The Times of The Jungle
During the19th century industrialization and urbanization were at their peaks. With constant labor, and the power to run business anyway one might like, the rich kept getting rich at the expense of the poor. By offering jobs to immigrants at the wages that barely sufficed for the income of a family, cheating people by selling non quality products at quality prices, and demanding long work hours, business owners took advantage of the poor with no remorse. It was the journalists, or muckrakers, like Upton Sinclair who exposed these conditions to the public and started the reform movement known as progressivism. By writing about the corruption of industrialism, muckrakers enlightened the middle to upper class to the ailments of everyday life of the poor. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was one of the most popular novels during this time that showed the public the truth behind industry. The Jungle, with main character Jurgis, exposes life as an immigrant during the time of booming industry and widespread corruption. In it there are many examples of the treatment of immigrants, working conditions and conflicting attitudes on the subject, and what led the United States into Progressivism. The Jungle portrayed the move of a Lithuanian fam
Sinclair also implies in his book that inspectors did not do proper jobs of inspecting the meats that were going pass them in the first place. Although it may seem as if life couldn't get any worse, problems on the home front were not the only thing immigrants had to deal with, they also had to go to work and endure "hell on earth". After the publishing of this novel there was widespread horror upon the masses. As Spencer would say, "If they are sufficiently complete to live, they live and it is well they should live. Packers would also sell the same grade of meat at different prices only with different labels saying one was A or B. Through the Jungle Sinclair gave America a dose of reality about the food in which they ingested everyday. Unlike the others who did not want to slave away all day in factories, Jurgis felt that work was work and if worked hard he could excel. Because many worked in unsanitary factories and lived in these houses, many were stuck down by illnesses. Because immigrants did not know about American government they gladly turned over votes for the help and money that the bosses offered. Not only did these unsanitary conditions affect the workers but also the food. For fear of their own well-being middle class Americans began to work on reforms to 'save America'. The 19th century up until World War I was an era when people began to open their eyes to the corruption of society. Social Darwinism was the belief that only the strong survive. Men were being cut by contaminated knives and forced to keep working, falling into meat grinders, or made to work at extremely fast paces to obtain a certain quota. As we saw in The Jungle many were tricked into buying houses that should have been condemned.
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