Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
by Barry Wright
Essay: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
Pages: 10
Rating: 3 stars
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Employment is hard to find and hard to keep and a job isn’t always what one hoped for. Sometimes jobs do not
sufficiently support our lifestyles, and all too frequently we’re convinced that our boss’s real job is to make us
miserable. However, every now and then there are reprieves such as company holiday parties or bonuses, raises,
promotions and even a half hour or hour to eat lunch that allows escape from monotonous workloads. Aside from
our complaints, employment today for majority of American’s isn’t totally dreadful, and there always lies
opportunity for promotion. American’s did not always experience this reality in their work places though, and not
long past are days of abysmal and disgusting work conditions. In 1906 Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was
published. His novel drastically transformed the way Americans felt about the unmitigated power corporations
wielded in the ‘free’ market economy that was heavily propagandized at the turn of the century. Corporations do
not have the same unscrupulous practices today because of actions taken by former President Theodore
Roosevelt who felt deeply impacted by Sinclair’s famous novel. Back in early 1900’s in the meatpacking plants of
Chicago the incarnation of greed ruled over the working man and dictated his role as a simple cog within an
enormous insatiable industrial machine. Executives of the 1900’s meatpacking industry in Chicago, IL, conspired to
work men to death, obliterate worker’s unions and lie to American citizens about what they were actually
consuming in order to simply acquire more money.
In a most literal sense men’s bodies were routinely exploited for unrelenting dangerous labor then discarded as
the human body began to break. Instead of being reward...
essay on upton sinclair