302 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900purposes of the parents who brought him overseas.” Antin never lost her belief in
the immigrant dream, as her later work They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914) also
testifies. For her, passage to America was genuinely passage into another, finer level
of experience in which all Americans could and should share.
Probably no writer is further from this optimistic view of the passage to America,
the immigrant encounter and the condition of the poor, than Upton Sinclair
(1878–1968). Born to a prominent but impoverished family in Maryland and
educated in New York City, Sinclair wrote six novels before publishing the book that
made him famous, The Jungle. The Jungle first appeared serially in Appeal to Reason,
a weekly socialist journal, and then was released in book form in 1906. Sinclair had
joined the Socialist Party of America in 1904; and, in the same year, he had spent
seven weeks living among the men and women who labored in the stockyards of
Chicago. A powerful study of the inhuman living and working conditions of the
workers, and the unsanitary methods of production in the stockyards, The Jungle
clearly reflected Sinclair’s commitment to socialism. “It will open countless ears that
have been deaf to Socialism,” Jack London enthused after he had read the novel. “It
will make thousands of converts to our cause.” However, Finley Peter Dunne was
nearer the mark when he had Mr. Dooley observe that, since Sinclair’s book came
out, “th’ President, like th’ rest iv us, has become a viggytaran.” The Jungle was
enormously successful. On its release date, such was the anticipation caused by its
earlier serialization in The Appeal to Reason, the story of its publication was splashed
on the front pages of newspapers from coast to coast. So impressed was President
Theodore Roosevelt on reading an advance copy that he invited Sinclair to the White
House to discuss the issues it raised. And, in the next several decades, it was translated
into 47 languages in 39 countries, making Sinclair equally famous abroad and at
home. It did not, however, promote the cause of socialism so much as it did that of
food hygiene. Sinclair’s major purpose in writing The Jungle had been to attack
“wage slavery,” the oppression of the workers in a place he called Packingtown.
Scarcely a dozen pages in the book were devoted to the gruesome details of meat
production. It was these, however, that hit a nerve, leading directly to the passing of
the Beef Inspection Act and the first Pure Food and Drug Act. Sinclair himself
perceived the irony and summed it up nicely. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he said,
“and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
As the portrait of another America than the commonly accepted and celebrated
one, The Jungle is the most vivid and lasting example of what was called at the time
the muckraking movement. The term, devised by Roosevelt, described those writers
who, around the turn of the twentieth century, devoted themselves to the exposure
of corruption in politics and business. Several leading periodicals of the time lent
their pages to the muckrakers, among them McClure’s, Collier’s, and Cosmopolitan.
And among the most influential and popular muckraking writers were Ida Tarbell
(1857–1944), Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), and David Graham Phillips (1867–1911).
Tarbell was the author of a two-volume exposé, The History of the Standard Oil
Company (1904). Steffens, seen as the leader of the movement, wrote articles collected
in The Shame of the Cities (1904), The Struggle for Self-Government (1906), andGGray_c03.indd 302ray_c 03 .indd 302 8 8/1/2011 7:54:25 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 25 AM