in Chicago, and a vision of ultimate electoral victory. Jurgis has a steady job as a porter in a hotel owned by a prominent local socialist.

What separated Sinclair, on the right of the Socialist Party, from those, like Jack London on the left wing, was this faith that socialism would and could come from municipal election victories. Having once won Chicago, there was still Illinois, with its rural and conservative majority. Beyond that lay Washington, the constitution and the Supreme Court: ‘a slow and weary process’ indeed. A socialist victory in Chicago would constitute a heady tonic to the movement, but from the point of view of socialist militants ‘municipal socialism’ had such serious drawbacks, and local politics were notoriously so corrupt, that the left wing of the Socialist Party were highly critical of the ultimate prospects of a purely electoral strategy.

It is remarkable that the crucial moment in Jurgis's conversion to socialism should have so little political content. As with so many conversion experiences studied by psychologists at the turn of the century, doctrinal theology was less required than a deep and urgent desire on the part of the subject to rid him- or herself of the ‘incompleteness’ which rendered life meaningless. The socialist preacher concentrated almost exclusively upon the wrongness of the present, thus confirming William James's belief that it was the intense specificity of ‘sin’, rather than the imaginary ideal of salvation and grace in the future, which was central to the process of conversion.¹⁷

The Jungle appeared throughout 1905 in The Appeal to Reason. Commercial publishers, as Sinclair soon discovered, were unwilling to publish the manuscript as it stood. Macmillan, who had given Sinclair a substantial advance, withdrew from the contract as serialization progressed: they asked Sinclair to delete ‘objectionable’ passages, but the novelist refused to do so. He announced in the Chicago Socialist on 25 November that he would publish The Jungle himself, in an edition selling for ＄1.50, and invited advance orders. Sinclair feared that the Beef Trust would throttle the book, and prevent it from reaching a large reading public. But before his own publication plans were complete, Doubleday, Page agreed to print the manuscript without alteration. Copies were sent to President Roosevelt when it was published early in 1906.

Within the socialist movement the book created an immediate sensation. Jack London, supporting Sinclair's plan for self-publication, advised Chicago socialists to

… take notice and remember, comrades, this book is straight proletarian. And straight proletarian it must be throughout. It is written by an intellectual proletarian. It is written for the proletariat. It is published by a proletarian publishing house. It is to be read by the proletariat. And depend upon it, if it is not circulated by the proletariat it will not be circulated at all. In short, it must be a supreme proletarian effort.¹⁸

Debs was no less enthusiastic than Jack London:

The first really great and distinctively proletarian novel has been written. Upton Sinclair's masterpiece, The Jungle, is entitled to that distinction. Here we have the tragic story of Les Misérables hot from the brain and soul of a living genius. In The Jungle we have a startling, shocking, world-arousing revelation. The pictures of Sinclair are as real as the palpitant flesh that inspires them. It is an awful panorama that is here unfolded, and all its colorings are so mercilessly true to life that they fairly quiver with its misery and groan with its despair. The minutest details, like the boldest outlines, are traced with the consummate skill of a master. All the passion that sweeps the soul of this inspired young author is aglow in these pages. It is a marvelous work. No possible review can do it justice. Every man, woman and child, rich and poor, should read it. The tragic fate of the children of poverty and ignorance is so thrillingly presented, and with such subtle power, that even the most gruesome pictures have potent charm and irresistible fascination.

The pulse of the proletarian revolution throbs in these pages. It is a novel of the impending crisis, and will prove a powerful factor in precipitating it.

The Jungle, as a masterful literary achievement, will mark a luminous epoch in the social revolution.

A million copies should be in demand the first year, and every Socialist and every sympathizer, and every other human being with a heart in working order, should join in giving it world circulation.¹⁹

A. M. Simons described The Jungle as ‘the great novel of capitalism’.²⁰

The novel contained material of such a sensational nature that its publication was planned with care. Isaac Marcosson, who handled the publicity for Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, planned a similar campaign for Doubleday, Page. Advance page proofs were sent to hundreds of leading American newspapers, with an invitation to quote freely. The release date, 15 January 1906, saw Sinclair suddenly transformed into a famous writer. Across the country front pages were filled with the more sensational passages from The Jungle. Marcosson was peppered with demands for photographs of Sinclair; theatrical managers wanted rights to adapt it for the stage; famous writers were lavish with praise; and when Marcosson received a wire from Jack London (‘The Jungle is the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery’) the publicity campaign had its perfect slogan. Marcosson was quick to suggest a similar novel on steel, and a third on coal-mining or the railroads, but he found Sinclair increasingly distracted by socialism, and by ‘a weird experiment in sociology’ in New Jersey which made the author a figure of ridicule. That The Jungle was so successfully marketed by a publisher and publicity agent is by no means the least of the ironies which surrounded it.²¹ As expected, it gave President Roosevelt useful impetus in a campaign to require federal inspection of meat. But Sinclair found the President resolute in his opposition to socialism:

