Finding Success Downstream

e people are passive and never achieve their potential. Others work aggressively, struggling relentlessly upstream — and also never achieve their potential.

Maybe the secret is somewhere in between.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a young American boy was growing up among "sordid surroundings," as he later put it, with an alcoholic father and a long-suffering mother. After some minor success writing dime novels for boys while he was still a teenager himself, he attempted something literary — "the great American novel," as he put it — and fell flat on his face. Unable to get back into his routine of writing dime novels, he wound up living, he said, in "tents and shanties."

So far, so . . . not so good.

Fortunately for this aspiring writer — and for American history — the story did not end there.

An Opportunity

In the midst of failure, this young man made a life-changing discovery.

“My nightmare experience had to continue until I discovered the Socialist movement," he recalled a few years later, "until I had learned to identify my own struggle for life with the struggle for life of humanity."

Things were looking up for Upton Sinclair.

In 1904, Fred Warren, the editor of a socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason, commissioned Sinclair to write a novel to be serialized in his publication. As scholar William Bloodworth explains, Sinclair's 1904 novel, Manassas, led Warren "to challenge Sinclair to write a novel treating the 'wage slaves' of industry in a manner similar to the treatment of chattel slaves in Manassas.”

Now Sinclair was in his element. He was passionate about exposing the sordid world of working-class laborers in Chicago (a world parallel to the "sordid surroundings" and poverty he had experienced as a child and a young adult) and perhaps even more passionate about promoting socialism to America.

Sinclair's twin passions carried him forward like a river current. He "wrote frantically for about three months," scholar Robert Crunden explains.

The resulting novel, called The Jungle, was the result not only of fervid writing, but also of laborious research. Sinclair's specific subject was the life of the men, women, and children of Packingtown, the center of the meatpacking industry on the south side of Chicago in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and he went to great lengths to capture the truth of both their working and their living conditions, which were indeed sordid — and grueling and mind-numbing and soul-and-body killing.

"I went out there and lived among the people for seven weeks; I being a socialist, they took me in and told me all they knew,” Sinclair recalled. “I would sit in their homes at night, and talk with them, and then in the daytime they would lay off their work, and take me around, and show me whatever I wished to see."

Sinclair was writing what I call "investigative fiction" — a genre only as good as its factual basis, since it was designed to expose reality, albeit with invented or adapted characters and plots. He explained:

"I studied every detail of their lives, and took notes enough to fill a volume. I talked, not merely with workingmen and their families, but with bosses and superintendents, with night-watchmen and saloon-keepers and policemen, with doctors and lawyers and merchants, with politicians and clergymen and settlement-workers. I spared no pains to get every detail exact, and I know that in this respect ‘The Jungle’ will stand the severest test—it is as authoritative as if it were a statistical compilation."

This was no idle boast. Research by others verified much of what Sinclair reported.

Great in Its Way

The result of all this work is a great American novel — not the Great American Novel, certainly (a subject that deserves a separate podcast) — but still a great novel if judged by its achievement in a narrow realm.

Sinclair was writing a polemical piece of investigative fiction. As Crunden puts it, "His goals were the conversion of the reader through empathy with the workers of Packingtown, votes for the socialist candidates, and ultimately, a socialist America." Judged on the basis of these goals, The Jungle is, I think, quite successful. Sinclair's stories of the struggles of his protagonist Jurgis Rudkus and his family — while perhaps too heavy-handed and copious for a "literary" novel — do arouse an emotional response that can lead to empathy and could make a case for socialism, especially in light of a speech that a socialist orator makes near the end of the novel.

Success Downstream

The takeaway here is not that we all need to become socialists. Rather, what we can learn from Sinclair's experience is that success is sometimes downstream. If you feel you are always swimming against the current and, not so surprisingly, making little progress, you might want to consider changing direction.

Sinclair was by no means passive. He worked hard, perhaps as hard any writer ever worked. He wrote, "I do not think that we have any book in American literature, with the possible exception of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ into the making of which more human anguish has entered." For one thing, unlike many writers, he wrote not merely from his imagination — although this approach is hard enough — but went out there and did his homework, spending all that time doing his research to get his story right.

Instead of continuing to try to follow in the footsteps of his literary heroes, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, and write "high literature," he followed the current of his life, drawing on his own experience and the beacon of an idea that inspired him.

Follow the Flow

Too often, we look at highly successful people and assume they have something we lack — inherent genius, mysterious inspiration, rock-solid discipline — but maybe their secret is simply being open to the currents flowing around them. It's easier to swim downstream than to fight the current.

What inspires you? Where do your experiences and the world's needs coincide? If you can answer these questions and respond with your passion and hard work — as Upton Sinclair did — you stand a far greater chance of success than you do fighting the current.

In this way, you are likely to find your own success downstream.

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Note: If you enjoyed this week's column, I invite you to join historian Chris Young and me in Chicago on August 29 for "Welcome to The Jungle," an in-person tour of Back of the Yards, one of the settings of Sinclair's 1906 novel. Register here.