In the late nineteenth century to early twentieth century the Progressive Era was moving to reshape America. Progressivism was a political movement that encouraged the exposure of corruption in America in order to reshape it for the better. This time period became known for the social and political changes that took place as a result of the progressives. Progressivism ruled the country, changing the way Americans lived and the way politics affected them. One of the main goals of the progressive movement was to use democracy to regulate the government by exposing the corruption of government officials. Another area in which the progressives moved for change was business. In the late nineteenth century many large businesses were corrupt, forming monopolies and large trusts that allowed them to bypass the law and rake in obscene amounts of money. This money making included the poor treatment and even worse payment of the workers who toiled day in and day out to make the trusts’ money. The Progressive Era brought attention to the corruption of these large monopolies and with the exposure came laws to bring these trusts under control. The Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890 was passed in an attempt to break up large, corrupt trusts. Bringing down these corrupt money making machines became known as trust busting, and was a large part of president Teddy Roosevelt’s career. Trust busting was a big part of the progressive movement and it was for the most part successful, bringing down trusts such as the large railroad tycoon Northern Securities. The Progressives were not only targeting trusts at the time however. They were also targeting social problems such as poverty and unsafe working conditions. People who exposed these things to the publ... ... middle of paper ... ...go Tribune, May 21, 2006, accessed May 15, 2014,http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-05-21/features/0605210414_1_upton-sinclair-trust-free/3. Holbrook, Stewart. The Age of the Moguls. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1953. Reed, Lawrence. “Ideas and Consequences: Of Meat and Myth.” The Freeman, 1994. Accessed April 23, 2014. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. NY: Doubleday&Company, 1906. Sinclair, Upton. “What Life Means to Me.” Cosmopolitan, 1906. “Upton Sinclair's the Jungle: Muckraking the Meat-Packing Industry.” Constitutional Rights Foundation 24, no. 1 (2008): 1. Accessed May 15, 2014. http://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-24-1-b-upton-sinclairs-the-jungle-muckraking-the-meat-packing-industry.html. Whorton James, review of Pure Food: Securing the Pure Food and Drug Acts of 1906, by James Young, Book Reviews-Isis, 1995, 586-88
The Jungle. One of the most famous muckrakers, Upton Sinclair, published The Jungle in 1906, and it immediately became an international best-seller. Sinclair, who had joined the Socialist party in 1903 originally wrote The Jungle for the socialist magazine, The Appeal to Reason (Constitutional Rights Foundation). He spent time in the Chicago meatpacking district so he could truly see what was going on. What Sinclair witnessed was appalling. He saw sausage that had traveled to and from Europe, poisoned bread and dead rats being put in the hopper that ground the sausage. Instead of smoking the sausage, they preserved the meat with borax and used gelatin to color it (Sinclair 168-169). Although Sinclair wrote The Jungle to show his readers the evils of capitalism, people were more appalled at the disgusting and unsanitary conditions of the meatpacking industry.
Cities and industry grew in growth on the first of January in 1900 which created an influx of the high classes. Andrew Carnegie is a factory owner who was about to sell his steel company, but ended up becoming one of the richest man in the world. However, there was an underside of this whole excitement to earn money and the hope of the American dream. Average earnings were less than $500 a year, but in the unskilled southern workers earned an average of $300 a year. The work hours were 60 hours a week, wages were strained, and horrible child labor. The question is what was the most important problems in America during the early 1900s that needed to be addressed by The Progressive Movement. There are three main reasons: the struggling child labor, women’s voting rights, and
Which by the approval of the 1906 Food and Drugs Act, the government succeeded in
In 1906, socialist Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a book he hoped would awaken the American people to the deplorable conditions of workers in the meat packing industry. Instead, the book sent the country reeling with its description of filthy, rat infested plants, suspect meats processed and sold to consumers, and corrupt government inspectors. President Roosevelt became seriously concerned by the charges brought forth by Mr. Sinclair and determined the only way to protect consumers from unscrupulous business and unsafe food was to enforce regulation.
The term Progressivism implies a philosophy that promotes change/reform in the current political, economic, and social aspects of society while conservatism stresses gradual change in society but promotes tradition rather than change. The Progressive movement from 1901 to 1917 worked to improve aspects of society that grew out of problems which occurred during the Industrial Age. The goals of the "Progressives" were to stop monopolies, corruption, inefficiency and social injustices. Both progressive acts and amendments were being passed to deal with social ills, corruption in politics and corporate America. The period from 1901-1917 was more a victory for liberalism, mainly "modern liberalism", than a triumph of conservatism due to the fact that multiple reform movements were occurring in this era changing political, economic, and social aspects in society to protect the rights of the common man.
Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle, wrote this novel to unveil the atrocious working conditions and the contaminated meat in meat-packing workhouses. It was pathos that enabled his book to horrify hundreds of people and to encourage them to take a stand against these meat-packing companies. To obtain the awareness of people, he incorporated a descriptive style to his writing. Ample amounts of imagery, including active verbs, abstract and tangible nouns, and precise adjectives compelled readers to be appalled. Durham, the leading Chicago meat packer, was illustrated, “having piles of meat... handfuls of dried dung of rats...rivers of hot blood, and carloads of moist flesh, and soap caldrons, craters of hell.” ( Sinclair 139). His description
... government inspection of meat products. The Pure Food and Drug act also passed after the Meat inspection Act of 1906. The packers denied the charges and opposed the bills to no avail. These bills protected the publics right to safe sanitary meat.
2Volume 24, Number 1. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle: Muckraking the Meat-Packing Industry [Internet]. Los Angeles, CA (USA): CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS FOUNDATION; (fall) 2008 [cited 2014 Feb 16]. Available from: http://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-24-1-b-upton-sinclairs-the-jungle-muckraking-the-meat-packing-industry.html
Where did some of modern America's issues originate from? The answer to that is the Progressive Era. The Legislation of that era laid all of the groundwork for today, and much of it is still in public debate today. Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, three of the presidents from that era, all played roles in the groundwork. These presidents passed acts, tariffs, and amendments that are still with us, and debated today.
Sinclair’s most famed work, The Jungle, was published in the Socialist weekly Appeal to Reason. The Jungle followed the life of an immigrant named Jurgis and his family as they struggled to survive and have a life while working in a stockyard district. The story begins happy, with the wedding of the main character. As the plot progresses, various trials unfold and display the horrors of the meatpacking industry. Revulsive conditions were abundant in the story (Swados,
Upton Sinclair was the most famous of the American “muckraker” journalists. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland on September 20, 1878. Although his family was poor, Sinclair was able to earn money as a writer from a very early age, and was able to save enough money to go to college. He attended the city college of New York and graduated from there with a B.A. degree. Soon after he went to Columbia University to graduate school. It was there that he began writing full-length novels with important social themes. His novels showed that he was concerned with the conditions of working people. During the early part of the twentieth century businesses had very little to restrain them and working class unions were not nearly as common as they are today. Some of the biggest abuses of labor conditions took place in big cities such as New York and Chicago. It was in the meatpacking district of Chicago that Sinclair found the setting of the book that would bring him to fame. He first won recognition by the jungle in 1906. This book is a powerful realistic study of social conditions in the stockyards and packing plants of Chicago. It aided in the passing of pure food laws.
In the beginning of the twentieth century, the economy was booming, new technology flourished. The rapid industrialization brought achievement to the United States, however, it also caused several social problems. Wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of a few, and poverty and political corruption were widespread. As people became aware of these problems, a new reform group was created. Unlike populism, which had been a group of farmers grown desperate as the economy submerged into depression, the new reform movement arose from the educated middle class. These people were known as the progressives. The Progressive Movement was a movement that aimed at solving political, economic, and social problems. The Progressives were people from the middle class who had confidence that they could achieve social progress through political reform. The Progressives sought after changes and improvements in the society through laws and other federal actions.
The most commonly known, and consequently most watered down, version of the progressive movement argues that this era was simply an effort by the middle class to cure many of the social and political ills of American society that had developed during the rapid industrial growth in the last quarter of the 19th century. This explanation has proven to be a woefully inadequate in the face of the complexities that characterize these times. In Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform, Peter Filene’s “An Obituary for the Progressive Movement,” Richard McCormick’s “The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics,” and Paula Baker’s “The Domestication of Politics” each author asserts their own unique interpretations of the progressive movement. These distinct examinations each chart and thus manifest the fluidity of knowledge about this particular time period and how it has been shaped reshaped by new analysis.
Spencer, Colin. The Heretic's Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. Hanover, NH: U of New England, 1996. Print.
For this paper, I chose to read and examine Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. Written in the height of the muckraking era, The Jungle exposes the terrible conditions of the meatpacking industry and influenced the American public...