The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution left America’s economy and cities in a prosperous state. Immigrants flocked to the United States in search of the American Dream, and rising cities like Chicago thrived off of the meat packing and steel industries. However, the American Dream for many newcomers wasn’t all that it seemed; corrupt political bosses and machines ruled major city politics, making the working and living conditions of immigrants employed for these corporations unsubstantial. After going undercover in a meat packing plant, muckraker Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906 to expose the repulsive conditions that the lower class worked in. An initial reading of this piece focuses strongly on the ideas of a capitalistic society …show more content…
In the animal kingdom, the most athletic and elite survive because they are constantly adapting to threatening forces, while the lower animals are terminated due to their inability to fight off their threats. As an immigrant, Jurgis is forced into employment at packingtown, where he is highly sought after due to his machine-like qualities; Jurgis notices that others are begging outside of the factory for jobs but are not immediately selected because their bodies are worn from years of working in other occupations. The cruel packingtown conditions eventually get the best of Jurgis after he becomes injured, and his body begins to wither. The quotation, “This wasn’t a world in which a man had any business with a family: sooner or later Jurgis would find that out also, and give up the fight and shift for himself” (139) encaptures how Jurgis eventually gives up on his family for survival, similarly to animals in the jungle having to abandon each other. Another example of Social Darwinism in the Jungle is the death of Dede Antanas. His passing supports this theory because Antanas was an elderly man that wasn’t capable of enduring the physical brutalities of the meat packing plant; the factory eroded his body, compared to a healthier, younger man that would’ve had a higher likelihood of survival. Additionally, the family wasn’t wealthy enough to give Antanas a funeral; they had to continue on with their everyday lives, which is similar to animals in a real jungle because they never have time to mourn because they have to focus on
This hard working, yet naïve immigrant leads his family from Lithuania to the one word of English he knows, Chicago. In the beginning of the novel, Jurgis believes a good, strong work ethic is the foundation for what any person needs to be successful in America, even opposing the very idea of a union. Upton Sinclair affirms this idea by writing, “But Jurgis had no sympathy with such ideas as this- he could do the work himself, and so could the rest of them, he declared, if they were good for anything. If they couldn’t do it, let them go somewhere else” (Sinclair, 43). But throughout the novel, it is exposed that greedy businessmen take advantage of unskilled workers by lowering wages and extending working hours because of the abundance of immigrants willing to work for less. For example, business leaders employed women and children at a fraction of the pay rate compared to men, which promoted institutionalized poverty and highlighted the lack of government influence in this economic period. Everyone is willing to undercut each other just to survive the machinery of capitalism, as evident by the title The Jungle, a cut throat competition for survival. Just like the cattle and pigs lined up to be slaughtered in Packingtown, wave after wave of immigrants lined up to be worn down and abused by the non-stop grind of dehumanizing conditions. Sinclair shows that the painful and toxic evils of capitalism are the driving force which keeps hard working immigrants like Jurgis from leaving their socio-economic
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.
