Cannibalism and Race Politics in Upton Sinclair's TheJungle

ABSTRACT

Upton Sinclair's muckraking exposé of Chicago's meatpacking industry, The Jungle, elicited outrage in the American public and led to the Meat Inspection Bill and the Pure Food and Drug Act, both in 1906. Sinclair himself wanted more of a showcase for his socialist politics and commented that he had "aimed at the public's heart, and by accident... hit it in the stomach." But what is most controversial about this novel is its suggestion that the meat-packing industry was making cannibals of us all, with graphic scenes of workers felling into industrial cooking vats and being incorporated into the industry's food products. Cannibalism, after all, has a range of cultural and metaphorical meanings, from serving as a marker of "othering" (the primitive vs. the civilized) to an analogy for capitalism. In The Jungle, Sinclair features a Lithuanian immigrant femily whose trials and tribulations demonstrate the meatpacking industry's indifference to individual workers. New immigrant workers are subject to abusive working conditions that treat them not as individuals but as consumable tools. Such conditions a century ago are echoed in what we know of the U.S. meatpacking industry today, circumstances brought to light in our recent COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, while Sinclair is sympathetic to the Eastern Europeans he features, he remains conspicuously racist in his depiction of Black Americans. In this essay, I revisit Sinclair's The Jungle for what it says about a cannibalism that implicates us all, as well as the race (and class) politics of the meatpacking industry then and now. Copyright © 2022 ELLAK.