Seth Ruiz Tracy Brady HIST151 October 19, 2015 Paper 1 Upton Sinclair’s Living and Dying in Packingtown, Chicago is a reading of a portion of his novel, The Jungle. In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair writes about a man named Jurgis Rudkus who is an immigrant from Lithuania looking for a job in Packingtown. After the death of one of his wife’s sons, Kristoforas, Jurgis applied to work for a fertilizer plant which was considered the lowest of the low places to work. He got the job and soon came to realize how terrible it was to work at the fertilizer plant. Upton Sinclair wrote about what the plant was like in Jurgis’s and the townspeople’s mind, “All this while he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage
Although government is corrupt we need to identify these voting schemes beforehand. Unlike the immigrants in the novel, they were oblivious to the political corruption taking place in Chicago. They are uneducated foreign people in need of money, living on low wages at the verge of starvation. Packingtown is packed with swindlers, from law enforcement to bartenders to muggers, everyone loses their morals for money.
Mike Scully was one of these cunning political officials he was also the richest man in Packingtown. He used to have control over the elections in the poorer parts of Chicago. Scully was a democrat and he arranged for democratic victories by buying votes, encouraging people to vote multiple times for money. For example in the book it says that Mike Scully would hire men and give them good working hours with good pay so this gave him good friends and everyone saw him as a great man (Sinclair 96). This goes back to the first point which was political system; its people like Scully who corrupt the political system.
Douglass uses three characteristic traits to define how whites perceived black people. All three characteristics mean the same thing- being a black person causes one to be a castaway from regular society. The purpose of stating three characteristics consecutively adds emphasis. It alerts the reader that despite who one was, if he was of ‘black blood,’ it unquestionable made them excluded from white society. White officers escorted men out “because they would not
In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a fictional novel that depicted the working class’ lifestyle and working conditions in the American city of Chicago. It focused on the meat-packing industry of the 20th century and the capitalist elite achieving success through the manipulation of poor immigrants, corruption of the capitalist government, institutions and its exploits of the growing industrial American state. Though Sinclair’s novel received critical acclaim for its reveal of the poor environmental and health conditions of the meat-packing industry, was there an underlying ideology he sought to impose and if so was he successful in his attempt? The third-person narration of The Jungle, enables Upton Sinclair from making his argument
By using this metaphor he creates a comparison for himself and the reader and shows an example of his reasoning. Douglass’ use of short sentences also aid in creating a desperate
Fredrick Douglass knew the South was a horrible place, but he that the North was place of beauty and it was a second chance at life for him. He thought of the North to be such of a wonderful place, he needed to clean himself up, to fit in Baltimore. Douglass says “I spent the most part of all these three days in the creek, washing off the plantation scurf, and preparing myself for my departure. ”(6.4), Douglass is washing off his old life into the creek, and getting prepared for his new life in Baltimore. Once Douglass arrived to Baltimore, it was better than what he expected, it was beautiful and he knew it was a new beginning of a great, new life.
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
Upton Sinclair, a successful muckraker in the early 1900s, is the author to the gut-wrenching novel, The Jungle. In this story, Sinclair incorporates real facts he learned from going, undercover, into a meat-packing factory. Upton believed that the working conditions and the lifestyle the immigrants were forced to live in, during this time, were heinous; because of this he strives to create a novel that will gain the attention of the government and large factories in order to create better working conditions and quality of life. To accomplish this feat Sinclair subtly compares the meat-packing factory to a jungle; he speaks of physical and mental aspects such as temperature and a hierarchy, includes ages and lifespans, and also integrates animal imagery. Fusing all of these different factors gives The Jungle the exact jungle-like atmosphere Sinclair was hoping to obtain.
Sinclair uses different methods to overall make this industrial jungle present in the novel. He shows how social Darwinism is normal in this society
In Section V of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass, at the age of seven or eight, Douglass is chosen to relocate to Baltimore to reside with Captain Anthony’s son-in-law, Hugh Auld. Upon departing from Colonel Lloyd’s Great House Farm, he envisions Baltimore as a place of promise and enlightenment. Douglass’s relocation to Baltimore conveys the notion of cities in nineteenth-century America promising greater freedom in many aspects to the Black slave as opposed to the countryside. Cities had a certain extent of societal freedom for slaves, in addition to further literacy and affluence. He articulates, “Even the Great House itself, with all its pictures, was far inferior to many buildings in Baltimore.
However the dangerous working conditions were not the only reason for the nightmare like conditions of the work place. Another factor was the constant speeding up that the workers were subjected to. The workers felt that the factory managers were “… speeding them up and grinding them into pieces…” (76), which was not far from the disturbing truth. For, the inhabitants of Packingtown did not live this American dream too long with the severe conditions that were imposed upon
Throughout the quote, it is clearly taken notice to that he has no positive outlooks on where he lived at. From the first line “I was seldom whipped by my old master, and suffered little from anything else than hunger and cold”, it can be noticed that Frederick wasn’t given much to live as a slave by his master from earlier years. The reader can infer from this quote that he was not treated all that well as a slave. Frederick clearly makes it noticed how harshly he was treated on the old plantation. Not only that, but the very last line he also brings up the physical abuse he has taken from the weather but stating “My feet had been so cracked with the frost that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes”.
McKay uses metaphor to describe the violent and aggressive actions of the whites. In line 3, McKay says, "While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot." (McKay). He is fed up with the way they're acting in the section that is specifically segregated for blacks. He wants the blacks to stand up for themselves.
People in positions of authority were largely inflictors of poverty, because they took advantage of immigrants and their lack of familiarity with their surroundings, as well as paying them far less than was required for a decent lifestyle. Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle depicted each of these issues with great detail and clarity, as well as many other issues that plagued immigrants. The book takes place in the Chicago Packingtown district, the heart of the meatpacking industry. This is a rough line of work to be in, and the lives of those immigrants who kept the industry afloat were often miserable.
