Historical Analysis Of The Jungle

994 Words2 Pages

Daniel Pham
Professor Justin Coburn
History 1
5 May 2014
The Jungle
Historical analysis:
The Industrial Revolution of the 1800’s had a dramatic effect on economic and social life around the globe. The economy of industrializing nations shifted from agriculture to manufacturing and from rural to urban. Thanks to innovation and technology, energy production and manufacturing, factories churned out large quantities of new products at lower prices. Almost overnight, cities swelled to support the new industries. Soon people were flocking to the growing city looking for work and a better life. The factory life did not live up to its promise. The workers had few rights. Wages were low, hours were long. Working conditions were often unsafe: unemployment, disability, or death was always just an accident away. These harsh working conditions were common at the turn of the 20th century. In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel about the American meat packing industry.
At the time The Jungle was written, the plants were a horrible place to work. They were full of violence, viruses, bacteria—there weren’t clean. Frequently, dead and diseased animals were slaughtered and then made into food.
Sinclair’s novel follows the story of a young Lithuanian, Jurgis Rudkus, who arrives in American seeking freedom and opportunity. He finds work in a prosperous and—as he learns to his dismay—filthy Chicago meat packaging plant.
Think about an individual coming from a rural-agricultural society. Whether it’s Jurgis coming from Lithuanian or a black migrant coming from the Deep South like Mississippi, coming into a large industrial city and working in a mass production industry like meat packing. The Jungle talks about the life of an immigran...

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... of the elite. The elite is very apparent in our time because there are a lot of problems in the American country and it seems like we haven’t really learned from Sinclair—we haven’t really learned from the people who wrote and lived early 1900s.
P.S. I actually thought Sinclair did an awesome job allowing the reader to feel deeply for Jurgis and his family. This was a wonderful book... until the end. As I was reading "The Jungle" I swore it was going to be among the best books I've read and along came the fifty or so pages of Socialistic propaganda, AT THE END! Way to ruin such a great story with political babble. I found out later that he was a diehard socialist and will never read another one of his books. Political. In my defense, it probably wasn’t the greatest idea to go from the satirical work of Kurt Vonnegut to the depressingly realistic work of Sinclair.

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