The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. 

3/5 rating. 

Book #1 of 2020. Read January 5, 2020.

This is an absolute classic in American lore and and muckraking. While it is terribly sad, I think it really is a must-read for every American.

This book follows the life of Jurgis Rudkus, an immigrant who moves to Chicago around 1900. He is forced to work in the stockyards merely to survive and start his journey through blood, sweat, tears, death, injury, disease, and continual exploitation.

Upton does an amazing job of showing the ugly truth behind what the Chicago stockyards were doing: the rats in the meat, the disease that was being passed over, and the ways that they would lie to their customers about the entire process.

Apart from just the meat industry, this book really shows what happens when a capitalist society is left with no regulation. I would urge anyone who believes that a free market can run without any government controls in place to read the horrible situation it left so many people at this time.

This book woke people up to the horrors of the meat industry and unfettered capitalism and changed America for the better. I would recommend every American to read it to see how far we have come.

Quotes:

“It is very imprudent, it is tragic – but, ah, it is so beautiful! Bit by bit these poor people have given up everything else; but to this they cling with all the power of their souls – they cannot give up the veselija! To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat – and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going.”

“It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests – and do perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it, and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense at apology, without the homage of a tear.”

“The old wanderlust had got into his blood, the joy of the unbound life, the joy of seeking, of hoping without limit.”

“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?”

“He had lost in the fierce battle of greed, and so was doomed to be exterminated; and all society was busied to see that he did not escape the sentence. Everywhere that he turned were prison bars, and hostile eyes following him; the well-fed, sleek policemen, from whose glances he shrank, and who seemed to grip their clubs more tightly when they saw him; the saloon-keepers, who never ceased to watch him while he was in their places, who were jealous of every moment he lingered after he had paid his money; the hurrying throngs upon the street, who were deaf to his entreaties, oblivious of his very existence – and savage and contemptuous when he forces himself upon them.”

“If I fail tonight, I can only try tomorrow; knowing that the fault must be mine – that if once the vision of my soul were spoken upon earth, if once the anguish of its defeat were here in human speech, it would break the stoutest barriers of prejudice, it would shake the most sluggish to action!”

“‘What,’ asks there prophet, ‘is the murder of them that kill the body, to the murder of them that kill the soul?’”

“He would no longer be the sport of circumstances, he would be a man, with a will and a purpose; he would have something to fight for, something to die for, if need be!”

“They would tell you that governments could not manage things as economically as private individuals; they would repeat and repeat that, and think they were saying something! They could not see that ‘economical’ management by masters meant simply that they, the people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid less!”

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