...“The Jungle” American Protest Literature Analysis 211 In Class Essay In the early 20th century, America was in the process of becoming the most industrial cities in the world. With the increase of factories across the country, stories were becoming more popular. One the most well-known stories from the novel titled “The Jungle”, written by Upton Sinclair. In the American Protest Literature text, I was able to see certain chapters of Upton Sinclair’s novel which peeked my interest. Upton’s techniques of persuading the readers, during that time, were able to have the realization of the harsh conditions of working the factory, however many of the readers have had a negative opinion towards his novel, believing it supporting communistic views. While I was unable to read the full novel, I was able to read certain important chapters from “The Jungle” by reading its section in American Protest. The story is about the Sinclair’s main protagonist named “Jurgis”, who is an immigrant from Europe. When he moves to America with his family, he starts to witness the harsh...
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...Impacts of The Jungle on American Society As Judith Lewis Herman exhorted in her novel, Trauma and Recovery, "The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness” (“Trauma and Recovery Quotes”). However, a nationwide nerve was struck when the grotesque meat- packing industry was revealed by Upton Sinclair. He blazoned to Americans across the country the lurid details of the industry though his novel, The Jungle, a novel which changed American history. [This scathing review on the meat packing industry with socialist undertones brought an advent of great social and legal change to the United States.] With its stunning entrance into American literature in 1906, The Jungle created an uproar that has endured over a century since its publication. Upton Sinclair was an ardent proponent of socialism in America and yearned to reform the ailing country (Fogel). His novel was produced as a metaphor, comparing a jungle directly to the corrupt meat packing industry based in Chicago. Sinclair sought to expose the unknown atrocities hidden in the meat packing industry, which was not forced to obey any form of regulation (Shafer). Sinclair wrote that, “It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory” (Sinclair 56). This fictional piece of literature brought America to a screeching halt. Never before had such a bold statement been made about an industry that affected almost every single American. Upton’s...
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...then on getting rid of corruption in government. (Constitutional Rights Foundation) Journalists of this time took advantage of the opportunity to show the American people how corrupt many of the health systems were. In 1902, magazine publishers discovered that their sales increased dramatically when they highlighted popular stories of political corruption, corporate misconduct, or other offenses. (Gilder Lehrman Institute) The novelist Upton Sinclair also played a large role during this new era in the fight...
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...Black Gold HST 370.05 Prof. Hoikkala October 19, 2015 In Oil! by Upton Sinclair, published by Penguin Books, Sinclair writes to expose the corrupt oil industry in California through the education of both readers and main character, Bunny Ross, on the proceedings for success in the oil business, including bribery and propaganda. Through the start of the book, the reader learns that the main characters father is a rising business man on the verge of becoming a magnate, although only through bribery of politicians and land proctors. Unfortunately Bunny sees both from a upper class and a lower class frame of reference and does not wish to abuse his power and take advantage of the lower class, yet still become a rich individual such as his father. This battle between the classes is seen with Bunny’s fight in favor of workers unions and against religion, using propaganda to aide him. I chose to write on this novel because I was familiar with Sinclair’s work in The Jungle, and after researching more about this book and his inclusion into the real-time history of California and how big of an impact Sinclair caused, I couldn’t choose another book to interest me as much as Sinclair engages his readers. The idea of capitalism and the processes in its execution always grab my attention due to their need for wealth and lack of inclusion from outside aide in order to better increase their wealth. Sinclair is also excellent in his ability to give a rich character development, leaving...
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...Throughout History there have always been constant debates of ways to improve the lives of U.S citizens by reducing the imperfections of the criminal justice system as well as eliminating the risk of unwholesome products in their everyday lives. For example, in the novel The Jungle, Upton Sinclair exposes the unwholesome and unsanitary practices of the meatpacking industry during the early 1900s. Furthemore, Sinclair was a 'muckraker' or journalist who exposed the immoral practices of the meatpacking industry in order to push for mandatory meat inspection; however, President Roosevelt viewed the novel as an exaggeration of the truth of the matter and personally inspected the industry's practices themselves. Thereafter, Roosevelt discovered...
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...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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...Upton Sinclair was an American author who made many changes that contribute to today’s society. He was born on September 20th, 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland and passed away November 25th, 1968 in Bound Brook, New Jersey. You see, Sinclair has been through a rough road throughout his life. However, the obstacles he faced only made him achieve so much. What hurt him, made him stronger. For example, his father, Upton Beall Sinclair, was an alcoholic and eventually drank himself to death. Alcohol left Sinclair fatherless with only one parent. When his father was around, the money situation was very limited considering his father spent his earnings on alcoholic beverages. His family was very dependent on his father. Upton Sinclair has once stated , "...as far back as I can remember my life was a series of Cinderella transformations; one night I would be sleeping on a vermin-ridden sofa in a lodging house, and the next night under silken coverlets in a fashionable home. It all depended on whether my father had the money for that week's board.". Sinclair’s...
