By Justice Katju
I am presently in California, USA, staying with some relatives.
Yesterday my relatives invited two American neighbours, a husband and wife, for dinner.
Before the dinner, at one point during the conversation, one of the Americans spoke of some food safety regulation in America,
At this I asked the Americans whether they had read the novel ‘The Jungle’ by the great American writer Upton Sinclair ?
They confessed they had neither heard of the novel, nor the name of Its author.
I informed them that it was a very great novel, which brought about a profound transformation in America.
The novel was published in 1906. At that time there were no food safety regulations in America, so the food sold in shops or served in hotels and restaurants was often containing filth and unsanitary materials.
Upton Sinclair disguised himself as a worker, and took up a job in a meat processing and packing plant. There he saw filth etc thrown into the boiling tubs along with the meat. On a couple of occasions workers accidentally fell into the tubs, and their meat was also sold to customers.
He wrote all this in his novel, which created a furore in America. Americans were horrified, and sale of meat fell almost 50%, as many Americans thought they were eating human flesh,
The US President Theodore Roosevelt invited Sinclair to the White House in Washington DC, where Sinclair told the President what he had seen with his own eyes.
Thereafter very strict food safety laws were made in America
Later, Sinclair said ” I aimed at the public’s heart, but by accident hit it in the stomach “
Thereafter the conversation shifted to the condition of blacks in America, and I recounted to the American couple of my meeting in Delhi a few years back with an American delegation, details of which are given in this article which I wrote :
As mentioned in this article, in that meeting ( in which there were about 20 Americans, half male and half female, and all white ) among the things I said was that the condition of blacks had greatly improved in America.
At this most of the Americans in the meeting vehemently disagreed with me.
I then asked the Americans how many of them had read Mark Twain’s great novel ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ ? Only a few had, and that too in childhood.
I told them that Ernest Hemingway, himself a great writer, had said that all American literature begins with that single novel.
In that novel at one place mention is made of an explosion, and Aunt Sally, one of the characters in the novel, asks Huck ” My God, was anyone hurt ? “.
To which Huck replies ” No Ma’am, only a nigger killed “.
This shows that at one time in America blacks were not even regarded humans, many being slaves.
After the American Civil War ( 1861-65 ) slavery was abolished, but the condition of blacks was still bad ( due to Jim Crow laws, Ku Klux Klan, etc ). The devious decision of the US Supreme Court in Plessy vs Ferguson, 1896, and the deceitful underhand principle ‘separate but equal’ which it laid down, legitimized racial discrimination against blacks and segregation all over America.
But in 1954, in Brown vs Board of Education, the US Supreme Court unanimously reversed the Plessy verdict, and now there is no legal segregation or discrimination against blacks.
No doubt there is still racialism in some parts of America, but things have considerably improved for them since the time they were brought as slaves from Africa.
There are many other great novels and great poetry written by Americans, e.g. John Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’, Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’, F. Scot Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’, Mark Twain’s novels, Ernest Hemingway’s novels, Theodore Dressers novels, Sinclair Lewis’ novels, Robert Frost’s poetry, etc
But how many Americans have heard of them ? I doubt many have
