...Upton Sinclair authored The Jungle in order to expose Americans to the plight of the lower classes by telling the story of an immigrant extended family that travels to America in the hopes of finding a new beginning. America was “a place of which lovers and young people dreamed,” (Sinclair 27) but Sinclair shows us that this dream was actually a nightmare through his depiction of the cruel reality where the immigrants were unable to improve their lives and were powerless to prevent themselves from experiencing many tragedies, most of which were directly or indirectly caused by the upper-class. In order to emphasize the relative strength and weaknesses of the working class and those in power, he entitled the book The Jungle, and included fictitious stories to emphasize the helplessness of the immigrants, despite their willingness to work. By making this a work of fiction, instead of a non-fiction book and recounting the true, horrible stories of the people he had encountered and interviewed during his thorough research, he was able...
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...Emily Andes Mr. Hardy AP English 3 Period 2 Literary Analysis Essay The Jungle and Fast Food Nation have become two worldwide known books for exposing the meat industry, and both were able to change the viewpoints of many people on what they eat. With the meat sales sky rocketing since 1961, our society can thank the inspections and production side of the meat industry. The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, was one of the first books to uncover the gruesome side of the meat packing factories. With this book the world was introduced to the exposed side of the meat factories in unsanitary conditions. Of course, Sinclair’s intention was not to write The Jungle in an effort to unveil the dirty side to the meat packing factories, but it was intended to be a love story between a young couple immigrating from Lithuania to the United States. Along with The Jungle is Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. The statistical side of this book was also intended to expose the meat industry but by humiliating fast food restaurants and where their meat products were coming from. People were appalled by the facts this book gave, and they began having new perspectives on fast food. Overall, Fast Food Nation appeals to readers’ senses of ethos pathos and logos then The Jungle does. First of all, Schlosser does a much better job of convincing people to change their views on fast food products and all meat products in general. His diction choices are pedantic and factual, his details become emotional...
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...Overview Upton Sinclair illustrates The Jungle with frightening detail, obviously making us ponder the question- “Do you think a man could make up a thing like that out of his head?” (page 269). The story follows a young Lithuanian, Jurgis, his newly wed wife, Ona, and the rest of his Slavic family. They immigrate to Chicago and a place called Packingtown, where the only work to be found there is in the cruel, merciless machinery inside the meat and canning factories. Jurgis finds himself quickly in debt without the pay he needs for his family and him; his deprivation of money coming from the lack of pay he’s getting from the painful factories he works in. After losing some of his loved ones to the diseases and terrible treatment of the workers, and the citizens no less, Jurgis and Ona find themselves struggling for survival, and Jurgis finds himself in jail after assaulting his wife’s boss (for raping Ona). The agony eats at him in his thirty days of imprisonment, only to find that his family has lost the house and is living deeply in poverty. What’s worse- his second son is stillborn to his wife who dies giving birth. With the loss of Ona, Jurgis goes into a dark depression, especially with him fighting to find another job. His only joy in his world is his baby son, Antanas, who dies from drowning about a year later. Having lost his only son and desperately trying to find a job, for he was blacklisted, Jurgis gives up and decides to “hobo it” as he hitches a ride and travels...
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...but one gigantic lie.” was written by Upton Sinclair in his book, The Jungle. In his book, he tells about a story of Jurgis Rudkus, who comes to America with full of hopes and dreams with his family from Lithuania and finds a job in Brown's slaughterhouse in Chicago. But life isn’t match with his American dream. Catastrophes ensuse to him. His loses his job because of work injury. His wife, Ona, is raped by her boss. Jurgis is under arrest because of beating the boss. Ona dies in dystocia and his son drowns. Everythings keeps eroding his...
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...Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle Upton Sinclair wrote his book The Jungle in 1906. This book was a huge success. Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland. Sinclair grew up poor with his mother and father. His mother sent him to his richer family on his mother's side. He started to write children’s stories and humor pieces in magazines at age 14. He also he started writing stories at age 16. At 18, he graduated from New York City University. After the success of The Jungle, Sinclair started to write more books with a political message. To write the book, The Jungle, Sinclair had to go undercover at a meat packing factory and expose how the industry had mistreated workers and had unsanitary conditions. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, is the book that he is most known for because it was able to change the law, it fit into a popular kind of writing called muckraking, and his political views were different from most peoples’ in America....