… while I agree with you that energetic, and, as I believe, in the long run radical, action must be taken to do away with the effects of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist, yet I am more than ever convinced that the real factor in the elevation of any man or any mass of men must be the development within his or their hearts and heads of the qualities which alone can make either the individual, the class or the nation permanently useful to themselves and to others.²²

The royalties enabled Sinclair to keep the issue before the public, but as an exercise in propaganda The Jungle was somewhat less successful than Sinclair hoped, and had its chief influence in ways he did not anticipate. The specific measures of hygiene and meat inspection which resulted from an aroused public opinion, and Roosevelt's legislation, although desirable in their own right, were humanitarian rather than socialist, and more characteristic of the objectives of progressives and reformers than socialists.²³ The long-suffering workers in Packingtown did not appreciate Sinclair's efforts, or at least not as much as he would have expected. One of the first reforms compelled them to get rid of their old, dirty work clothes and to purchase a new outfit. With wages at ＄5.00 per week, Sinclair and his meddling was bitterly resented.²⁴ The Socialist Party, which might have been expecting a boost from The Jungle, by 1906 had lost some of its earlier momentum and popular appeal. And in Chicago, where the novel might have been expected to have its greatest impact, the socialist vote collapsed in the 1907 mayoral election. Socialist voters abandoned their own candidate to support a reform Democrat named Dunne, who, like Tom Johnson in Cleveland, advocated the municipal ownership of the traction companies which ran civic trolley lines. The regular Democratic Party machine, fixed by the political clubs of ‘Hinky Dink’, ‘Bathhouse John’ and others (the political bosses who used Jurgis as scab and agent provocateur), swung over behind the Republican candidate Busse. It was a nice example of Chicago democracy at work. The radical vote was split and discredited, and the new mayor, as reported in the International Socialist Review, was ‘frankly and openly the candidate of plutocracy’.²⁵

Sinclair revisited Chicago in 1909. He gave a lecture in which he described the President's reaction to The Jungle, the subsequent investigations, and the resulting legislation. The novelist's disillusionment was transparent:

You have perhaps heard my remark, concerning The Jungle, that I aimed at the public heart and by accident hit it in the stomach. You see, a great deal of fuss was made about the book, but there was never the least thing done in behalf of the poor laboring man who has to support a wife and children on ＄5.00 a week. I am told that they have whitewashed the walls of the packing houses, and that manicure parlors have been established for the use of the girls who handle the meats; but they have done nothing for the workingman. They have done nothing to protect his wife from the brutal foreman, and they have done nothing for the children who work in the cellars and should be at school.

And even the so-called reforms in the packing of meat have amounted to nothing.²⁶

Sinclair attempted to dramatize The Jungle, but the New York production was a flop which cost him several thousand dollars.²⁷ A silent film version of the novel was made by the All-Star Feature Corporation in 1914. Directed by Augustus Thomas in five reels, the film featured George Nash as Jurgis and Gail Kane as Ona (Sinclair himself played the socialist orator), but the company went bankrupt not long after completing the film and it was never released commercially. Sinclair purchased the negative, and showed it to socialist audiences across the country. The film was banned in Chicago. In 1920 the Labor Film Service proposed to re-edit the now rather old-fashioned film and reissue it with additional scenes. The picture is lost, but something of its original conception may be gathered from Sinclair's correspondence with Joseph D. Cannon, Field Director of the Labor Film Service. Cannon wrote to Sinclair in September 1920:

The picture does not measure up to the story; it seems that economy in its production was carried too far … We can improve this by having some large strike meetings made which would fill it out … the picture … The last reel needs almost entire remodeling … Instead of the Socialist Party meeting, Jurgis should stroll into a big union meeting. It might be a celebration of the winning of their strike by the workers in the packing-house industry a few years ago; or what would be better still a meeting preceding the winning of the strike and the appeal should be for solidarity and unity of purpose, to hold intact, to join together, to stick together … the picture ending with the audience spontaneously coming to its feet, cheering enthusiastically and tumultuously, and when this is quieting down and a few leave their seats going to the exits, there suddenly is heard a song, and they halt and listen as a voice of a child, in the far-off corner of the great hall is heard singing the opening words of the Marseillaise …

