Analysis Of The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair exposed the exploitation of Immigrants working in Chicago’s meatpacking industry during the early twentieth century. Many people believed his book “The Jungle” helped with the exposure of the corruption in the government during the twentieth century. The book focused mainly on the poor living and working conditions of Immigrants during the early twentieth century. Sinclair wanted to prove that labor unions and Progressive reform had little or no impact on improving the working conditions of Immigrants. He felt that capitalism, with or without unions or reform, would be bad for workers, especially immigrant workers who were even lower on the socioeconomic ladder than native-born workers. Sinclair 's book is meant to reject the capitalist system and bring in its place a socialist system. In this critical portrait of capitalism and its exploitation of immigrants and other workers, unions are in fact shown to be tools for the capitalist bosses, used as another means to control and mislead immigrants. Sinclair 's book talks about the broken dreams of a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkis, and his Lithuanian family. In the book, unions are meant to be institutions that give false hope to many workers. These workers live

The author wants to show that the unions were a cruel hoax in large part fueled and controlled by the owners of the factories themselves. Jurgis is driven to learn English to understand what is going on at union meetings, and he imagines that the union is "the beginning of democracy with him, . . . a miniature republic" (94). His learning of English comes only to allow him to see more clearly the helpless situation he and his fellow immigrants are in, and his vision of the union as a little democracy only leaves him more crushed than ever once he realizes the futility of hoping for help from that