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...After the Civil War, writers, photographers, and many other people in the media attempted to convince the government to create new laws. Upton Sinclair attempted to write a Socialist book, describing the immense injustices against the workers, but the American people were more focused on food quality than anything else. So within months, two pieces of legislation resulted from Sinclair's novel: The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both signed into law on June 30th, 1906. Many other writers followed suit and convinced the American people to raise awareness so that the government could change the ways of large industries. The media in the early 20th century raised awareness for the reprehensible monopolies and unsafe working conditions, which led the government to enhance the worker safety and develop anti-trust laws throughout the country. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair berated the meat packing...
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...The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was one of the few works of art in American history to have a massive and important impact on society. Sinclair was part of an era when people witnessed all that was wrong and corrupt in business and politics, they stood up against it. The Jungle was criticizing the wage of the working people. Upton Sinclair revels intense representations of the shocking lack of hygiene involved in the labor field such as the meatpacking industry in Chicago. After this was exposed it resulted in public outrage to the point where the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act was passed by congress. The Jungle became part of the era when the industry was quickly progressing and millions of immigrants moved to the...
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...During the Progressive Era, meat packing company owners in Chicago did not care how the product got handled or who handled it, all they wanted was the money that came with it. Working in the meat packing industry was dangerous for various reasons and consuming the product they packed was equally as dangerous. Going by what Upton Sinclair wrote in his book The Jungle, a person can assume that working in the meat packing industry of Chicago was Hell on Earth. The reason one can assume that is, by the way, Sinclair narrates on how a character in his book named Jurgis, feels about working in that specific industry.: He was working in the steaming pit of hell; day after day, week after week—until now, there was not an organ of his body that did its work without pain, until the sound of the ocean breakers echoed in his head day and night, and the buildings swayed and danced before him as he went down the street. And from all the unending horror of this there was a respite, a deliverance—he could drink! He could forget the pain, he could slip off the burden; he would see clearly again, he would be master of his brain, of his thoughts, of his will. His dead self would stir in him, and he would find himself laughing and cracking jokes with his companions—he would be a man again and a master...
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...The Horrors of Packingtown Living and Dying in Packingtown, Chicago is an expert from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which told the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant trying to survive in Chicago. Sinclair wrote The Jungle with hopes to achieve better working conditions all around the United States, but also to show the corruption and evil that come with capitalism. His book was an instant best seller and caused massive reform of the meatpacking industry, however, this reform was focused on health concerns rather than concerns for the workers. “‘I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,’ he said.” (BLACKWELL) Living and Dying in Packingtown, Chicago opens into the struggles of life at home for immigrant family with the painful death of their child, Kristoforas, who had eaten some tubercular beef which was unfit for export. The family could not afford a grave so the mother, Elzbieta, went in tears to beg from their local neighbors for a proper burial. This opening brings the reader instantly into the situation this family is in and what dire state of poverty they faced. Jurgis, having no job and a family to feed, went to the dreaded fertilizer plants which were talked about mostly in feared rumor. “Few visitors ever saw them, and the few who did would come out looking like Dante, of whom the peasants declared that he had been into hell.” (p. 74) Only the desperate resort to working at the fertilizer plants which was where all the “tankage”...
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...Andrew Middleton 2/23/15 History 100c The Jungle: Diluted Dreams From the 1880’s though the 1920’s, industries in America were steadily on the rise, followed diligently by its population. Immigrant’s traveled from across the world with a single shared fantasy in mind: that the wealthy and prosperous America, through its abundant opportunities, would provide them with a respectable form of employment and a presentable household for the upbringing of their families. The Jungle is a very distinct type of book that looks at various aspects of the past and modern day inter-workings of the American society. Witten by Upton Sinclair, his main purpose was to raise awareness of his anit-capitalism message by means of specific details and cunning symbolism. The arrangement of the novel depicts the corrupt capitalism in the years of the early 1900's. The book captures the dramatic changes occurring at the turn of the turn of the turn of the century. Its central focus is to portray the unspeakable working conditions in the meat-packing industry in many large cities and specifically in Chicago. Western America was known as the frontier because of its undeveloped landscape but Manifest Destiny was initiating industrial growth that was disperse throughout the country. All these job openings attracted thousands and thousands of immigrants into America and especially into the urban parts of major cities because most of them had no other means of bringing in money. They were unaware of the...
