Upton Sinclair And The Chicago Meat-Packing IndustryEssay Preview: Upton Sinclair And The Chicago Meat-Packing IndustryReport this essayUpton Sinclair and the Chicago Meat-packing IndustryIn 1900, there were over 1.6 million people living in Chicago, the countrys second largest city. Of those 1.6 million, nearly 30% were immigrants. Most immigrants came to the United States with little or no money at all, in hope of making a better life for themselves. A city like Chicago offered these people jobs that required no skill. However, the working and living conditions were hazardous and the pay was barely enough to survive on. This is the bases for Upton Sinclairs book, The Jungle.
Sinclair agreed to “investigate working conditions in Chicagos meatpacking plants,” for the Socialist journal, Appeal to Reason, in 1904. The Jungle, published in 1906, is Sinclairs most popular and influential work. It is also his first of many “muckraker” pieces. In order to improve society, muckrakers wanted to expose any injustice on human rights or well-being. Therefore, it was Sinclairs goal to expose the harsh treatment of factory workers through The Jungle. The improvement on society, that he hoped would follow, was the reformation of labor.
After seven weeks in Chicago, Sinclair was ready to start writing. He channeled the information that he gathered and represented it through the experiences of a fictitious family of Lithuanian immigrants. This family comes to America with the hope of prosperity and because “rich and poor, a man was free, it was said.” However, when they arrive in Chicago, they discover that they must sell themselves into “wage slavery” just to survive. The term “wage slavery” was used because the poor treatment of the migrant workers was similar to that of blacks in the South, prior to the Civil War. Also, note that “wage slaves [were] kept from a meaningful community life by the struggle for mere existence.”
The owners of the factories couldnt continuously oppress their workers through sheer capitalism alone. They needed help from the government and local community. In other words, “machine politics.” Politicians played an important role in the political machine. In order to maintain this role, they received substantial kickbacks from the owners of the factories. They would recruit people to help the immigrants become citizens of the United States, and then pay the immigrants to vote for a specific candidate, often several times. Before the Progressive Party materialized, there were just the Democrats and the Republicans, “and the one got the office which bought the most votes.”
Readers were not concerned with the treatment of workers, as portrayed by The Jungle, because they really didnt care for the working class, or more specifically, immigrants. However, readers were shocked when they discovered exactly how their meat was processed and prepared. Sinclair used just as much, if not more, gruesome detail in describing the products the American public was consuming, as he did when describing the workplace, living conditions, politics, society and Chicagos scenery. In a futile attempt to build up the readers sympathy toward the wage-slaves, Sinclair also details the process in which foods not related to the meat-packing industry are prepared. For example, he writes, “their pale blue milkwas watered, and doctored with formaldehyde.”
Another thing that bothered me about The Jungle is the way the story’s ending, from the point of view of the victims’, is also played up to justify the inhumanity, cruelty, and violence inflicted by the industrial workers. Thus, we see an extremely serious, horrible, and often fatal flaw in the narrative. When one goes back to the scene on their own land and goes looking for evidence regarding the atrocities committed in the factory, one finds a number of examples of that. We find cases of a group of industrial workers stealing a truck, then running over and kicking out of the workers that attacked them, for example, by throwing a wooden board in the process. In this case, the only thing that did a fair bit of damage to the meat was the wooden board. In another case, we find a group of workers who beat up a truck driver who had just taken off to the park with a horse, while the workers were away, and the animal was later killed, and given to the workers. All of these examples, while telling a simple story of living the capitalist lifestyle, had a tragic ending. In order to properly portray the world in a serious light, we need to be able to show our viewers what a society is like as contrasted to a very corrupt one like ours. This cannot be done by talking about the victims, which is clearly not the case. Instead, what I want to write is a comprehensive critique of the capitalist economy by writers who want to do justice to the plight of the victims.
Sinclair also uses the term “culture”, which means cultural practices: they tend to express a different cultural background, based on one’s own experience. This “culture” is the very difference between our traditional ways of working and the modern “culture” of the former. Like the former, the modern culture places a special focus on work, which puts it into a new and different sphere. While the modern industry and its various forms of social organization create a unique environment, it also places special emphasis on work, particularly in areas such as the construction of factories, which create new jobs and new opportunities for many. For example, a New York Times report that described how people in the U.S. employed by the American Postal Service in a new “urban office” have seen improved working conditions, which translates into lower hours of work, which also translates into better pay. Of course, this would only apply to the United States of America, but this view doesn’t exist anywhere else.
The culture Sinclair uses is that of the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization which makes it its mission to “speak not to the past, but to speak to the present,” a view often taken as being a part of the capitalist system. Since we live in a world in which all things are being manufactured and to which workers have the right to demand, every time we do something in response to the demands in the market, or when we are looking for a job, we are expected to act accordingly. As a consequence, the
The controversy over food preparations was so great, that it made The Jungle an instant success and thrust Upton Sinclair into the limelight as a muckraker journalist. The passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act by Congress in 1906 was a direct result of the novel and Sinclairs correspondence with President Theodore Roosevelt.
Despite its popularity, The Jungle has always been seen as a documentation of history, rather than a piece of literature. Critics view Sinclair “as a muckraker, a talented progressive journalist and reformer with no literary technique whatsoever.” Although Sinclairs accurate descriptions were amazing, he fell short in his character development and plot.
The main character, Jurgis Rudkus, went through an implausible number of extreme changes in the period of time the story takes place. He morphs from a