Exploring The Jungle: The True Impact of a Literary Masterpiece

Employers of these plants provided very little for their workers and paid them merely a fraction of what American citizens were originally paid. In fact, Sinclair wrote that “There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage.” Sinclair’s observance depicts employers as careless when it comes to how they treat their workers and how they run their businesses. There was also nowhere to eat in the factories, so workers were forced to either eat in the stench from which they work or they had to eat at the liquor store to escape the potent smells of the workplace. Injuries were also very common in the meat-packing plants. Fatigued workers became carless and since they were working with sharp knives, they often sliced off parts of their fingers. Most of the time, steam filled the air and men were running rampant with sharp objects, so Sinclair thought that it was “a wonder that there were not more men slaughtered than

Written at the turn of the 20th century, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle took place in an era of unprecedented advancement in civilization where the American economy had risen to become one of the wealthiest on the planet. However, Sinclair asserts that the rise of capitalist America resulted in the virulent corruption and competition that plighted society into an untamed “jungle.” Shown by the corruption of the Chicago meatpacking industry, Sinclair highlights the repulsive filth of human greed that was created as a byproduct of the economic boom. The effects of industrialism and the rise of untamed capitalism is what raped the superfluity of workers, like Jurgis Rudkus, of the opportunity to uncover prosperity in America. Not only does The Jungle capture the brutality and acceleration of corrupt capitalism and ruthless Darwinism during the Progressive Era, it also prompts resistance and displacement of the existing political system in favor of a socialist revolution. Through the novel, Sinclair demonstrates how the deterioration of the American Dream was exacerbated by the capitalist greed and corruption that eventually drove Jurgis and his family into mental degeneration and despair.

Laborers were forced to work in filthy facilities that had no lighting or place to wash their hands and materials. The dangers of the consumption of food and the unsafe and disease-ridden procedures the meatpacking and food agencies were performing needed to be addressed to the public. Likewise, muckrakers and journalists were people who reinforced public awareness on the food scam and heightened the ideals they were accompanying to. Finally, after the ongoing scandal, the public’s outcry sought Congress’s attention and the Pure Food and Drug Act along with the Meat Inspection Act were considered to prevent the sale, manufacture, and transportation of misbranded goods that were harmful to the human health and welfare. After months of debate between the Senate and the House, the act was signed by Roosevelt to protect the public and ensure that natural food was being processed to purchasers. In consequence to the new act passed, meat and food industries were required to provide hygienic and practicable conditions for their employees, regulate the standards of the products, and inspect the processing plants and food before

Despite almost a century separating two publications on the meat industry in the United States, the works of Upton Sinclair and Eric Schlosser contain eerily similar accounts in attempt to expose the dangers behind our food. These shocking revelations exposed by Sinclair and Schlosser have forever changed the way our nation views its food. Sinclair 's The Jungle and Schlosser 's Fast Food Nation discuss the topics of factory conditions and their safety, prevalence of immigrant workers, the conditions of animals and their health, and the corruption behind large corporations and the federal government. These overwhelming similarities have caused Schlosser to be compared to his predecessor Sinclair. Although each reading contains many similar elements, Sinclair and Schlosser had different intentions for the public reaction to their works.

There were no toilets, so human and rat excrement wound up in the meat, along with the rats themselves. These unsanitary details moved readers far more than the injustices inflicted on the workers. Other examples include the rechurning of rancid butter, the cutting of ice from polluted water and the doctoring of milk with formaldehyde. The average consumer was shocked to know that the “pure beef” was in fact contaminated and unfit for human consumption. Imagine

In 1906 Doubleday published a fiction novel based in reality and centered on immigrant life in the Chicago meat packing district. “The Jungle,” was written by Upton Sinclair, a 27 year old author from Baltimore under a $500 advance from a socialist newspaper. This novel soon became a focus of controversy and change within the United States. Though known more for it’s horrific portrayal of the conditions inside slaughterhouses, only 60 pages of the 413 pages that make up “The Jungle” detail the goings-on of the meat packing industry.Sinclair’s book was intended to be a political and social commentary on the plight of the worker during the turn of the century. Oddly enough, the story opens with a wedding.

