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What Is Upton Sinclair's Response To The Jungle

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The Jungle Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is a gut wrenching novel at the turn of the century, providing readers’ with a vivid portrait of the American meat-packing industry. Appalling most readers, his novel’s exposure of the meat-packing industry subsequently led to government regulations on the food industry. As we divulge deeper into the novel, we will begin to discuss Sinclair’s original intentions, the ramifications caused by the novel, how the ideas expressed still remain in today’s society, and examples of how other crises have led to the passage of legislation. From these topics, we can hopefully obtain a stronger grasp on one of the most impactful books in American history. The story follows an immigrant family from Lithuania as …show more content…

Seeming unimaginable in today’s world, the novel helped initiate federal regulation, but surprisingly, Sinclair missed his target. Originally, he intended the novel to illustrate the hardships of immigrants traveling to the United States in search of a better life. As previously mentioned, the novel does not give the American people the anticipated sympathetic feeling. Sinclair’s work physically disgusts the public sending the nation into an uproar about what they are putting into their mouths. Revisiting Sinclair’s statement, instead of readers pitying the immigrants, his book actually causes the readers to feel nothing but …show more content…

Food regulation and laws are a normal part of our life. In the early 1900’s, big businesses were ruthless and more concerned with making larger profits than the quality of its products. Also, in that time, the competition between businesses was scarce opposed to today’s market. There are countless number of businesses and companies in which one can purchase their goods from. This causes companies to really focus on the quality of their product in order to please the consumer. Big business owners in the early 20th century had minimal competition, allowing them to take over the market. All in all, the meat production industry and all other food industries should definitely be regulated in order to ensure the safety of the American

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How Upton Sinclair Changed American

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Innocent Belief Famously known for his novel, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair changed American life in the early 1900s without a doubt through his literature. However, many don’t realize that Sinclair reformed American life in more than one instance, through more than one book. At times, he even reached beyond his realm of literature to discuss other needed adjustments. Besides the serendipitous changes he created for the meat packaging industry, Sinclair’s other actions throughout his life are, subjectively, important to American history, according to Anthony Arthur. In his biography, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Arthur reveals his bias towards Sinclair, while supplying a relevant nature to his writing across an in-depth review of Sinclair’s

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“With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great Packingtown swindles” (par.1). This statement from Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, introduces trust from a family because of their own personal knowledge . The Jungle, features an immigrant family trying to survive in 1900’s Chicago meat packing district. In the story, Sinclair’s goal is to expose the miserable life of immigrants who work in factories.

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He wanted others to see poor conditions these workers had to indur to gain a very little amount of money. “ "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach," he spoke. What Upton Sinclair described better than the working conditions or obstacles that millions of immigrants faced to produce money was, the meat that was being shipped out from Chicago to the people who were sitting and reading the book. Sinclair did not begin to write about socialism out of the blue though. He struggled to publish his books and thought about writing about socialism.

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Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle'

637 Words | 3 Pages

The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, is about a Lithuanian family that travels to Chicago in pursuit of the American Dream. When writing this novel, Sinclair sought to build support for the Socialist Party and the working class. In preparation for writing The Jungle, Sinclair spent weeks in Chicago’s meat packing plants to study the lives of its stockyard workers. When the novel was first published, readers were more concerned with the health standards and conditions in which the meat was processed rather than the socialist message that Sinclair intended. The Jungle is also often associated with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act both in 1906, the year the novel was published (Source A).

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They also better to identify with Jurgis and his families’ struggles. Sinclair probably also wanted government officials to read the book because they had the power to take immediate action. It is ironic because government officials did take action, just not in the way that Sinclair originally anticipated. Roosevelt passed the Federal meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug act in response to the book. While this changed America for the better, it did not come in the form of democratic socialism that Sinclair

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That same day, The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was created. This act required the makers of prepared food and medicine to host government inspection as well. Overall, these acts have now been a reassurance to the public that meat and other things are in good

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1060 Words | 5 Pages

However, readers at the time were not very concerned about the petty immigrants living on the lower rung of society. Rather, they cared about what affected them most: the condition of the meat they were eating-- and had been eating-- for years, that were produced by some of the very factories mentioned in Sinclair’s novel. For the majority of The Jungle’s readers, the fact that poor immigrants were being exploited was not bothersome. Instead, the fact that the food that readers had been eating for years contained the power to kill them seemed shocking, pushing the nation into a worried frenzy. Readers were disgusted by the facts they were reading, catalyzing the creation of administrations like the FDA.

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Here Sinclair used figurative language to describe about packing town, and about the dream Jurgis had when he arrived to American for better life. Moreover, Sinclair defined difficulties that women had to face during that

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Aneta Kowalkowska September 25, 2016 Professor Cory Davis History 104 – Modern America: From Industrialization to Globalization The Progressive Era in The Jungle Upton Sinclair’s main focus in The Jungle is to show how capitalism ruins and crushes the American dream through a Lithuanian family of immigrants who struggle to survive in the labor force. Sinclair is sending out a message that immigrants were not a threat to American culture and that the real enemy for every American are capitalists and that socialism is the answer to that problem. He tries to establish a bond between immigrants and Americans by starting the book with a wedding scene. He does not try to make the Lithuanians at this wedding completely Americanized,

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he muckraking novel, The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair does not only expose the secrets of the meat industry in Chicago in the early twentieth century, but tells of the hardships a family of Lithuanian immigrants had to go through when trying to create a better life in the United States. Even when the cold winter blew in and their lives in America were not off to the greatest start, “...the germ of hope was not to be kept from sprouting in their hearts” (Sinclair 69). Jurgis and his family go through many ups and downs as the novel continues, but their determination never diminishes as each person tries their hardest to find a good job and keep a high spirit. This “germ of hope” was found in the hearts and souls of thousands of immigrants in the United States at this time since

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1423 Words | 6 Pages

Though best known for his muckraking efforts that helped to end the Gilded Age, Upton Sinclair wrote nearly a hundred books in his lifetime. From a young age his mother encouraged in him a love of reading; when he could, Sinclair could be found reading for up to fourteen hours a day. However, his childhood was marked by poverty and his father's raging alcoholism. His mother took a strong sense of morality against his father’s drinking and of all types of sinning. These strict morals implanted in him made the socialist party very appealing.

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(Sinclair 143). The events described by Sinclair were so abominable that he needed to explicitly remind the reader that, although The Jungle is fiction, the atrocious details of meatpacking were were “no fairy story and no joke.” And even then most people

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The Jungle Critical Analysis

1202 Words | 5 Pages

During the time period of the 1900’s, the meat packaging industry in Chicago, as Sinclair mentions in his novel, The Jungle, was a very unsanitary and extremely dangerous workplace that lacked much more than just a few safety precautions. Simple things, such as enforcing hand washing or workers’ rights were unheard of in the working environment. It is clear that Upton Sinclair was trying to expose the worker’s horrendous labor conditions in order to improve their situation, along with the introduction of socialism. Upton Sinclair, in his novel, talks about how a Lithuanian immigrant by the name of Jurgis Rudkus, and his family, travel to Chicago trying to make ends meet. However, they soon realize Chicago was not the place for that.

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