The scenes that I encountered when reading about the meat packaging industry in the early 1900's were very graphic. Some images were more graphic than others. The first scene that comes to mind when I think about the passage "The Jungle" was the huge iron wheel with pigs on it. This scene sticks out in my mind because I can almost see the pigs squealing as they are ripped away by their feet up higher and higher into the air. I can also see the massive "river" of hogs awaiting their turn to be chained up by the burly Negro. Another scene that is easy to describe is the scene where the "knockers" struck the cows on the head with a sledge hammer. In this scene all I can imagine is worn out man who has swung a sledge all day. This man would have to be worn out in a couple of years due to the physical demand. The next scene im going to describe is the scene in the steaming room. This is probably one of the most disgusting scenes in the entire text. Knowing all the germs that could possibly be there and the fact that there was new germs brought in every hour. The odor those men had to have worked in would have been gut wrenching.
The bubbly creek was the part of the Chicago river into which all the blood, lard, hair, and any other possible thing that came off of a pig or cow was swept into. The idea that a man came along and collected the film that formed on the top and sold it as "pure lard" is appalling. And to think that unsuspecting families purchased the waste and then cooked with it.
One of the jobs the men in the factory could apply for was the "knocker." This was the man who would knock out the cows before they were slid out of the "killing bed." Another job there was in the factory was the "butcher" this guy was the one who was to bleed out the cow. The way in which he did this was to make one swift stroke to the cow. After which the cow was hung to bleed out. The "headsman" was one of the other jobs men had in the factory. It was his job to make two or three swift strikes to the neck and severe the head in the fastest manner possible.
Upon his 1906 publishing of The Jungle, Sinclair was coined as an avid “muckraker” when President Roosevelt addressed an audience in April of that year. When asked whether or not the novel provided a realistic account of workers conditions within the Chicago meat packing industry, Roosevelt accused Sinclair of being a liar in an attempt to discredit him. A large part of this was credited to Roosevelt’s personal distaste for Sinclair’s apparent link to the Socialist party but, Roosevelt was also unaware that Sinclair had worked undercover at the plant to gather first hand and accurate accounts. The Jungle shined light on the poor working conditions of workers in a meat packing facility. Throughout the novel, Sinclair gave gruesome examples of what workers went through each and every day. Each department of the facility was faced with its own risks and challenges, “There were the wool pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with
The United States of America is known as the land of opportunity and dreams. People dream of migrating to this nation for a chance of a better a life. This belief has been around for many years, ever since the birth of the United States; therefore it’s a factor in which motivate many people migrate to the United States. Upton Sinclair, author of the Jungle, narrates the life of a Lithuanian family and there struggles with work, crime, family loss, and survival in the city of Packingtown. Sinclair expresses her disgust as well as the unbelievable truth of life in the United States involving politics, corruption, and daily struggle that many suffered through in the 19th and 20th century.
While The Jungle was by far Sinclair’s most famous work, what many are not aware of is the fact that The Jungle was initially written as an expose for a well-known socialist newspaper in the country, Appeal to Reason. Although Sinclair once said he were to write the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the labor movement”, he did so not by merely speculating what the meat packing industry was like, but by actually experiencing the lifestyle firsthand. Upton Sinclair went to the packing plants himself in order to truly gain the experience of what it was like to work in the stockyards as well as communicating directly with employees, laborers, social workers, and locals to truly grasp what life was like in a place like Packingtown. It was not until Sinclair was able to take all of his experiences in that he was able to sit down and write an accurate and to some, frightful expose of what the meat packing industry
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).
In today's society, relationships of all different kinds become more and more accepted each day. However, when it comes to interracial relationships, people still hold opposing viewpoints on the matter. For the most part, peoples' viewpoints all boil down to two beliefs; the traditional belief and the popular culture belief. People who follow the traditional belief are seen as more proud of and loyal to their culture/heritage and tend to be more segregated than others. They feel that when someone of their own culture dates someone outside of their own culture, he or she is "wanting to escape" from his or her cultural identity. On the other hand, popular culture belief sees people not by the color of their skin nor by their culture, but rather
During the Progressive era, consumer safety was a hot issue. In Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, there were many disturbing things the American people learned about the meat packing industry. After people saw that their meat had dead rats and tuberculosis many did not want to buy any meat. People were disgusted by the things that they could buy without knowing what it was. This brought about stricter health codes and made the consumers have a little more peace of mind.
