Sinclair, Upton (1878–1968)

AMERICAN NOVELIST, essayist, muckraker, and socialist economic reformer, Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Upton Beall and Priscilla (Harden) Sinclair. His father's alcoholism severely affected the family's stability and living conditions; his mother hated alcohol and caffeine. Sinclair began publishing dime novels when he was 15 (five years after the family moved to New York City), and while attending New York City College, he wrote pulp fiction to finance his education.

He enrolled at Columbia University in 1897, producing under pseudonyms in his spare time, the Clif Faraday and Mark Mallory, stories for boys' publications. Sinclair began reading the Appeal to[Page 747]Reason, a socialist-populist newspaper, and then joined the American Socialist Party when he was 24 years old.

Sinclair's most famous work and only bestseller, the historical fiction novel The Jungle (1906), is much more remembered for its political effects than for its literary contribution. In 1905, The Jungle was serialized in Appeal to Reason. Doubleday agreed to publish its entirety in 1906. It was dedicated to the workingmen of America, and educated the public about the horrors of the meatpacking industry in Chicago (“Packingtown”), including the ways in which meats delivered to consumers were contaminated. Widespread outrage and boycotting aimed at the meat industry shortly followed, and the government quickly passed in 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The legislation occurred during the Progressive Era, representing America's first national consumer protection laws, and it was a clear indication that the federal government was no longer following a hands-off attitude toward business.

The Pure Food and Drug Act may be seen as an example of “structural Marxism”—when laws are enacted in order to promote the viability of a capitalistic system. Unless confidence was restored in the marketplace, all of the economic role participants in the meat industry—farmers, butchers, railroads, grocery stores, packing houses—would be adversely affected. Even though the initial cost of implementing the law may not have been in participants' best interests, the law was nevertheless necessary to prevent economic disaster.

The Jungle depicts the experience of protagonist Jurgus Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who came to America with dreams of wealth, success, and happiness. Rudkus found only price-gouging, corruption, wage-slavery, and unsafe working conditions, causing him ultimately to become a socialist. Sinclair tried to demonstrate in The Jungle that capitalism is an attack on the American Dream that states that hard work leads to financial success. He also tried to convince the reader that socialism is the remedy for the evils of capitalism. The slaughterhouses and pens at Packingtown were to symbolize the plight of the working class—both the animals and the workers were at the mercy of the owners of Packingtown.

The Jungle is a metaphor for capitalism, portraying it as a system based on competition and self-gratification, in which only the strongest survive. As a historical novel, The Jungle is said to have had the most significant political impact since Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. President Theodore Roosevelt, moved by The Jungle, ordered federal investigations of the meatpacking industry which led to the passage of the pure food laws. It was soon translated into 17 languages and became a worldwide bestseller.

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