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Summary Of The Jungle Under The Auspice By Upton Sinclair

1424 Words6 Pages

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 …show more content…

The advertisement claimed, “The meat barons were ‘purely capitalistic’ and their excessive greed caused them to demolish competitors, treat employees like slaves, and develop ever more by-products.” (Wade pg. 83) This is also where he got the town name of Packingtown while the others called it Back of the Yards. Simons told Sinclair he was welcome to use whatever he could from it. Adolph Smith was an English socialist, who came to a convention on tuberculosis in St Louis and afterward visited the stockyards of Chicago. Sinclair wrote of Smith’s criticisms of the packinghouses as his own since had never done that type of reporting. Earnest Poole wrote of a Lithuanian, who came to the packinghouse area and prospered with the help of the union. Sinclair received a copy Charles Edward Russell's series 'The Greatest Trust in the World" and wrote to him saying they had been on the same path. With all of this information in hand Sinclair wrote The Jungle. It is likely to be based on the similarities of IK Freeman’s By Bread Alone. Sinclair had only visited the stockyards on three different occasions during his research. He had not given much mind to what was being done to the meat products during these visits, as that was not his

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How Did Upton Sinclair Protect The Meat Packing Industry

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Upton Sinclair was part of the group of people who wanted to improve the meat packing industry. He started to protest after going to investigate the Chicago Packingtown strike. Upton’s investigation led him to find that there were poor working conditions, and poor sanitation in the factory. There was diseased and rotten meat, and later, it was found that there was chemicals that are harmful to humans put into the meat. Also, it was found that many products were mislabeled.

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Role Of Upton Sinclair's Living And Dying In Packingtown

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Seth Ruiz Tracy Brady HIST151 October 19, 2015 Paper 1 Upton Sinclair’s Living and Dying in Packingtown, Chicago is a reading of a portion of his novel, The Jungle. In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair writes about a man named Jurgis Rudkus who is an immigrant from Lithuania looking for a job in Packingtown. After the death of one of his wife’s sons, Kristoforas, Jurgis applied to work for a fertilizer plant which was considered the lowest of the low places to work. He got the job and soon came to realize how terrible it was to work at the fertilizer plant. Upton Sinclair wrote about what the plant was like in Jurgis’s and the townspeople’s mind, “All this while he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage

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'Immigrants In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle'

502 Words | 3 Pages

He vividly described the unkempt messiness of the meat packing factories, going as far as to say that men “made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage.” The colorful descriptions of the factories left a heavy impact on America as a whole, as seen in the passing of the Meat Inspection Act. One of the major flaws of this book was the seemingly forced ending. Rudkus goes through years of toil and hardship, and supposedly finds the light at the end of the road in socialism. It was obvious to me when reading that Sinclair was a strong proponent of socialism, and I was disenchanted with the whole story after the

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Summary Of The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

1523 Words | 7 Pages

One can argue, however, that in addition to the corruption of the system, the workers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries put themselves in the situation of endless strife. This was due to their naivety with regards to misconceptions of the American Dream and system, unfamiliarity with the English language, nonexistent awareness of classism, political motives, and greed. Through the illustration of the hardships new immigrant workers faced, Sinclair used the life of Jurgis Rudkus to advance his argument for the movement towards socialism in the Gilded Age. Originating from a rural area in Lithuania, Jurgis tried to seize any opportunity he could in order to better life for himself and his posterity.

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Similarities Between Frederick Douglass And Upton Sinclair

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The writings of Frederick Douglass and Upton Sinclair provide examples the address the essential question, how does literature shape or reflect society? Cultural events and ethics provide inspiration for authors to discuss the political and social occurrences during this era. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass, explains his yearning for freedom when he was a slave. Frederick Douglass was born a slave, escaped to freedom, and used the rest of his life to fight slavery. Frederick, as a child, is deprived of learning to read and write because his owner Mr.Auld told his other owner Mrs. Auld not to teach him.

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The Jungle And Fast Food Nation Analysis

862 Words | 4 Pages

The conditions of the workers and the quality of the products served were of no importance to the leaders in Chicago’s meatpacking industry, and are often not important to fast food chains today. The meat sold to customers in The Jungle is often soiled, but the head of the company allows it to be sold to maximise his own profit. Bad parts of the meat in the factory were cut out and disposed of but the remained parts were still then sold. Other meats were covered in germs from a leak in the building or rat feces as the rodents roamed around the building. The health or waste of money for the citizens in this case is not important to the owners.

