Several years before and after the turn the turn of the twentieth century, America experienced a large influx of European immigration. These new citizens had come in search of the American dream of success, bolstered by promise of good fortune. Instead they found themselves beaten into failure by American industry. Upton Sinclair wanted to expose the cruelty and heartlessness endured by these ordinary workers. He chose to represent the industrial world through the meatpacking industry, where the rewards of progress were enjoyed only by the privileged, who exploited the powerless masses of workers. The Jungle is a novel and a work of investigative journalism; its primary purpose was to inform the general public about the dehumanization of American workers. However the novel was much more effective at exposing the unsanitary conditions of the meatpacking industry. The public’s concern about the meat supply was so great that Sinclair later commented, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” He played the journalist role well, actually spending seven months in Chicago where he studied the inner workings of the meatpacking industry.
The experience allowed him to describe first-hand the sickening environment of the modern industrial factory. After Jurgis loses his factory job, he begins a frustrating search for new employment. Eventually he is forced into taking a job at the fertilizer plant, the worst place in the town. Sinclair makes it clear that the worker will, in fact, be working in sewage. The fertilizer works of Durham’s lay away from the rest of the plant. This this part of the yards came all the “tankage,” and the waste products of all sorts; here they dried out the bones-and in suffocating cellars where the day light bending over whirling machines and sewing bits of bone into all sorts of shapes, breathing their lungs of the fine dust, and doomed to die, every one of them, within a certain time.
The Essay on And Reactors Industry Workers
Career Risks of Nuclear Industry Workers: When one talks about the subject of nuclear reactors, it is most commonly the case that fear is alongside the talk. People fear the dangers of nuclear catastrophes and the harmful diseases and cancers caused by radiation. But there are people who must go to work everyday, putting their lives at a potential risk for their job. These people are the Nuclear ...
Here they made the blood into albumen, and made other foul-smelling things into thins still more foul-smelling. In the corridors and caverns where it was done, you might lose yourself as in the great caves of Kentucky. (p. 152) The thought of working in the waste of Packingtown disgusts Jurgis so much that he wishes he doesn’t get hired. Jurgis is a typical immigrant worker, and he realizes that this job is his “only hope.” The work is brutal and leads Jurgis to alcoholism, eventually destroying the Rudkus family. Sinclair blames the company completely, and wants to make it clear that Jurgis is forced to take this job because of the lack of opportunity and the heartlessness of his former employers. However, this message does not come across effectively because the average reader is more concerned with the contamination surrounding Jurgis in the meatpacking plant: There were the wool pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men.
. . There were those who made the tins for the canned meat, and their hands too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a change for blood poisoning. . . as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting-sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world a Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard! (p.117) There were no toilets, so human and rat excrement wound up in the meat, along with the rats themselves. These unsanitary details moved readers far more than the injustices inflicted on the workers.
The Essay on Brown Side Made Working King
Occupations in The 16 th Century In the Elizabethan Era, occupations were as varied as a bowl of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans. There was some much to do as the times were changing rapidly. Professions in this time and age ranged from rabbit catching to working with royalty. Making weapons, clothes, working in the house, working in the castle, selling goods in the marketplace, and healing others were ...
Other examples include the rechurning of rancid butter, the cutting of ice from polluted water and the doctoring of milk with formaldehyde. The average consumer was shocked to know that the “pure beef” was in fact contaminated and unfit for human consumption. Imagine the shock of the meat-eating consumer after reading: There were cattle which had been fed on “Whisky malt,” the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called “steerly”-which means covered with boils. . . It was stuff such as this that made the “embalmed beef” that had killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was old stuff that had been lying for year in the cellars. (p.114) Sinclair makes it clear that the factories are thoroughly corrupt, as Ona’s boss seduces her and asks her to work in a brothel.
When Jurgis retaliates, he is thrown in jail. Sinclair is showing how the industrial system was meant to keep its workers permanently in poverty. It cannot be denied that the main objective of the novel is to depict the squalid conditions of the working class laborer. Sinclair’s intended result was to show that the forces of industry capitalists would drive the working class to Socialism. Jack London, famous Socialist, commented, “What ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ did for the black slaves ‘The Jungle’ has a large chance to do for the white slaves of today.” By demonizing American industry he hoped to change the world. There are only a dozen or so pages concerned with the horrid details of meat production, but it was these informal references to the food they were buying and eating that angered the people and created public demand for reform. Upton Sinclair was primarily concerned with labor conditions for workers in the meat packing industry.
He also exposed unsanitary food processing, which was incidental. It succeeded on both fronts, leading President Roosevelt to sign the Pure Food and Drug Act as a result. Sinclair was able to paint a detailed picture of immigrant culture while remaining informative. The sacrifice of millions of lives for the amassing of wealth was hard to believe, as were the exploitation of women and children in the factories. Sinclair hoped that no one who read The Jungle would forget the opening chapters..
The Term Paper on The Reality Of Fast Food Meat
According to Eric Schlosser author of Fast Food Nation, 'Fast food has had an enormous impact not only on our eating habits but on our economy, our culture, and our values' (3). According to Lois Williams on any given day, about one quarter of U. S. adults visit a fast-food restaurant. The typical American now eats about three hamburgers each week (2).Schlosser also writes that "thirty years ago ...
