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Income inequality 1900s and present essay
Social class and inequality both globally and in the United States
Income inequality 1900s and present essay
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“In twentieth-century America the history of poverty begins with most working people living on the edge of destitution, periodically short of food, fuel, clothing, and shelter” (Poverty in 20th Century America). Poverty possesses the ability to completely degrade a person, as well as a family, but it can also make that person and family stronger. In The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, a family of immigrants has to live in severe poverty in Packingtown, a suburb of Chicago. The poverty degrades the family numerous times, and even brings them close to death. Originally the family has each other to fall back on, but eventually members of the family must face numerous struggles on their own, including “hoboing it” and becoming a prostitute. The Jungle, a naturalistic novel by Upton Sinclair, reveals the detrimental effects that a life of poverty exerts on the familial relationships of immigrants in Chicago during the early 1900’s.
The most obvious effect of poverty remains the material aspect. The family has no money, therefore they cannot afford a good of decent quality. They can only purchase subpar goods. The family gets cheated numerous times in money related incidents. The housing agent cheats them the most, as they must pay much more money then he told them they would. Not only do they get cheated on the insurance, but they pay much more for the house than the value of it. The bosses cheat them as well: “big businesses had become even bigger. Large corporations were making a great deal of money, and some owners and managers became very rich. However, most of the people working in business and industry were not getting rich” (Duyne). When problems arise with the house, the family can only buy cheap goods to fix them with. When the...
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...ous struggles of Jurgis and his family. Not only does the family suffer from poverty, but they also suffer from a poor knowledge of English, the glares of the townspeople, and the damaging effects of hard manual labor. The family gets harmed by the bosses in Packingtown as well, they receive unfair wages for long days at work. They also get deceived by the housing agent, forcing them to pay much more money for the house as a result of insurance, an expense they were not prepared for. As a result of the hard manual labor and his name being put on the blacklist, Jurgis resorts to “hoboing it” just to survive towards the end of the novel. The poverty tears the family apart: they end up splitting up towards the end of the novel, all going separate ways. Poverty negatively impacted the familial relationships of thousands of immigrants in Chicago in the early 1900s.
The tenement was the biggest hindrance to achieving the American myth of rags to riches. It becomes impossible for one to rise up in the social structure when it can be considered a miracle to live passed the age of five. Children under the age of five living in tenements had a death rate of 139.83 compared to the city’s overall death rate of 26.67. Even if one did live past the age of five it was highly probable he’d become a criminal, since virtually all of them originate from the tenements. They are forced to steal and murder, they’ll do anything to survive, Riis appropriately calls it the “survival of the unfittest”. (Pg.
In The Jungle, Sinclair deeply understands his subjects and can make the plots real for the reader. Even in a small section of the book, Sinclair makes me feel, imagine and contemplate his words. Chapters 18 through 23, were chapters that Sinclair took time and effort to write and make it to perfection. In my own perspective, I think he achieved this accomplishment and made these chapters a realistic event.
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).
Although poverty has minimized, it is still significant poverty which is characterized by a numerous amount of things. There are two types of poverty case and insular. “Case poverty is the farm family with the junk-filled yard and the dirty children playing in the bare dirt” (Galbraith 236)Case poverty is not irretraceable and usually caused if someone in the household experiences “ mental deficiency, bad health, inability to adapt to the discipline of industrial life, uncontrollable procreation, alcohol, some educational handicap unrelated to community shortcomings” (Galbraith 236).Case poverty is often blamed on the people for their shortcomings but on some levels can be to pinpoint one person's shortcomings that caused this poverty. Most modern poverty is insular and is caused by things people in this community cannot control. “The most important characteristic of insular poverty is forces, common to all members of the community, that restrain or prevent participation in economic life and increase rates of return.
The most significant event in the emergence of the twentieth century is the diversity and struggle of society's classes. The novel, The Jungle penned by Upton Sinclair attempts to display the social and economic challenges of the lower class by demonstrating the difficulties of a Lithuanian immigrant family.The predicament situation of Jurgis and his family reveals the dark side of the capitalism, therefore, it also revealed dominance and the exploitation of the bourgeoisie from the proletariat class.Throughout the novel, Jurgis and his family encounter varied difficulties from being unable to find a proper job to several deaths followed one after another due to the harsh life conditions consequently followed by the separation of the family
To be concise, Jurgis and his family faced various challenges in America. As a result, their lives changed, for better or for worse. They were inexperienced, and therefore made many mistakes, which made their life in Chicago very worrisome. However, their ideology and strong belief in determination and hard work kept them alive. In a land swarming with predators, this family of delicate prey found their place and made the best of it, despite the fact that America, a somewhat disarranged and hazardous jungle, was not the wholesome promise-land they had predicted it to be.
“The Jungle,” written by Upton Sinclair in 1906, describes how the life and challenges of immigrants in the United States affected their emotional and physical state, as well as relationships with others. The working class was contrasted to wealthy and powerful individuals who controlled numerous industries and activities in the community. The world was always divided into these two categories of people, those controlling the world and holding the majority of the power, and those being subjected to them. Sinclair succeeded to show this social gap by using the example of the meatpacking industry. He explained the terrible and unsafe working conditions workers in the US were subjected to and the increasing rate of corruption, which created the feeling of hopelessness among the working class.
