Capitalism In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

Upton SInclair’s novel, The Jungle, is a novel based on the “Gilded Age” in american history. It is the life of a working man named Jurgis Rudkus and as the story progresses, it shows the corruption and dishonesty of the people during this time period, as well as their reasoning behind their actions. Also as the novel continued, it showed the author's inspiration for the title of this novel. Throughout the book, Upton Sinclair had scattered metaphors as to why Capitalism is corrupt and why Socialism is better. With subtle hints to social classes and how Jurgis progresses through them through corruption.

In the novel The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, the butchered animals within the factory represent the miserable lives of the immigrants and poor people of Chicago. Sinclair creates this representation through paralleling the experiences of the animals and the people. Both the animals and the people are oblivious as to their ultimate fate; the animals do not know that the factory is the path to their death, and the immigrants do not know of all the calamities that will befall them in the United States. The novel creates parallelism in the treatment of the animals and the people; both the animals and the people are treated in atrocious ways. Finally, there is considerable similarity between the indignant deaths of the animals and the people. Thus, from the beginning of the animals’ lives in the factory and the immigrants’ lives in the United States to the death of both the animals and the immigrants and poor people, there is resemblance between the animals and the people.

In the book The Jungle, Upton Sinclair portrays the life of a Lithuanian family and begins working in the unhealthy and unsanitary meat packing plants. Sinclair is part of the socialist party. Sinclair’s diction, imagery, and anaphora help expose the harsh, unhealthy working conditions that the workers faced in the meatpacking industry in order to put in laws that regulate the working conditions. Sinclair’s overall purpose is to promote Socialism to help the immigrants and others working get the fair and just treatment that they deserve.

The animals notice that the pigs and dogs do not produce any harvest by their own labour, yet they still consume the most of it. They are beginning to think things are worse than they were when Jones was there. They work longer hours and are not fed any better than before. Only Old Benjamin remembers that things, “ never had been, nor ever could be much better or worse - hunger, hardship, and disappointment being so he said, the unalterable law of

From 1865 to 1910, the Industrial Age was an interesting time of great economic growth and prosperity for the United States as a whole, however the American citizens who worked to push this positive chain of success paved the way and paid the cost for that very occurrence. In The Jungle, a family from Lithuania travels to the United States in order to gain a better living than what they had in their home country. During their time of adjustment to life within the United States, some members of the Rudkus and Lukoszaite family especially Jurgis Rudkus, experienced extreme hardship while attempting to develop their lives into a better state for the sake of their family’s wellbeing. Upton Sinclair opens a small window into the lives of hopeful and hardworking immigrants to reveal how America’s Industrialization Age hindered many from true freedom. This was due to a lack of care for employees and their wellbeing in the workplace, poor sanitary conditions that led to unhealthy living conditions for workers, and political corruption which was held over certain citizens in order to allow corruption to thrive, making workers remain powerless.

Although it was a shocking and revolutionary exposure to the hazardous environment of the meat-packing plants of Chicago in 1906, The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, proves to still be relevant in modern day due strains of bacterial diseases contaminating meat and produce, and causing illness to the public. In its time, the content of The Jungle was supposed to illustrate the demeaning means of which labor was carried out in a new world of industrialization. Sinclair had a goal of exposing the horrid lifestyle impeded on a certain immigrant worker (and many more in the same situations), and ended up causing a revolutionary change in the working conditions of meat-packing factories in cities all across the United States. President Theodore

     While the works of Upton Sinclair are not widely read today because of their primacy of social change rather than aesthetic pleasure, works like The Jungle are important to understand in relation to the society that produced them.  Sinclair was considered a part of the muckraking era, an era when social critics observed all that was wrong and corrupt in business and politics and responded against it.  The Jungle was written primarily as a harsh indictment of wage slavery, but its vivid depictions of the deplorable lack of sanitation involved in the meatpacking industry in Chicago resulted in public outrage to the point where Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection

The Jungle Book was a book written by Upton Sinclair in 1905 which discussed the meatpacking industry. It exposed the industry as a dirty industry that was not very well regulated at all and that the meat that they produced was often contaminated and could make individuals who ate it very ill. This caused major outrage throughout America and in 1906 a meat inspection bill was passed by Congress so that the meat industry could be regulated so individuals would not have to eat dirty meat like they did before. This showed the power of the Progressive Era as a major flaw in regulations was shown in 1905 and just a year later there was major legislation passed which was there to regulate the industry to protect the consumers.

In an eye opening novel entitled The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, the author tells a story in which exposes the gut wrenching and shocking facts of what actually goes on in these food processing and meat packing factories in an urban Chicago during the early 1900s. Sinclair does a wonderful job at exposing what actually happened behind these factory doors and informs the reader of the unsanitary process in which animals were transformed into meat products. However when reading this novel one must take into consideration that Sinclair’s main concern was not only the disgusting products produced but the employees that produced them as

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a book set in the Stockyards of Chicago in the early 1900’s. The book has multiple characters, but it mainly follows the character of Jurgis Rudkus who is a Lithuanian man struggling to get by once he moves to America with his love interest and family. This book brought attention to major problems and scandals in the industries, and therefore brought change to the States that is still visible to this day. One of the many conflicts during this time were companies selling spoiled or diseased meat.

A muckraker, an investigative journalist that draws attention to problems, is not particularly what I would call myself. However, many people seem to believe in the idea that I, Upton Sinclair, have changed the American food industry for the better by exposing the meatpacking industry. The Jungle, my first successful novel out of many failed ones, used Jurgis Rudkus, an immigrant from Lithuania who got a job in meatpacking, to uncover the unfortunate truth of the industry. It all started when my Socialist contacts told me to go for a journaling job in Chicago to write about meatpacking, out of which I came up with the novel. After being published in 1906 and selling millions of copies worldwide, The Jungle created a public scare that would

The major issues Sinclair addressed in The Jungle are Capitalism. The explosive growth of American industry in the late nineteenth century caused a similar expansion in the work force. Working conditions in the new urban industrial zones were wretched, and a progressive reform movement soon grew out of the need to address the health and welfare of the American worker. In 1905, Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), a young socialist journalist and novelist, received a $500 advance to write a novel about abuses in the meat processing industry and spent seven weeks investigating the subject in Chicago. His novel, The Jungle (1906), shows the unsanitary and dangerous conditions in the plants, was an immediate best-seller and incited President Roosevelt to

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a story about a family that travels to America in hopes of living the “American dream”. Once they arrive, they soon find that dream is not so easy to obtain. Throughout the book he stresses that socialism is the answer and capitalism is evil. I enjoyed this reading because it really showed what it was really like at the time. People were dreaming of freedom and having the white picket fence house, but in reality most people were struggling to just stay alive.

Conner denies everything in court so Jurgis gets thrown in jail. If Conner had told the

Christopher Phelps, ed. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), 363 pages with related documents.