Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle

The storm of public reaction which followed the publication of The Jungle, with its revelations of shockingly unsanitary conditions in the packing houses, was directly responsible for the enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (Sinclair, 1981, p. v). It must be recognized that Sinclair's actual intent in writing the book was much more sweeping than to call for stricter standards for the inspection of meat. Upton Sinclair was a socialist, and the intent of the book was to make a general indictment of corporate capitalism.

Sinclair's focus was only incidentally on abuses peculiar to the meat-packing industry, and in the course of it, he calls attention to a broad range of the working and living conditions to which immigrants and other workers were subjected at the time. It was, however, the sanitary abuses which most immediately captured public attention; for example, rotten pork was ground up and mixed into "good" meat in sufficiently small quantities as not to call attention to itself by its odor (

. . .
to take this questionable document at face value, while the very sporadic and casual state inspections are plainly ineffectual at rooting out violations. Unionization, and companies' responses to "labor agitation," are a major theme throughout The Jungle. The early union experience of the book's protagonist, Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkis, is indifferent, but later, as a result of knocking down a supervisor, due to an incident to be related below, he finds himself blacklisted: "They had him on a secret list in every office, big and little, in the place ... he was condemned and sentenced, without trial and without appeal; he could never work for the packers again" (Sinclair, 1981, p. 196). The practice of blacklist lies ultimately behind the body of case law that has sharply limited the right of employers to request previous employers' references for prospective hires (McAdams, Freeman, and Pincus, 1995, pp. 509-510. In some respects, however, Sinclair was very much a man of his own times, and this shows for example in his characterization of strikebreakers: As very few of the better class fo workingmen could be got for such work, these specimens of the new American hero contained an assortment of the criminals an
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Freeman Pincus, Elzbeita Stanislovas, Upton Sinclair, Act Jungle, City Foods, Tata Elzbeita, Upton Sinclair's, Conner Sinclair, Sicilians Slovaks, Jurgis Rudkis, freeman pincus, pincus 1995, freeman pincus 1995, sinclair 1981, city foods, capital city foods, mcadams freeman pincus, capital city, mcadams freeman, pincus 1995 pp, broad range, 1995 pp, practices workplace, employment practices, pure food drug,
Approximate Word count = 2072
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Upton Sinclair novel, The Jungle