994 smith, Betty
strong. He gets a job immediately, sweeping cattle
guts into a floor trap for 17.5 cents per hour. Jurgis
wonders why workers complain about the work-
place, and he blames his fellow workers’ discontent
on their “laziness” or proclivity for vice. However,
when he twists his ankle and is out of work for
several months, he begins to understand that it is
not individual failing that causes the workers to
complain but the harsh realities of the workplace.
Since Jurgis has been physically, mentally, and emo-
tionally worn down, like other workers who “simply
[become] the worn-out parts of the great merciless
packing machine,” he cannot find a job when he
heals. At this point, the only place where he can find
work is in a fertilizer plant, where men are given
moist sponges for protection, but nothing protects
them from breathing in the fine dust of the pulver-
ized animal carcasses. Everyone knows that anyone
who works here is “doomed to die.”
Throughout The Jungle, Sinclair shows that the
system is corrupt. There are no child labor laws or
sexual harassment laws. Fourteen-year-old Stanislo-
vas gets false working papers from a priest. When
Jurgis’s wife, Ona, is seduced by the yard boss, she
must comply or she will lose her job. Workers get
and keep jobs because of political connections and
bribery. In order for Jurgis’s father, Antanas, to get a
job, he has to give a man who claims to be his boss
one-third of his wages. Workers are paid by the
piece, and when there are slowdowns in the work-
place, as on the killing beds in winter, workers are
only paid for the hours they are actually slaughter-
ing animals and not for the time they spend at the
work site. Workers are subject to work speed-ups.
The strongest men set the pace on the killing beds
and the rest of the workers have to keep up or lose
their jobs. Sinclair writes that foremen “would ‘speed
[a worker] up’ till they had worn him out and then
they would throw him into the gutter.” Socialists
believed that capitalists used the worker like parts of
a larger industrial machine that, when broken, could
be replaced easily.
The workers’ souls are starved by the monotony
of backbreaking, repetitive tasks. Elzbieta “was part
of the machine that she tended, and every faculty
that was not needed for the machine was doomed
to be crushed out of existence.” Workers’ minds have
been numbed to the point where they have lost their
humanity.
At the end of the novel, Jurgis rediscovers his
humanity when he becomes involved in the socialist
movement. In The Jungle, Sinclair argues that social-
ism is the solution for the working man’s plight.
Donna Kessler-EngSmiTH, bETTy A Tree Grows in
Brooklyn (1943)
One of the most popular American novels ever
written, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has sold more
than 4 million copies and has been translated into
more than 16 languages. Written in a simple, direct,
and easily accessible style, it is an autobiographi-
cal bildungsroman, a novel that portrays a young
person’s coming of age. The protagonist is Francie
Nolan, a skinny, sensitive girl struggling to survive
in the tenement apartments of early 20th-century
Brooklyn. Francie’s father, Johnny, is a dream-
filled, underemployed, alcoholic singing waiter; her
mother, Katie, is a practical, hardworking janitor
who scrubs floors. Francie, who loves to read and
write, is chronically cold, hungry, neglected, and
lonely. Yet, like the tree of the novel’s title, she
manages to grow—and even flourish—in her harsh
urban environment.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn derives its themes and
style from the populist movement that dominated
American literature during the Great Depression.
Its author, Betty Smith (1896–1972)—who, like her
protagonist, grew up poor in Brooklyn—worked in
the early 1930s as a playwright and actress for the
Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theater
Project. Later she joined the Carolina Playmakers,
a group dedicated to creating a “folk” theater that
portrayed ordinary people’s lives, focusing on their
struggle for survival and their joy in living. The
director of the Playmakers, Frederick Koch, believed
that such a theater would appeal to everyone because
of its roots in a universal, common human life. Betty
Smith wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn while living
in North Carolina and working with the Playmak-
ers; the novel adheres to the “folk” principles of the
group, and this may account for its success.
Joyce Zonana