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Who Is Upton Sinclair's Criticism

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Upton was born in a boarding house which made him prone to poverty (Bryant). To get away from the poverty he was sent to his rich uncles who were snobby (Bryant). From what he saw from his uncles Sinclair swore that he would never sell out to the higher class (Bryant). He had written over forty novels as well as short stories and many other things (Swirski). In 1902 Upton Sinclair joined the Socialist Party (Swirski).

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During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Progressive reformers worked to improve the social, political, and economic problems in American society. Throughout this time, muckrakers helped reformers by revealing injustices to Americans through journalism, books, campaigns, photographs, and political cartoons. Poor working conditions, low quality of consumer products, and inferior democracy were present in American life during the Progressive Era; reforms such as state actions, the Meat Inspection Act, and Direct Primary helped to eliminate these corruptions. An issue society faced during the Progressive Era was poor working conditions. In Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, he writes that if a person found anyone who uses knives in this factory,

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Upton Sinclair's Accomplishments

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Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland in a small row house on September 20, 1878. In addition to this, from an early age he was exposed to differences that would have a long lasting effect on his juvenile mind and drastically influence his thinking as time progressed. Moreover, he was the only child to an alcoholic liquor salesman of a father, and a determined mother, he was raised on the premise of poverty, yet was also exposed to the advantages of the upper class through frequent gatherings with his mother’s wealthy family (biography.com). Equally important, is at the age of ten Sinclair’s father uprooted the family from Baltimore to New York City. During this time, Sinclair started to establish a sharp mind and was an insatiable

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Working Conditions In The Jungle

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The Bosses squeezed and drained the life of those men. In the book The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair he described the life of a struggling family try to work and stay alive in the filth. The working conditions in the factories were unsafe, unsanitary and people made little. The purpose of this book was for people to become socialist other than capitalist.

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The Economic Tension In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

1899 Words | 8 Pages

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 late 19th century and early 20th centuries, there were massive immigrants move into the United States, and most of them were from Europe. The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, like many other immigrants, have the “America Dream” which they believe America is heaven to them, where they can

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Meatpacking Workers In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

1060 Words | 5 Pages

However, readers at the time were not very concerned about the petty immigrants living on the lower rung of society. Rather, they cared about what affected them most: the condition of the meat they were eating-- and had been eating-- for years, that were produced by some of the very factories mentioned in Sinclair’s novel. For the majority of The Jungle’s readers, the fact that poor immigrants were being exploited was not bothersome. Instead, the fact that the food that readers had been eating for years contained the power to kill them seemed shocking, pushing the nation into a worried frenzy. Readers were disgusted by the facts they were reading, catalyzing the creation of administrations like the FDA.

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Successes And Failures In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

845 Words | 4 Pages

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle “hit [the readers] in their stomach” rather than in their hearts like he had hoped to. Steve Trott thoroughly writes about Upton Sinclair’s successes and failures as a writer in his piece, “Upton Sinclair and The Jungle.” Sinclair had written the novel in hopes of drawing attention to the “appalling conditions and squalor of wage-laborers under capitalism… [b]ut his objective was lost on the public, overshadowed by unsanitary conditions and inadequate regulation in the meat processing plants” (Trott 2). Because Sinclair based the novel off of a fictional character, Jurgis Rudkus, his reliability fell short.

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Harsh Conditions Of The Meatpacking Industry In The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

584 Words | 3 Pages

As a writer and an undercover worker, he wrote from a perspective that allowed the public to truly understand the situations rather than taking one side. This also gave him the advantage of being able to use imagery in his novel to accurately portray details. Whatever he wrote in the novel spoke for itself. It sets of an eerie, dark, and twisted setting that churns the audience’s stomach in a grotesque manner. The content was so disturbing that it did not shed much light on Sinclair’s intended target of working conditions.

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The Jungle Critical Analysis

1202 Words | 5 Pages

During the time period of the 1900’s, the meat packaging industry in Chicago, as Sinclair mentions in his novel, The Jungle, was a very unsanitary and extremely dangerous workplace that lacked much more than just a few safety precautions. Simple things, such as enforcing hand washing or workers’ rights were unheard of in the working environment. It is clear that Upton Sinclair was trying to expose the worker’s horrendous labor conditions in order to improve their situation, along with the introduction of socialism. Upton Sinclair, in his novel, talks about how a Lithuanian immigrant by the name of Jurgis Rudkus, and his family, travel to Chicago trying to make ends meet. However, they soon realize Chicago was not the place for that.

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