The devastating effects of poverty, which affects all nations, go beyond the money that is provided in your paycheck. With a lack of sufficient funds arises a lack of adequate nutrition, there is never enough money in which to buy food to fill the bellies of the hard working men and women who give their all to place a hot meal on the family table. Homelessness, due to having to decide whether
One of the main causes of poverty is a lack of money. There are some families that do have at least one person employed in the household but the money earned is not enough to provide for the family. Tough decisions such as paying rent buying groceries become a daily challenge for struggling households. Those living in households headed by people with no high school degree are the most likely to enter poverty. Limited options in the job market make it hard for those without degrees the ability to find jobs that will pay above minimum wage. Many Americans earn less than the nation’s median income which hinders most Americans from living a life free of hunger. Children who grow up in poverty suffer more persistent, frequent, and severe health problems than do children who grow up under better financial circumstances. Children of poverty are at an extreme disadvantage and cycle ends up repeating itself until the pattern is somehow
In the world of economic competition that we live in today, many thrive and many are left to dig through trashcans. It has been a constant struggle throughout the modern history of society. One widely prescribed example of this struggle is Upton Sinclair's groundbreaking novel, The Jungle. The Jungle takes the reader along on a journey with a group of recent Lithuanian immigrants to America. As well as a physical journey, this is a journey into a new world for them. They have come to America, where in the early twentieth century it was said that any man willing to work an honest day would make a living and could support his family. It is an ideal that all Americans are familiar with- one of the foundations that got American society where it is today. However, while telling this story, Upton Sinclair engages the reader in a symbolic and metaphorical war against capitalism. Sinclair's contempt for capitalist society is present throughout the novel, from cover to cover, personified in the eagerness of Jurgis to work, the constant struggle for survival of the workers of Packingtown, the corruption of "the man" at all levels of society, and in many other ways.
In the early 1900's life for America's new Chicago immigrant workers in the meat packing industry was explored by Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle. Originally published in 1904 as a serial piece in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, Sinclair's novel was initially found too graphic and shocking by publishing firms and therefore was not published in its complete form until 1906. In this paper, I will focus on the challenges faced by a newly immigrated worker and on what I feel Sinclair's purpose was for this novel.
The notion of poverty has a very expanded meaning. Although all three stories use poverty as their theme, each interprets it differently. Consequently, it does not necessarily mean the state of extreme misery that has been described in ?Everyday Use?. As Carver points out, poverty may refer to poverty of one?s mind, which is caused primarily by the lack of education and stereotyped personality. Finally, poverty may reflect the hopelessness of one?s mind. Realizing that no bright future awaits them, Harlem kids find no sense in their lives. Unfortunately, the satisfaction of realizing their full potential does not derive from achieving standards that are unachievable by others. Instead, it arises uniquely from denigrating others, as the only way to be higher than someone is to put this person lower than you.
Poverty is “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions” (Merriam-Webster dictionary, 2015); in other words, struggling to provide a comfortable living style. It is the cause of family stress and many other problems, especially for the children. Millions of people around the world are struggling with poverty; families suffering to provide enough food seem to be growing in numbers. According to the United States Census Bureau, the poverty rate was highest in the 1960s and decreased greatly in the 1970s. However, it is now slowly starting to increase again. Recently released census data by the Bureau showed that one in five people are living in poverty (Census Bureau, 2014). Poverty is even
There are two ways to categorize poverty from a sociologist viewpoint. Absolute poverty simply refers to the condition in which one is unable to afford the necessities of life, whereas relative poverty refers to the condition in which one is unable to afford that which is considered a normal standard of living in society. Absolute poverty is far more worse than relative poverty because they could quite possible not have a house or food to live on for everyday survival. There are basically five different categories in which each poverty stricken person can be placed in. The first category are those who are not able to work because they are too old, too young, disabled, or tied down by social responsibility. The second category are those who are able and qualified to work but can not find work. The third category are those who are not equipped to fill available jobs either because they are undereducated or because their skills have become outdated. The fourth category are those whose social and personal problems have brought them to a point of self-defeating discouragement. The last category are those who are underpaid, or unable to get a fair price for what they have to sell. After defining which people are in poverty, these categories can answer my question of why are they in poverty and how they can be helped.
To begin, there are two main types of poverty in the world, non-income and income poverty (ZPRP). Non Income Poverty is when people may have money, but only a little to keep themselves alive (ZPRP). They don’t have the money to afford physical services and social events such as schooling, work, medicines, health care, sanitation, and transportation (ZPRP). The best way to condense the cause of non-income poverty is to make sure that individuals have access to inexpensive and exceptional social services, that they feel safe when in their homes and that they have family and friends to protect them when needed (ZPRP). Income poverty is when people are living on less than 1 dollar a day, which is far from the normal amount a family can survive on (ZPRP). They tend to not have fresh food and water, medicine, live in poor houses, sometimes no houses, and have dirty and ragged clothes (ZPRP). Just as there are many types of poverty, there are many effects to it to.