retain an active and controlling influence in an important business, from which they would have otherwise been forced to retire”.
Olmsted also argues that women and children who are poor now have an option of getting some country in their lives by being able to attend the Park, whereas they could not afford a trip to the country. He also claims that the Park helps the sick convalesce and its good for tourism, both factors that also increase the overall economic health of the city, “The addition thus made to the productive labor of the city is not unimportant…[and]…The Park, moreover, has had a very marked effect in making the city attractive to visitors, and in thus increasing its trade”. We can see the progressive era theme in this essay that social works should be works that benefit the most numbers of people, including the poor, the rich and business as well as the general public. Therefore, it is not surprise that Olmsted brings up Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, to support his argument that natural public works like the Park have a dualistic value for the cities that construct them, “first, for the pleasure itself which results from it: second, from its tendency to weaken the dangerous inclinations which man derives from his nature”. Finally, Olmsted even goes so far as to imply that the pubs of New York lost Sunday business because their regular patrons opted for the social, natural environment of the Park. Therefore, we see how nature is linked with the uplifting of the human spirit and the promotion of fellowship in the Progressive Era.
In Upton Sinclair’s excerpt from The Jungle, we get a completely different attack in favor of uplifting the human spirit. However, in Sinclair’s scathing attack on the way in which the slaughterhouse industry degrades the human soul, we get a damnation of endeavors that completely remove man from nature, as opposed to an essay like Olmsted’s whic...