Thinker

Upton Sinclair

He wrote a novel about immigrant workers in Chicago’s meatpacking plants, and a nation focused on the meat.

Novelist and investigative journalist, 1878–1968

Upton Beall Sinclair was born in Baltimore in 1878 and grew up between poverty and privilege, splitting time between his struggling parents’ home and his wealthy grandparents’ house. He put himself through the College of the City of New York by writing dime novels and pulp fiction, sometimes producing as many as eight thousand words a day.1

In 1904, the editor of a socialist newspaper sent Sinclair to Chicago to investigate labor conditions in the meatpacking industry. He spent seven weeks living among the workers of Packingtown, the neighborhood surrounding the Union Stock Yards.2

The result was The Jungle, published in 1906. The novel followed Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant, through a system designed to consume him. Workers lost fingers to the machinery. They fell into rendering vats. Sick cattle were processed alongside healthy ones. Wages were cut without notice. When workers were injured, they were replaced the next morning.3

Sinclair’s intent was to expose the exploitation of labor. The public’s reaction focused on food safety. Sinclair later wrote that he had aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit it in the stomach.

Weeks Sinclair spent living among meatpacking workers in Chicago’s Packingtown before writing The Jungle.

The novel’s impact on regulation was immediate. Within months of its publication, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.4 Roosevelt had initially dismissed Sinclair as a "crackpot" but sent investigators to the stockyards, who confirmed the conditions described in the book.

Sinclair went on to write nearly a hundred books, ran for governor of California in 1934 on a platform called End Poverty in California (EPIC), and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 for Dragon’s Teeth, a novel about the rise of Nazism.5 He died in Bound Brook, New Jersey, in 1968, at the age of ninety. The Jungle is still assigned in American high schools and universities, typically in courses about food safety rather than labor. The misdirection Sinclair identified in 1906 has not corrected itself.6

Timeline

1906

The Jungle was published, exposing conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants.

1906

Roosevelt signed the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act within months of publication.

1934

Sinclair ran for governor of California on the End Poverty in California (EPIC) platform.

1943

Sinclair won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Dragon’s Teeth, a novel about the rise of Nazism.

Endnotes

1 Anthony Arthur, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair (New York: Random House, 2006), 10–25.

2 Arthur, Radical Innocent, 60–65.

3 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, 1906).

4 James Harvey Young, Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 220–240.

5 Arthur, Radical Innocent, 310–315.

6 Arthur, Radical Innocent, 70. Sinclair’s remark about "aiming at the public’s heart" appears in multiple biographies and is attributed to his autobiography.