You see I do not wish to change the philosophy of The Jungle, but I want to make it the more inspiring, more gripping, and I want the people to leave the theatres whistling or singing the Marseillaise, to go out with a spirit of revolt awakened in their heart.²⁸

These changes, best described as radical schlock, seemed acceptable to Sinclair. In a letter to Cannon on 27 September 1920 he repeated a proposal he had first made in 1914 for the ending of the film:

Let me suggest that you look up in the Rand School library and the public library a collection of some twenty or thirty drawings on Socialist themes by Walter Crane. One of these shows a pageant, a May Day festival of labor, a number of symbolic figures, men, women and children marching with a chariot symbolizing peace and plenty. It seems to me that this particular vision could be an admirable way of conveying a very happy ending of The Jungle—that is to say, happy ending for all the workers and not merely for Jurgis and a new wife working on a glorified tenant farm.²⁹

Sinclair's socialism, with its roots in the great urban centres of New York and Chicago, has an unexpected dimension. The iconography of Walter Crane, so much a part of the Arts and Crafts approach to socialism, and so closely associated with William Morris and his American heirs writing in The Comrade, a socialist monthly published in New York 1901-4, seemed an adequate vehicle for Sinclair's ‘vision of a redeemed society’. The details of the revised ending, including Jurgis's new wife and their life on ‘a glorified tenant farm’, confirm the impression that the redemption cannot seriously be envisaged as taking place within Packingtown. It will occur, if at all, in the form of an escape from the slaughterhouses, and the closed world of industrial capitalism they symbolize. This conclusion seems to have emerged from Sinclair's activities in the year following publication of The Jungle. His meetings with President Roosevelt, the numerous public lectures, interviews with the press, and the notoriety of his book, seem to have left Sinclair (normally a self-advancing and publicity-conscious person) hungry to withdraw from society.

Part of the money he received from The Jungle was spent in 1906 on a nine-acre plot of land near Englewood, New Jersey, where he proposed to found an ‘experiment in co-operative distribution’. Called Helicon Hall Home Colony, the project lasted from July 1906 to March 1907 when the hall was burned down.³⁰ Helicon Hall was not designed along ascetic lines: it consisted of the grounds and buildings of a former school, complete with a bowling alley, theatre, organ and tropical plants. The hope was that the Colony would be run ‘as one big happy family’. Radicals from all over the country came to visit the experiment, including John Dewey and Emma Goldman. Sinclair Lewis lived in the colony for a month before escaping to write an article for the New York Sun about ‘Two Yale Men in Utopia’.³¹ The American press portrayed the experiment with innuendo and vilification, but at the time of the fire in 1907 there was a substantial waiting list to enter. The colony represented something of a throwback to the socialist politics of the end of the nineteenth century when utopian socialists, anarchists, Single Taxers and prohibitionists, argued against the exclusively electoral strategy of the ‘political actionists’. The Socialist Party itself emerged out of this argument, when the Milwaukee socialist leader, Victor Berger, led political actionists out of the Social Democracy of America into the Social Democratic Party, which in 1901, after further mergers, formed the Socialist Party.³²

By placing Jurgis in a ‘glorified tenant farm’, with the socialist symbolism of Walter Crane, Sinclair tacitly acknowledged the impossibility, in contemporary American social conditions, of extending the process which made Jurgis a socialist to the whole workforce. In this he was well attuned to the revisionist tendency within the Socialist Party. Leading figures such as Morris Hillquit and John Spargo had, by 1907, essentially agreed that the revolutionary perspective of orthodox Marxism did not seem to fit American conditions. In lectures delivered at the Cooper Union in the winter of 1907-8, and published as The Spiritual Significance of Modern Socialism (New York, 1908), Spargo abandoned class conflict, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the whole economic and historical dimension of socialism in favour of a ‘spiritual interpretation’ of the movement which rooted it in dreams of universal peace and the brotherhood of man. Spargo believed that socialism would come to America only gradually, one step at a time. The platform of the Socialist Party convention in 1908 was wholly preoccupied with issues of municipal reform. Plans for a Karl Marx memorial celebration were dropped. The bible of the Socialist Party was the second edition of W. D. P. Bliss's The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform (1909) which carried detailed accounts of every aspect of ‘municipalism’ throughout the world. Hopes for the sudden, violent transformation of the political order seemed irrelevant to American socialists. The issue now was how socialism could be adapted to the modern world of industrialism and democracy. Spargo wrote that ‘no Socialist whose works have any influence in the movement believes that there will be a sudden, violent change from capitalism to Socialism’.³³ Sinclair felt that the old hope that ‘the co-operative commonwealth could be established at once upon a small scale’ carried little weight in the party. It proved difficult, however, to transform a millennial rhetoric into a meliorative one, as Sinclair shows: ‘The modern “Scientific Socialist” believes that the end of the competitive wage system will come by a revolutionary change affecting the whole of society at once, and coming as the end of a long process of industrial evolution.’³⁴ Two audiences were being appeased here, and neither with much conviction. Sinclair's social thought is as muddled as that of the party itself, which wanted to be respectable and revolutionary—sometimes in the same sentence. Having declared that the cooperative spirit was now dead, he devoted his considerable energies, and the royalties from The Jungle, to found a cooperative community called Helicon Hall.

