Episode 25
March 2, 2020
The Jungle
Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari
The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jurgis saw so plainly the meaning of it. In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had gotten a job the first day; but now he was second-hand, a damaged article, so to speak, and they did not want him. They had got the best of him—they had worn him out, with their speeding-up and their carelessness, and now they had thrown him away! And Jurgis would make the acquaintance of others of these unemployed men and find that they had all had the same experience. There were some, of course, who had wandered in from other places, who had been ground up in other mills; there were others who were out from their own fault—some, for instance, who had not been able to stand the awful grind without drink. The vast majority, however, were simply the worn-out parts of the great merciless packing machine; they had toiled there, and kept up with the pace, some of them for ten or twenty years, until finally the time had come when they could not keep up with it any more.
Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906) describes the lives of the working class in America by following Jurgis Rudkus, who moves with his family from Lithuania to the US at the turn of the century and then spends several years toiling in the slaughterhouses of Chicago. The novel ends with Jurgis’s conversion to socialism, and Sinclair hoped to inspire the reader to the socialist cause as well. And although the socialist revolution in America didn’t play out as Sinclair imagined, his novel did lead to major reforms in food safety legislation. It offers a lot for Suzanne and Chris to chew on.
![[Episode artwork]](/images/podcast/art/s/spouter.png)
Show Notes.
Upton Sinclair: The Jungle. [Gutenberg. Librivox. Bookshop.]
Also by Upton Sinclair: Manassas. The Brass Check. Oil!
There Will Be Blood [trailer].
An article on the Helicon Home Colony.
The story of Sinclair’s run for Governor of California.