



One hundred years ago, American business leaders and politicians celebrated the free market. They praised the virtues of small government, competition and laissez-faire capitalism. They said that with enough hard work anybody could make it to the top. Although free-market rhetoric was plentiful in those days, free markets were hard to find. Almost every sector of the American economy was controlled by a handful of corporations whose executives met in secret, set prices, determined wages and conspired to destroy labor unions. These interlocking corporate and financial monopolies had a pleasant, innocent-sounding name: trusts. There was a steel trust, a sugar trust and a coal trust, among others. The markets weren't free, but the trusts were-free to employ children in factories, free to make people work 60 or 70 hours a week, free to pollute rivers and streams, to hire private armies, to bribe state legislators and members of Congress, to sell what they wanted at whatever price they liked.

The freedom of big business seemed limitless. Drug companies sold patent medicines containing heroin, morphine and cocaine that promised to cure all sorts of diseases but actually cured none of them. Food companies sold children's candy colored with toxic heavy metals. Cheap margarine was routinely marketed as butter. Crude mixtures of apple scraps, glucose, timothy seeds and food coloring made from coal tar were sold as strawberry jam. In the age of the great trusts, the gulf between the wealthy and the poor became enormous. Robber barons built their homes in imitation of European palaces, while millions of American workers lived in urban slums.

Upton Sinclair was moved by these injustices. During the fall of 1904, he left his home in New Jersey and traveled to Chicago, intending to write a novel about the plight of the city's meatpacking workers. The beef trust controlled the industry with an iron fist. It had recently crushed a strike by union members who were seeking a pay raise of less than 3 cents an hour. The meatpacking industry seemed to embody everything that was wrong with American society, operating largely in secret, wielding unchecked power, threatening the health of workers and consumers. As Sinclair later argued in "The Jungle," the beef trust was "the incarnation of blind and insensate greed . . . the Great Butcher . . . the spirit of capitalism made flesh."

Sinclair was a socialist with grand ambitions. He set out to write a book that would do for workers what "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had done for slaves half a century earlier. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was considered the most important novel ever published in the United States. It had played a central role in creating public outrage toward slavery and widespread support for a war to liberate the slaves. Sinclair was aiming pretty high. He was only 26 years old, and his previous novel had sold fewer than 2,000 copies. He spent seven weeks in Chicago, wandering through the stockyards and slaughterhouses, visiting the homes of meatpacking workers, listening to their stories and filling his notebooks with the details of their lives. Living on advances from a socialist newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, and a New York publisher, Macmillan, he returned to New Jersey and started writing on Christmas morning 1904.

"The Jungle" tells the story of a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, his family and his friends. It describes the terrible working conditions in meatpacking plants, the squalid housing, the ruthlessness of employers, the sexual harassment, the lure of alcoholism and prostitution, the political corruption, the misery of life in jail. It depicts a world where honest, decent people are transformed into cogs in a huge industrial machine. It upends the traditional rags-to-riches success story, portraying a downward spiral. The immigrants are exploited and discarded, not rewarded and applauded for their hard work. At a time when most popular fiction dealt with the problems of the middle or upper class, Sinclair focused on life at the bottom. He dedicated "The Jungle" to "THE WORKINGMEN OF AMERICA."