Sinclair’s poetic imagery concerning the dead animals was to represent the fate of the workers, and instead made the reader sick to their stomach (Wilson). This misinterpretation, however, was powerful force which demanded an immediate change. The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act passed in 1906, and led to the development of the federal Food and Drug Administration (Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle). With the publication of The Jungle, Sinclair became internationally famous and even more involved in social issues. He went on to muckrake the steel and glass-making industry as well as continuing to lobby for meatpacking

For many who lived through it, the late 1900s, especially the 1980s, was a very tough time for Americans and immigrants alike. While America had to focus on repairing its country from the Vietnam War, a population surge, and the AIDS epidemic, immigrants were suffering from the xenophobic laws passed by American congress. The Haitian people, for instance, were running to America to get away from government tyranny and a severe economic depression, only to be turned away on a technicality. Even if they made it to America, they faced discrimination and poverty. It was a lose-lose situation for the Haitians. Upton Sinclair seemed to have a similar view of the Lithuanian immigrants of the 1800s. Upton Sinclair is the author of The Jungle, a book that follows a family of Lithuanian immigrants as they travel to and try to make their way in America. Sinclair used the book to speak out about the issues of America through the eyes of immigrants, including the economic system and the corruption within the government. The question this paper is required to answer is if Upton Sinclair adequately portrayed the immigrant experience. There are many reasons why one might say he didn’t, such as the fact that what he portrayed appears to be a worst case scenario and the fact that he, a white man, would not understand the turmoils of immigrant life. However, this paper is going to explain why others believe Upton Sinclair adequately portrayed the immigrant experience through The Jungle.

It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of mean and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go in the hoppers together.”# There was nothing the packers would not do to make a profit, if meat went bad they would pickle it or make sausage out of it, “there was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white-it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption.”# The Packers took no responsibilities for the sickness that these meats caused. It was not uncommon for people to die from sickness they had gotten from eating bad meat, this is also an issue in “The Jungle” when a young family member suddenly dies one morning, “it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that morning-which may have been made out of some of the tubercular pork that was condemned unfit for export.”# Disease was also a factor for the workers, as quoted from the book “Meat and Men “Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world.”# It was also not uncommon for people to fall into the vats and become lard. “The public revolted at the

Upton Sinclair is one of the most well known muckrakers from the Progressive Era(1890-1920). He was a writer who wrote about 100 books and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1904 he was sent to Chicago by the socialist newspaper,Appeal to Reason,to expose the meatpacking industry and created it into a novel called The Jungle. According to “Upton Sinclair's The Jungle:Muckraking the Meat-Packing Industry” it states, ‘“Almost as an afterthought, Sinclair included a chapter on how diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat products were processed, doctored by chemicals, and mislabeled for sale to the public. He wrote that workers would process dead, injured, and diseased animals after regular hours when no meat inspectors were around. He explained how pork fat and beef scraps were canned and labeled as "potted chicken."’ This is what Sinclair would write about in The Jungle. It became very

Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, was written about the meatpacking industry of Chicago in 1906. The inside look at the processes of the factories opened the eyes of the American people and led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Throughout the novel, Sinclair brings to light the true conditions in the meatpacking factories through the life of a family of Lithuanian immigrants. The atmosphere created by Sinclair in The Jungle is comparable to a literal jungle through concepts such as corporate hierarchy, Social Darwinism, and metaphorical language.

The dependence on meat and meat products in the United States is at an all-time high. Despite the great need for healthy and ethical meat, the procedures in meatpacking facilities have not been improved much in the past century. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser outlines some of the most important facts and realities facing slaughterhouse workers today. The problems with the food can be fixed with chemicals and the like, but the value of human life cannot be improved without the influence of government actions. There are still such injustices to the workers as sexual harassment, injuries that go unnoticed, and horrific treatment of sanitation workers.

Theodore Roosevelt appointed a special investigation commission to check out the claims, and their resulting reports were appalling. Roosevelt soon passed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 which would subject meat shipped over state lines to federal inspection.

Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, follows the life of Jurgis Rudkus, his Lithuanian family, and friends who all recently immigrated to Chicago in search of a better life. Jurgis, Ona, and the rest of their family find jobs in Packington, the meatpacking industry of Chicago. Quickly they discover the difficulties of surviving in the United States during the early 1900’s through financial troubles, unreliable work, illness, and swindling. Through his novel, Sinclair exploits the dangerous working conditions of the Chicago meatpacking industry, the health violations, and the struggles the workers face to make ends meet. Contrasted with today’s food industry and the fight for Food Justice, authors Raj Patel, Gottlieb, and Joshi address the similarities between Jurgis and meatpacking workers to the agriculture and industry workers of today. All face challenges such as the struggle to survive on low wages, hazards in the workplace, and the mental burdens these jobs impose on workers. Upton Sinclair exploits the corrupt environment of the meatpacking industry but issues such as worker wages, public health, and sanitation remain important issues today.

During the late 1800s rat droppings, assortments of putrid items,and chemicals were found in meats like, hams, sausages, and cans of meat. A man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of dried dung of rats. Upton Sinclair was a muckraker who wrote, “The Jungle”, which exposes the