The literary world celebrated “The Jungle” when Upton Sinclair’s expose of the scandalous conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses was published around the turn of the 20th Century.
Scholars embraced the book as a “naturalistic potboiler” and a classic example of the era’s literary naturalism, a movement in which writers framed their stories with the bare-knuckled experiences of the real world. Sociologists praised the book, too, as a vivid reminder of the squalid working conditions that prevailed in a rapidly industrializing America.
But “The Jungle” and Sinclair also had a huge impact in the world of journalism. After it rolled off the presses in 1906, the book and its author became legendary in the annals of “muckraking,” a brash, crusading form of journalism that survives today as investigative reporting.
Even 100 years later, Sinclair and “The Jungle” have a familiar ring, says Anthony Arthur, a retired English professor and author of a biography of Sinclair, “Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair,” due out this month. “I found that he had widespread name recognition, even among people who don’t read a lot. People knew ‘The Jungle’ by name.”
That Sinclair and his book would have such an impact in journalistic circles is ironic. He was, after all, a novelist, a writer who dealt in fiction, not exactly the medium chosen by the “watchdog” journalists who hold him in such high esteem. He was an avowed socialist, too, and his philosophy of life saturated his books and articles.
Contemporary journalists who openly display bias or fabricate stories, such as Jayson Blair, the young reporter who engulfed the New York Times in scandal, get ostracized or drummed out of the business for mixing fact and fiction. So what made Upton Sinclair a prince and Blair a pariah?
The first and most obvious reason, of course, is that Sinclair labeled “The Jungle” a novel. But there were other reasons for Sinclair’s success that could provide insights for contemporary media executives struggling with declining circulations and readership.
Sinclair wrote fiction, but he was also a great reporter. He got out of the office and actually talked directly to people, enriching his novels with shoe-leather reporting from the trenches. True, his Socialist leanings engendered some goofy ideas, but he made no secret of his philosophy or politics. He told his readers, without fear or favor, what was important, and he challenged the power structure, particularly the world of politics and business. Most important, he was a master of the story well told, a skill and practice that transcends time, trends and typefaces.
“He was the only one of the muckrakers who had the story-telling talent,” says Arthur. “There hasn’t really been anyone like him who used fiction as he did.”
Nowhere is the secret of his success more evident than in the story of how he came to write “The Jungle.” A native of Baltimore, Sinclair arrived in Chicago at the height of the muckraking era in the early 1900s. He was 26. Although he had shown considerable promise as a budding writer, success as a novelist eluded him.
By the time he wandered into a hotel near the stockyards in 1904, he’d published four novels, but none had sold well. Ernest Poole, a writer and acquaintance, described how he met Sinclair at the Transit House, then a favorite hangout for journalists on the prowl for a good story and local color.
“[He] breezed [into its elegant lobby] in a wide-brimmed hat, with loose flowing tie and a wonderful warm expansive smile. Hello! I’m Upton Sinclair!” he said, “and I’ve come here to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Labor Movement.”
Sinclair was new to the muckraking scene. Veteran journalists such as Nellie Bly; Lincoln Steffens; Frank Norris; Henry Demerest Lloyd, once chief editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune; and Ida Tarbell, who gave the public a look inside the Standard Oil Trust, had been exposing social, commercial and political corruption since the mid-1800s.
Some of the more splashy yet effective muckraking was done for newspapers, says William Serrin, a New York University journalism professor and co-author of “Muckraking, the Journalism that Changed America.”
Bly, for instance, whose real name was Elizabeth Cochrane, got herself committed to an insane asylum and wrote a gripping first-person account for the New York World in 1887. True to the “yellow journalism” of the day, the expose had the salacious details that gave the story sex appeal and the writer credibility:
“We were taken into a cold, wet bathroom and I was ordered to undress,” she wrote. “Did I protest? Well I never grew so earnest in my life as when I tried to beg off. . . They began to undress me and one-by-one pulled off my clothes. At last everything was gone excepting one garment. ‘I will not remove it,’ I said vehemently, but they took it off. I gave one glance at the group of patients at the door watching the scene and I jumped into the bathtub with more energy than grace.”
But many of the newspapers that published civic-minded exposes also published sensationalistic stories with lurid, tantalizing headlines about taboo subjects-sex, death, the girl-gone-bad. Headlines from William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in the 1890s tell the story:
“Had Four Wives,” “Henry’s Bad Son,” “Alive in a Coffin,” “Fiendish Parents,” “Snakes Are Their Gods.”
Sinclair held newspapers owned by corporate barons in contempt. He even named a novel he later wrote about the newspaper industry “The Brass Check,” slang for a token given to those waiting for service in a brothel.
