Life before Health Benefits: A Jungle

In honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday, I am going to write about a cause that would have been very close to King’s heart and that America’s first black president has embraced: universal health care.  Like many I believe that, if we don’t pass universal health care this year, we probably will not do so within our lifetime (or mine at any rate).  My European friends are horrified by the fact that we don’t yet have it. They can’t imagine a world where an uninsured family can be plunged into crippling debt if a member becomes sick.

The phrases of “socialism” and “government takeover of healthcare” have been thrown around so freely that I thought it might be useful to remind ourselves of a time when we had even fewer safeguards than we have now, safeguards we now take for granted.  In Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), one hears the same attacks on government support for those in distress.  The novel is about a young Lithuanian immigrant, recently married, who at first looks with scorn on those who feel they need special help.

When I think of him, I am brought to mind of my son and his wife, who also don’t have health care—although in their case, as with many their age, they are not looking at health insurance as unnecessary. Rather, they are making a calculated gamble. They are hoping that they nothing really bad happens before they get their working lives (a marketing agency in their case) up and running. There are millions like them.

Sinclair’s protagonist revels in his youth and his health as he works in the Chicago stockyards:

Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told him stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterwards—stories to make your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been there four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten. “That is well enough for men like you,” he would say, “silpanas, puny fellows—but my back is broad.”

Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country. He was the sort of man the bosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they cannot get hold of. Then he was told to go to a certain place, he would go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was in him. If he were working in a line of men, the line always moved too slowly for him, and you could pick him out by his impatience and restlessness. That was why he had been picked out on one important occasion: for Jurgis had stood outside of Brown and Company’s “Central Time Station” not more than half an hour, the second day of his arrival in Chicago, before he had been beckoned by one of the bosses. Of this he was very proud, and it made him more disposed than ever to laugh at the pessimists. In vain would they all tell him that there were men in that crowd from which he had been chosen who had stood there a month—yes many months—and not been chosen yet. “Yes,” he would say, “but what sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings, fellows who have spent all their money drinking, and want to get more for it. Do you want me to believe that with these arms”—and he would clench his fists and hold them up in the air, so that you might see the rolling muscles—“that with these arms people will ever let me starve?”

Jurgis is a poster child for American optimism. Of course, given the arduous work in the stockyards, his health cannot last. He sprains his ankle and, because workers don’t have health benefits (deemed socialism), he loses valuable pay. Then he learns that he has been tricked on his mortgage (doesn’t that sound eerily familiar?). Then his wife dies in childbirth because they cannot afford a doctor. And on and on, disaster after disaster.  The Jungle tears at every heartstring available.

I’m not generally a fan of message novels because I feel that story and character can get sacrificed. On the other hand, they testify to the power of narrative, which is better able than dry prose to convey emotion and urgency. Sinclair’s novel may not be great literature, but it at least got health regulators into the meatpacking plants. It also helped pressure employers to provide benefits to their employees.  There would be a lot more support for the current legislation if so many of us did not have such benefits.

But these changes were not accomplished without a fight—in fact, a more ferocious fight than we are seeing currently. Word is that Americans have lost enthusiasm over health care as the legislative process has dragged on, just as they would lose their appetite for sausages if they had to see the sausages being made (to use a time-worn analogy). Well, Sinclair literally linked health care and sausage making. He was decried as a red socialist as a result (as was King and as is Obama). But could we imagine living in the world he describes?