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...industry making him one of the world’s richest men. His rags-to-riches story epitomizes the immigrant success story. While Carnegie was a firm believer in the importance of philanthropy and the potential of the laboring class, the rise of business and industry created a widening gap between the rich in the poor by the late nineteenth century. This discrepancy of wealth and unjust activity within business and political enterprises became commonly discussed in writings of the day. Over the course of seven weeks in 1904, journalist Upton Sinclair entered Chicago’s meatpacking industry and...
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...In 1906, Upton Sinclair's Book The Jungle was published in book form; it had previously been published as a newspaper serial in 1905. Few works of literature have changed history in the United States so much as The Jungle did when it was published. Does Sinclair Lewis make a compelling argument for socialism in his book, The Jungle? I think that the answer to this question is going to be dependent on what you end up believing about socialism. A die hard socialist is probably going to point to Sinclair's ending with zeal and passion because it proves that Jurgis could only find a home when renouncing capitalism and its perverse interpretation of the American Dream. I think that Sinclair believed in the socialist ending of his novel. Yet, I want to pivot the question a bit. While the socialist claim might not be persuasive, like Marx himself, Sinclair is probably more eloquent on suggesting that the current capitalist system, the one being written about at the turn of the century, is in desperate need of repair. His persuasion might lie in his critique of capitalism more than his embrace of socialism. “The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, exposed the nauseating conditions of Chicago’s meat packing industry.” (Goldfield, David R. The American Journey: A History of the United States.) He couldn't have been very happy that the book gained fame for a different reason, but nonetheless it did gain a significant amount of fame and get that message of socialism is better than communism...
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...On February 26, 1906, Upton Sinclair released The Jungle, a novel written about the life of a Lithuanian family moving to America and the hardships they faced there. Sinclair, a Socialist and a muckraker reporter wrote the novel in hopes of gaining supporters of the Socialist party. What he ended up doing was single handily cause the formation of the Food and Drug Administration after he showed the nation what was really happening with their food. Yet looking at the work as what it’s meant to be, an exposure of the negative effects of a capitalist society on the impoverished citizens, was Sinclair’s indictment a fair assessment. The novel The Jungle, follows the story of Jurgis Rudkus and his new family as they move to America in search of...
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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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...Andrew Costly quoted Upton Sinclair in the article, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: Muckraking the Meat-Packing Industry, stating, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach” (8). Sinclair conveys his disappointment in his novel not reaching the public as he had hoped. Sinclair anticipated that he would unveil to America the appalling conditions of big corporations; furthermore, showing how they monopolized every aspect of their business from the farm house all the way to America’s kitchen table. Costly states, “Because they were so large, the Armour, Swift, Morris, and National Packing companies could dictate prices to cattle ranchers, feed growers, and consumers” (2). Sinclair desired to pull America’s heart strings,...
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...paved with gold, rather they were welcomed by streets paved with trash and the air filled with smoke and pungent odors, as presented in the book The Jungle. The Jungle is a novel written by Upton Sinclair that displayed the severe working and living conditions that immigrants were forced to deal with. Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tensions and historical processes in hand in the late 19th, early 20th century showing us factory conditions, housing conditions, and political corruption through the eyes of an immigrant family. Writing the novel through the eyes of the family allows readers to feel sympathetic towards the family, and is why this book was so effective in bringing attention to the circumstances that the lower class was put in. The Jungle is about an immigrant family from Lithuania who came to the United States being promised a better life, however as soon as...
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...Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, attempts to portray the corruption within capitalism in virtue of the American Dream. Due to Sinclair’s earlier years of childhood, he was together exposed to poverty as well as the upper-class. In result of being raised by an alcohol salesman and puritan mother, he could understand the glimpses of the upper-class lifestyle that were received from his mother’s wealthy family. Sinclair was very knowledgeable from a young age, thus leading him to college studying journalism in hopes of becoming a novelist. Though many of his books failed, Sinclair continued on to write a best-selling novel that changed the outlook on society. Originally, The Jungle was not accepted into newspapers as he wished, but was released...
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...which we the reader have not endured ourselves. His most notable work was The Jungle in which he exposed the American public to the inhumane and hazardous conditions of the meat packing industry and the injustices faced by immigrants. Upton Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland to an alcoholic father whom he was named after and his...
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