Is it just me, or has there been an unusual profluence of Upton Sinclair articles lately? This is not a bad thing; I'm just sayin'.
The Nation rolls in with this piece by Brenda Wineapple, discussing what I've always thought to be one of hte most interesting aspects to The Jungle--it ignited positive change, but not the positive change that Sinclair had hoped for.
"One hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his gut-churning exposé of the meatpacking industry that schoolchildren still read today in their history classes. A well-merchandized sensation, it sold 100,000 copies in the first year, millions after that, was almost immediately translated into seventeen languages, spurred an uptick in vegetarianism, greased the way for the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug acts, and transformed its 27-year-old Socialist author into a celebrity. Teddy Roosevelt called Sinclair a crackpot but invited him to the White House, and meatpacking magnate J. Ogden Armour offered Frank Doubleday, The Jungle's publisher, a huge advertising contract if he would suppress the book. To seal the deal Armour's representative brought a can of preserved meat.
Despite the hoopla--and the royalties--Sinclair wasn't happy. Nothing if not grandiose, he thought his book would end "wage slavery" in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin ended chattel slavery and convert his readers to socialism in the bargain. No dice. But hundreds of thousands of readers were transfixed by his graphic descriptions of working conditions in meatpacking plants: employees falling into open cooking vats, diseased cattle passing through slaughterhouses, amputated fingers ground into sausage."
Read it all here. And really read it all here.
And oh yes--I've just realized the cause of the Sinclair energy of late: it's the 100th birthday of The Jungle this year.
Right.
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