To start with, this is a book about the working conditions of the poor at the end of Guilded Age America. Our main character, Jurdis, arrives in America from Lithuania and makes the journey to Chicago where they found themselves in the heart of the meat packing industry. The slums were overcrowded, dirty, mortality rate is high, and it wasn't long before the Lithuanian immigrants started dropping like flies. Until only Jurdis Rudkus, Martha, and Elizebta remained.
The book's main theme resonates around how bad members of the lower class are living. All around them, the hierarchy is cheating them for every penny and hard labor. Party bosses pay off politicians and law enforcement, cheating and scamming those below them. While their goons do the dirty work. Jurdis went from meat packing worker, to farmer, to miner, to steel worker, and finally janitor. He had mingled with a lot of people who had either helped him or contributed to his ruin. Through it all he observes the hierarchy and the patterns that the upper class use over the lower, noting how each layer of the hierarchy is trying to cheat those below them. The whole system was rigged, and despite the efforts of socialists and worker strikes, the men in power crushed each uprising without much effort.
But what really made the book immortalized within American culture was its graphic description of the conditions within the meat packing industry. Ice from a contaminated pond was harvested and served to regular folks, as there were no electric refrigeration that day Medicines are also questionable, no way of telling if the drugs are even real or effective. Canned meat and sausage products got the worst of it all. Animals were abused upon transport, some even got sick. Spoiled and tuberculosis-infected meat got mixed into the cans, along with rat meat, rat feces, horse, and on occasion human body parts. In one page, a whole man fell into a vat and got turned into lard! Yes, there were government inspectors, but they were either bribed by the party bosses or were just too lazy to do their work properly. Yes, there were scandals relating to the conditions of the meat packing industry, but they were quieted down. There was one passage in the scene where one of Jurdis's young relatives, who was only three, died within hours after eating tainted sausage meat. The book was pretty descriptive of the child's suffering, no need for me to repeat it here.
The book was published in February 26, 1906, and it hit people in the gut. President Theodore Roosevelt damned the book as socialist propaganda, but after reading it he sent inspectors to Chicago to investigate. Sure enough, they found the working conditions appalling. Months later, on June 4, 1906, the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act were enacted. According to Maura Spiegel's introduction in my Barnes & Noble Classics copy, Sinclair was known for quoting, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." He was trying to advocate for working conditions, not health conditions, of the lower class. No doubt this sat unsettled in his mind.
I have read the tainted meat passages of the book to people in my college, and they were outright disgusted. My history professor explained that party bosses still rule Chicago, but it was not as bad today as it was during the Guilded Age. If you ever wonder about why we have an FDA, this book is the real reason why. As it brought light about the horrid conditions of the food being produced which later finds its way on your dinner plate.
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I’m sure it’s a great story, but it looks like someone copied text into Notepad.
Just wondering if the book is printed strange, if I ordered a odd/cheap copy, or if this was how it was originally printed.... but I hate it. It’s slightly distracting. I’m sure I’ll get over it and enjoy the story but geez.
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