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The Influence Of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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The influence of Upton Sinclair upon our world cannot thoroughly be measured in just a few short paragraphs or even one study. Sinclair 's work for which he was most famous, The Jungle, written in 1906, was just one of many examples of one person 's ability to change the world they live in. While the topic of The Jungle was bringing to light the horrible working conditions associated with the meat industry, the work accomplished so much more. Of course people were enraged when they found out they were probably eating rat meat along with their favorite meats but they also began to see how much hardship immigrants were going through just to try and make a living in the country at the time. Sinclair didn 't just interview people to get the …show more content…

No one wanted to touch the book because they feared being sued by the Meat Industry. Finally Doubleday said they would publish it but they had to verify the extreme conditions Sinclair had written about. Even President Theodore Roosevelt, after reading the newspaper version of The Jungle, contacted Doubleday and chastised them for considering publishing such a thing. It wasn 't long after though that Roosevelt conducted his own investigation and found everything Sinclair had written about was steeped in truth. Not long after Congress passed the first laws regulating the industry in hopes it could protect people from unsanitary handling of food. This was the Progressive Era in real action and Sinclair was telling a story that people still aren 't completely hearing today. Sinclair was a devout socialist and while his perceived cure may not have been the answer for all the world 's woes, his belief in watching the effects of unregulated capitalism is still a struggle in today 's world where so many live in greed, excess and without a care for their common man. What would he have written about the financial collapse in 2008? Or the oil spills over the last few decades? The biggest question to answer is why we don 't have more journalists or authors

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