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There are many characters in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. These characters vary widely in their professions, social status, and economic status. The main character in the novel is a Lithuanian named Jurgis Radius. His wife is Ona Lukoszaite, also a Lithuanian. Their son is named Antanas. Mike Scully is a powerful political leader in Packingtown.
Phil Connor is a foreman in Packingtown, politically connected (through Scully), and a man who causes much trouble for Jurgis. Jack Duane is an experienced and educated criminal who is also politically connected. A man called Ostrinski is a half- blind tailor who teaches Jurgis about Socialism. There are also the members of Ona's family, each of whom play minor roles in the story. Jurgis, Ona, and her family moved from Lithuania to America, expecting a better life.
Instead of telling a story about their success through hard work and dedication, Upton Sinclair tells a story about how they were cheated before they even got off the boat. Throughout the story, people preyed on the family's ignorance. During the passage to America, an agent appeared to be helping them but was really cheating them. After arriving, they were constantly cheated out of their money.
The house they bought was a total fraud, full of hidden expenses. Many members of the family were able to get jobs only through bribery. Ona was exploited by Connor, who threatened to have her, Jurgis, and the rest of the family fired if she refused the relationship. When Jurgis left Packingtown, he lived by thievery, selfishness, and bribery. When Jurgis switched to this corrupt lifestyle, he finally became successful. The foremen (and foreladies) of Packingtown also lived by corruption.
They fired union members, cheated people out of their pay, and required gifts before hiring people. When a foreman's boss learned of this, he required gifts from the foreman to keep quiet. The police were also corrupt. They let robbers go, and demanded a percentage of what the robbers had taken. The politicians placed friends on the city payroll, accepted bribes from criminals, and bribed the police to avoid arrest. In the book, anyone who earned a living through honesty and hard work was trapped in poverty.
Anyone who lied and cheated to make a living was wealthy. This was the way a Capitalistic society was presented in the book. It showed that a hard worker was not rewarded, and was disposed of when he / she became a burden. The book portrayed an honest, hardworking lower class, and a dishonest, lazy upper class.
No middle class was described. Toward the end of the book, Upton Sinclair shows the reader how to solve Capitalism's problems: replace it with Socialism. The Socialist party is promoted as an international political party that will solve all of the worlds problems. Every member of the party was told about the Socialist revolution, when the entire planet would become Socialist. Not once does the book mention the possibility of failure. It even claimed Socialists would control the country by 1912.
The Socialists despised the concept of competition. They considered the commercial world to be the essence of corruption. The goal of the Socialist party in The Jungle was to end the corrupt and powerful Beef Trust. In the national capital it had power to falsify government reports; it violated the rebate laws, and when an investigation was threatened it burned its books and sent its criminal agents across th country, (The Jungle, page 305). After reading The Jungle, a person would never expect the United States to survive as a Capitalist country.
The only option shown to the reader is Socialism. The author never mentions the good that Capitalism has done, nor does he mention any possible flaws in Socialism. Socialism is presented as perfection, while all other philosophies are flawed. This makes the novel surprisingly one-sided and anti-American. The promotion of Socialism is understandable, though, since Sinclair himself was a Socialist from an early age. He was brought up in a poor and not very successful family.
This could explain why he became a Socialist, since one of the main ideals of Socialism is equality for everyone. This may also explain why he describes Capitalists as heartless cheats, and describes working people as oppressed heroes. The Jungle is, however, more than an advertisement for Socialism. It describes the horrors of the meat packing industry in great detail.
People were forced to work from before sunrise to after sunset. In the meat preserving plants, the floors were never dry. The workers would catch horrible foot diseases, causing them to loose toes and eventually entire legs. The butchers would be forced to move at a blinding pace, often cutting themselves and others. They would still have to work though, or loose their job. Often, the wounds would become infected, and the butcher would die of blood poisoning.
The book discusses all the things that were being shipped out to the civilized world as meat. Sausages were not really made of sausage meat. They were mostly composed of potato flour; an odorless and tasteless potato extract with almost no food value. There were the cattle that had been fed whiskey malt; the refuse of breweries.
These animals would become steel, or covered with boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged you knife into them they would burst and splash foul- smelling stuff in your face, (The Jungle, page 94). According to law, diseased meat could not be sold out of the state. However, there were no laws restricting its sale inside the state. As a result, the tuberculosis-infected hog meat never left Packingtown. It was sold to the meat workers at inflated prices.
Another thing that shocked me while reading the novel was the cruelty to animals. The animals were packed in freight cars, and shipped across the country. Many of them died on the trip. Once reaching Packingtown, each hog had a chain fastened around its leg, was hoisted into the air, and carried into a room where its throat was slit. When the cattle reached Packingtown, they were stunned by electric shock, and dropped onto a conveyor belt, where a man with a sledgehammer pierced their skulls. These animal existed in very poor conditions, especially the steel cattle that developed boils.
Despite the cruel conditions, the anti-American sentiment, and the one-sided views, the novel was well-written. Upton Sinclair did an excellent job of describing the massive organization and efficiency of Packingtown. It is clear that he despised Packingtown, for being a center of Capitalism and for its working conditions, but he was impressed with it. Packingtown slaughtered, processed, packed, and shipped hundreds of thousands of cattle and hogs every day.
It ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and never stopped. Even during holidays and during union strikes, Packingtown still ran at full speed. Now that I have read The Jungle, I am amazed that our country survived to be the world superpower it is today. I am even more amazed that we did not all die from eating food made in such poor conditions. The novel did not persuade me to become a Socialist, but I did consider a vegetarian lifestyle. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed reading it.
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Research essay sample on Upton Sinclair Socialist Party
