The Sins of Packington
By Upton Sinclair
In 1906 Upton Sinclair wrote a book called The Jungle. His purpose was to rouse the public to the suffering of poor immigrants, their long hours of work at low pay, and their terrible living conditions. But people who read the book did not pay much attention to Sinclair’s immigrants. Instead they were struck by his horrible yet fascinating account of how meat was prepared in the packing houses of Chicago. “I aimed at the nation’s heart,” Sinclair said, “and by accident hit it in the stomach”. Fiction, which has some social importance (Harriet B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852, and Edward Bellamy’s, Looking Backward, 1888, are other good examples), is often useful for the historical study of a period. Read carefully the account taken by Sinclair’s book as it appeared in Frank Freidel’s America: A Modern History of the United States pp. 492-493.
During the early part of the winter the family had had money enough to love on a little over to pay their debts with; but when the earnings of Jurgis fell from nine to ten dollars a week to five or six, there was no longer anything to spare. The winter came and went, spring came, and found them still living thus from hand to mouth, hanging on day by day, with literally not a month’s wages between them and starvation. Marija was in despair, for there was still no word about the reopening of the canning factory, and her savings were almost entirely gone. She had had to give up all idea of marrying then; the family could not get along without her-though for that matter she was likely to become burden even upon them, for when her money was all gone, they would have to pay back what they owed her in board. So Jurgis and Ona and Teta Elzbieta would hold anxious conferences until late at night, trying to figure out how they could manage this too without starving.
Such were the cruel terms upon which their life was possible, that they might never have not expected a single instant’s respite from worry, a single instant in which they were to haunted by the thought of money…
With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had first-hand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they could not study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read a new grim meaning into the old Packingtown jest—that they use everything of the pig except the squeal.
Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or slated, whole or chopped, any color and nay flavor and an odor they choose.
It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make a difference. There was never the least bit attention paid to what as cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white. It could be filled with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust where the workers had trampled and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of dried dung rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit…
Every spring the waste barrels would be cleaned out. In these barrels would be dirt and rust and stale water. Cartload after cartload of this waster would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out for the people’s breakfast.
Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta was placed, and such was the work she was compelled to do. It was stupefying, brutalizing work; it left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence. There was only one mercy about the cruel grind—that it gave her the gift of insensibility.
They were beaten; they had lost the game; they were swept aside…They had dreamed of freedom; a chance to look about them and learn something; to be decent and clean, to see their children grow up to be strong. And now it was all gone—it would never be. They had played the game and they had lost. Six years more of toil they had to face before they could expect the least respite, the cessation of the payments upon their house; and how cruelly certain it was that they could never stand six years of such a life as they were living! They were lost, they were going down—and there was no deliverance for them, no hope…
1. After reading this excerpt from The Jungle, how would you describe the meat-packing industry of the early 1900s?
2. What are some of the changes that needed to be made to the meat packing industry?
3. The people who owned the packing houses said the government had no right to meddle in their affairs. Do you agree? Explain your answer
4. If you had been a citizen in 1906, what could you have done to help improve the quality of meat?
5. Why do you think Sinclair titled his novel The Jungle?