Sinclair shared the perspective of the right-wing leadership of the Socialist Party in believing that the future of the movement lay in patient electoral work, party propaganda, and not rubbing Samuel Gompers the wrong way. Writing about a bitter industrial dispute in King Coal (1917), which is analyzed in Chapter 3, he clearly sided with the wise heads of the union and not with the syndicalists who advocated direct industrial action for social change. The transformation of Jurgis, an immigrant workman in a Chicago slaughterhouse, was a model of the coming of socialism as anticipated by the right wing of the party. It was a conversion based on oppression and victimization on a personal level. Jurgis's political consciousness was untouched by organized industrial conflict, and in this Sinclair was undoubtedly false to the experience of the socialist movement in Chicago. Sinclair shows how effectively the industrial system pitted workers against each other, and how these divisions were exacerbated by racial and ethnic conflicts within the workforce. But he does not show how some workers did, in fact, learn solidarity through industrial conflict. Jurgis had to be extracted from the packing-houses, and from the industrial system, before the socialist message could reach him. The effects of the socialist speech were instantaneous and permanent. At the end of the book Jurgis shares the urgent, impatient certainties of the new convert. In a brief but acute observation, John Chamberlain noted that while Sinclair's critics have pointed out that the conversion ‘solves’ nothing, the portrayal of Packingtown was the real substance of the book, its true call to action.³⁵ In trying to reconnect the harsh naturalism of the description of the slaughterhouses with the remarkable transformation with which the book ends, one senses the limitations of the socialist perspective it conveys. It is a problem which Sinclair could not solve in the novel, any more than the Socialist Party could, in political terms, find a way to link its detailed criticism of American capitalism with its belief in the advent of socialism by persuasion and propaganda.

Notes

1. Gertrude Atherton, ‘Why is American Literature Bourgeois?’, North American Review, 179 (May 1904) 771-81.

2. James Oppenheim in The Mystic Warrior (1921) nicely captures the perspective of the magazine editors:

   Don't be too gloomy, and don't be sordid,
   Don't open the stink-pot and the lavatories,
   Don't offend people's moral scruples and religious creeds,
   Keep out of politics, and sex, and socialism,
   Don't be highbrow, don't end up in tragedy—
   In short, uplift the people …

   Quoted by Robert Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1975) p. 89.

3. See James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (1950).

4. Sinclair's article was printed as a pamphlet by Charles H. Kerr in The Pocket Library of Socialism, no. 43, in 1904. Sinclair's subsequent friendship with Mrs Atherton is suggested in his My Lifetime in Letters (1960) pp. 37-8, 185-92.

5. Biographical details from Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (1975) and Sinclair, American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences (1932), which was expanded and republished as The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962).

6. Sinclair, Autobiography, p. 34.

7. Ibid., p. 108.

8. Ibid., p. 109.

9. On Herron, see Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (1940) pp. 184-200, and Howard H. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism (1953) pp. 127-41.

10. From a lecture delivered by Herron in Boston in 1895, reprinted in Paul H. Boase (ed.), The Rhetoric of Christian Socialism (1969) pp. 94-104.

11. Kent and Gretchen Kreuter, An American Dissenter: The Life of Algie M. Simons, 1870-1950 (1969). Simons defended the truthfulness of The Jungle in ‘Packingtown, The Jungle and its Critics’, International Socialist Review, VI (June 1906) 70-2.

12. John R. Commons, ‘Labor Conditions in Slaughtering and Meat Packing’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, XIX (1904) 1-32; reprinted in Commons (ed.), Trade Unionism and Labor Problems (1905) pp. 222-49.

