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Challenges and hardships for immigrants
Challenges and hardships for immigrants
The hardships in America for immigrants
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During the early 20th century, life for immigrants was very tough. Those days you had corrupted government officials and horrible living conditions. The only word that comes to mind when thinking about this time period is filthy. Not only were the living spaces filthy but so were the people. For example, the first time the readers witness this is when Jurgis Rudkus and his family come to the United States through Ellis Island. There he get scammed by an imposter; in Upton Sinclair’s words, “...there was an agent who helped them, but he proved a scoundrel, and got them into a trap with some officials, and cost them a good deal of their precious money.” (Sinclair 26). Not only that but they also get put in a hotel room by a fake police officer …show more content…
A huge part of when they fell victim to the new society is when Jurgis and Ona get married and quickly go in debt because people simply came to eat and drink but never paid their respects to the family. The newly married couple and their family did not realize that people throw away the beliefs and their old traditions when they arrive in America. After the celebrations are over, “The guests are expected to pay for this entertainment ; if they be proper guests, they will see that there is a neat sum left over for the bride and bridegroom to start life upon.” (14). Unfortunately, for Jurgis and Ona, most of the “guests” just left without even leaving some money. There are a lot more examples of this but a major one is when Jurgis and his family decide to buy a home. They are swindled of their $300 and do not even know of the extra money they had to pay. In the book it says, “The house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed to make money by swindling poor people.” (77). Jurgis also later found out that there was interest and they had to get insurance for the home which he did not know at the initial purchase of the home. So not only was he greatly overpaying for the home but also had to pay other expenses that no one ever told him about. The last example but certainly not the least is when Jurgis thinks he is a very lucky man when he get a job at Brown and Company after only living in Chicago for a couple of days. In the reading it explains, “...not more than half an hour, the second day of his arrival in Chicago, before he had been beckoned by one of the bosses. Of this he was very proud, and it made him more disposed than ever to laugh at the pessimists.” (23). What Jurgis didn’t know is that the meat packing industry is a awful
Emerson wrote, “Times of terror are times of eloquence.” Based on your reading of Bitzer’s article, what does this sentiment mean to you? Given your understanding, illustrate this concept by providing three illustrations, one each from the three different contexts indicated below, a(n):
Instead, he found that the same poverty that existed in Lithuania existed in America. His family put all of their money together to purchase a very modest home, only to find that if they missed one payment, they would lose the home. This follows very closely to what actual immigrants to America experienced. The early 20th century was a rapidly growing time and people flocked from all over the world to come to America where most ended up in major cities such as Chicago. It was in these cities that multiple families were forced to live in broken down tenement buildings because they could not earn a living wage
Upton Sinclair's Purpose in Writing The Jungle Upton Sinclair wrote this book for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, he tries to awaken the reader to the terrible. living conditions of immigrants in the cities around the turn of the century. Chicago has the most potent examples of these. conditions.
Discuss how Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tensions and historical processes at hand in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Most immigrants settled near each other’s own nationality and/or original village when in America. They could speak their own language and act as if they were in their own country. Within these neighborhoods, immigrants suffered crowded conditions. These were often called slums, yet they became ghettos when laws, prejudice and community pressure prevented inhabitants from renting elsewhere. Health conditions were terrible in these districts.
... many immigrants faced discrimination, thus leaving them no choice but to live in the slums of some areas and try fight their way up to success.
Immigrants were held for long periods of time before they could get into America. People who had to send here were Steerages, a lower class, they had been “named” by the medical exams “E” for eye trouble, “K” for hernia, “L” for lameness, “X for mental defects, “H” for heart disease, Mary Gordon, 1987. In the other hand, Angel Island and Ellis Island had many differences between them. Ellis Island was in the East coast, Upper New York Bay. In additional, Ellis Island was a castle garden, and it was used for immigrants from Europe. “Immigrants could pass through Ellis Island in mere hours, though for some the process took days”, May Gordon, 1987. The immigrants who passed Ellis Island had been treated by terrible things such as “stolen their names and chalked their weaknesses in public on their clothing” Marry Gordon, 1987. Immigrants who had to go to the Angel Island was treated worse. They would be separated men from women and children at the moment they had arrived. Then they had to do the medical exams which required undressing in front of strangers. If they fail the test for various diseases they would be deported immediately. After all of the examinations, the immigrants did not pass through yet, they would wait in a detention dormitory and a bunk until the interrogation process, and this process took a few days to months. In conclusion, I rather to live in Ellis Island and
The Jungle (by Upton Sinclair) describes the hardships of being an immigrant. Such as, not knowing the language, low pay, and keeping a job.
