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In the Book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair the extreme horrors of the meat packing industry in the 1900 s were exposed to all. He vividly displayed the hardships that new immigrants had faced upon their arrival to this great nation. Also I found that this book was a huge promoter of socialism, and it was believed that this method of economy would be the end of poverty in America. The book goes through the life a Lithuanian family that just moved to America in pursuit of wealth and prosperity.
They had no idea what was about to become of them. The story opens with the feast at Jurgis and Ona's wedding in America, but soon flashes back to the time before they left Lithuania. Unfortunately, they were too poor to have a wedding, since Ona's father just died. In the hopes of finding freedom and fortune, they left for America, bringing many members of Ona's family with them. After arriving in America, they are taken to Packingtown to find work. Packingtown is a section of Chicago where the meat packing industry is centralized.
They take a tour of the plant, and see the unbelievable efficiency and speed at which hogs and cattle are butchered, cooked, packed, and shipped. In Packingtown, no part of the animal is wasted. The tour guide specifically says, "They use everything about the hog except the squeal" (page 38). Jurgis brawny build quickly gets him a job on the cattle killing beds. The other members of the family soon find jobs, except for the children.
They are put into school. At first, Jurgis is happy with his job and America, but he soon learns that America is plagued by corruption, dishonesty, and bribery. He is forced to work at high speeds for long hours with low pay, and so is the rest of the family. He is cheated out of his money several times. The children must leave school and go to work to help the family survive. This means they will never receive the education they need to rise above this.
Ona is not permitted to take a holiday, even for her own wedding. After the birth of her first son, Antanas, Ona soon becomes pregnant again. She becomes very upset, but will not tell Jurgis why. After she fails to come home one night, Jurgis confronts her. She breaks into tears and tells Jurgis that a foreman named Connor has forced a sexual relationship on her.
Jurgis curses her and runs off to find Connor. After beating Connor to a pulp, Jurgis is sent to jail for thirty days. The judge refuses to listen to Jurgis story seriously. When Jurgis is released, he finds that his family has moved to an even poorer neighborhood, and Ona is in labor at that very moment. Neither the baby, nor Ona survive the birth.
Tragedy continues to plague the family when Jurgis first child drowns in the flood filled streets of Packingtown. Jurgis gives up on this town and hops on a train to Chicago. He actually enjoys a "hobo" life, wandering across the country. When winter comes, he is forced to return to Chicago. He gets into a fight in a bar and is sent to jail. In jail, he meets Jack Duane, an experienced criminal.
After being freed from jail, Jurgis and Duane team up in a luxurious, but risky life of crime. Jurgis learns about the connections between criminals, police, politics, and big business. He becomes a member of this complex network and moves into politics. He runs into Connor again, and beats him to a pulp a second time. Connors political connections cause Jurgis to lose all his acquired profit.
Jurgis is back to wandering the streets. To keep warm, Jurgis walks into a Socialist meeting. After the meeting, he is introduced to a man named Ostrinski, who teaches Jurgis about Socialism. Jurgis agrees completely with the political partys ideals, and becomes an active member.
Jurgis and his 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... When Jurgis left Packingtown, he lived by thievery, selfishness, and bribery. When Jurgis switched to this amoral lifestyle, he finally became successful. The foremen 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.
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", which is 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" (page 99). 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. It was also said that the branch of government inspecting the meat was a joke.
The book states: This government inspector, who sat in the doorway and felt the glands in the neck for tuberculosis did not have the manner of a manner of a man who was worked to death; he was apparently not haunted by a fear that the hog might get by him before he had finished the testing. If you were a sociable person, he was quite willing to enter into a conversation with, and to explain to you the deadly nature of the ptomaines which are found in tubercular pork; and while he was talking with you you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched (page 41) 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 animals 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. Another reviewer of this book named Daisy Andry, from Lexington Kentucky, found that it was well written, and very descriptive.
She thought that you could actually visualize the filthy stockyards, and smell the rancid slaughterhouses. She also felt that the ending should have been written more personable to the characters in the story. Overall she felt it was an excellent book and a must read. Also noting on its contribution to our history. It was partially responsible for the new acts in congress that cracked down on the meat packing industry such as the Pure-food and drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Bibliography:
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