Stockyards gone, `Jungle' lives on
As Sinclair's classic Back of the Yards novel turns 100, a monumental gateway is hailed as a literary landmark
chicagotribune.com
By Ron Grossman
Tribune staff reporter
June 24, 2005
When a South Side landmark was rededicated in the name of literature Thursday, it wasn't only culture vultures who spoke but a Chicago alderman, a government bureaucrat and an Old Lefty.
But then the book being honored on its 100th birthday and its author were always oddballs. Upton Sinclair had trouble finding a publisher for "The Jungle," his classic account of a Chicago working-class neighborhood. A century ago, his word picture of hardscrabble life in the Back of the Yards was considered too risque for genteel society. Since then, the novel has become a staple of high school reading lists.
"I read `The Jungle' at St. Ignatius high school," County Commissioner John Daley, a son of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, told an audience of about 40. "My father walked through that gate to work in the stockyards."
Thursday's ceremony was held at the Union Stockyard Gate, a lonely sentinel marking an era when Chicago was the nation's meatpacker. The protagonist of "The Jungle," Jurgis Rudkus, worked in the now-vanished warren of slaughterhouses and cattle and hog pens to which the monumental stone gateway once gave entrance.
Sinclair, a dedicated socialist, hoped his novel would convince readers that capitalism condemns workers to back-breaking toil and poverty. Its depiction of unsanitary conditions in Chicago's meatpacking plants provoked President Theodore Roosevelt to establish a watchdog agency, the Food and Drug Administration.
"Years later, Sinclair would say, `I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach,'" said Rocco Staino, a board member of the Friends of Libraries U.S.A., a support group that organized the event.
To celebrate the novel's centennial, the Union Stockyards Gate was proclaimed a literary landmark by the organization.
"The monument that we honor today, in the broad sense, is the spirit of the people and particularly the literary monument that Upton Sinclair has left us, which will withstand the winds of time even when the physical monuments have turned to sand," said Saulius Kuprys, president of the Lithuanian American Council. The novel's Rudkus was an immigrant from Lithuania. When a speaker asked how many in the audience spoke Lithuanian, a majority of hands went up.
Previously, 85 locations nationwide have been landmarked as being specially linked to America's literary heritage by the Friends of Libraries. To gather material for "The Jungle," Sinclair stayed for seven weeks in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, where many packinghouse workers lived.
"Try to imagine what working conditions were like then," said Ald. James Balcer (11th). "They worked 84 hours a week at 16 cents an hour."
Sinclair came to Chicago on a dare from the editor of the Appeal to Reason, a widely circulated socialist publication of the day. Sinclair had written about slavery; the editor challenged him to write something about wage-slaves in America's factories, providing him with a $500 advance.
He found that the South Side neighborhood was an ethnic house divided against itself. Factory owners pitted one immigrant group against the next to keep their workers from getting together in a union. In "The Jungle," Sinclair described the divide-and-conquer tactics of one such boss:
"And so he had sent his agents into every city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages at the stockyards. The people had come in hordes; and [the factory owner] had squeezed them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces and sending for new ones. The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands, had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians were giving way to the Slovaks."
`Then we got a union in 1936'
Les Orear, who worked in the stockyards during the Depression, when the hourly pay rate was 32 1/2 cents, took note of Thursday afternoon's sweltering heat.
"On the killing floor on a hot day like this, the hogs would be squealing, and the boss hadn't brought the fans he'd promised the week before," said Orear, president of the Illinois Labor History Society. "Then we got a union in 1936. I was the first leaflet writer for local No. 347 in the Armour plant."
The book's Rudkus was drawn to America by the perennial immigrant dream of a country whose streets are paved with gold. By the novel's end, he has been disabused of that naivete. Amid the squalor of the Back of the Yards, his wife dies in childbirth. Rudkus turns to drink, becomes a wife-beater and strike-breaker and does precinct work for the local political machine. But in a secular reworking of the Christian theme of sin and redemption, Sinclair has Rudkus wind up a convert to socialism.
Though Sinclair's novel was a huge success when it was serialized in the Appeal to Reason in 1905, it was turned down by half a dozen book publishers. A manuscript reader for Macmillan strongly urged its rejection, noting, "One feels that what is at the bottom of his fierceness is not nearly so much desire to help the poor as hatred of the rich."
Yet when Doubleday finally brought the book out, it quickly sold 150,000 copies. Shortly translated into numerous languages, it was a worldwide best seller. Reportedly, the White House received 100 letters a day demanding reforms in the meat-packing industry.
The founding of the Food and Drug Administration was afterward emulated in many countries, noted Michael Bird, an official of the Department of Agriculture.
"There is simply no way to determine the thousands of injuries and deaths that were prevented, thanks to this book," Bird said.
Sinclair's success
"The Jungle" made Sinclair's fortune, literary and monetary. He wrote many more books, used his royalties to finance a short-lived socialist commune in New Jersey and ran twice unsuccessfully for governor of California. Those setbacks never robbed his political faith--an optimism in the face of adversity he expressed in the closing line of "The Jungle": "We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us--and Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!"
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rgrossman@tribune.com
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