In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair explains how horrible working conditions were for people in the meatpacking industry. Have you ever wondered what effect Upton Sinclair had on American industry? The Jungle is about the poor working conditions and the very poor sanitation in 1906. We will also be talking about the backstory behind Upton Sinclair.
Upton Sinclair discovered how bad working areas were. There were repetitive and dangerous assembly lines. People could easily break their backs in any of the jobs. They didn’t even get breaks. People couldn’t advance their careers, and they worked in foul and filthy spaces. They worked ten hours a day, with six days a week.
The corporations and management system was faulty. They didn’t provide worker safety measures. They focused on consolidation, and simply removed competitors. They had
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They would shriek, as they were cut open alive, without anesthetic. They were stabbed onto a hook before being killed. They were frightened. They were chained up and yanked from their feet. They were moved by machinery and carts. Upton Sinclair said that “It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon.”
Upton wrote a lot of books. Most of them failed, until he wrote The Jungle. He went to Princeton, but only to access their collection on the Civil War. To support himself, he wrote dime novels. He also sold humor bits to newspapers and magazines. He had an unhappy marriage to Meta Fuller, with one son, David. He almost died of pneumonia. Upton Sinclair was born in 1878, and died in 1968. He condemned education, because it didn’t fit poverty.
The Meat Inspection Act was created because of him in 1906. Animals have to pass a test before and after death to be fed to humans. These animals include cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats. There are now rules for cleanliness in slaughterhouses and processing plants. The Beef Trust act fought against the Meat Inspection Act, but
There was so much pressure to keep their jobs that workers would comply to working the hazardous machines. Even the best worker is prone to make mistakes, but for the workers operating these machines making a mistake was disastrous. This was the price the workers had to pay to make a living, they had to gamble their own life in order to make low wages that could not even support their own
WHAT IS “THE JUNGLE”? The Jungle is book written by Upton Sinclair in 1906, published by Jabber & Company in the state of New York. It contains details on the Chicago meatpacking industry, originally written to help bring awareness to the harsh conditions of immigrants workers in these industries. The public, however, too the terrible, unsanitary conditions of these industries, with rats running along the meat, and employees going to the bathroom in the same spot they work with the meat in.
Although many people were being employed and paid, working conditions were very hazardous and payment was unfair. Workers would work twelve to eighteen hours a day, but got poorly paid by their
The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, is about a Lithuanian family that travels to Chicago in pursuit of the American Dream. When writing this novel, Sinclair sought to build support for the Socialist Party and the working class. In preparation for writing The Jungle, Sinclair spent weeks in Chicago’s meat packing plants to study the lives of its stockyard workers. When the novel was first published, readers were more concerned with the health standards and conditions in which the meat was processed rather than the socialist message that Sinclair intended. The Jungle is also often associated with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act both in 1906, the year the novel was published (Source A).
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.
Even though he was not wealthy as a kid, his mother’s family was rich, so he experienced a rare event — both sides of poverty and wealthiness. After graduating from City College of New York in 1897, Sinclair enrolled at Columbia University in order to continue his studies and wrote novels to support himself. Therefore, Sinclair had a bright mind as a child which led him to his achievements and a successful life as an adult.
Max Toubes JR 101 Upton Sinclair A pioneer on the forefront of investigative reporting, Upton Sinclair was one of the most prominent novelists of the early twentieth century and a political activist whose famous foray into the meatpacking industry gained him a spot among the most important journalists of all time. Sinclair’s diverse endeavors ranged from his nearly-one-hundred book bibliography to his radical political career. Perhaps one of his most significant long term contributions to the field of journalism was his work in exploiting social misconduct, gaining him the title “muckraker.”
The image of the industrial plant is how most of those dangerous factories looked like while running (Document 3). Large, menacing building were the places of employment for many common folk. Inside, they housed the precarious machines that employees would work on for hours upon hours. These machines moved quickly and mistakes could not be afforded in these conditions. Lewis Hine's popular photo shows children working on dangerous machines with their hair, pants, and shirts tucked away for safety (Document 8).
Upton Sinclair was born September 20, 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was a noted American Muckraker, social activist, and also was an American author. Sinclair went to Columbia to study law but fairly after that became interested into politics and literature. Through the years he supported for himself by writing adventure story magazines. He wrote fairly amount of books.
The Jungle was released to expose meatpacking industries’ ways of treating workers and meat. With this release, changes occurred. President Roosevelt urged Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. This act required the Department of Agriculture to inspect every hog and steer whose carcass state lines. In other words, it required companies to pay to get their facilities and practices checked by an inspector to assure everything was being done correctly.
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.
Immigrants faced harsh living and working conditions, racial strife, poverty, as well as social class issues. Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle explores many of these hardships immigrants had to face through the lives of Lithuanian Immigrants. Throughout his novel, Sinclair focuses on poverty and thoughts of what America was supposed to be like to portray hardships immigrants faced when coming to America.
The Jungle was written by Upton Sinclair and published in 1906. I chose this book because it’s been mentioned in multiple History classes I’ve taken. I took it upon interest mainly because it is about the brutal and unfair treatment of immigrants in labor and because it exposed the meat industry. (it exposed both). Sinclair strives to expose the danger in capitalism by vividly describing and exposing the ranging and brutal treatment of immigrant laborers who searched to live the American dream but found misfortune instead.
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
Camila Casanova U.S. History 1302: S67 Mr. Isaac G. Pietrzak February 9, 2018 Critical Review: The Jungle Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.