The Progressive movement of the 1900’s was the most important event to occur in the United States during the twentieth century. Progressives at first concentrated on improving the lives of those living in slums and in getting rid of corruption in government. The goal was to make working conditions better for the workers. True reform needed to happen. The workers of America believed this to be the best nation with opportunities for all people. Reform started with industrialization. Workers needed healthy and safe places to work, especially for women and children who were considered vulnerable and weak during that time period. Women and children over 14 worked at meat trimming sausage making and canning. “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair in one example in which the appalling working conditions in the meat-packing industry was exposed. His description of the filth that was so apparent which shocked the public and led to new federal food safety laws now known as the Food and Drug Administration. Progressives had started to attack huge corporations like the Armour meat-packing company for their unjust practices such as workers treated as “wage slaves”. Workers earned just pennies on the hour and worked ten hour days, six days a week. The unskilled workers are the ones who made and worked these long laborious hours. Therefore, unskilled immigrant men did the backbreaking and dangerous work, often in dark, unventilated rooms which were hot in summer and cold in with no heat in the winter. Many stood for hours on floors which were covered with blood and scraps of meat.
“Woodworker” is a very broad term for a large number of jobs. Anything made out of wood was made by some type of woodworker. The carpenter was responsible for building houses. He made planks out of logs. He used the planks to make shingles and boards, which were given to the joiner so he could finish the roof. The joiner was responsible for finishing the house. He made doors, windows, and roofs with shingles. There was the cabinetmaker, who was responsible for making a wide variety of furniture. This included cabinets, dressers, candlestands, chairs, and tables. The carpenter was the head craftsman, but he had many slaves and other people working for him. This shows that the woodworker had a very wide variety of tasks to do. Woodworking provided employment for many settlers. The woodworker could not do all of these tasks with just his hands, he needed tools.
Imagine going to work and being sprayed by a scorching splash of molten metal. Wouldn't that be just terrible? Unfortunately for the working-class Americans of the early 20th century (who worked in a steel-factory of sorts), this hellish scene was a reality for them (Sinclair 215). Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, a ficticious yet all-the-more realistic novel about the Chicago meat packing industry (and just working/life conditions in general for city-dwelling Americans at the time), follows Jurgis Rudkus --- A Lithuanian immigrant trying to live the “American dream”. Unfortunately, that dream is crushed under the deepest and darkest aspects of Capitalism through terrible working conditions, appalling living situations, homelessness/unemployment, and unfair legal and political procedures. These obstacles make excellent examples as for why some rules and regulations are needed in our otherwise Capitalistic society.
Despite many people working for companies that cared so little for their employees, upper class citizens had no idea what was going on behind closed doors. It took muckrakers, investigative journalists who exposed the horrors of factory jobs, for the wealthy to see what poor, immigrant workers had to do for a living. Even the president at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, was not fully aware of what conditions these workers were subjected to. He sent two trusted men to investigate a certain meat-packing facility, and The Neill-Reynolds Report was the result. In this report, it was revealed to Roosevelt, along with the nation, that the men “saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors… in most cases damp and soggy…” and that the workers arrived every day to their jobs only to face “the expectoration of tuberculosis and other diseased workers,” (Doc B). Not only did people in the meat-packing industry have to work in dangerous conditions, but their health was at serious risk as well, from both fellow employees and the raw meat that was handled daily. Fortunately, once word of this reached President Roosevelt, he passed the Federal
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.
From the start of the Civil War until the 1920's Chicago was home to the countries largest meat packing facilities; Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Nelson Morris. As much as 85 percent of consumer meat in the US came from Chicago's vast packing plants. Behind the companies were around 25,000 employees, making up almost half of the entire US meatpacking work force. Most of the employees were underpaid immigrants who spoke little to no english and made a meager one cent an hour. The highest an employee could aspire to was being a "butcher" who were considered the most skilled workers and made up to fifty cent an hour. Workers slaved away in gruesome, unsafe conditions for ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week. Laboring through the ear deafening shrieks of animals a slaughter, treading over slick blood soaked floors, suffering in unventilated rooms and constantly breathing in the vile, putrid smell of every that was the slaughter house. In 1904 the meatpacker union in Chicago went on strike and demanded better wages and working conditions, but the strike didn't even slow down p...
The Jungle caused such an outcry that President Roosevelt tried to mandate government enforcement of sanitary and health standards in the food industry. After Congress wouldn’t pass a meat inspection bill, Roosevelt released the findings of the Neill-Reynolds report. The Neill-Reynolds’s report found that the meat packing industry was as horrendous as Sinclair claime...
The sunset was not spectacular that day. The vivid ruby and tangerine streaks that so often caressed the blue brow of the sky were sleeping, hidden behind the heavy mists. There are some days when the sunlight seems to dance, to weave and frolic with tongues of fire between the blades of grass. Not on that day. That evening, the yellow light was sickly. It diffused softly through the gray curtains with a shrouded light that just failed to illuminate. High up in the treetops, the leaves swayed, but on the ground, the grass was silent, limp and unmoving. The sun set and the earth waited.
Many poets are inspired by the impressive persona that exists in nature to influence their style of poetry. The awesome power of nature can bring about thought and provoke certain feelings the poet has towards the natural surroundings.