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Comparing King Coal 'And The Jungle'

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King Coal was another novel that really shows the inhumane treatment of workers. The protagonist, Hal, is beaten by the company guards near the beginning of the novel under suspicion of being a strike-leader, and the company is shown time and time again to care very little about its workers – when an explosion happens in the mines, the company focuses more on saving the equipment than saving its workers. King Coal, however, did not incite the public outrage that The Jungle did, and again, the unions were primarily responsible for change in the coal mining industry. However, the novel did, perhaps in a more relatable way than The Jungle, expose the public to the evils of “wage slavery”, which Sinclair would surely appreciate. Two years after
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Tarbell, fueled with anger on this whole topic, would slam her book on the table. “While we are on the topic of national resources, ” she would exclaim, “The coal-oil business is primarily owned by Mr. Rockefeller, a robber baron himself.” She would then proceed to discuss his unethical, cheating, and deliberate rigging of railroad prices and other distrustful practices against competitors in the oil trade. Upton Sinclair would be hanging on the edge of his seat eating up every word, waiting for his turn to talk. He would then slam his Journal, The Jungle, on the table.

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Tarbell, fueled with anger on this whole topic, would slam her book on the table. “While we are on the topic of national resources, ” she would exclaim, “The coal-oil business is primarily owned by Mr. Rockefeller, a robber baron himself.” She would then proceed to discuss his unethical, cheating, and deliberate rigging of railroad prices and other distrustful practices against competitors in the oil trade. Upton Sinclair would be hanging on the edge of his seat eating up every word, waiting for his turn to talk. He would then slam his Journal, The Jungle, on the table.

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The conditions of the factory in The Jungle were horrid. As previously stated, there were leaks in the ceiling, rodents crawling about, no heat in the cold winter of Chicago, and the work was very difficult which even resulted in the death of an old man employed there. (Sinclair). The owners would not have invested in proper working conditions because this would have cost them money. After this book was released, in fact, the quality of this industry was further inspected and found actually as bad as described.

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The Jungle exposed the way workers were treated in the meatpacking industry. It stated that they were exposed to filthy workplaces, in which the smell would be outrageous. They were forced to work through these smells for non-stop hours. In addition, the smell would come from the meat itself. The smell would bring in rodents, such as rats, into the factories.

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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

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In February 1906, Upton Sinclair would write and publish his fictional novel The Jungle. This book, which was intended to focus on the exploited workers in the meat industry would depict the unsanitary conditions for a mere 10 pages. Missing the point of the novel, Americans were disgusted by the conditions of the packing plants, rather than outrage at the mistreatment of the workers at these plants (Kauffman). The Jungle spurred new legislation, but this legislation wasn’t the first that called for such standards. In 1641, the Massachusetts Colony had passed the Meat and Fish Inspection document which prohibited selling “diseased, corrupted, contagious or unwholesome provisions” (Massachusetts Act against Selling Unwholesome Provisions).

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It was simple for capitalists to cut costs in terms of labor because workers depended on holding a job to survive. As a result, working conditions worsened, and wages decreased substantially. In Zola’s Germinal, the working-class Maheu family faced horrible working conditions in the coal mine. The conditions are described using these gruesome terms: “At the bottom of the shaft, it had been very cold, and in the haulage roadway—through which all the air in the mine passed—an icy wind blew, whipped to a storm by the narrowness of the space between the walls.

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