Socialism in the Jungle

Jurgis has gone a little off of the deep end. He found out that Ona had been being molested by a man at her work. Naturally, he lost his temper and pounded the guys face in. For this he had to spend some time in jail. By the time he got out and walked home Ona was in the midst of a terrible and painful premature labor. She dies before the end of the night. He is able to find a new job before long and works through his grief. They lost the house while he was in jail and now the 10 of them lived in a garret of another poor woman. Jurgis comes home one day and finds that his toddler has died. His baby was the reason he spent his days toiling. He simply walked off and never returned. After a couple hundred pages of tragedy Jurgis, in his total loss, is free. He moves from place to place tramping. He works and blows his money and his life is good. He is finally able to live in fresh air and clean himself in cool natural water. He spends any money he makes so he is still broke. Out in the country, being broke doesn’t matter. It is only when he returns to the city does money count again. He gets a great job back in Chicago digging for the new subway system that is being placed underground only to get his arm broken due to the dangerous nature of the work. After his stay in the hospital he cannot work and has no place to go. He becomes a beggar.
I don’t normally like to spend this much time summarizing but a lot has happened to Jurgis only for him to be right back where he started. This is a recurring theme throughout the novel. No matter how much good luck comes his way, the entire system he lives in keeps him from coming up on top. His life was the happiest and easiest when he was living as a tramp, outside of the system. Only by abandoning society was he able to live like a man. The flaw is the system, not the man who suffers trying to work within it. It is obvious that ‘The Jungle’ is a commentary on the failure of the system. To be more specific, the failures of a society that thrives on competition.
The rest of the novel is a detailed explanation of why socialism is the answer to all the problems presented in the story thus far. Jurgis’s luck turns around after crashing a socialist meeting which instills in him an insatiable thirst for knowledge about how America really works and how it can be changed to work for proletariats like himself instead of against them. He then gets a job working at a hotel for a member of the socialist movement which provides him with the money needed to get by and support his old family. He meets socialist thinkers who through their speeches and conversations with others share the ideals of socialism with the reader. For anyone curious about the tenants of socialism, this is a rich resource.
Upton Sinclair wrote this book to share the plight of the working families and offer socialism as a solution to the injustice being suffered by so many in America. The latter section of the novel may lose a readers attention given the preachy nature and therefore it is no surprise that when this book came out people were a lot more interested in the exposure of the disgusting conditions that their food was being produced in than the deplorable conditions the workers were dealing with. The Jungle led to better food inspection but couldn’t get a socialist leader elected into any powerful offices.

Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger

For the past couple weeks I have been trying to discover the nature of the relationship between Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger. Most of what is published on the web will mention that they had an “affair.” I’m not sure this is the appropriate term for the intimate friendship that they shared.
In her autobiography there is a chapter titled with his name. Here she describes how they met and then goes on to gush about how wonderful he is. She describes him as almost god like in his perfection. It is rumored that they had a sexual affair, which certainly seems plausible given her immense affection for him. To dig deeper I found Ellis’s autobiography at the library and dug through it to get his point of view on the matter. This is where things started to get a little less obvious and a little more sketchy.
Ellis’s autobiography, at least the majority of it, is more of a dedication of love to his late wife Edith than it is a story about the man himself. Edith and Havelock seemed to have a bit of a complicated marriage when it is viewed from the outside. They did not live together (save brief periods of time), and they were not exclusive lovers. It would seem that often they were not lovers at all as Edith preferred relationships with other women. Any simple Google search on Havelock mentions his life long struggle with impotence that supposedly wasn’t cured until he was in his 60’s and found that he was aroused by watching a woman urinate. Despite these obstacles their relationship was actually rather simple. The two were wonderfully loving and devoted to one another. Ellis writes chapter after chapter detailing his love for her in his book. Edith went on speaking tours lecturing about his research and publications. She addresses him as “my darling boy” and signs her letters “wifey.” It is obvious to the reader that these two were bonded tightly despite their unconventional relationship. The following passage describing life as Edith works across the Atlantic in America is a typical one:

“I lived alone in my flat with my chief thoughts eagerly fixed on the days when the American mail arrived, and my chief consoling distraction lay in the occasional little excursions, usually to a concert, with my new friend. To me a deep love which had grown stronger through a quarter century of trials and proofs was something far too solid ever to be shaken. My love was sure, and I knew it was sure, just as I knew hers to be sure.” (pg 522-523).