Christopher Phelps’ Introduction states, “As a metaphor, ‘jungle’ denoted the ferocity of dog-eat-dog competition, the barbarity of exploitative work, the wilderness of urban life, the savagery of poverty, the crudity of political corruption, and the primitiveness of the doctrine of survival of the fittest, which led people to the slaughter as surely as cattle.”(1), this is the foundation to Sinclair’s arguments that capitalism promotes competition between the working-class for mere survival all the while destroying human rights
Upton Sinclair published his novel, The Jungle, in 1906 using elements of naturalistic fiction, with the idea that ordinary people cannot overcome the system, to convey his political agenda. He did this by writing about a fictional family that comes to Chicago from Lithuania with the promise of guaranteed work where they “might earn three roubles a day” and be “rich m[en] in the bargain” (Sinclair 24-25). He used the meatpacking industry to show the extreme affects a large scale industry can have on an individual and on a family and to draw sympathy from the reader for typical families in capitalist America, choosing to focus on the immigrant experience. The Jungle, however, not only describes the horrific working conditions and the failures
This is seen in the meatpacking industry where the conditions were horrific. Sinclair exposes the truth of Capitalism in America as hypocritical and deceitful. Furthermore, these changes in American society influenced the work of Upton Sinclair and particularly in “The Jungle”. Sinclair examines several societal changes during the turn of the century where his literature reflects the changes of a newly emerging
Several years before and after the turn the turn of the twentieth century, America experienced a large influx of European immigration. These new citizens had come in search of the American dream of success, bolstered by promise of good fortune. Instead they found themselves beaten into failure by American industry. Upton Sinclair wanted to expose the cruelty and heartlessness endured by these ordinary workers. He chose to represent the industrial world through the meatpacking industry, where the rewards of progress were enjoyed only by the privileged, who exploited the powerless masses of workers. The Jungle is a novel and a work of investigative journalism; its primary purpose was to inform the general public about the dehumanization
Although Jurgis knows it is going to be strenuous and difficult to work in the packing plants, he ambitiously proceeds each day. “Lithuanians are exploited inside the packing plant and cheated outside of it” (Woodress). Working in the packing plants was grueling and required much skill, and Jurgis did exceedingly well at the beginning of his job. He was even
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.
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.
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.
Following this wedding sequence the book catches its readers up on the status of Jurgis and the rest during the six months prior. A man of strong build, it did not take long for Jurgis to find work in the Chicago stockyards sweeping cow entrails into waste chutes on the killing floors of Brown’s slaughterhouse. The mechanics of the slaughterhouse are communicated with vivid detail – so much so that it is no wonder they became the primary subject readers latched onto when the book originally released. Among the most interesting slaughterhouse descriptions which Sinclair provides is that of the concept of “speeding up”, in which workers in certain positions at the slaughterhouse are trained and paid more to work faster in order to set the pace of the slaughterhouse’s disassembly machine and achieve a higher output. This exemplifies one of Sinclair’s issues with capitalism. In a capitalist society, the poor are kept in need, which makes them exploitable. Because there were many unemployed people looking for work at the stockyards at any given time, not performing at the dangerous pace set by others often meant giving up your job to someone more capable of or willing to
In his work, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair depicts the brutal story of a migrant Lithuanian family and their new life in America. The novel brings to life the harsh reality that Jurgis Rudkus and his family faced everyday in the Chicago Stockyards, known as Packingtown. Their preconceived dreams of America were slowly crushed by their daily struggle to make a life for themselves and to simply survive. As the story is unfolded, it becomes clear how the family and others were trapped in a greedy and unforgiving system. They poured themselves into working under the most horrendous conditions only to make a few pennies an hour and fall victims to the evil schemes of business owners and city officials. Eventually the story turns to what I believe
America is known as the golden opportunity to live a better life, have freedom, and liberty. Immigrants believe that America could improve their quality of life. Immigrants encountered extreme poverty in their countries and affording a family was impossible. However, the reality is much more horrendous and the true successors in the labor force are the wealthy business owners. The Jungle is a fictional novel by Upton Sinclair, reveals the real reality of working in the labor force in America and the dehumanizing of capitalism. The capitalist class took advantage of the working class by having them under their thumb and took away labor rights, threatening their freedom of speech, and abusing them physically and mentally. The working
The novel, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair depicts the lives of poor immigrants in the United States during the early 1900’s. Sinclair is extremely effective in this novel at identifying and expressing the perils and social concerns of immigrants during this era. The turmoil that immigrants faced was contingent on societal values during the era. There was a Social Darwinist sentiment
In the book, The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, the author describes the struggles and hardships of immigrants at the time of the gilded age in America. They faced low wages, no job security, outstanding cold, poverty, and starvation, to name just a few. Corrupt businesses and politics ruled at this time. To put it simply, America was not a great place for anyone of the lower class. So why would any foreigner ever want to come to America in the first place? The answer was that The United States held the whispers of success, fame and fortune to anyone. To an immigrant stuck in a poor social class at home, America seemed to have it all. Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, describes how alcoholism, poverty, and people in positions of power had a negative impact on the lives of immigrants.