Socialism has always been hard for me to understand. I never really grasped the concept of it until I read the book The Jungle and began to research for this paper. Before I begin I would like to go through a condensed version of the history of Socialism. It was founded in 1901 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Two groups came together to form the Socialists, the Social Democratic Party and the “Kangaroo” wing of the older Socialist Labor Party. These parties contained mostly immigrant workers from big cities (Jurgis from The Jungle was one such fictional worker). The new party expanded and included every type of extremist.
They stood on the motto of “reform vs. revolution” and focused mainly on the labor union’s, “this included the concepts of revolution by education and of building the new society within the shell of it’s old. ‘ In 1912 they had elected two members of Congress and more than seventy mayors. The most members it every attained at this time was 100,000 and even had a presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, who received almost a million votes. However soon the party began to have internal problems due to diverse ideologies. During the war half did not believe in the war and half believed in Stalin and his Communist ways, therefore, the party split.
The party had become weak and did not enter a political candidate for the presidential election. However, once the Great Depression began the Socialist party took a turn back to full tilt and gained strength. It ran Norman Thomas as their Presidential Candidate. He never won but continued to run, loosing votes every time he ran. Finally in 1948 with only 80,000 votes Thomas declared, “a Socialist presidential race was a futile effort and an utter waste of the party’s resources. ” This warning was pushed aside and the party ran Darlington Hoopes in 1952.
He received merely 20,203 votes and in the next lection he received only a woeful 2,126 votes in the race of 1956. The Socialist Party in this nation had come to a crashing final end in terms of elections. It now only had an underdeveloped 2,000 members nationwide. In 1960, the first time since 1924 the Socialist party did not enter a presidential candidate on the ballot. It was at this time the party took a swing away from the presidential candidacy and swung full force into the civil rights movement. In 1960 the book The Other America was published by Michael Harrington.
This book took great favor within the Socialist Party. The left wing Socialists were beginning to die out and in 1968 he right wing Socialists held the majority of the members. Over the next years many splits, divisions and merging occurred under the control of the right wing Socialists and in 1982 the party was renamed the Democratic Socialists of America. The only state to have a Socialist ballot is the Socialist Party of Oregon, which formed in 1994. This is how it remains today. In the beginning I read Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle in order to gain entrance into the Advanced Placement English class.
The things I learned about Socialism, the meat-packing industry and Sinclair’s own views lead me to discover a new era of writers I didn’t now existed. These writers brought to the attention of the nation problems that were carefully shielded from the public’s eyes. Many of these authors such as Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Ida Tarbell and many others took a particularly Socialistic view and this was expressed in their writing. A few of the books that Sinclair wrote had an especially socialistic tone, such as The Jungle which was published in 1906.
Conflictive to most people’s beliefs The Jungle was not written to reform the meat-packing industry and incite pure food acts. He stated, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. ” He wrote this book to persuade people in the direction of Socialism and away from Capitalism. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. ” (Upton Sinclair) Upton Sinclair had many factors working against him, eventually leading him to a life as a Socialist.
He was born in 1878 to his parents Upton Beall and Priscilla Harden Sinclair. His father was an alcoholic which caused Sinclair to be staunch supporter for prohibition. His family once had been a notable southern family who had fallen into ruin. it seemed that no matter how hard they tried they never had nough money and always just were scraping by. This later had a great deal of influence on his socialistic views. He grew up in New York and was reared by his mother. When he attended college he began he writing and it was heavily directed toward the doctrine of social reform.
He then entered another college to become a lawyer, but soon dropped out to enter into the world of a “serious writer”. Then in 1902 he joined the Socialist Party. It was at this time that all of his work became increasingly socialistic in tone. He became a major force in the Socialist movement. In 1905 Sinclair created the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. This was designed to inform students of “the inherent evils of American economic and social system based on laissez-faire policies, and to promote the establishment of a socialist order.
This society was quickly established on campus’s all over the country. Over the next years it outspread it’s movement and in 1921 it was reconstructed to form the League for a Industrial Democracy, “a membership society engaged in education toward a social order based on production for use and not for profit. ” This group went from extremely liberal to toned down liberal as did Sinclair. Sinclair, however, still felt so strongly about his views nd the virtue of Socialism that he ran for the House of Representatives in 1906 just after The Jungle was published.
He did not win but this did not stop him. Sinclair was determined to make changes in the government. He ran again in 1920 for the House, in 1922 for the Senate, in 1926 for the Governor of California and again in 1930. It was during this time that Sinclair began to feel some strain within the Socialist party and in 1917 he withdrew from the party on account that he did not agree with their anti-war principle. His books continued to be published but became more and more about his own campaign trail. In a final decision in 1934 Sinclair resigned from Socialism all together and became a Democrat.