13. Details from Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894), and A. M. Simons, Packingtown (1899). Simons makes the interesting point that the packers and related industries, employing between 25,000 and 35,000 at the turn of the century, made up the largest industrial community in the world, far larger than the Krupp works at Essen.

14. The persuasive argument about the packing industry's attitude towards inspection was made by Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (1963) pp. 101-7.

15. The difference is suggested by documents such as The God That Failed, with an Introduction by Richard Crossman (1950), Robert C. Tucker, ‘The Deradicalization of Marxist Movements’, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (1970), and John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (1975). Compare these with the series ‘How I Became a Socialist’ in Justice (19 May 1894-14 September 1895), which includes contributions from H. M. Hyndman, William Morris and Walter Crane. A similar series appeared in The Comrade in New York (April 1902-November 1903), with contributions already noted from Jack London, Eugene Debs and others. See also Charles Edward Russell, Why I Am a Socialist (1910). There is a trajectory here, a story which has never been fully told.

16. Simons is named as Sinclair's model in the Kreuter's An American Dissenter, pp. 78-9.

17. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902) p. 209. See also James Strachan, ‘Conversion’, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. IV, ed. James Hastings (1911) pp. 104-10.

18. Jack London in The Chicago Socialist (25 November 1905) 2.

19. Debs, The Appeal to Reason (21 July 1906) p. 4.

20. Simons, International Socialist Review, VI (June 1906) 70.

21. Isaac F. Marcosson, Adventures in Interviewing (1919) pp. 280-9.

22. Roosevelt to Sinclair, 15 March 1906, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. V, ed. Elting E. Morison et al. (1952) pp. 179-80.

23. The Chicago Socialist began publication as a daily on 25 October 1906. The first detailed attention to the packing-houses and stockyards (‘Manicurists in the Jungle’, 22 November 1906) argued that almost all of the improvements and changes were cosmetic, and that conditions were as bad as before the scandal blew up.

24. S. G. H[obson]., review of The Jungle, Fabian News, XVI (July 1906) 30.

25. The socialist vote in Cook County in the mid-term election in November 1906 was 23,993, a drop of some 17,000 from the Debs vote two years earlier. The mayoral election in April 1907 ended even more disastrously, with a socialist vote down to 13,121 and the elimination of the Democrats from city, county and state power (Chicago Daily Socialist, 7 November 1906 and 3 April 1907). The electoral setbacks were analyzed in ‘The Chicago Election’, International Socialist Review, VII (April 1907) 623-5.

26. Sinclair, ‘Reminiscences of The Jungle’, Wilshire's Magazine, XIII (May 1909) 20.

27. Sinclair was dissatisfied with the degree of realism in the stage adaptation and arranged for six phonograph recordings of pig squeals to be played each time the doors of the ‘pig-sticking parlour’ were opened on stage. See ‘Real Pig Squeals in Jungle Drama’, Chicago Daily Socialist (21 November 1906) and Harris, Upton Sinclair, p. 150. He defended the shockingly realistic effects thus produced ‘on the ground that it is symbolistic of what happens to humans as well as hogs who happen to get caught in the remorseless wheels of our modern industrial system.’

28. Cannon to Sinclair, 20 September 1920, Upton Sinclair Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University.

29. Sinclair to Cannon, 27 September 1920, Upton Sinclair Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University. A similar ending was devised by W. G. Henry when London's The Iron Heel was ‘dramatized’ in 1911. The play ended on election eve, 1912, when news of ‘immense Socialist gains throughout the country are received in San Francisco’, at which point the cast and audience sang the Marseillaise. See Grace V. Silver, ‘The Iron Heel Dramatized’, International Socialist Review, XI (June 1911) 752-3.

30. Sinclair, ‘A Co-operative Home Colony’, World's Work, IX (March 1907) 382-7, and Sinclair, ‘Helicon Hall’, The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform, ed. W. D. P. Bliss (1909). Socialists in Chicago regarded the Helicon Hall as an interesting experiment, but one which had little bearing upon socialism as they understood the term. See ‘Helicon Hall’, Chicago Daily Socialist (27 November 1906). Floyd Dell regarded the hall as ‘eminently conservative and within its own limitations, entirely successful economic and social experiment’: Dell, Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest (1927) p. 124.

31. Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961) p. 113.

32. Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (1952) ch. 4.

33. John Spargo, quoted by Kipnis, ibid., p. 202.

34. Upton Sinclair, ‘The Socialist Party’, World's Work, XI (April 1906) 7431-2.

35. John Chamberlain, Farewell to Reform (1932) pp. 184-5.