The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair was an expose on the life of those who lived in Packingtown, Chicago. Packingtown was where most of the people who was looking for work lived, it was a very crowded city. Job openings were scarce and most of the jobs were very unsafe. Most of the people in this part of town were poor, so they did not really have much doubts of food,. The Jungle exposed the horrific work conditions, the poor food quality, and the deceitfulness of the business owners. Working in Packingtown, Chicago was a nightmare because 99% of the jobs were very deleterious. Finding jobs were very scarce and there were not a lot of jobs that were great, so people had to take anything they could get. These jobs had no safety precautions or safety rules; employees got seriously injured daily and death would happen occasionally as an effect of on the job accidents. Some of the jobs were just detrimental to the employees’ health even without the accidents. The main character Jurgis took a job at a fertilizer mill and he started getting sick on the first …show more content…
The store owners in Packingtown are very sheisty. They tamper with the merchandise and then sell it for unreasonable prices. Sinclair exposed them when he said, “How could they find out that their tea and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with aniline dyes?” (56). This did not stop only with food items, they would also trick people into paying higher prices for the exact same item that is a lower cost. “...the man had wound up the first halfway and the second all the way, and showed the customer how the latter made twice as much noise...” (56). This is crazy because thy both are the exact same clock but he’s selling one for a dollar and the second a dollar
There was a kind of labors in the U.S. food industry stood on the floor with half an inch deep blood, and put up with the stench. But not only that, they worked faster, but earned less. In fact, they were immigrant labors, and this horrible treatment of them truly happened in the beginning of twenty centuries. The Jungle which was written by Upton Sinclair documented this inhuman treatment. However, a hundred years later, immigrants still suffer the harsh treatment in the modern food industry.
Ashwin Kumar Ms. Bergith Weber AP English Language/4 March 17, 2018 Independent Reading Lodestar Title: The title of this book is The Jungle.
It includes muckraking and yellow journalism which make it an excellent example of the type of journalism during this era. Muckraking was a type of journalism that was used to investigate and reveal scandalous or corrupt information. A clear example of muckraking and yellow journalism in Sinclair’s book is when he says, “All day long the blazing midsummer sun beat down upon that square mile of abominations: upon tens of thousands of cattle crowded into pens whose wooden floors stank and steamed contagion; upon bare, blistering, cinder-strewn railroad tracks and huge blocks of dingy meat factories, whose labyrinthine passages defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate them; and there are not merely rivers of hot blood and carloads of moist flesh, and rendering-vats and soup cauldrons, glue-factories and fertilizer tanks, that smelt like the craters of hell-there are also tons of garbage festering in the sun, and the greasy laundry of the workers hung out to dry and dining rooms littered with food black with flies, and toilet rooms that are open sewers,” (Sinclair 27). Yellow journalism is the use of exaggeration and sensationalism in writing. Sinclair’s uses both of these tactics to expose the horrific conditions of the meatpacking industry and the conditions the workers were forced to
In The Jungle , Upton Sinclair shows The corruption of the Industrial Age through his depiction of working conditions, wages, and living conditions. The working conditions were considered extremely bad in the industrial age. One was that no one could take a day off and if you didn’t go to work you job might not be there the next day. Another example of terrible working conditions was the danger that jurgis was in the Jungle.
The Jungle is a widely known book created by Upton Sinclair. Its mainly about a man by the name of Jurgis Rudkus and his family immigrating from Lithuania to Chicago for a better life in the Americas. The family finds a employment in a meat-packing factory. The family quickly realizes their dream becomes into a nightmare and it is not what they hoped for.
Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in order to improve worker conditions as well as sanitation in factories. Today, there has been little to none improvement in these fields, as exposed by the video Food Inc. Comparatively, The Jungle and Food Inc. demonstrate how America’s food sanitation and worker conditions have not changed substantially over the century separating them.
The thesis of this review mainly consists of the issue with the school use of Upton Sinclairs’s “The Jungle”. The relevance with the book is that within this review there is a negative critique on how it is described to the students in the classroom. The author of this review, Louise Carroll Wade, argues that teachers have been kind to Sinclair. She explains that this novel was made to “call attention to the plight of Chicago packinghouse workers who had just lost a strike against the Beef Trust”. Also, she express her idea of how scholars have uncritically accepted Upton Sinclair's descriptions of the terrifying working and unsanitary conditions of the Chicago meat packing industry in 'The Jungle”, where in reality it was more skeptical.
and it would fall into the meat grinder and it would still be packed and sold. The factories were not sanitary at all. Many of the animals that were used had diseases which could cause many to get sick. The book starts with the main characters Jurgis and Ona. They immigrated from Lithuania to Chicago and they have a wedding feast, which is in packingtown.
In the summer, “the hot weather there descended upon Packingtown a veritable Egyptian plague of flies” (103). However, he must continue to work; the possibility of losing his job poses a greater threat than injuring himself. Eventually, when he sprains his ankle, Jurgis cannot work. Disregarding the health of its workers in favor of their production, “the injury was not one that Durham and Company could be held responsible for” (116). This leads Jurgis to go three months without pay.
The Jungle was mainly written to inform the public of the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in Chicago factories, but it ended up being a huge proponent for socialism in addition to workers rights. Also, The Jungle focuses on the possible negative aspects of
The Bosses squeezed and drained the life of those men. In the book The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair he described the life of a struggling family try to work and stay alive in the filth. The working conditions in the factories were unsafe, unsanitary and people made little. The purpose of this book was for people to become socialist other than capitalist.
Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tension in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through his novel “The Jungle”. He used the story of a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, to show the harsh situation that immigrants had to face in the United States, the unsanitary and unsafe working conditions in the meatpacking plants, as well as the tension between the capitalism and socialism in the United States during the early 1900s. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, there were massive immigrants move into the United States, and most of them were from Europe. The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, like many other immigrants, have the “America Dream” which they believe America is heaven to them, where they can
The Harsh Reality Experiencing hardships will change people for the rest of their lives. It is easy to see in Chicago during the time of The Jungle. The people of Packingtown led hard lives; harder than one can imagine. In The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, Jurgis and his family suffer and experience hardships; some of the most traumatic hardships include the poor working conditions, the swindling of immigrants, and the death of family members.
Thus, Sinclair’s purpose of writing The Jungle failed to bring readers to advocate for the rights of workers trapped in the low wages, unsafe working conditions, and long hours of meatpacking factories, but rather, succeeded in opening the country’s eyes to the meatpacking practices that went on behind closed doors and the establishment administrations to protect the public from these unscrupulous
He describes in depth about the atmosphere and the environment when the family arrives in the city. Jurgis’ family witnesses a vast amount of pollution and how the day ‘’grew darker all the time’’(Sinclair 27). Moreover, the author illustrates the smoke coming from the factories when they reached Packingtown. Sinclair states, ‘’... immense volumes of smoke pouring from the chimneys darkening the air above making filthy the earth beneath’’ (Sinclair 27).