He won the primary election for Governor of California, as a Democrat, but lost in the general election by a narrow margin. This was the end of his campaigning and he set down and began to write almost purely to historical fiction. Upton Sinclair may not have remained a die-hard Socialist to the end but his views in his earlier life did have impact on the world; Not always in the way he intended but in some form or another. However, all that Upton Sinclair achieved in his life, he is most remembered for his novel The Jungle. His views as a Socialist were best demonstrated in this novel.
Be that as it may I have read one account by a man named Frederick Nymeyer, a man who worked in a meat-packing plant. It was his theory that the accounts of the actual conditions of the men working in the meat-packing industry were false, “in order to develop a skillful, but invalid, argument in favor of Socialism. ” I do not believe this theory. Sinclair spent many months at the plants observing the conditions in order to achieve a semi-factual account of what it was really like. It is observed that all of Sinclair’s books at that time were very iased towards his political views.
And yet, this book, being noted as a work of fiction, impacted the industry and made it a cleaner and safer place for American’s and immigrants alike to work and earn their wages. The Jungle portrayed the meat-packing industry almost as the Id in the human soul; The part that is basic and primal, seemingly out to destroy you. The early chapters of the book are described with startling imagery the horror’s of the “wage slave” of Packingtown. The main character, Jurgis, is portrayed as struggling in vain against the evil capitalist who keeps getting richer and fatter and the workers eep getting more hungry and poorer.
His family is also exposed to the deprave nature of the capitalist policies and to the elections within the community that are nothing but a sham. In the final ten chapters Sinclair introduces the element of Socialist hope in an otherwise grim and cruel world. It is from this point on that Socialism begins to dominate the book and the story of Jurgis seems to be only a sideline plot. The final words of the book “Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS! ” draws a final conclusion to the feeling that Socialism will rise to be a great power among the parties, mirroring Sinclair’s own opes.
Sinclair tried to cross the boundaries between literature and life by attempting to evoke an emotional response out of the reader. This novel did, however, cross the boundaries of the ocean into other continents worlds away. It was Sinclair’s attempt to bring Socialism into modern literature by the use of a dramatic character that the public could identify with. If the public connected with this character, who connected with Socialism, Sinclair thought he would get his message across and forever immortalize Socialism into literature and history.
His attempt to immortalize it in literature ucceed as The Jungle is now thought of as one of the greatest novels of that time. Even being one of great novels it is still in essence a “muckraking book”. This, as well as his novel King Coal are prime examples of this type of literature. Many other authors had published “muckraking books” before The Jungle, for example, Henry Demerest Lloyd’s novel attacking the Standard Oil Company Wealth Against Commonwealth was published in 1894. Jacob Riis’s novel How the Other Half Lives was an account of New York City slums, published in 1890.
The Bitter Cry of the Children by John Spargo was about kids at ork in sweat shops. But still The Jungle remains the most vivid and most widely recognized of all these types of novels. Upton Sinclair was not the only influential man to come from the Socialist party. Albert Einstein, who is hailed as one of the most advanced thinking of men of our time, was a member of the Socialist Party. “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.
We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor — ot by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production — that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods — may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals. (Albert Einstein)
He felt the capitalist was the main antagonist against the working man and against the student. “This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An xaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. ” (Albert Einstein) Now I know all this page would be thought of is a bunch of quotes, not my own actual thoughts.
However, try as I may to paraphrase the feeling of a man whose level of intelligence is far surpassing my own, the result was a dim view of the original; So I felt it necessary to quote him word for word. No matter if it was Albert Einstein, Jack London or Upton Sinclair Socialism was a growing way of life through the afore-mentioned periods in time. These people simply helped to push it along. Men and women from all walks of life, scientific genius to college drop out turned writer believed in the power of Socialism during the times on the late 1800’s to the mid 1970’s.
It was felt that it was the only true way to end the ” army of the unemployed”. Sinclair may have not been a great writer in terms of structure or the use of symbolism . He was more interested in politics rather than the inner reaches of a man’s mind. His character’s lacked development beyond a static figure. He had no formal education as a writer and except for The Jungle he is hardly remembered at all and as no bearing on modern writers. He simply attempted to make literature functional and express his ideals concerning Socialism and perhaps persuade a few younger members to join.
He seemingly failed to grasp the concept of literature in a whole “reveals life as complex and difficult to fathom”. He merely wanted to simplify it. In spite of all this, he remains a mystery, an enigma to critics the world round. “Even within a larger realization of his literary weaknesses and intellectual ambivalences, and taking into account even his blindness to racial oppression, Sinclairs’s commitment to social justice commands respect. “
