Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tension in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through his novel “The Jungle”. He used the story of a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, to show the harsh situation that immigrants had to face in the United States, the unsanitary and unsafe working conditions in the meatpacking plants, as well as the tension between the capitalism and socialism in the United States during the early 1900s.
In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair presents a wide range of corruption involving, blacklisting, political scams, and the mishandling of meat. During the early 20th century, immigrants in America were exposed to many forms of corruption. The Jungle is based in Packingtown, Chicago, a very crowded city. Here, lived an excess amount of very poor immigrants. As they were immigrants, they often did not realize they were taken advantage of until it was too late--if ever. This was because many of them did not speak English, did not understand our government laws, or rules of their community, or were extremely poor, making them desperate for things like low-paying jobs.
In “ The Jungle”, the author Upton Sinclair states that “ I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach”. This means that Sinclair wanted to muckrake the Meat Packing Industry to seek attention for the workers, but instead food became a bigger concern. The characters Jurgis, Ona, and Marija with fellow family members are Lithuanian immigrants who came to PackingTown in hope for a better future, however they came to realize that the whole town is run by capitalist. Although Sinclair intentionally uses metaphors and similes to depict the characters struggle in the horrible living and working conditions in Packingtown, his purpose is undermined and overlooked by his use of realism to depict the food process.
In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Jurgis and his family attempt to survive in a malicious society. In this jungle of a town, rotten meat is being packaged in order to save money. Throughout the novel, the immigrants are faced with greedy capitalists who take advantage of the family’s ignorance and naivety in order to make money. The symbols of corruption, a jungle-like setting, and the tension between family and a work-based lifestyle transparently contribute to the unifying theme of anti-capitalism. In other words, this book is not art; this book is propaganda.
everyday got more difficult as the days went on. In the meat packing business things were
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, is a renowned source of political fiction that pioneered the movement of food safety in the United States. The Jungle was first published in a socialist newspaper in 1905 and then later adapted into a novel in 1906 after popular demand. Sinclair initially wrote the exposé as a way to change the unfortunate circumstances of immigrant laborers, whose working conditions that were believed to be unacceptable for any laborer in the industry. Sinclair leaves short references of his political opinions in the novel in various locations throughout the text “As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!” (Sinclair 31). Written as an indirect
The political cause the led to “The Jungle” was urban political corruption. Sinclair, along with other journalists decided to investigate the “plight of the working class, especially the immigrants working in the meat plants”. His journal then raised questions about the government’s involvement with health regulations in the working area. Sinclair’s book led to new establishments of health and safety regulations. Socially, “The Jungle” was created to explore “unhealthy conditions, and general absence of meaningful safety standards in the workplace”. This book caused society to “think about the nature of the system that was making such conditions necessary”. Conditions such as the ones presented in Sinclair’s book appalled the readers. Economically, Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” after she decided to investigate immigrant workers in the workplace. The book led to the “loss of the European market caused by their smaller competitors”. Europeans were concerned by the health issues “The Jungle”
Upton Sinclair was a muckraker, which meant he was a journalist who exposed the harsh societal norms
The thesis of this review mainly consists of the issue with the school use of Upton Sinclairs’s “The Jungle”. The relevance with the book is that within this review there is a negative critique on how it is described to the students in the classroom. The author of this review, Louise Carroll Wade, argues that teachers have been kind to Sinclair. She explains that this novel was made to “call attention to the plight of Chicago packinghouse workers who had just lost a strike against the Beef Trust”. Also, she express her idea of how scholars have uncritically accepted Upton Sinclair's descriptions of the terrifying working and unsanitary conditions of the Chicago meat packing industry in 'The Jungle”, where in reality it was more skeptical.
Food is the sustaining life force that drives the human race forwards from day to day. As daily consumers of food products, it is automatically expected that the producers of such important products aim to produce goods that will help the consumer and attribute to their health. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. At the turn of the twentieth century, food sanitation in factories was at an all time low. Adding to this issue were the harsh conditions in which the workers were forced to work in. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in order to improve worker conditions as well as sanitation in factories. Today, there has been little to none improvement in these fields, as exposed by the video Food Inc. Comparatively, The Jungle and Food Inc. demonstrate how America’s food sanitation and worker conditions have not changed substantially over the century separating them.
As one thinks about the change brought about by a book named The Jungle, one might think of its call to preserve forests or wildlife. However, in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, he writes about something completely different. Sinclair writes this book to expose the meat packing industry and its horrific conditions for the meat and for the workers while also promoting socialism as the ideal form of government. His socialists views expressed in the book lead the book to be banned in several countries. Even though many find this book and its ideas to be controversial, it should be taught in secondary schools for its historical value and its example of how a book brought about social change.
The Jungle Book Review In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle to expose how rough the life of immigrants coming to the United States was. This book also exposed unsanitary conditions in meatpacking industry. Upton Sinclair’s main focus in this book was to show how tough life
In 1904 Upton Sinclair was given $500 and commissioned by Fred Warren, the editor of the Appeal to Ransom to write about the wage slavery going on in Chicago’s packinghouse district after a failed strike by the workers. He was a socialist who had written several articles, political novels and was a patron of left-wing magazines. He spent seven weeks in Chicago doing his research. He was very much ill prepared for what he saw. He had never been in such areas, as he was raised in Baltimore and living in New Jersey. He wrote The Jungle under the auspice that he wanted to bring attention not only to the way the immigrants were being treated in America by their employers and others but also the living conditions they had to endure but it was actually
There was a kind of labors in the U.S. food industry stood on the floor with half an inch deep blood, and put up with the stench. But not only that, they worked faster, but earned less. In fact, they were immigrant labors, and this horrible treatment of them truly happened in the beginning of twenty centuries. The Jungle which was written by Upton Sinclair documented this inhuman treatment. However, a hundred years later, immigrants still suffer the harsh treatment in the modern food industry. These immigrants are poor and uneducated, and working for food industry doesn’t require higher education. Meanwhile, they might save some money and achieve their dream which is becoming rich. Working for food industry sound like an ideal for immigrants.
In The Jungle , Upton Sinclair shows The corruption of the Industrial Age through his depiction of working conditions, wages, and living conditions.