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Upton Sinclair (1878-1968)
Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He became an insatiable reader at an early age, and did not attend school until age 10. After his parents moved to New York City, he entered City College at age 14 and began selling his writing to pay for tuition. After graduating, he attended Columbia Law School, but dropped out to pursue a writing career. Sinclair published several books while in his twenties, and moved to Chicago to take a job in the meatpacking industry in order to obtain background material for a novel on the subject. The Jungle became a best-seller upon publication in 1906.
Sinclair continued to exposes the greed of American industries, which led him to become a fervent advocate of socialism. He later moved to California and ran for public office several times, always unsuccessfully. He continued to write and support socialists causes until his death at age 90.
The Jungle (1906)
There was scarcely a thing needed in the business that Durham and Company did not make for themselves. There was a great steam power plant and an electricity plant. There was a barrel factory, and a boiler-repair shop. There was a building to which the grease was piped, and made into soap and lard; and then there was a factory for making lard cans, and another for making soap boxes. There was a building in which the bristles were cleaned and dried, for the making of hair cushions and such things; there was a building where the skins were dried and tanned, there was another where heads and feet were made into glue, and another where bones were made into fertilizer. No tiniest particle of organic matter was wasted in Durham’s. Out of the horns of the cattle they made combs, buttons, hairpins, and imitation ivory; out of the shinbones and other big bones they cut knife and toothbrush handles, and mouthpieces for pipes; out of the hoofs they cut hairpins and buttons, before they madethe rest into glue. From such things as feet, knuckles, hide clippings, and sinews came such strange and unlikely products as gelatin, isinglass, and phosphorus, bone black, shoe blacking, and bone oil. They had curled-hair works for the cattle tails, and a “wool pullery” for the sheepskins; they made pepsin from the stomachs of the pigs, and albumen from the blood, and violin strings from the ill-smelling entrails. When there was nothing else to be done with a thing, they first put it into a tank and got out of it all the tallow and grease, and then they made it into fertilizer. All these industries were gathered into buildings near by, connected by galleries and railroads with the main establishment; and it was estimated that they had handled nearly a quarter of a billion of animals since the founding of the plant by the elder Durham a generation and more ago. If you counted with it the other big plants—and they were now really all one—it was, so Jokubas informed them, the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place. It e