Upton Sinclair (1878–1968)

Intense. Had to have a drink on hand whenever reading this to stomach the misery and greed. A Lithuanian family, hoping for a life less oppressed, immigrates to America and finds their way to Chicago's stockyards at the turn of the last century only to be cruelly tricked into indentured servitude in the meat packing industry. Their daily struggle to counter starvation, sickness, exhaustion, and homelessness is heartrending. The reader experiences the foul and brutal practices of the meat show more industry; the utter lack of a social safety net for anyone or basic infrastructure in the workingman's neighborhoods; the corruption of the industries, the city officials, and the political machine - and their collusion; the extensive world of crime, gambling, and prostitution (women habitually held hostage and doped); and the tenuous hope of relief through union organization and the socialist revolution. Sickening to think that these situations and conditions still exist in the world. Come the fuck on humanity. show less

Jurgis Rudkus and his family emigrate from Lithuania to the United States because they live a very hard life and were told the wages are much higher here. What they were not told is that costs are also much higher, so the family ends up typical of the poorest of the poor. After having most of their money swindled in New York, they make it to Chicago to live in a single room in a fetid boarding house, from which all the family members can get jobs. With several incomes they make the smart show more choice to buy a house in the slaughterhouse district, the only place they can afford to live and work. This proves to be another swindle, as the house is falling apart, their interest is high, and if they fail to make a single payment they will be evicted. Their jobs in the slaughterhouses are incredibly difficult and dangerous. Men have life-threatening accidents every day, and the meat is rotting and full of toxic chemicals. The workers get sick with tuberculosis and other contagious disease often, but can’t afford to take time off, even unpaid, as they will lose their job. Family members die or go missing. Jurgis ends up in prison for beating a man who raped his wife, and when he gets out his wife dies in childbirth, the family is evicted, and his other child dies. Jurgis leaves them and becomes a tramp and then a thief. He becomes a vote fixer for the Republican Party, then the Democratic Party, and then a strikebreaker for the very union he used to belong to. After another stint in prison he returns to his two remaining family members, his wife’s stepmother and cousin, to find the latter has been trafficked into prostitution. One day, when looking for a warm place to loiter, Jurgis hears a speech by a great socialist orator. The words he hears reflect Jurgis’ lived experience, unlike any politics he's heard before, and offer him hope for the future and something to fight for. After the speech, Jurgis meets the speaker, who offers him a job as a porter at a hotel run by a socialist, where he thrives.

I had not ever read this classic before, and I'm very glad that I did. The descriptions of work at the slaughterhouse that are so famous are only in about a third of the book (the first third, which makes me wonder if some readers only get that far). Overall, the book is about the plight of immigrants, the poor who work so hard for nothing, and the lie of the American Dream. Jurgis and his family frequently lament that there's no such thing as freedom if you can't afford it, and they would not have been fundamentally worse off if they had stayed in Lithuania.
After the horrible things he's been through, socialism is a light at the end of the tunnel for Jurgis. He doesn't find utopia, he just finds a system that acknowledges him and cares about people like him and gives him something to look forward to. The ending is bittersweet from a modern perspective, as the socialists are so optimistic but the reader knows what will actually happen to the reputation of socialism over the next 115 years. The book does go a bit too far in trying to overexplain the nickels and dimes of how much different people will get paid for different tasks under socialism. Quit while you're ahead!
Cynics like to point out that the only change this book catalyzed when it was published was food safety, not socialism or worker welfare or a social safety net, but that's absolutely not nothing. The upper class aren't eating the rotten tubercular pork or the beef sausage full of rats and workers’ body parts - the workers and the poor themselves are. Food safety improvements help them most.
I often find that “classics” don't hold up as well as people claim they do, but this book is great and I'm so glad I finally read it. show less

This is an astonishing book. One of the more astonishing things about it is that it was written 112 years ago. Many of the same things destroying America today, albeit in different areas today than in the meat packing industry of 1906, were already very much alive (and, unfortunately well) then. Sinclair's hope of changing the political thinking of Americans at the beginning of the 20th century did little more than encourage the passage of legislation protecting the food consumption of the show more Americans of his day. As he wrote himself, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident hit its stomach." Sadly, in spite of that moderate success, his socialist dream is no closer to becoming reality today than it was then. Nevertheless, Sinclair's hero, Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, would be proud to know that there are still people willing to fight for those ideals today, however hopeless it might seem in America at the beginning of the 21st century. show less

A broad, sweeping, socially conscious epic set in the midst a fictionalized version of southern California. The oil boom of Los Angeles and the corruption of the Harding administration are squished right in to the same tight window of years as the first World War. The main character, 'Bunny' Ross, is the scion of an new money oil tycoon who progressively wakes up to the plight of common labor and the evils of capitalism; his conscious heading in one direction, his social obligations in the show more other. Bunny is the only member of the business aristocracy that ever attempts to act on his growing self consciousness, but most often he does so tepidly.

Sinclair wrote Oil! in a target rich environment. College athletics, prohibition, politics, law enforcement, war, media and propaganda, capitalism, individualism, conservatism, social expectations, economics, the judicial system, education, religion and more are all on the table for lambasting. Though, in the end, the vast majority of these problems congeal to one main point: the rich and the poor playing supposedly the same game but with decidedly different rules. I wish Sinclair had a more surgical approach to his critiques, because as it stands Oil! does spread itself too thin. The Jungle is probably the superior Sinclair novel for this reason alone. If unabashed polemics aren't your speed, I'd steer clear.

For all of its didactic focus on socialism, Oil! did occasionally manage to move me emotionally with its character portrayals. Partially because of just how long the reader spends with Bunny, I truly felt the conflict within his soul. Even though Bunny is totally removed from the struggles and violence that he abhors, Sinclair is still unrelenting in his uniquely ugly picture of the 1920's oil business. Sinclair also has this dry, black sarcasm that creeps around in the underbelly of the text. Had Sinclair wanted to write a more prose rich work, I think he could've done so, considering how strong the opening scene was. A shame he didn't though.

Yes, it's much too long, and yes, it can get boring. Oil! certainly creaks around on its aging joints, and if we were living a world completely devoid of the problems that Sinclair highlighted, I might be more tempted to write it off as a work of its time. Unfortunately, that's not the case. In much the same way as they were in the 20's, Communism and Socialism remain the boogeyman dug out of the grave whenever a progressive policy is suggested. The tycoons of oil, railroad, and property have extended to conglomerates in nearly every facet of the economy. Wealth inequality is peaking. Labor unions are uncommon and often toothless in the face of these gargantuan corporations. It's as if the Harding administration never left office, and as such I can't help but be drawn into Sinclair's story. show less