Austin Nuttle
[Instructor Name]
[Course Number]
25 November 2014
The Jungle
In the Jungle by Upton Sinclair it focuses on the evil of Capitalism. The book shows how capitalism fails and how the author views it as horrible, inhuman and destructive. The main family, the Jurgis’s, in the book suffer the consequences of Capitalism as the economic system destroys them and the working class altogether. The Jurgis’s like most in their day believed in the American Dream, which would soon be shattered as all their hard work got them nowhere but further in turmoil. The novel uses this family and the other characters mentioned to stand for the stories of millions of people affected by Capitalism. The Jungle wasn’t written to be complicated and it’s easy
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Socialism is then introduced towards the end of the book, mainly in chapter 28, and is shown to be the good in the world as Capitalism is shown as the bad. He shows that Socialism works for everyone whereas Capitalism only further destroys the many, for the benefit of few people. He wants people to see that socialism works for the benefit of everyone. The author’s goal is to persuade the reader to pick socialism instead of Capitalism. Every little thing that he mentions in the book was made to make the political system look bad, even worse than it probably was. He wanted to show that the socialist political system had the ability to restore humanity, that it could give the people the real American dream. Furthermore, the family that Sinclair uses to represent the struggle and failure of the working class are immigrants that just recently moved to America, because of the use of that minor detail the novel can explore the struggle of immigrants in America as well. It shows how it was even harder for them to find work and that all they believed in turned out to be a lie. The main characters in the novel …show more content…
Instead of a place of money, happiness and opportunity, they find a place of poverty, crime and illness. Because Sincalir wants the people who read his book to sympathize with the characters, he goes to extreme lengths to not attack the American Dream; but instead use all of the struggles that they face to show that what he believes about the economy is true. One of the most important parts of the book was probably the passage of The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The act was passed in response to the public’s cry for help over the meat industry’s practice of selling rotten and diseased meat to customers. Sinclair uses the cans of rotten meat to represent the evil of capitalism once more. The cans look appealing to the eye but inside they contain soiled meat, which is unfit for human consumption and made lots of people ill. In the same way, American capitalism presents an attractive face to immigrants, but the America that they find is rotten. The novel’s title symbolizes the true nature of capitalism, Packingtown is in its own way like a jungle. For example, the strong prey on the weak and everyone is fighting for survival. They are fighting over good food that isn’t rotten, to
The novel follows a family of immigrants from Lithuania working in a meatpacking factory, and as the novel progresses, the reader learns of the revolting conditions within the factories. Sinclair’s The Jungle illustrates the concept of Bitzer’s “Rhetorical Situation” and Emerson’s quote quite effectively. For instance, the horrendous safety and health conditions of the packing factories were the exigencies that Upton Sinclair was making clear to the reader. The rhetorical audience that Sinclair aimed to influence with his novel was Congress and the president, as both had to agree in order to establish health and safety bills to better the conditions within factories. Sinclair’s efforts did not go unnoticed as in 1906 both the Meat Inspection Act, and the Pure Food and Drug act were approved by both Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt (Cherny,
The period of time running from the 1890’s through the early 1930’s is often referred to as the “Progressive Era.” It was a time where names such as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller stood for the progress of America and their great contributions to American industry and innovation. This chapter however, has a much darker side. Deplorable working conditions, rampant political corruption and power hungry monopolies and trusts threatened the working class of America and the steady influx of European immigrants hoping to make a better life for themselves and their families. What started as a grass-roots movement pushing for political reform at the local and municipal levels soon began to encompass
Dorothy Day had a curious personality and a very imaginative mind. When she attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she wrote in her biography The Long Loneliness, "my reading began to be socially conscious" (Day 36). It was around this time that she began to read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Sinclair was a socialist whom Day most likely would have strongly related to. Day was a part of the Christian Socialist Movement and sympathized with a lot of Sinclair's ideals. At the time she was introduced to The Jungle, Dorothy Day lived in Chicago with her family. Coindentally, The Jungle was set in Chicago, and so Day could further relate to the realities depicted in the novel.
Upton Sinclair's Purpose in Writing The Jungle Upton Sinclair wrote this book for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, he tries to awaken the reader to the terrible. living conditions of immigrants in the cities around the turn of the century. Chicago has the most potent examples of these. conditions.
