In the second and final half of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the reader witnesses the hero, Jurgis Rudkus, defeated by the capitalist culture of America. Jobless, homeless, and familyless, Jurgis joins the rest of the defeated of Chicago in the only other capitalist way to survive, the seedy, but surprisingly rewarding, world of organized and unorganized crime. But this also cannot support Jurgis for long enough and he must now turn to the last resort, the better resort in the author’s eye, socialism.
Sinclair, a now known socialist, published The Jungle, in 1906, when the idea of socialism appeared fresh and innovative. Capitalism had tried to cope with the sweeping changes associated with the Industrial Revolution, and had succeeded to a point. But the wheels of the capitalist machine were oiled by the blood of its workers as Sinclair realistically portrays in this novel. At the time this novel was written, most natural Americans had established a safe niche in their country and were satisfied with what capitalism had given them. It was pointless for Socialist supporters to try to convert these fundamental capitalists to the newer idea of socialism. Sinclair, upon writing The Jungle, understood that America was being swamped with immigrants from all over the world. They would start behind the rest of America when they arrived and would not endorse capitalism immediately as the acceptable form of society. Sinclair understood, as many other socialist supporters probably did, that this new growing majority in the immigrants could be turned into believing that socialism was the solution and the inevitable path for America in the Industrial Revolution to turn to. This was probably the motivation behind Sinclair’s writing of The Jungle.
The Jungle itself appears to be predicting the likely path of the growth of socialism in America. Socialists probably all arrived in America bewildered but hopeful off their new life. They then were probably shot down in their attempts at survival and at their attempts at spreading the theory of Socialism, just as the Rudkus’s were defeated in their attempt to establish a life in the states. The Socialists were probably forced into small pockets of people who tried to find support for their philosophy, just as Jurgis found himself lost and alone after his family died. This is where the actual path of American socialism meets with the path projected in The Jungle. The Jungle predicts that, just as Jurgis becomes part of the underground world of crime, Socialism would be driven underground, only to arise in the end as Jurgis did at the end of the novel, screaming, “CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” In reality, Socialism began to go underground and attempted to rise to power only to be crushed by Cold War and McCarthyism (the Red Scare).