The Economic Tension In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

The Jungle, a novel written in 1906, by Upton Sinclair is a harsh and very real account of what child labor looked like during the time of the Industrial Revolution. This work particularly looks at the lives of Lithuanian immigrants funneling into the United States and the work they are forced to do to maintain their meager existences. The immigrants are in such a degraded state that so many are forced to have their children employed to help the family survive. The key word for these immigrants and their children was survival. Sinclair states throughout the novel that education for these immigrant children was purely a bonus, as so many had to give up schooling to help the family make ends meet.

How would you feel people would feel knowing that they were ingesting contaminated foods? This was the case in the late 18th hundred and early 19th hundred many social and economic problems came to be in the United States. For example, one of the many problems that arose during these years were the sanitation conditions in the companies. To be more precise, food companies were getting away with many of the inspections the government would act on. Meat packing industries were becoming more unsafe everyday.

With the policy of collectivization Ukrainians were virtually forced to give up essential necessities for the Empowerment of the Soviet Union resulting in Starvation of millions of Ukrainians. Stalin’s even used propaganda to falsify Ukrainians as happy servants to the Soviet Union but in reality their right and freedom were sacrificed and with the shortage of food coming into Ukraine it lead to starvation. Soviet Union rise in self-determination allowing them to become economic viable at the expenses of millions of

Most workers are forced to stay silent because of their social, economic and class status. In most cases, immigrants without any documentations suffers the worst kind of working conditions because they are powerlessness in the hands of corporate

The "illegal" ideology has always been disgusting to me but, I didn’t really know how it was built. Nativists were powerful enough to start the "illegal" status towards Mexicans. It is humiliation to think America only let in a limited number of Mexican workers in the US. It was also ridiculously expensive to legally cross the border, which was not an option to Mexicans due to their economic fall, and all of the discrimination involving looking for a job. The border has always been seen as an evil place to go through because the way people were treated there; and still do to this day.

People were afraid and concerned since they had a major insufficiency of jobs, supplies and shelter. Many companies began to enforce wage cutbacks and increased workload. Relief was not being offered to all the unfortunate Canadians who did not have a job. Many people were laid off from factories which meant that supplies were scarce as not many people could afford to provide for their family’s, people turned to the government to find a solution. I believe that their expectations were much too high as the government was struggling too.

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.

Multiple small businesses did not control the city, instead, the city was controlled by one large business. This only benefits the large business owners and affects the citizens of the city poorly. They get poor healthcare, poor food quality, and poor air quality. A large portion of the population have suffered from diseases and did not get the health care they needed because the big business owners are not aiding their workers. The main company which controlled everyone had been the Packingtown.

Upton Sinclair developed his thoughts on the plight of immigrants in Chicago extremely well throughout his novel, The Jungle. Through the portrayal of the Lithuanian family's struggles and hardships, Sinclairs tells the truths of the corruption and immigrant experience in Chicago in the early 1900s. The gruesome details of the meat packaging industry show how truly unjust and disturbing the working conditions were during these times. Upton goes on to depict the unfair living conditions of the Lithuanian immigrants as well as the immigrants before and after their time in Packington. After Sinclair released the serial form of his novel in a Socialist newspaper in 1905, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was soon to follow.

Over the years, immigrants have influenced many aspects of American society and has had a vital role in shaping the United States to what it is today. According to the US Census Bureau, an agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System responsible for producing data about the American people and economy, “non-Hispanic white population in the U.S. declined from 85 percent in 1965 to 62.2 percent in 2014, and the forecast is for the percentage of non-Hispanic whites to fall to 43.6 percent in 2060” (qtd. in Walsh). Despite the rise of immigrants and the profound impact they have had on society, many immigrants face perpetual discrimination; this idea has appeared many times throughout Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Bean Trees. Taking place during the 1970s, the main character, Taylor, moves from Kentucky to Arizona; along the way, she meets Esperanza and Estevan, illegal immigrants from Guatemala. As she gets to know them better, she notices they are forced to live a monotonous, arduous life which implies that immigrants face prejudice from Americans who claim to be accepting.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, also famously known as ‘Commodore Vanderbilt’ was one of the richest men in America. He was born on May 27, 1794 on Staten Island, New York. He was brought up in a poor family including a tragic death in his family. At age eleven he dropped out of school and started working on boats which, brought about an interest in the shipping industry. Then at age sixteen he bought his very first ferry with a one hundred dollar loan.

He feared there would be no one to maintain the house and take care of the children if she was working. It also threatened his masculinity, but similar to the families in the museum, they had no choice. If he wanted his children to eat and have a home he had to allow Katie to work. Several other ideas also overlapped between the Tenement Museum and Jews without Money.

The rise and fall of the Populist party all started when farmers from all over the nation gathered together and addressed some common problems that they were facing. Farmers were stuck in a bad economic cycle. Prices for their crops were falling, and unfortunately farmers often had to mortgage their farms so that they could buy more land and produce more crops in order to “flourish”. There was very little suitable land to farm and cultivate and banks were foreclosing on the mortgages of farmers who could not make the payments on their loans. Moreover, the railroads were being taken advantage of farmers by charging excessive prices for shipping and storage.

“By the 1920s, Americans had consumed over twenty-five million gallons of illegal liquor, and bootlegging became a one billion dollars business” As the bootlegging business blossomed, street gangs became established gangsters. With their new found wealth they were able to pay off law enforcement officials. Many law enforcement officials took the bribe, because they were underpaid and overworked. Not only did gangsters have money, they now had the power of the law which made running their operations less complicated.

Many new immigrants from places in southern and eastern Europe such as Italy, Greece and Russia settled in Northern cities and became the backbone of industrial labor. Due to a lack of space in cities and the tendency of poverty among these immigrants, many of them had to live in tenements and slums. Since these immigrants were willing to settle for lower wages and worse conditions, they occupied many industrial jobs, frustrating the working class of whites and old immigrants. Along with the frustration that the immigrants were taking jobs away from natives, there was a widespread sentiment that these new immigrants were inferior. Furthermore, these new immigrants were religious but tended to be Catholic or Jewish as opposed to Protestant as was the majority, providing another basis of resentment.