Upton Sinclair's The Jungle: The Progressive Era

Upton Sinclair

The period of time running from the 1890’s through the early 1930’s is often referred to as the “Progressive Era.” It was a time where names such as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller stood for the progress of America and their great contributions to American industry and innovation. This chapter however, has a much darker side. Deplorable working conditions, rampant political corruption and power hungry monopolies and trusts threatened the working class of America and the steady influx of European immigrants hoping to make a better life for themselves and their families. What started as a grass-roots movement pushing for political reform at the local and municipal levels soon began to encompass

so much more and the political level of reform was pushed far beyond local municipalities to the very steps of the White House.

Upon his 1906 publishing of The Jungle, Sinclair was coined as an avid “muckraker” when President Roosevelt addressed an audience in April of that year. When asked whether or not the novel provided a realistic account of workers conditions within the Chicago meat packing industry, Roosevelt accused Sinclair of being a liar in an attempt to discredit him. A large part of this was credited to Roosevelt’s personal distaste for Sinclair’s apparent link to the Socialist party but, Roosevelt was also unaware that Sinclair had worked undercover at the plant to gather first hand and accurate accounts. The Jungle shined light on the poor working conditions of workers in a meat packing facility. Throughout the novel, Sinclair gave gruesome examples of what workers went through each and every day. Each department of the facility was faced with its own risks and challenges, “There were the wool pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with

their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off.” Not only did many of these workers endure life altering injuries, they also encountered many diseases such as Tuberculosis and Rheumatism. Sadly death was the outcome for countless workers within these facilities. Not only were these conditions inhumane for these factory workers, the contents being produced from the facilities were tainted and disease infested meat was being packaged. The meat being prepared, cooked and placed on the dinner table of many, was unsanitary and should not have been ingested. Upton Sinclair () said it himself, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” (1934) Until the publishing of this book, this was the life these workers faced, day in and day out. Sinclair was the voice for all these workers, the voice to empower change.
Sinclair’s original intentions were to reveal the harsh and inhumane working conditions and unfair wages factory workers were encountering.

However, that was not the case. When The Jungle was presented to the public, readers were astonished by the disgusting and unsanitary state in which the meat was being processed in. The community was more concerned with the meat conditions than they were with the horrific conditions the workers were faced with. So while the popularity of Sinclair’s work was not his original intentions, it still accomplished stages of reform. It can be assumed that Roosevelts initial reluctance to accept Sinclair’s novel was in part, directly connected to his disbelief that the Federal government had become so disconnected and oblivious to American industry and the complete lack of Federal oversight. This “disconnect” did not last long as The Pure Food and Drug Act, as well as, the Meat Inspection Act were both directly set in to place mere months after Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle was published. This type of reform supported progressive philosophy by preventing corporate owners from remaining above government regulation and started a trend in the way government regulators began to deal with corporate monopolies and trusts. The Jungle, along with other “muckrakers” began a series of Federal oversight reforms and regulatory guidance that soon began to take hold in other industries. Big industry would soon realize that they were not above the

government and that the people were fed up with their unscrupulous business practices. Change was in the atmosphere and it was not going anywhere.