The Jungle 4 Essay, Research Paper

American history has always been dominated by those individuals who have challenged themselves with causes. Sinclair used The Jungle as a way to make America aware of the corruption of Chicago s meat packing industry and the general corruption of capitalism. He did this by telling the story of a group of Lithuanian immigrants who came to America seeking fortune, freedom, and opportunity. These hopes for the new world perished in jungle of human suffering. Sinclair s answer to the horrible conditions in packinghouses, wage slavery, and anguish of laborers was socialist reform.

The immigrants in The Jungle were victims of the greed that turned the America into a brutal jungle at the tun of the century. Sinclair wrote All the fair and noble impulses of humanity, the dreams of poets and the agonies of martyrs, are shackled and bound in the service of organized and predatory Greed. Sinclair s solution was to substitute cooperation for competition by reorganizing the economy along Socialist lines. If ownership of industries was given to the public, and run democratically for everyone s benefit the atrocities that occurred to Jurgis and the other workers would not have happened.

The people at the bottom of the economic ladder, such as Jurgis, Ona and their family were at the most disadvantage. The packinghouses and factories prey on immigrants who are ignorant of the language and customs of America. Businesses take no responsibility for their workers, using up the young and strong and discarding the olds and weak. While workers tried to form unions, they were no match for the capitalist organizations.

Sinclair brings his views of socialism as the solution to light when in the story Jurgis attends a socialist rally just to keep warm and ends up being inspired to turn his life around. He gets a job at a hotel with a socialist organizer and is again accepted in his family.