A Conspiracy of Silence: The Suppressed Protest of The Jungle

Abstract

Positioned at the vanguard of the American labor movement, radical writers sought to disseminate Marxist ideology through proletarian literature, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. Because their ideas were branded as essentially un-American, however, novelists such as Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck sought to tell their stories through more popular and commercial channels in order to reach a wider audience than might read periodicals or attend rallies. To an extent both authors were successful, for their novels reached wider audiences and are now regarded as American classics. Yet this success was a Pyrrhic victory and came at the cost of the messages they sought to promulgate. Put simply, I argue, it is no accident that Americans did not read these books, and do not remember them in the radical, revolutionary spirit they were intended.