The Books: Arguably, ‘Upton Sinclair: A Capitalist Primer’, by Christopher Hitchens

On the essays shelf:

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Like most people, I had to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in high school. I’m thinking junior year. I haven’t read it since. My memories of it are vivid. The stink of the book, the sheer overwhelming sense of the STINK going on in those filthy places, made a big impression on me. I don’t remember getting the sense that it was a novel, it felt like a work of journalism (which indeed it is). I don’t remember the characters, in other words, but I remember the setting, and the gross meat, and the squealing terrified pigs, and the squalor. Published in 1906, after a couple of years undercover in Chicago, The Jungle was such a smash hit, and so influential, that it actually helped lead to the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Sinclair wrote it to shine a spotlight on how labor was treated in this country, but the reaction was: “OMG our food supply is coming from this gross place.” The Jungle sparked a conversation about industry and food and how controls should be put in place. Who cares about immigrant labor? (I’m being facetious. But still: what I remember from the book is the animals and the gross-ness of those places. I don’t remember reading it and feeling sad/distressed for the PEOPLE who work in that environment. Screw them! What about the poor pigs?? I should re-read it, clearly.)

Of course none of this was news to me at age 16, because I had already written a novel when I was 11 years old about a family of Polish immigrants crushed by hard times. Listen, mine isn’t a scholarly site. You get a little Upton Sinclair and you also get my 11-year-old expose about the immigrant experience.

Sinclair came from wealth. He was drawn to Socialism (as many wealthy or middle-class people are), and the rapacious capitalism on display in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century obviously presented a problem. (It’s interesting: I’ve been re-reading Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror and I am now on the section with the “trials” of the so-called “saboteurs”. You know, the ones blamed for things like mine explosions and faulty machinery as some sort of conscious politically-motivated sabotage, when really it was just sheer incompetence – at both an individual level and a policy level. But Conquest made a point that the “factory towns” that were built slap-dash around these gigantic factories and mines made industrialism in the capitalist countries look downright CUSHY. So here we are, in the Socialist Utopia, with hundreds of thousands of people working long hours, dangerous jobs, piled on top of each other in communal tenement housing, living in squalor unimaginable even in a place like Chicago. Worker’s Paradise, my ass. Of course there were the prettified exceptions, shown to credulous Western journalists who would report back home on the glorious dream being lived by the “worker” in Russia.)

Christopher Hitchens wrote an essay about The Jungle for The Atlantic in 2002. The overriding theme of the essay is that Sinclair’s realism got in the way of his Socialism and that showed up in his writing. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘Upton Sinclair: A Capitalist Primer’, by Christopher Hitchens

Probably no two words in our language are now more calculated to shrivel the sensitive nostril than “socialist realism.” Taken together, they evoke the tractor opera, the granite-jawed proletarian sculpture, the cultural and literary standards of Commissar Zhadanov, and the bone-deep weariness that is paradoxically produced by ceaseless uplift and exhortation. Yet these words used to have an authentic meaning, which was also directly related to “social” realism. And the most fully realized instance of the genre, more telling and more moving than even the works of Dickens and Zola, was composed in these United States.

Like Dickens and Zola, Upton Sinclair was in many ways a journalist. His greatest novel was originally commissioned as a serial, for the popular socialist paper Appeal to Reason, which was published (this now seems somehow improbable) in Kansas. An advance of $500 sent Sinclair to Chicago in 1904, there to make radical fiction out of brute reality. The city was then the great maw of American capitalism. That is to say, it took resources and raw materials from everywhere and converted them into money at an unprecedented rate. Hogs and steers, coal and iron, were transformed into multifarious products by new and ruthless means. The Chicago system created almost every imaginable kind of goods. But the main thing it consumed was people. Upton Sinclair tried to elucidate and illuminate the ways in which commodities deposed, and controlled, human beings. His novel is the most successful attempt ever made to fictionalize the central passages of Marx’s Das Kapital.

The influence of Dickens can be felt in two ways. First, we are introduced to a family of naive but decent Lithuanian immigrants, sentimentally portrayed at a wedding feast where high hopes and good cheer provide some protection against the cruelty of quotidian life. There are lavishly spread tables, vital minor characters, and fiddle music. Second, we see these natural and spontaneous people being steadily reduced, as in Hard Times, by crass utilitarian calculation. They dwell in a place named Packingtown, and “steadily reduced” is a euphemism. The extended family of the stolid Jurgis is exposed to every variety of misery and exploitation, and discovers slowly – necessarily slowly – that the odds are so arranged that no honest person can ever hope to win. The landlord, the saloonkeeper, the foreman, the shopkeeper, the ward heeler, all are leagued against the gullible toiler in such a way that he can scarcely find time to imagine what his actual explorer or boss might be getting away with. To this accumulation of adversity Jurgis invariably responds with the mantra “I will work harder.”

This is exactly what the innocent cart horse Boxer later says as he wears out his muscles on the cynical futilities of Animal Farm. Orwell was an admirer of Sinclair’s work, and wrote in praise of The Jungle in 1940, but Sinclair may have been depressed to see his main character redeployed in service of allegory.

Sinclair’s realism, indeed, got in the way of his socialism, in more than one fashion. His intention was to direct the conscience of America to the inhuman conditions in which immigrant labor was put to work. However, so graphic and detailed were his depictions of the filthy way in which food was produced that his book sparked a revolution among consumers instead (and led at some remove to the passage of the Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. He wryly said of this unintended consequence that he had aimed for the public’s heart but had instead hit its stomach.