Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle (1906). The Viking Press. 1946.
In 1905, Upton Sinclair released his book, The Jungle, to the American public. The Jungle hit mainstream America with a startling force, exposing the clandestine horrors of Chicago’s meatpacking industry. By following a fictional immigrant family’s life in the Chicago stockyards, Sinclair created a space to discuss the illusion of the American Dream and America’s relationship with slaughterhouses across space and scale. The Jungle is an incredibly illustrative piece for geographers to analyze, as it is a poignant reminder of the reality of the many fallacies of imaginative geography.
Imaginative geography is a perceived conception of space. It is this imaginative geography that prompts Jurgis Rudkus and his Lithuanian family to leave Lithuania and travel to Packingtown, Illinios, the Chicago stockyard. For Jurgis, America was a place where a man “might do as he pleased and count himself as good as any other man” (Sinclair 23). In his mind, America existed as a space where he could “be a rich man” and that if he could just pay the passage fair, “he could count his troubles at an end” (Sinclair 23). Jurgis came to believe in this idealized space because he had heard romanticized success stories from Lithuania’s diaspora. Jurgis and his family left their home and travelled thousands of miles to live in the stockyards of Chicago because of the hope of economic opportunity in a place “where a friend of his had gotten rich” (Sinclair 23).
As shown in The Jungle, romanticized stories from the diaspora create spatial concentrations of immigrants in communities within the receiving country. As Sinclair depicts in his book, Chicago was an extremely popular destination for newly arrived immigrants from Lithuania. As a node in a land of “opportunity and freedom,” the Lithuanian immigrant population created a strong pull factor, drawing other disheartened Lithuanians to their newly established community in Chicago (Sinclair 30).
This spatial concentration manifested itself further within Chicago. After one day of wandering the streets of Chicago, Jurgis and his family were taken in by the police. The next day the police found an interpreter, taught them the word ‘stockyard’ and put on a train to Packingtown. When the Chicago authorities figured out the immigrants were from Lithuania, they sent them straight to the stockyards to find work, aiding in the spatial concentration of these immigrants. Soon after arriving in Packingtown, Jurgis found housing amongst other Eastern Europeans in the “back of the yard” with Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks and Bohemians (Sinclair 29). This spatial distribution appeared because of the wave of Eastern European immigrants in the early 1900’s existed at the bottom of the economic hierarchy of Packingtown. Subsequently they were placed in extremely cheap housing together, further separating themselves from mainstream Chicago and into their own Eastern European community within Chicago’s meat packing industry. Imaginative geographies of the space of America pulled many immigrants, including Jurgis, to the stockyards in Chicago.
After only a couple days in the United States, Jurgis realized that his preconceived notion of America had been severely skewed. He saw that America was a “land of high prices, and that in it the poor man was almost as poor as in any other corner of the world” (Sinclair 26). Although Jurgis knew that his dreams of easy wealth had vanished, he still held on to the idea of the American Dream, the dream that hard work and strong morals could make him a successful man. He made this clear when he pondered his future with unbounded optimism, asserting, “Tomorrow I shall go and get a job!” (Sinclair 30)
In 1977, geographer Yi Fu Tuan wrote that “place is humanized space…made real through investment of emotion” (Jackson 199). Jurgis has invested an incredible amount of time, emotion, and money into his preconceived notion of America, and would not let it go easily. At the start of his life in Packingtown, America existed as Jurgis imagined it, not as the downtrodden or weak experienced it. He would not let his imagined geography of that space to vanish so quickly. However, as the book progresses it becomes apparent that Jurgis was fighting a losing battle. His belief in the American dream only served to cripple his dreams of success. After one long evening watching the extreme mistreatment of animals and seeing their unfit body parts enter America’s food product, Jurgis’ loyalty to his vision finally wavered, thinking “at last how those might be right who had laughed at him for his faith in America” (Sinclair 63).