Real muckrakers wrote for about 10 of the popular magazines then riding a wave of literacy generated by the Industrial Revolution’s rising tide of wealth-journals such as McClure’s, the American and Appeal to Reason. They were led by fiercely independent publishers and editors, such as Fred Warren, an Arcola, Ill., native who was just as interested in exposes that attacked the powerful as earnings and ads.
Warren was managing editor of “Appeal to Reason,” the fourth-largest weekly journal in America when he commissioned Sinclair in 1904 to write a novel about immigrant workers in Chicago’s meat packinghouses.
Warren’s publisher, Julius Wayland, gave Sinclair a $500 advance, and the author headed to the Union Stock Yards, where he spent the next seven weeks reporting, interviewing people in hotels, bars, bordellos and beef- and hog-packing plants.
Sinclair then sat down and told the story of the stockyards through the life of Jurgis Rudkis, a Lithuanian immigrant desperate for work in “The Jungle.” The target of Sinclair’s furious narrative was the packing trust, men such as Augustus Swift and Phillip Armour, giants of the industry. Sinclair wanted to expose the evils of an economic system that valued the cattle and hogs slaughtered in Chicago more than Rudkis and his family.
It was fiction, but its richly-developed characters were as real as the 25,000 immigrant Poles, Czechs, Slavs and Lithuanians who then toiled in huge plants, tossing animal guts, splitting necks and hanging carcasses in a workplace teeming with unsanitary and inhumane working conditions. Appeal to Reason serialized the novel in 1905. By the end of the year, its circulation jumped nearly 20 percent to 175,000. The book, published in 17 languages, became a worldwide best-seller.
The muckrakers were a lot like today’s bloggers: A handful were good but many were like some would-be journalists who couldn’t tell solid fact from idle gossip if it hit them in their hard drives.
David Graham Phillips was one of the latter, and it was his series of stories for Hearst’s now-defunct Cosmopolitan magazine that gave the muckrakers their label and started their demise. Called “The Treason of the Senate,” the series attacked the nation’s august chamber as a rich man’s club and zeroed in on the political allies of President Theodore Roosevelt, an enemy of Hearst.
Phillips stories were not outrageously off the mark, but his reporting was sloppy; his writing exaggerated, odious and petty. A friend tried to get Phillips to tone down his stories. He didn’t, and Roosevelt, an adroit politician, struck back, mainly because of Hearst’s involvement.
In a speech to the elite Gridiron Club, Roosevelt cited a passage from Pilgrim’s Progress in which author John Bunyan equated a man selfishly seeking worldly riches with the “Man with the Muck-rake” who was so busy raking in his material goods that he failed to raise his head and see anything better.
Roosevelt twisted the metaphor, though, and applied it to the crusading journalists, arguing they were so busy dishing the dirt that they didn’t see the good side of political life. The Gridiron remarks went over well and Roosevelt decided to raise the volume in a later, more public speech:
The “Man with the Muck-rake” is desperately needed at times Roosevelt said: “There is filth on the floor and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake . . . But the man who never does anything else; who never thinks or speaks or writes, save on his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes not a help to society; not an incitement to good but one of the most potent forces for evil.”
There was no mistake that he was talking about Phillips and others. Journalists such as Steffens, a friend of the President’s, felt betrayed. Many of Roosevelt’s reforms came about because of their work. Those who printed lies and falsehoods, such as Hearst, were the real targets of the speech, Roosevelt later told Steffens, not legitimate journalists such as Tarbell, Steffens and Sinclair. He made no such distinction in his remarks, though, and Arthur, the biographer, says Sinclair and others were targets, even if they were not named.
But Sinclair survived Roosevelt’s attack and many others. He published more than 90 books; almost all characterized by great reporting and masterful storytelling.
Investigative reporting survived many attacks over the years, too, and Sinclair’s legacy in journalism probably can be summed up in one word-inspiration. Generations of reporters and writers have followed his example, though few use fiction. Most are the kind of people who think a tax lien is a good read and a day at the county recorder’s office is as good as it gets. Most have been idealists seeking social change generated by that magic blend of the good story well told and solid documentation.
Indeed, about 60 years after Sinclair published “The Jungle,” another young journalist came along to write about flies crawling over contaminated pork, putrid meat and unsanitary packing plants around the country. He was Nick Kotz of the Des Moines Register. His stories helped pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1967, legislation that closed loopholes in the laws inspired by “The Jungle.”
“Was I inspired by Sinclair and “The Jungle”? Absolutely,” says Kotz, who won a 1968 Pulitzer Prize for his work. “I was a fan of his, of Frank Norris and Ida Tarbell, all those people.” Other investigative reporters were, too, he says. “All that raising hell, it was inspiring.”
Indeed, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Meat Inspection Act in 1967, Kotz was invited to the White House signing ceremony. There he met an old man in the last chapter of his life, Upton Beall Sinclair, who died about a year later in 1968.
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jo’shea@tribune.com