The mail he is waiting for is letters from Edith, the new friend he mentions is Margaret Sanger. At the time Ellis and Sanger met Edith was away in America and Sanger was on the lamb from American law. She had been studying at the British Museum to try and build her case before returning to face the courts at home. After Sanger and Ellis’s initial meeting it is clear that the two hit it off right away. Ellis then helped her by directing her reading and providing companionship which was greatly appreciated by Sanger who was alone in a foreign country and missing her family. To be more accurate, she was missing her children. Very shortly before meeting Ellis she had written to Bill Sanger ending their union deciding that they were no longer propelling each other forward in their lives.
Edith at this time is very ill with heart problems and dies less then two years after Ellis and Sanger meet. Ellis is very open with his wife and mentions Sanger often in his letters. Edith becomes obsessed with the idea that Ellis will replace her with Sanger. She is already depressed and bitter from her illness and the news of Sanger and her husband spending time together only makes it worse.
Ellis’s autobiography contains many, many letters to and from his wife. Here is one from this period in their lives:

“The thing I have dreaded ever since you wrote of M. has come. I have never been well since you told me, but thank heaven you did. … but thank goodness I casually mentioned M’s friendship with you when he was here, (Name not given) having also heard about it among the Socialists in Buffalo. [The enclosed was an innocent—but meaningless—little newspaper cutting incidentally mentioning that M. was working with Havelock Ellis in London]…I dragged myself out of bed, dressed, and burnt all your letters, as M’s name has been in all lately; and I thought it better in case I die—for I’ve has about enough to kill tow of one sort or another—to destroy all letters I had here, not because of anything that mattered, but because of newspaper gossip which will overpower me, I know. I still feel that you do not realize that the adoration of these women must be taken in a different way to what we are used to, but it is all too late and you have probably been hurt at what you think is my jealousy. It is not that—it is soul and heart and body weariness of perpetual everlasting crucifixion…(pg. 535).

Her despair is obvious in the letter. It is also notable that throughout Ellis’s book Sanger’s name is never mentioned. She is simply “M.” in letters or referred to as Ellis’s American friend. According to the website for the Margaret Sanger Paper’s Project (New York University), when Sanger read Ellis’s book (which was released after his death) she was so hurt by his downplay of their relationship that she never mentioned him publically again.
“…the transcript does convey Sanger's affection and respect for Ellis and a good summation of her many tributes to him. It also marks the final time she deified him in public as a kind of Saint Francis of Assisi as sex psychologist. Following the posthumous release of Ellis's autobiography, My Life, in 1939, in which he revised the history of his marriage (already troubled when Ellis met Sanger and made worse by Edith's jealousy of her), by reducing his relationship with Sanger to an unremarkable and mildly intimate friendship, a wounded Sanger refrained from further hero-worship.”
(http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/newsletter/articles/king_and_i.html)

So what then was the nature of their relationship? Ellis, was in love with his wife but in an open marriage and Sanger was in the midst of hero worship. Whose recollection of their relationship can we believe? From reading various correspondences (most from: The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger Volume 1: The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928 edited by Esther Katz. 2003. University of Illinois Press, Chicago) between the two it is clear that they both carried great affection for one another. Perhaps guilt over the death of his wife led Ellis to downplay his relationship in his autobiography. Perhaps the excitement going on her life and her loneliness led Sanger to play up the importance of the relationship in her book.
Margaret Sanger characterized their relationship as such: “I have never felt about any other person as I do about Havelock Ellis. To know him has been a bounteous privilege; to claim him friend my greatest honor.” What I have decided is that the specific details of the relationship don’t really matter and whether or not their relationship was sexual seems irrelevant. What is important is that their friendship was an intimate and life long one. Ellis was a great encourager of Sanger’s goal to make birth control legal and available. He was a mentor figure and someone that she could laugh with. I think that they both needed one another at the time in their lives that circumstance brought them together.