At the beginnings of the 1900s, some leading magazines in the U.S have already started to exhibit choking reports about unjust monopolistic practices, rampant political corruption, and many other offenses; which helped their sales to soar. In this context, in 1904, The Appeal to Reason, a leading socialist weekly, offered Sinclair $500 to prepare an exposé on the meatpacking industry (Cherny). To accomplish his mission, Sinclair headed to Chicago, the center of the meatpacking industry, and started an investigation as he declared“ I spent seven weeks in Packingtown studying conditions there, and I verified every smallest detail, so that as a picture of social conditions the book is as exact as a government report” (Sinclair, The Industrial Republic 115-16). To get a direct knowledge of the work, he sneaked into the packing plants as a pretended worker. He toured the streets of Packingtown, the area near the stockyards where the workers live. He approached people, from different walks of life, who could provide useful information about conditions in Packingtown. At the end of seven weeks, he returned home to New Jersey, shut himself up in a small cabin, wrote for nine months, and produced The Jungle (Cherny).
Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” gave the most in-depth description of the horrid truths about the way America’s food companies, “the only source of food for people living in the city,” are preparing the food they sell. “The Jungle” describes the terrible
During the late 1800's and early 1900's hundreds of thousands of European immigrants migrated to the United States of America. They had aspirations of success, prosperity and their own conception of the American Dream. The majority of the immigrants believed that their lives would completely change for the better and the new world would bring nothing but happiness. Advertisements that appeared in Europe offered a bright future and economic stability to these naive and hopeful people. Jobs with excellent wages and working conditions, prime safety, and other benefits seemed like a chance in a lifetime to these struggling foreigners. Little did these people know that what they would confront would be the complete antithesis of what they dreamed of.
The book ends with multiple chapters praising socialism and how it is the only fair form of economy due to the extreme poverty of the working class and corruption in politics. To demonstrate the poverty of the people, Sinclair writes things such
The description of capitalism in The Jungle and "The Gospel of Wealth" are polar opposites. In The Jungle, the horrors of capitalism are exaggerated and its promise is non-existent. For example, Sinclair describes capitalism as a system that is " relentless, remorseless … and cruel" and if someone tried to get in its way, it would "cut his throat and watch him gasp for life" (Sinclair 41). A character like Andrew Carnegie does not exist. There is not one single character that was impoverished and made it in the capitalist system.
Discuss how Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tensions and historical processes at hand in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Many impoverished people immigrated to America in hopes of achieving the American Dream but instead were faced with dangerous working conditions while the factory and corporation owners increased their wealth and profit by exploiting this cheap means of labor. Upton Sinclair succeeded to show the nature of the wage slavery occurring in America in the beginning of the twentieth century. People felt distressed and unimportant in the community because they were being used by the wealthy to generate capital leading the industry for the future success and efficacy in the market. Upton Sinclair was an American journalist who incorporated his personal research of the meatpacking industry conditions and people’s life, as well as the structure of the present business into the novel under analysis. Thus, real facts and data were incorporated into this literary work, which helps the audience to feel involved in the work and understand the overall atmosphe...
In Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, he exposes corruption in both business and politics, as well as its disastrous effects on a family from Lithuania. In a protest novel, the ills of society are dramatized for its effect on its characters in the story. The Jungle is an example of protest literature because it exposes in a muckraking style the lethal and penurious conditions that laborers lived and worked in, corruption in business and politics, and the unsanitary meat that was sold.
Capitalism underwent a severe attack at the hands of Upton Sinclair in this novel. By showing the misery that capitalism brought the immigrants through working conditions, living conditions, social conditions, and the overall impossibility to thrive in this new world, Sinclair opened the door for what he believed was the solution: socialism. With the details of the meatpacking industry, the government investigated and the public cried out in disgust and anger. The novel was responsible for the passage of The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. With the impact that Sinclair must have known this book would have, it is interesting that he also apparently tried to make it fuction as propaganda against capitalism and pro-socialism.
The public’s reaction created unintended consequences from the author’s original intent. Sinclair himself writes "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Publishing the novel led to new federal food safety laws such as the Pure Food and Drug act and the Meat Inspection Act. During his job Jurgis noticed the meat factory was a place “...where men welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding...”(112). As it would fatten them up and the factory could sell disease ridden meat. Moreover, on the killing floor, they would butcher “slunk calves” for meat. Slunk calves are born prematurely and is against the law to process this cow meat for
At the turn of the twentieth century “Muckraking” had become a very popular practice. This was where “muckrakers” would bring major problems to the publics attention. One of the most powerful pieces done by a muckraker was the book “The Jungle”, by Upton Sinclair. The book was written to show the horrible working and living conditions in the packing towns of Chicago, but what caused a major controversy was the filth that was going into Americas meat. As Sinclair later said in an interview about the book “I aimed at the publics heart and by accident hit them in the stomach.”# The meat packing industry took no responsibility for producing safe and sanitary meat.