The Jungle also provides an interesting depiction of the Rudkus family through the lens of human geography. The crushing forces of capitalism had significantly detrimental effects on Jurgis and his family. The extreme economic inequality and hardship of their new home tore the family apart, the same family that had migrated thousands of miles in hope of a better life together. In one instance the Rudkus family wasn’t even phased when a family member, Kristoforas, died. “Nobody was really sorry” when Kristoforas died because he was a consumer, and did not produce any money for the family (Sinclair 126). At other points throughout the book, Jurgis’s marriage falls apart, he goes to jail for attacking a man who forced his wife into becoming a mistress, and he becomes a struggling alcoholic. Changing locations from Lithuania to Packingtown had significant effects on the Rudkus family as their social fabric unraveled when they buckled under the economic inequalities they experienced in America.
In 2006, geographer Peter Jackson wrote about the concept of relational thinking in his article titled “Thinking Geographically.” Relational thinking refers to the way “we think about similarities and differences…by contrasting geographies of self and other” (Jackson). In The Jungle, Sinclair urges his audience to think in this way, guiding mainstream America to examine its own relationship with slaughterhouses.
Beginning in the 18th century, Americans began to move the slaughtering of animals to increasingly discreet areas. As Americans began killing increasingly large numbers of animals, it was only natural for the process to be veiled, for “slaughter on the large scale is different. It is disturbing” (Fitzgerald). As time progressed these spaces designated for slaughter “were designed and sited to reduce contemplation and questioning of them by workers and consumers,” creating an institutionalized forgetfulness (Fitzgerald). The slaughterhouse has been pushed into invisible spaces, a “place that is no-place.” America has attempted to avoid a “collective cultural guilt” by separating the public from the industrialization of animal slaughter (Fitzgerald).
By unveiling the reality of industrialized meat production, The Jungle cut through years of socially constructed space. The Jungle brought the systematically hidden horrors of the slaughterhouse to mainstream America’s kitchen table. Sinclair’s audience responded with outrage when they found out that “there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit” (Sinclair 135). In the introduction to the 1946 publication of The Jungle, Sinclair notes that directly following its release in 1906, President Roosevelt reached out to him and began an immediate investigation of the stockyards. This was followed by the quick passage of “new meat-inspection laws,” such as the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) (Sinclair x).
Prominent geographer, Doreen Massey, makes the argument in her book, For Space, that space exists as “the sphere of possibility of the existence of multiplicity” (Massey). In this complex phrase, Massey asserts that the same space can exist as different places for different people. In this instance, The Jungle bridged the gap between the American public’s misguided understanding of its meat industry and the reality understood by those who work closely with the slaughterhouse industry.
At the time, Sinclair was disappointed that the public responded to his book with regulations for their food instead of regulations to limit the exploitation of workers. Sinclair is famously quoted saying, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach” (Sinclair x). Sinclair wanted to merge the public’s understanding of slaughterhouse labor with the slaughterhouse worker’s understanding of his/her own labor, shrinking the gap of possibility in Massey’s assessment. Throughout the book Sinclair pushes the reader to compare the immigrant labor force with the cattle in the slaughterhouse. Just as the animals are forced to suffer as they are led to their deaths, the laborer also suffers at the raw end of capitalism, impoverished and worked til exhaustion. By applying the concept of relational thinking, it is easy to see how The Jungle pushes its audience to empathize with the plight of immigrant workers, or all of those who have repeatedly suffered under the capitalist system and have been pushed into invisible spaces, just like the cattle.
Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, exposed the exploitation and horror of the meat packing industry in Chicago in the early 1900s. The book is significant to geographers because it revolves around several geographic concepts: imaginative geographies, humanized space, and relational thinking. Throughout the novel, Sinclair explains how meat companies consistently sold rotten cans of meat to the unknowing public. The can appears pretty on the outside, but is repulsive on the inside. The Jungle urges its readers to peel back the pretty packaging and expose whatever horrors exist on the inside. Without a desire to find truth and end exploitation, everybody will suffer.
Bibliography
Jackson, P. (2006) Thinking Geographically. Geography 91 (3).
Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage Press. (9)
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. 1906. The Viking Press. 1946.