A well-discussed debate among today’s economy is the issues concerning immigrants and their yearning desire to become American citizens. As displayed in The Jungle, a rather perturbing novel about the trials and ruthless temptations early America presents to a Lithuanian family, adjusting to new surrounding and a new way of life is quite difficult. To make matters worse, language barriers and lack of domestic knowledge only seems to entice starvation and poverty among newly acquired citizens, who simply wish to change their social and economic lives to better themselves and their families.
Employment is hard to find and hard to keep and a job isn’t always what one hoped for. Sometimes jobs do not sufficiently support our lifestyles, and all too frequently we’re convinced that our boss’s real job is to make us miserable. However, every now and then there are reprieves such as company holiday parties or bonuses, raises, promotions and even a half hour or hour to eat lunch that allows escape from monotonous workloads. Aside from our complaints, employment today for majority of American’s isn’t totally dreadful, and there always lies opportunity for promotion. American’s did not always experience this reality in their work places though, and not long past are days of abysmal and disgusting work conditions. In 1906 Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was published. His novel drastically transformed the way Americans felt about the unmitigated power corporations wielded in the ‘free’ market economy that was heavily propagandized at the turn of the century. Corporations do not have the same unscrupulous practices today because of actions taken by former President Theodore Roosevelt who felt deeply impacted by Sinclair’s famous novel. Back in early 1900’s in the meatpacking plants of Chicago the incarnation of greed ruled over the working man and dictated his role as a simple cog within an enormous insatiable industrial machine. Executives of the 1900’s meatpacking industry in Chicago, IL, conspired to work men to death, obliterate worker’s unions and lie to American citizens about what they were actually consuming in order to simply acquire more money.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of great social and political change. With an influx of immigrants rushing to work in factories, the dynamics of culture were swiftly changing. The naïve, new Americans were easily persuaded into making decisions in voting that were greatly influenced by the corrupt individuals guiding them (Sinclair, 1906, pp. 97-98). Unknowingly, these immigrants were working very hard to prevent themselves from achieving the heavily desired “American Dream.” Upton Sinclair’s own political beliefs are reflected in his startling novel, The Jungle, which details a believable account of such an immigrant’s experience. Though it is often thought of as an exposure of the unsanitary meat packing industry,
The life of an immigrant in the United States during the Gilded Age was a rough life. During this time period the U.S. went through a dramatic change in dealing with changing infrastructure and masses of people coming over from different countries for a chance at a better life. This time period was characterized by small wage jobs, poor working conditions and the struggle to survive. The Jungle embodies the themes of the Gilded Age with first hand experiences of an immigrant's hardships of life.
In the eyes of the early American colonists and the founders of the Constitution, the United States was to represent the ideals of acceptance and tolerance to those of all walks of life. When the immigration rush began in the mid-1800's, America proved to be everything but that. The millions of immigrants would soon realize the meaning of hardship and rejection as newcomers, as they attempted to assimilate into American culture. For countless immigrants, the struggle to arrive in America was rivaled only by the struggle to gain acceptance among the existing American population.
[Topic sentence for first body paragraph]. The first event that led to an increase vegetarianism in America was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906. Upton Sinclair‘s The Jungle, was about Chicago's filthy, unsanitary meat-packing facilities. The novel resulted in a few percent of Americans no longer wanting to eat meat for fear of unsanitariness, and thus resulted in the first noticeably increase in vegetarians in America, even though the government passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The second major event that led to a slight increase in vegetarians was in 1958. It was reported that animals were cut piece by piece while still conscious in slaughter houses. This caused an outcry from by a large number of animal lovers, and they campaigned to put an end
One of the many trials that migrant workers faced were the conditions they had to live in. They sometimes had to stay in barns or chicken coops because sometimes the farm owners just didn’t care or they did not have enough money (“The Harvest Gypsies”). They also had to sleep in one room and one story shacks that had no plumbing or electricity and basically had to pay half their daily wages just to stay there (“ Depression Era: 1930s: Repatriation