Q's Views

A month or so ago, my daughter, her boyfriend and I were in a used book store. He picked up a copy of The Jungle and stated he wanted to read it. I told him that he probably should but I didn't care for it...for reasons that I've already posted to this blog. A week ago, we went camping and my daughter's boyfriend saw my copy of King Coal by Upton Sinclair lying about and he said, "I thought you hated Sinclair."

"No, I don't. I said I didn't care for The Jungle. This is better."

And it is. Part of the problem with The Jungle is that it is very much more like newspaper reporting than storytelling. The story isn't really that interesting. The circumstance in which the characters (primarily Jurgis Rudkus) find themselves are horrid, but singular thread of the plot, what little there is, grows cold and dreary by the end of the book. And I ask again, why would anyone who read care about the plight of the pitiful people who pack the meat? They wouldn't. They would care that their sausages might be 5% Sven. That's the attention getter.

In King Coal, Sinclair is a more mature writer and tells a better story. The main character, Hal Warner, is a young man of means who as an experiment goes to work in a coal mine to see what it's like. He very quickly becomes absorbed into the lives of the people who slavishly work in this Colorado mine camp. He moves around. He meets a variety of characters of diverse ethnic backgrounds and becomes involved in their lives. Eventually, he gets involved in the actions that are the beginning of unionization of the camp.

Late on, we discover that Hal is the son of a coal miner and his brother runs several mines for their father who has been incapacitated by a stroke. Sinclair shows the trials and tribulations of the workers, but he also introduces a wonderful scene where Hal's peers, people of money and class, have to confront not only the renegade Hal has become, but the cause he has adopted. In the end, he has to choose between the world in which he has been raised and the one he has adopted.

For the miners, this diverse mix of cultures, hard working men made old, drunken, and broken by this heavy labor, Sinclair gives them something he just couldn't bring himself to give poor Jurgis Rudkus...hope. The seeds of a labor movement are planted in the mining camp. Sinclair tacks on a postscript that provides some real world insight into the type of environment that he so excellently describes throughout he novel. Interesting stuff.

Rich people, made rich on the backs of laborers for whom they can't possibly relate have no reason to care about coal. It's just something to burn in a stove or to fire the wheels of industry. Sinclair tells the story through the eyes of one their own and the tale becomes a harbinger of the movement in American labor. But those same people wouldn't possibly care about the plight of a meat packer unless you tell them that the sausage on the table has all of the pig except the squeal.

Bon appetit!!