Summary Of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

At the turn of the twentieth century, progressives were gaining momentum through the United States. The focused on attacking major corporations such as Standard Oil, U.S. Steel and the Armour meat-packing company to improve the living and working conditions of those in poverty (“Upton”). Those focused on these companies as many of their labor employees were immigrants that were treated as “wage slaves”, working in brutal conditions for the lowest wages (“Upton”). Upton Sinclair set out to exploit the meat-packing industry by investigating the conditions and lives of the workers; he later used his findings to write the novel “The Jungle” (“Upton”). Writing “The Jungle”, Sinclair expected and hoped that his work would attract the attention needed

“The White House was bombarded with mail, calling for reform of the meat-packing industry… [President Roosevelt] then appointed a special commission to investigate Chicago’s slaughterhouses” (“Upton”). The special commission’s report “confirmed almost all the horrors that Sinclair had written about” (“Upton”). As a result, Roosevelt pushed for and later signed into law the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 which regulated the system of inspections by the federal government and made it a crime to sell mislabeled food products (“Upton”; Cohen). These actions further disappointed Sinclair as they did not address the issue of mistreatment and abuse that the workers

Like “The Jungle”, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was aimed towards improving the lives of the novel’s subject, slaves in the United States. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “novel helped to move anti-slavery feeling in the North beyond the relatively small circle of abolitionists to a more general audience” (McNamara). This was crucial for the time as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the law forcing runaway slaves to be returned to their owners, had passed two years before the novel’s publication (Robbins). In addition, Abraham Lincoln would be running for president a few years later in 1960, who would later sign the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves from their owners (McNamara). As more people began to oppose slavery after reading the novel, the more popular the idea of freeing these slaves became. Just as with “The Jungle”, this novel influenced many throughout the nation to demand a change in their