Undercover Reporting

"The Jungle Revisited" - Tony Horwitz - Wall Street Journal

". . .But not all of the changes in the industry have bettered workers' lives. With increased automation - including, in some plants, the use of robotics and lasers - many jobs have become 'deskilled,' according to Donald Stull, a meatpacking expert at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Workers who once followed individual cattles through the plant, performing many of the skills of a butcher, 'now stand in the same spot, making the same cut thousands of times a day,' he says. This also heightened the risk of cumulative trauma, which contributes to meatpackin'g ranking as the most dangerous industry in America. . ."

Wall Street Journal  1994-12-01

"The Media's Intrusion on Privacy: Protecting Investigative Journalism" - C. Thomas Dienes - The George Washington Law Review

". . .In 1904, the Muckraker journalist, Upton Sinclair, went undercover as a meat packer to expose conditions in the Chicago slaughterhouses. His findings, documented in The Jungle, provided impetus for adoption of federal food and drug legislation

The George Washington Law Review  1999-06-01

Promotional Piece III - "The Jungle" - Appeal to Reason

"As previously announced, the second chapter of "The Jungle" will be printed next week—No. 484—thus giving an interval of two weeks between the publication of the first chapter and the second. This was done in order that the names of the new subscribers could be put on the mailing list in time to receive the second chapter. This putting on of new names is a big job—especially true at this time when the new names are beginning to roll into the office in a flood. . . ."

Appeal to Reason  1905-03-04

Promotional Piece II-"The Jungle: A Story of Chicago" - Upton Sinclair - Appeal to Reason

"It will set forth the breaking of human hearts in a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profits. It will shake the popular heart and blow the top off of the industrial tea-kettle. What Socialism there will be in this book, will, of course, be imminent; it will be revealed by incidents--there will be no sermons. The novel will not have any superficial resemblance to 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' Fundamentally it will be identical with it—or try to be. It will show the 'system working.' It will show Graft in its thousand forms at work slaughtering women and children. Its themes will be the everyday ones of bread and butter; it will have incidents and adventures—a life and death struggle, and a heart-breaking tragedy—the tragedy of life. . . ."

Appeal to Reason  1905-02-11

Introductory Essay to The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" - Gene DeGruson - Peachtree Press

"In the summer of 1980 a young man brought to Pittsburg StateUniversity a small truckload of rotting, mildewed paper. He had been hired, he explained, to clean out a cellar of a nearby Girard, Kansas, farm. Upon seeing the name of Upton Sinclair on several pieces of correspondence, he decided that perhaps the material should go to the local university's library rather than to the county dump. Too fragile to handle, the papers were covered with brightly colored mold, dyed purple by typewriter ribbon and red and green by inks used to write and print the documents. The fetid mass eventually proved to be over a thousand business records, inner office memos, and correspondence of the Appeal to Reason, once the nation's leading Socialist newspaper. Six months of drying were followed by weeks of careful brushing. More than a year was to pass before the most delicate items were deacidified and mounted on rag paper. Then began the organization of the papers. Pages of letters had become separated, and, in the sorting and drying process, many pieces no larger than a dime were stored to await their place in what came to be regarded as a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Throughout the long and tedious period of reconstruction, however, there was no question that the time and expense would be warranted. . . "

VII-"The Jungle: A Story of Chicago" - Upton Sinclair - Appeal to Reason

"They were over a hundred dollars in debt, and all things not yet counted. It was a bitter and cruel experience, and it left them plunged in an agony of despair. Such a time of all times for them to have it, when their hearts were made tender! Such a pitiful beginning it was for their married life; they loved each other so, and they could not have the briefest respite!"

Appeal to Reason  1905-04-15

VI-"The Jungle: A Story of Chicago" - Upton Sinclair - Appeal to Reason

"The details came gradually. In the first place as to the house they had bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed; it was about fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint, which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed to make money by swindling poor people."

Appeal to Reason  1905-04-08

V-"The Jungle: A Story of Chicago" - Upton Sinclair - Appeal to Reason

"The pace they set here, it was one that called for every faculty of a man—from the instant the first steer fell till the sounding of the noon whistle, and again from half past twelve till Heaven only knew what hour in the late afternoon or evening, there was never one instant's rest for a man, for his hand or his eye, or his brain."

Appeal to Reason  1905-04-01

Promotional Piece I-"The Crowning Achievement of the Appeal" - "The Jungle: A Story of Chicago" - Upton Sinclair - Appeal to Reason

"It will be the most powerful story ever written. It will be the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Socialist movement. It will touch the heart strings of the people as they have never been touched before."

Appeal to Reason  1905-02-04

III- "The Jungle: A Story of Chicago" - Upton Sinclair - Appeal to Reason

"Jokubas was an old-time resident, and all these wonders had grown up under his eyes, and he had a personal pride in them. The packers might own the land, but he claimed the landscape, and there was no one to say nay to this."

