The Jungle 5 Essay, Research Paper

The Jungle

From the point of view of history, The Jungle, is both a comment on and a product of its own times. Those times most definitely need to be viewed in relation to what happened in the last half of the nineteenth century. This incredible time period saw the making of great industries and great fortunes (for those who were in control of the industries). So far as the relationship between business and government was concerned, it was a time of laissez-faire, where government had very little to do with what business was doing. If as Calvin Coolidge said in the 1920 s, the business of America is business, what did this mean for individuals, their rights and expectations?

The Jungle appeared in January of 1906. It is completely understandable to me that the reading public responded to details on meat production and plant sanitation instead of the conditions of workingmen or Sinclair s Socialist message. In turn, The Jungle helped to do something completely different than what the book s author meant for it to do. The Jungle helped to push the Pure Food and Drug Bill out of a House committee and force president Teddy Roosevelt to jump into action. Roosevelt quickly requested the Department of Agriculture to send an investigating committee and through additional pressure, including Sinclair s personal appeal, Roosevelt sent in an additional committee (Neill-Reynolds Commission). Also, at the same time a Beef Inspection Act was submitted in the Senate, all of this with Roosevelt s complete approval.

Somehow, when the meat industry found out about all this they were able to get articles published which defended present practices. Since Roosevelt was not able to exert the pressure he himself felt, he released a portion of the Neill-Reynolds report, which basically confirmed the truths of the packinghouse conditions that were depicted in The Jungle. It is my opinion that the fact that The Jungle could cause such a large industry to fight back powerfully attests to its own power as a persuasive medium.

Upton Sinclair s often quoted remark about aiming for the heart and hitting the stomach definitely rings true when reading The Jungle. Most readers mistook it for another muckraking effort, on unsanitary conditions in the packinghouses. If Sinclair had not written the last three of four chapters of the book then it would have read much more like a social protest novel.

Most definitely the purpose of The Jungle is to promote socialism as the only answer to the wage slavery enforced by capitalism. The book points out that labor unions have failed because owners can form more powerful associations. The answer, according to the socialists, is public ownership of the means of production. In other works people like Sinclair wanted to completely restructure the American society. He and other socialists believed that this was the only way for the workingman to gain freedom. They believe that there are no other alternatives offered; Socialism is the only way. Thus, finally is the theme of The Jungle.

In some ways I can see where Sinclair is coming from in his beliefs, but at the same time there are other aspects of Socialism that I definitely do not agree with. It is a wonderful theory that if everyone owned everything then everyone would provide equally for it. This sound absolutely wonderful on paper, but the startling reality is that we are not all alike and different people have different standards. We live in America, the melting pot nation, the land of opportunity, where anyone can make it provided they have or can acquire the skills necessary to do so. Granted it is a lot easier to make it in America today than it was back when Sinclair wrote The Jungle due to Socialistic based programs like social security, welfare, Medicare, and workman s compensation. In addition, programs like these along with federal and private scholarship foundations have opened up many doors for the children of today to further their education without putting enormous strain on their entire family.

The book The Jungle was an extremely interesting book to read for me. Sinclair s in depth details during many of the scenes was unbelievably disgusting. The fact that people had to live like that during those times is ridiculous. For the most part the people who worked in the packinghouses might as well have been slaves. If they were slaves they would at least be given a place to stay and enough food to stay able to work. But still neither of these situations could have helped their dignity, for that had to be completely lost. I cannot imagine being able to pay my bills one year and the very next year have to resort to getting on my hands and knees and begging for money. I know that desperate times call for desperate measures, but I do not think that I could sacrifice my pride so far as to beg in the streets to the same people who had put me there in the first place.

In conclusion, I would like to leave you with a little information about Upton Sinclair s life and career. The author of The Jungle’s, Upton Sinclair, life is best characterized by one word prolific: during the course of seventy-six years he wrote dozens of books, pamphlets, and plays as well as hundreds of articles, speeches, and letters on every conceivable subject for a man who was interested in social conditions and social changes. Estimates in the early 1900 s give him 90 published books and 772 translations of these books in 47 languages and 39 countries. How many millions of words the output represents would be extremely difficult to calculate, though in the early years of his writing career he was producing 2 million words a year.

Born Upton Bell Sinclair, Jr., on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, he was the son of parents who were southern by ancestry. The family was poor as the result of his father s lack of success as a salesman, and this plus his inability to support the family led him to drink heavily. Sinclair had an abhorrence of drinking abundantly apparent in The Jungle. Also, he makes mention of a science of clean eating in the same book.