Upton Sinclair The Jungle Analysis

A Reality That’s Hard To Swallow

In Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle, the difficult lives of Lithuanian immigrants are depicted against the backdrop of the Chicago’s slaughterhouses and the beef trusts of the early 1900’s. In an attempt to highlight the failures of capitalism, corporate greed, and the exploitation of immigrate workers; he describes horrendous accounts of unscrupulous practices within the meatpacking industry. He intended to show the public how destructive the corporate conglomerates really were and how they actually were destroying the ability to achieve the American dream. This story has captivated me more than I expected. Maybe because I, today, feel the desire and struggle for the same dream that these characters felt,

while I work a labor intensive, barely above minimum wage job.

The Jungle met my personal narrative on so many levels, from the description of work being “stupefying, brutalizing…” (Sinclair, 483) leaving Elzbieta with “no strength for anything.” (Sinclair, 483) To the details and comparisons to workers being parts of a disposable machine, “She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence.” (Sinclair, 483) It is sad to say I know how these characters feel. I am lucky in the sense that my working conditions have never been as disgusting as those of the early 20th century slaughterhouses, but it is a shame that anyone should endure the unfortunate reality that hard work doesn’t always pay off the way it ideally should. I believe this is due to the profiteering off unethical labor practices, deceitful product accountability and price gouging on consumers, workers and suppliers. Industrial capitalism prevents those most vulnerable to economic struggles from climbing the social ladder. Through low wages and dangerous working conditions, Sinclair draws comparisons between the animals and workers being

ground up by the meatpacking industry.

In his attempts to uncover the scandals, Sinclair went undercover and spent seven weeks posing as a worker in the meatpacking industry. He later retreated to a cabin in his home state of New Jersey and spent the next nine months writing The Jungle. Before coming to America, his main character Jurgis shares his romantic and idealistic notions of the ability to make good money working in the land of dreams “a place of which lovers and young people dreamed.” (Sinclair, 471) Jurgis believes that in America “a man might earn three roubles a day” and that seems like a good living when he thinks of the way things are in his country. He has no idea of the level of extortion, swindling and profiteering he faces at every turn and attached to every decision he has to make. He quickly becomes aware of his circumstances when they finally make it to “Packingtown” and had to rent a cheap flat in a tenement house owned by the industry. “A very few days of practical experience in this land of high wages had been sufficient to make clear to them the cruel fact that it was also a land of high prices, and in it the poor man was almost as poor as in any other corner of the earth; and so there vanished in a night all the wonderful dreams of wealth that had been haunting Jurgis.” (Sinclair, 474) I felt this foreshadowed the failure about to occur and that his goal is unachievable.
Sinclair uses persistent gouging of Jurgis and his family; everything from extortion by cops, to the rental of subpar tenement housing, and the extremely high cost of impure food products to give examples of what exacerbated their inability to succeed amidst all the hard work. And to emphasis the barbarous power of capitalism he paralleled the suffering of the workers to the disgusting treatment of their final product. At no point does capitalism receive respect and The Jungle was intended to show how industry was only concerned with self-interests and profit at the expense of workers and consumers. Because of corporate conglomeration there was little way around participation in the capitalistic system running amuck throughout “Packingtown”. Workers worked in the factories for low wages, paid high rents and then had to spend their wages on low quality food at high prices. A vicious cycle that ate people up “it was true, - that here in this huge city, with its stores of heaped-up wealth, human creatures might be hunted down and destroyed by the wild-beast powers of nature…” The entire city was an industrial capitalistic industry and immigrates were just a means to and end.
The disgusting accounts of what ended up in the final products produced by the meatpacking industry gained more attention by audiences than the disenfranchised workers who performed the atrocious and dangerous labor. Sinclair intended to spark interest in the plight that inflicted the immigrate and the industries unfair labor practices, but he underestimated the glutinous attitudes of Americans. Because the loudest public discourse was an outcry towards the foul and grotesque quality of food products sold to consumers. Sinclair’s publisher was actually hesitant to publish his book, afraid of being sued, but sent one of their own editors to confirm the accounts and a former governmental inspector confirmed that his depictions were not exaggerated. Roosevelt himself called The Jungle “an obnoxious book” (Cherny, gilderlehrman.org) and after he initiated his own investigation, then President Roosevelt was quoted saying, “the method of handling and preparing food products in uncleanly and dangerous to health.” (Cherny, gilderlehrman.org)
Sinclair felt that capitalism had clearly failed at providing many with the ability to reach the American dream.

He believed socialism and public ownership of industries would help improve the lives of the poor and curb corporate corruption. But unfortunately his ideals never materialized past a brief movement of American Socialism in the early 1900’s, only to die out by the late 1940-50’s due to a rise in Communism and McCarthyism. With the intentions of The Jungle, Sinclair wanted to show the negative side effects of capitalism and expose the cheap labor, the disregard for workers welfare and improper treatment of immigrates by corporate industries. In the beginning Jurgis imagines being free, “ In that country, rich or poor, a man was free…”(Sinclair, 471) but freedom is an illusion when his life consists of nothing but working day in and day out, barely having enough to make ends meet and put food on the table, no rest, no joy, essentially locked in slavery by low wages. So much effort put forth by so many people in one family and they still were not able to fulfill the American dream and survive in their new land. “They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside. It was not less tragic because it was so sordid, because that it had to do with wages and grocery bill and rents. They had dreamed of freedom; of a chance to look about them and learn something; to be decent and clean, to see their child grow up to be strong. And now it was all gone—it would

never be! They had played the game and they had lost.”(Sinclair, 483)
The promises of capitalism end up being myths in which the poor and vulnerable are coerced into becoming the disposable cogs within the machine of industrial conglomerates. Sinclair’s portrayal of it this one particular immigrant family can share narratives with many who suffered at the hands of unfortunate economic status whether you were foreign or just born into poverty, many and most were taken advantage of by big business. This still occurs today. Much like the past, the voices of the suppressed are muffled by the outcries of the elites. All the while, a whole class of people are sacrificed and sidelined for profit and cheaper consumer goods.