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...The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Compared to Modern Day Meat Processing The theme of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle is that capitalism is the devil. In the novel, capitalism is made out to be absolutely evil, one reason being that they (the meat companies) willfully put contaminated meat on the market for the oblivious consumers. There are several ways that the meat-packing practices from the novel are similar to how meat is processed today. The first similarity is that slaughterhouses were and have been treating animals very brutally; also, the slaughterhouses in the book were just as unsafe to work in as the slaughterhouses today. People are taking major risks just by going to work. The second similarity is that contaminated meat is being sold and served to the consumers. Another similarity is that if you get hurt on the job and become disabled for several months, a lot of companies will stop paying you or possibly lay you off. The last similarity between The Jungle and modern-day meat processing is that meat companies can and will sue you or throw you in jail if you “spill the beans” or defend yourself or your family. First of all, the slaughterhouses and meat factories are just as filthy, cruel, and unsafe as the slaughterhouses and meat factories from the early nineteen-hundreds (time period in which The Jungle takes place). The novel says that animals are brought into pens, suffer, and are slaughtered. In slaughterhouses today, animals are rounded up, placed somewhere...
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...mass poverty in Europe. This new group of immigrants were often poor and uneducated and were likely considered peasants in their own countries. Jurgis Rudkus, a fictionalized character in Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle is an example of such a person. Jurgis is from Lithuania and comes to America in search of the American dream. At the beginning of the novel Jurgis comes to America as any other typical European immigrant. He dreams of America as being a land where a man with little can rise through the ranks and ultimately become a man with wealth and prosperity. Jurgis quickly realizes that industrial America is a land of heartache, where a willing man is exploited and used as energy to fuel the never ending industrial machine. At the end of the novel Jurgis learns that the great land of America has its limitations, but at a cost as he loses his wife and child and spends stints in jail for trying to defy the machine. Thus, the novel, The Jungle exemplifies how immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the early 1900s could not fully realize and achieve the American dream no matter how hard they toiled and worked in the brutal American factories of the time. A jungle is an area of madness and chaos where animals roam free and one either eats or is eaten. Upton Sinclair titled his novel, The Jungle because urban Chicago exemplified all of the same traits that a jungle possessed except for the fact that the jungle of...
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...In the 1900s , meat industry workers worked in awful conditions . A muckraker named Upton Sinclair exposed the meat industry in his book “ The Jungle “ . A muckraker is someone who seeks out the secrets of business or scandel and exposes them for the public to see . Sinclair himself was a writer . The meat produced in the plants was extremely unsanitary . When they first read it , the public was absolutely horrified . In the slaughterhouses , there would be meat that had tumbled onto the floor , in dirt and sawdust , and had billions of germs on it . When it rained , water would fall onto it through cracks in the ceiling . Rats would often gather round the meat , and the meat itself was often covered in rat waste . Dead rats would be thrown...
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...The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was a very interesting novel, for example, throughout the novel Upton Sinclair tells a story about a family who immigrated to Chicago from Lithuania who wanted to purse a better life. Furthermore, Sinclair uses objective language because he gives all the details of the ups and downs of the events of Jurgis family having to face in the U.S. meat-packing industry. The intended audience of The Jungle is the citizen of Chicago who wants to know more about historican events. In addition, Sinclair uses serious and informal tone in the novel. For example, Sinclair uses serious tone to show how the truth behind business of Chicago jobs, also he uses informal tone to demonstrate the business of Chicago as well. However, there are enough evidence offered throughout the novel, Sinclair uses imagery to give readers a sense of what to think of when they are reading the events of the...
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...Welcome to Packingtown Fraudulent, nauseating, greedy, mortifying - these are all words to describe the Chicago meat packing industry. A coalition of wicked, lying companies made up a large sum of Chicago’s economy in the 19th to 20th century. The Chicago meatpacking industry was a corrupt, vulgar group of corporations that incited fraudulent monopolization, disgusting work conditions, unfit meat products, low wages that trapped immigrants in poverty, and was the reason for founding the Food and Drug Administration. In the beginning of Union Stockyards, the area in which the packers kept their livestock, there were four major companies, Armour, Swift, Morris, and Hammond. Armour & Co. first came to the stockyards in 1863, founded by...
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