What Americanness Mean as Per The American Bible by Stephen Prothero and The Jungle by Upton Sinclair's

Stephen Prothero applies a unique analytic model for text selection in his anthology The American Bible: Whose America Is This? At the center of Prothero’s model is his nuanced definition of Americanness; for him, one is not required to agree with a “set of propositions” that define national identity. Instead, an American is one who is willing to argue about these propositions. Prothero’s model is reducible to two components; a text worthy of entry into the American canon must attempt to define the character of America and it must generate controversy. Prothero structured his anthology along the lines of the Bible: for his section on Lamentations, he selected Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and he included a sampling of names from Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The Book of Lamentations is the dirge of dirges; the heart-rending lament with which the author expresses for the exiled Jerusalemites gives one pause for thought: how much emotional pain can a people bare before hope is lost? Using Prothero’s analytic model, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 classic The Jungle should be included among Prothero’s other selections for his section on Lamentations because it exceeds the parameters delineated by his analytic model.

Only some of the documents contained in The American Bible are reproduced in their entirety. If one is to seriously consider The Jungle for inclusion in the anthology, logistical constraints must be taken into account. Americans characteristically misunderstood the larger significance of Sinclair’s novel. The Junglewas written as a socialist exposé whose central aim was to cast capitalist industrialization in the worst possibly light. Focused on the socioeconomic dislocation and immobility of a family of Lithuanian immigrants, Sinclair famously noted that he “aimed for the public's heart, and by accident [he] hit it in the stomach." Instead of stirring up discussion about class struggle and the plight of immigrant, urban industrial workers, Sinclair’s novel acted as a catalyst for major safety reforms to the meatpacking industry in the United States, since the more graphic scenes in the novel involve food and safety issues. A healthy balance between Sinclair’s socialist intentions and the American public’s safety concerns looks like a representative textual sample from The Junglethat includes all two of Prothero’s inclusion-parameters. In context of the logistics for inclusion in the anthology, the most shocking scene foundwithin the text is arguably at the close of the twenty-first chapter. The protagonist of the novel, Jurgis, comes home to find a deathly silence among the cohabitants.

"What's the matter?" he exclaimed again. […] He started for the ladder— and Aniele seized him by the arm. "No, no!" she exclaimed. "Don't go up there!" "What is it?" he shouted. And the old woman answered him weakly: "It's Antanas. He's dead. He was drowned out in the street!"

The passage narrates a tragic turn of events in Jurgis’ life. Ironically set in the spring, Jurgis’ newborn Antanas, named after his deceased grandfather, drowns in a puddle outside caused by heavy rainfall when he had just started to recover from the death of his wife, Ona.

The subsequent chapter deals with Jurgis’ reaction to the death of Antanas. The narrator tells us that “[t]his was no world for women and children, and the sooner they got out of it the better for them.” Instead of heading to a bar and getting incredibly drunk, as he did after the death of his wife, Jurgis fled to the countryside. After an unsuccessful season of job searching, realizing that he could not sustain this lifestyle, he returned to the city only to become homeless. On the surface, this appears to complicate the argument that Sinclair’s Jungle begets a concrete definition of the character of America. Americans are traditionally depicted as optimistic, if not, perseverant individualists. Instead of complicating the argument, however, Jurgis’ experience transforms the black mire of his horrible life into a colorful shading of gray; the implication being that Jurgis remains in a state of ignorance about his own condition. America, as Prothero notes, is the pursuit of argument, not adherence to propositions. In Jurgis’ case, this pursuit would not necessarily be perseverance, or optimism for that matter. While he is not straightforwardly nihilistic, he has every reason to be at this point in his life; he has lost virtually everything near and dear to him. However, inexplicably, he continues to live life as an urban worker—not recognizing the futility of his own existence. This is a typology of perseverance, and even though it is in spite of itself, it remains a definition of the character of America and Americanness—the visceral, animalistic drive to move forward.

The Jungle was a serial publication in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. After consulting with at least five different publishing houses, Sinclair was forced to pay for the first printing of the collected Jungle with his own funds. After some serious fact-checking, Doubleday, Page & Company decided to publish Sinclair’s political novel with some minor revisions executed by the author. At the time of its publication, though, big names had quite a lot to say about the book. President Theodore Roosevelt, in personal correspondence with Sinclair said:

In the end of your book, among the various characters who preach socialism, almost all betray the pathetic belief that the individual capacity which is unable to raise itself even in the comparatively simple work of directing the individual how to earn his own livelihood, will, when it becomes the banded incapacity of all the people, succeed in doing admirably a form of government work infinitely more complex, infinitely more difficult than any which the most intelligent and highly developed people has ever yet successfully tried.

Sinclair’s depiction of the suffering of the urban underclass did not receive as much attention from the American public as did his criticism of the meatpacking industry. Nevertheless, Roosevelt, being a very intelligent man, did realize that the novel served as a political soapbox, to some extent, for the socialist cause. His criticism is measured, and he promises that, should the criticisms Sinclair brings up turn out to be true, he will do everything he can to deal with them.

Sinclair’s Jungle belongs in Prothero’s American Bible because it is an American classic; it is a historical text that generated presidential controversy. It defined the character of America as forward moving and forward thinking, even in light of the most horrendous circumstances. The text is a Lamentation of its own since it tells the story of a family withering away into meaninglessness and nothingness. Jurgis is the flame that never went out, though, and he found his hope in socialism—an idea, no less.