In ‘06, the United States in overwhelmed by materialism and greed, driven by advertisers determined to make us feel inadequate. Being middle class isn’t good enough, they suggest — you need to aspire to the luxury items of the ultra-rich. If you can’t afford them, you can buy them on credit (with interest, of course).
Critics decry the situation. “Beneath the hundred thousand women of the elite are a million middle-class women, miserable because they are not of the elite, and trying to appear of it in public… When one comes to the ultra-modern profession of advertising–the science of persuading people to buy what they do not want—he is in the very center of the ghastly charnel house of capitalist destructiveness, and he scarcely knows which of a dozen horrors to point out first.”
When I added “The Jungle” to my list I didn’t realize that it was the 100th anniversary of the publication of the novel. Because of that I was able to buy this excellent special edition with artwork by Charles Burns:
Like most people, I learned about the book in high school — in history class. It’s not often recognized as literature, largely because it’s not especially well-written. Published serially, it slips into a hypnotic pattern of hardship, followed by a minor uptick of good luck, and then total catastrophe. For example, Chapter 27:
- The hero Juris returns to the city to look for work because he is starving.
- Serendipitously, he runs into an family member…
- …who tells him that his young nephew was eaten by rats.
Other chapters end with children drowning in mud, women dying in childbirth, and meat-packing workers tumbling into vats of lard. By the time we get to chapter 30, most of the characters are dead, which presents a problem for Sinclair, who wants to end the book on a hopeful note.
The hope is Socialism. Juris, the barely-literate Lithuanian immigrant, discovers it in Chapter 31, and that makes the previous thirty chapters of feces-filled potted meats a distant memory. Most readers dislike this last section because it’s so transparently a lecture, but I found it fascinating. For one thing, Sinclair must’ve really hated when his wife asked him to do the dishes:
Surely it is moderate to say that the dishwashing for a family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day’s work, it takes, therefore, half a million able-bodied persons—mostly women to do the dishwashing of the country. And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay.
No kidding! Thankfully, Socialism will save us by inventing, uh, General Electric:
There would be a machine which would wash and dry the dishes, and do it, not merely to the eye and the touch, but scientifically—sterilizing them—and do it at a saving of all the drudgery and nine-tenths of the time!
And ConAgra:
…imagine the problem of providing the food supply of our nation once taken in hand systematically and rationally, by scientists! To picture the great potato-planting machine, drawn by four horses, or an electric motor, ploughing the furrow, cutting and dropping and covering the potatoes, and planting a score of acres a day! To picture the great potato-digging machine, run by electricity, perhaps, and moving across a thousand-acre field, scooping up earth and potatoes, and dropping the latter into sacks! To every other kind of vegetable and fruit handled in the same way—apples and oranges picked by machinery, cows milked by electricity…And to contrast all this with our present agonizing system of independent small farming,—a stunted, haggard, ignorant man, mated with a yellow, lean, and sad-eyed drudge, and toiling from four o’clock in the morning until nine at night, working the children as soon as they are able to walk, scratching the soil with its primitive tools, and shut out from all knowledge and hope, from all their benefits of science and invention, and all the joys of the spirit—held to a bare existence by competition in labor, and boasting of his freedom because he is too blind to see his chains!
Take that, stunted, haggard, ignorant guy I bought the organic scallions from today at the Somerville Farmer’s Market. Sucker!
Sinclair was right about a number of issues and then totally wrong about how to solve them. Teddy Roosevelt, upon reading the book, told Sinclair that this farm reform would result in the starvation of thousands — a Not So Great Leap Forward. In the US, the Green Revolution achieved Sinclair’s goal: cheap food for the masses, but today’s Left hates the scientific approach to food, and not because we support child labor and the 18-hour work day.
He would’ve loathed the organic food movement, with its high labor cost and fetishizing of heirloom fruits (”Consider the waste in time and energy incidental to making ten thousand varieties of a thing for purposes of ostentation and snobbishness, where one variety would do for use!”). Juris’s world is tragic and was deeply disturbing to read about, but Sinclair’s clinical utopia is frightening too. By the time the book ends with Sinclair’s Socialists screaming “CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” I was starting to think the Red Scare wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
My nascent Republican moment passed pretty quickly, but I always appreciate a reminder that some things about the good old days actually sucked. Given no other choice, I’d rather my sausage contained antibiotics than parts of young Stanislovas’s hand. Next time you frown at those sallow, rock-hard winter tomatoes, remember that’s one less rat-bitten child drowning in mud. Feel free to get indignant about strawberries, though, they’re still picked by exploited immigrants.