Upton Sinclair used the words, “I aimed for the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach” to describe the reaction his novel, The Jungle received after publication. Sinclair was disappointed that the political point of his novel was overshadowed by the public’s outcry over food production. Sinclair originally intended to show how American factory workers were wrongfully treated but the people focused on the food safety. The Jungle illustrated the unsanitary and unethical standards of how meat was produced throughout factories in the United States. After Sinclair’s book was published the public started to demand new reforms in the meat industry. The descriptions used in Sinclair’s novel about the meat industry and the way meat was produced gained the attention of politicians and …show more content…
The novel did a tremendous job at exposing the horrendous work and unsanitary conditions in the meat packing industry publicly that the Pure Food and Drug act of 1906 was passed. The Jungle told how bribed inspectors allowed diseased cows to be made into beef, workers falling into the tanks and being mixed in with the animal parts. Upton Sinclair’s novel led to a direct reform of all packaging industries and gave federal officials the right to inspect all the meat being shipped in and shipped out to ensure the animals were healthy. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was a direct effect of The Jungle. Upton Sinclair not only took interest in bringing the wrongdoings of the meat industry to the public, but he also stood up for immigrants who were being treated with disrespect. Which created a sense of hope for the immigrants coming to America to give a better life and greater opportunities to their families. Immigrants felt pride in knowing that they deserved the freedom, respect everyone else had and deserved to live the American
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.
After many months of writing his book was published. Much of the population began to take interest in the book. Many were outraged and horrified over the description of the meat packing industry. They looked more closely on the fact that rat infested meat was churned and put into sausages that would later would be set on the table to be fed to people. Many movement were created and pursued to the congress that laws or acts must be pushed to change the gruesome meat production.
Sinclair sheds light on how unsanitary the meat processing industry was, using words to paint a mental picture in the minds of the reader leaving them with a bad taste in their mouths. This story eventually led to the creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act after people went crazy reading what was described in the book. Although no specific facts were provided other than the contents in the book itself, it held true accounts of what the industry was like. Sinclair would speak of the rat poison being left close to the meat, or the use of the rotting meat to be sold. With this story people began to see the gruesome conditions by which their food was being handled.
Sinclair worked undercover in a meatpacking plant to gather information firsthand, before he began writing the book. Its influence on the labor practices and regulations governing the food industry cannot be understated. It tackles subjects as varied as the poor living conditions of the immigrants, exploitation of cheap labor by industrialists, and the unsanitary conditions of the meatpacking plants and stockyards of Chicago. The descriptions of the disgusting processes that were conducted in the meatpacking plants made for shocking reading and turned the book into a bestseller. The President Teddy Roosevelt ordered an investigation into the lack of sanitation in meatpacking plants and caused the creation of legislation governing the food industry in the form of the Food and Drugs Act of 1906.
In The Jungle Upton Sinclair tried to expose how cruel slaughterhouses were to the animals and how poor the quality of the meat was. Sinclair investigated a slaughter house with the eye witness of two immigrants. The slaughterhouse they went to was willing to and made a great effort of showing visitors their facility. The immigrant Jokubas had a suspicion that the slaughterhouse would limit what the visitors see and tries to make the slaughterhouse seem ethical. The slaughterhouse has to filter what they showed to visitors, especially after when Sinclair tried to expose them.
Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to portray the lives of wage workers in industrialized areas of the United States. His goal in publishing this story was to promote the Socialist movement, but many readers were most concerned with his exposure of health violations and unsanitary production practices in the meatpacking industry. The novel depicts working class poverty, – or “wage slavery” – the absence of social programs, harsh and unpleasant living and working conditions, and the hopelessness that wage workers experienced. He compares these components with the presence of deeply rooted corruption in people with power. During the Gilded Age, corruption was the biggest obstacle preventing workers from achieving prosperity, as well as the most
The author of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair, was a bright student and a skilled writer from a young age. At the age of fourteen he entered the College of the City of New York. He earned his B.A. from City College of New York in 1897 and later entered a graduate program at Columbia University. He was a socialist and wrote many muckraking articles which expose social and political corruption. In 1904 he spent several weeks in a meatpacking plant undercover to research for his book, The Jungle.
By reading this book, a reader basically just appreciates all the benefits of socialism. However, Sinclair fails to mention all the benefits of capitalism. The book is extremely biased toward socialism, but that is because he wanted to convince readers that socialism is the best form of government. In addition, a reader also learns about the horrors of meat packing. In class, we learned about how the meatpacking industry was one of the most disgusting of its time.
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
One book, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, comprehensively exposed the horrors of meat packing plants. What he wrote was so startling, it caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. Sinclair detailed how diseased animal carcasses were mishandled in filthy factories, and the meat was often left lying around for days in vats contaminated with rat feces and poison. When they finally got around to packing the meat, it was treated with a plethora of chemicals, canned, and often mislabeled.
Innocent Belief Famously known for his novel, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair changed American life in the early 1900s without a doubt through his literature. However, many don’t realize that Sinclair reformed American life in more than one instance, through more than one book. At times, he even reached beyond his realm of literature to discuss other needed adjustments. Besides the serendipitous changes he created for the meat packaging industry, Sinclair’s other actions throughout his life are, subjectively, important to American history, according to Anthony Arthur. In his biography, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Arthur reveals his bias towards Sinclair, while supplying a relevant nature to his writing across an in-depth review of Sinclair’s
Thus, Sinclair’s purpose of writing The Jungle failed to bring readers to advocate for the rights of workers trapped in the low wages, unsafe working conditions, and long hours of meatpacking factories, but rather, succeeded in opening the country’s eyes to the meatpacking practices that went on behind closed doors and the establishment administrations to protect the public from these unscrupulous
Though best known for his muckraking efforts that helped to end the Gilded Age, Upton Sinclair wrote nearly a hundred books in his lifetime. From a young age his mother encouraged in him a love of reading; when he could, Sinclair could be found reading for up to fourteen hours a day. However, his childhood was marked by poverty and his father's raging alcoholism. His mother took a strong sense of morality against his father’s drinking and of all types of sinning. These strict morals implanted in him made the socialist party very appealing.
Mr. Sinclair’s book provided more distressing news of the terrible practices in this industry taught to the workers so that more meat can be distributed for profit. “He wrote that workers would process dead, injured, and diseased animals after regular hours when no meat inspectors were around” (“Upton Sinclair’s”). Meatpacking industries provides more meat for their customers purely for profit. This causes the industry to be influenced to sell its meat, no matter the condition it is in. Packaged meat put in revolting conditions were brought to light, thanks to “The Jungle” and the customers of these businesses were
Camila Casanova U.S. History 1302: S67 Mr. Isaac G. Pietrzak February 9, 2018 Critical Review: The Jungle Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.