Appeal to Reason  1905-03-18

II- "The Jungle: A Story of Chicago" - Upton Sinclair - Appeal to Reason

"There were twelve in all in the party, five adults and six children—and Ona, who was a little of both. They had a hard time of the passage: there was an agent who helped them, but he proved a scoundrel, and got them into a trap with some officials, and cost them a good deal of their precious money, which they clung to with such horrible fear. This happened to them again in New York—for, of course, they knew nothing about the country, and had no one to tell them, and it was easy for a man in a blue uniform to lead them away, and to take them to a hotel and keep them there, and make them pay enormous charges to get away."

Appeal to Reason  1905-03-11

I- "The Jungle: A Story of Chicago" - Upton Sinclair - Appeal to Reason

"Marija was too eager to see that others conformed to the proprieties to consider them herself. She had left the church last of all, and, desiring to arrive first at the hall, had issued orders to the coachman to drive faster. When that personage had developed a will of his own in the matter, Marija had flung up the window of the carriage, and, leaning out, proceeded to tell him her opinion of him, first in Lithuanian, which he did not understand, and then in Polish, which he did."

Appeal to Reason  1905-02-25

"'The Jungle' and the Progressive Era" - Robert W. Cherny - History Now

The publication of Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle produced an immediate and powerful effect on Americans and on federal policy, but Sinclair had hoped to achieve a very different result. At the time he began working on the novel, he had completed his studies at Columbia University and was trying to develop a career as an author. He had been born in Baltimore in 1878, but his family had moved to the Bronx in 1888. Though he came from a prominent family, his own parents had little money, and he paid for his university studies by writing dime novels and short stories. While at Columbia, he also became a convert to socialism.

History Now  2008-06-01

"The Inferno of Packingtown Revealed" - Review of "The Jungle" - The Arena

The Jungle is worthy of a place by the side of Frank Norris' greatest work, The Odojna. These two works have more of historic truth than many histories and they are marked by that high order of genius that compels the reader to see and feel all that man can see and feel under tragic conditions similar to those described. They are, we think, the greatest realistic romances that America has given to the world. There are many realistic writers, but for the most part they succeed only in reproducing the details of common, every-day life without revealing the soul of the picture they would portray. They are superficial observers and write superficially. They are imitators and theft works are dull and unprofitable. But let the man of transcendentimagination describe a scene and we see and feel what he sees and feels. We pass behind the mask or the superficial aspects and see the interior workings of life. The soul of the picture is revealed. He sees all that is to be seen; he feels what the actors in the scene feel; he shares the boundless hopes, the lofty aspirations, the nameless fear and the measureless despair of those that move to and fro in the play. When he depicts a section of life he becomes in the highest sense the historian of what he describes. It is this element of imagination that differentiates the genius from the hack writer; the poet from the versifier. It is this element of imagination also that invests a great painting with life, atmosphere, soul, that the camera can never catch, hold or reflect.

The Arena  1906-06-01

"The Jungle at 100" - Chris Bachelder - Mother Jones

The Jungle was rejected by a half-dozen publishers, including Macmillan (“Gloom and horror unrelieved,” noted one of Brett’s readers. “As to the possibilities of a large sale, I should think them not very good.”), before Doubleday, Page & Company agreed to publish it. The book came out 100 years ago, in February 1906, when Sinclair was 27, and it achieved immediate and astonishing international success. According to the New York Evening World, “Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of worldwide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.”

Mother Jones  2006-01-01

Editorial following "The Jungle": "The Beef Investigation" - The Independent

The charges made by Mr. Upton Sinclair against the beef packers methods, put into his novel, but vouched by him to be true, have been examined by two most admirable men selected by the President, and to the surprise of many people the muck rake is vindicated.

The Independent  1906-05-31

Followup to "The Jungle" - "The Condemned-Meat Industry"

In the course of his recent defense of the Y. Beef Trust, Mr. J. Ogden Armour writes as follows: Government inspection is another important feature of the packers' business. To the general public, the meat-eating public, it ought to appeal as one of the most important features of any and all business in the whole country. It is the wall that stands between the meat-eating public and the sale of diseased meat. This Government inspection alone, if there were no other business or economic reasons, would be an all-sufficient reason for the existence of the jacking and meat business on a mammoth scale. It should, if understood, make the general public a partizan supporter of the large packers.Strangely enough, in view of its vital importance, this Government inspection has been the subject of almost endless misrepresentation—of ignorantly or maliciously false statements. The public has been told that meat animals and carcasses condemned as diseased are afterward secretly made use of by the packers and sold to the public for food in the form of both dressed meats and canned meats. Right here I desire to brand such statements as absolutely false as applied to the business of Armour & Co. I believe they are equally false as to all establishments in this country that are classed as packing-houses. I repeat: "In Armour & Co.'s business not one atom of any condemned animal or carcass finds its way, directly or indirectly, from any source, into any jood product or jood ingredient."

Everybody's Magazine  1906-05-01