The evangelist was preaching “sin and redemption,” the infinite grace of God and His pardon for human frailty. He was very much in earnest, and he meant well, but Jurgis, as he listened, found his soul filled with hatred. What did he know about sin and suffering—with his smooth, black coat and his neatly starched collar, his body warm, and his belly full, and money in his pocket—and lecturing men who were struggling for their lives, men at the death-grapple with the demon powers of hunger and cold!—This, of course, was unfair; but Jurgis felt that these men were out of touch with the life they discussed, that they were unfitted to solve its problems; nay, they themselves were part of the problem—they were part of the order established that was crushing men down and beating them! They were of the triumphant and insolent possessors; they had a hall, and a fire, and food and clothing and money, and so they might preach to hungry men, and hungry men must be humble and listen! They were trying to save their souls—and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?On the whole I found that The Jungle was something spurious and misdirected—that it was nothing less than a piece of propaganda. But despite my own ideological reaction to it, there is no denying that Sinclair is one hell of a writer. The story has a power over you which is not akin to many other things written. I wouldn't necessarily call it a page turner, but I will say that there were parts which caused certain other things in my life to be ignored.
Before this I had read Germinal and found that to be a better, more real defense of socialism than the honorable Sinclair’s version. Perhaps this is because I had the misfortune to be reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in tandem with The Jungle. And the curious thing was that the many evils which Sinclair ascribed to the capitalists (the corruption, the collusion, the abuse, the unfairness) were in Solzhenitsyn’s book the evils of the people Sinclair claimed to be virtuous and heralds of the pure and good future. Really it was a sad picture between the two books. One written less than half a century before the other, so full of hope as to a new way of life, as to a new and heroic world in which things would be different, and the other looking back on the outcome of such heroism only to find that it was not any better and maybe even a whole lot worse.
In the Packing-town of Sinclair the poor were forced into horrible conditions, unfair labor, and ultimately taken advantage of to such an extent that they were doomed to death. In the Gulags of Solzhenitsyn the poor were forced into horrible conditions, unfair labor, and ultimately taken advantage of to such an extent that they were doomed to death. The only difference was who had the power. First the capitalists, second the socialists. Both were to misuse the power they had been given. Is this a lesson into the nature of man? Is this the reflection of our own poor state? Perhaps.
But enough of the sermon. The Jungle is worth the read, even if just for the passing reference at the end to the socialist Jack London (something I had not learned about him until I read The Jungle).
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