However, when the lawyer tells him that it is a legal and fair document, Jurgis believes him. The lawyer does not tell him of the loopholes that will eventually lead to the loss of the house. After Jurgis works in the packing house for a while, a man tells him in Lithuanian that he can now become a citizen. Jurgis is then registered to vote, and told about one of the candidates. Nothing is said of the other candidate, so he votes for the man that he is told of, and receives money for this vote.
Another problem faced by most of the immigrants of Chicago is making a living. Jurgis gets a job on the first day trying. In Lithuania, this is a lot of money. With the wages of himself and his brother, the entire family should be able to keep solvent.
Due to the hidden charges for the house, he finds that he is dreadfully wrong. Eventually, all of the family members must seek work, just to survive. Life becomes a 'hand-to-mouth' proposition. Even after the family loses the house, things do not get any easier. During this time period, there is no such thing as job security. All of the packing houses have a 'speed-up' polic This work paints a very vivid picture of the world of the immigrant of the early 's.
It makes the reader think about the injustices that existed then, and to some extent, still exist. The story seems to be true to life, and not the least bit contrived. The reader is wrapped up in the life of Jurgis Rudkus. Every time he seems to be on top of things, he is knocked off by some unseen force. The book is very difficult to put down because the fate of the main character always seems to be hanging on the brink.
This book is an indispensable insight into the history of the era. However, the socialist propaganda at the end seems to be a bit hard to accept. It is too large of a dose, and seems to abandon Jurgis.
This appears to be the only problem with the book, and can be almost overlooked by the reader, if it is desired. Upton Sinclair wrote a very impressive work. It is definitely worth the time to read it. It shows many facets of life during the period. The storyteller has a very dynamic person to narrarate. The hopes and dreams of a generation of immigrants to the United States are presented in a very thought-provoking manner. They had one child. Sinclair began to write novels but had difficulty getting them published.
As he was struggling to make a living as a writer, he began reading about socialism. He came to believe in the idea of a peaceful revolution in which Americans would vote for the government to take over the ownership of big businesses. He joined the Socialist Party in , and a year later he began to write for Appeal to Reason , a socialist magazine. In , the meat-packer's union in Chicago went on strike, demanding better wages and working conditions.
The Big Four companies broke the strike and the union by bringing in strikebreakers, replacements for those on strike.
The new workers kept the assembly lines running while the strikers and their families fell into poverty. The editor of Appeal to Reason suggested that Sinclair write a novel about the strike. Sinclair, at age 26, went to Chicago at the end of to research the strike and the conditions suffered by the meat-packing workers. He interviewed them, their families, lawyers, doctors, and social workers.
He personally observed the appalling conditions inside the meat-packing plants. The Jungle is Sinclair's fictionalized account of Chicago's Packingtown. The title reflects his view of the brutality he saw in the meat-packing business. The story centered on a young man, Jurgis Rudkis, who had recently immigrated to Chicago with a group of relatives and friends from Lithuania.
Full of hope for a better life, Jurgis married and bought a house on credit. Jurgis soon learned how the company sped up the assembly line to squeeze more work out of the men for the same pay. He discovered the company cheated workers by not paying them anything for working part of an hour.
Jurgis saw men in the pickling room with skin diseases. Men who used knives on the sped-up assembly lines frequently lost fingers. Men who hauled pound hunks of meat crippled their backs. Workers with tuberculosis coughed constantly and spit blood on the floor. Right next to where the meat was processed, workers used primitive toilets with no soap and water to clean their hands.
In some areas, no toilets existed, and workers had to urinate in a corner. Lunchrooms were rare, and workers ate where they worked. Almost as an afterthought, Sinclair included a chapter on how diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat products were processed, doctored by chemicals, and mislabeled for sale to the public.
He wrote that workers would process dead, injured, and diseased animals after regular hours when no meat inspectors were around. He explained how pork fat and beef scraps were canned and labeled as "potted chicken. Sinclair wrote that meat for canning and sausage was piled on the floor before workers carried it off in carts holding sawdust, human spit and urine, rat dung, rat poison, and even dead rats.
His most famous description of a meat-packing horror concerned men who fell into steaming lard vats:. Jurgis suffered a series of heart-wrenching misfortunes that began when he was injured on the assembly line. No workers' compensation existed, and the employer was not responsible for people injured on the job. Jurgis' life fell apart, and he lost his wife, son, house, and job. Then Jurgis met a socialist hotel owner, who hired him as a porter. Jurgis listened to socialist speakers who appeared at the hotel, attended political rallies, and drew inspiration from socialism.
Sinclair used the speeches to express his own views about workers voting for socialist candidates to take over the government and end the evils of capitalist greed and "wage slavery. In the last scene of the novel, Jurgis attended a celebration of socialist election victories in Packingtown. Jurgis was excited and once again hopeful. A speaker, probably modeled after Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, begged the crowd to "Organize!
Chicago will be ours! The Jungle was first published in as a serial in The Appeal to Reason and then as a book in Sales rocketed.
It was an international best-seller, published in 17 languages. Sinclair was dismayed, however, when the public reacted with outrage about the filthy and falsely labeled meat but ignored the plight of the workers. Meat sales dropped sharply. Sinclair thought of himself as a novelist, not as a muckraker who investigated and wrote about economic and social injustices. But The Jungle took on a life of its own as one of the great muckraking works of the Progressive Era.
Sinclair became an "accidental muckraker. The White House was bombarded with mail, calling for reform of the meat-packing industry. The president then appointed a special commission to investigate Chicago's slaughterhouses.
The special commission issued its report in May The report confirmed almost all the horrors that Sinclair had written about. One day, the commissioners witnessed a slaughtered hog that fell part way into a worker toilet.
Workers took the carcass out without cleaning it and put it on a hook with the others on the assembly line. The commissioners criticized existing meat-inspection laws that required only confirming the healthfulness of animals at the time of slaughter. Jones is was made to represent Tsar Nicholas II and both of their inabilities to rule a society.
Old major dream represents Karl Marx communist manifesto and his political philosophy on communism. Most of the other animals in the farm represented the workers and peasants of Russia, particularly Boxer and clover, which embodied the roles of the working class. They worked hard, where loyal, but clearly lacked philosophical direction.
Even though, society was still unaware of the fact that the immigrants were working illegal hours in a brutal fight of survival of the fittest during…. In , Upton Sinclair, a novelist traveled to Chicago to gather information about the terrible things and abused that happened in the meat packing industry.
The author claims three main points that are crucial to understanding the industry. The first argument is the conditions and sickness, then the meat…. One of the best known muckrakers was the author Upton Sinclair.
Sinclair used his novel The Jungle to expose the corruption and unsanitary conditions of the meat-packing industry. He gave honest and sometimes gruesomely vivid descriptions of all of the working conditions that would concern any social reformers of the time McChesney. However, the description of Chicago 's Packingtown only took up part of Sinclair 's book. Essays Essays FlashCards. Browse Essays.
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