Depicting the Times in The Jungle

Industry in America during the 1900's was in the "I'm walking, what next?", stages of infancy. Politics, although not so young, was dealing with the bourgeoning growth of industry. Regulation in American industry was veritably nonexistent during this time. Anything went, and everything went, providing they achieved profit. Huge quantities of immigrants arriving daily into the United States provided a bewildered and obedient workforce. If profit meant that we neglected workers or sanitary conditions the dollar spoke louder.

Large unregulated corporations began to dominate the U.S. after the civil war. The most harmful and biggest monopolies called "the trusts." The trusts were groups of corporations that would squeeze out free competition to keep the prices of their products low. Although the Sherman Anti-Trust of 1890 banned this, the U.S. government sparingly enforced the law believing that supply and demand would regulate the economy to the best interests of everyone.

Graft and corruption ran rampant within the city governments and corporations, who worked hand in hand tying and interweaving unjust practices, leaving a blind eye to worker and consumer rights. In 1901, a Socialist party was founded and exercised remarkable growth due to this straining industrialization of the U.S.. The Socialist party blamed many of society's ill's on competition for profit and believed government regulated cooperation should substitute for competition.

Upton Sinclair, a journalist, spent seven weeks researching and interviewing within Chicago's meat packing district. His novel "The Jungle," depicted the graft, corruption and unsavory practices of the meat packing industry. Originally published as a series of articles in a weekly Socialist-based newspaper called "Appeal to Reason." This newspaper's circulation was a half million and heading upwards, thus "The Jungle," found much notoriety before published as a novel. Due to public outcries that followed its publication as a novel in 1906 led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug act later that year.

Although Sinclair wrote this novel as an argument for Socialism, it became an expose of the meat packing industry. His main idea throughout this novel was the injustice of commercialism to working-class people. He used his immigrant characters lives and difficulties to display how horrible capitalism treated society. Greed, graft, and corruption enslaved his characters. The inequities of society blatantly listed paragraph by paragraph to a public he hoped to influence to his politics.