Analysis Of The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

The Jungle

In The Jungle by Upton Sinclair portrays a young family from Lithuania and their journey to surviving America during the time of political machines and industrialization. The Jungle helps paint the picture of the dangers of factory life in the life of an immigrant and this reflects on what was going on in 1906. In the factories they would use animals that were unsafe for consumption in the meat that aided in the spread of disease. Another issue was that children labor was at an all time high along with their death rates. Death and disease surrounded the people who worked in these place so naturally most of them caught their death there, killed in an accident, or worked until they were broken. These issues portrayed in the book …show more content…
In the book Out of Many: A History of the American People states, “In 1900, at least one-quarter of all Southern cotton mill workers were between the ages of ten to sixteen, and many worked more that sixty hours a week.”(Faragher et al.2009, 463). In The Jungle, the children were forced to work even though they were significantly younger than the working age staying out late nights selling newspapers or working in a factory under false documentation all so the family could pay the bills. Many women. like Florence Kelley, stepped up to the plate to demand social reform for children and for the age to work to be at least fourteen after seeing the working conditions they had to endure. Children were often forced to grow up at a very young age, some not even able to attend school because their responsibility was to their family first. In one scene in The Jungle, Stanislovas Lukoszaite, one of Teta Elzbieta Lukoszaite six children, is a thirteen year old boy who fears the cold and gets false documentation to say he is sixteen years old. He fears getting frost bite and having his fingers fall off since that is what happened to the little boy he had worked with at the lard canning. His wages are significantly lower than everyone else in the family but, still he was told to earn his …show more content…
In the book Out of Many: A History of the American People states, “A 1910 study of work accidents revealed that nearly a fourth of all new steel workers were killed or injured each year.”( Faragher et al.2009, 470). They were all replaceable with the rush to have a job there was always someone new to take their spot. Inside The Jungle, if a man were to fall inside the vat of lard he would be left there to die. In an exert from the jungle, “Their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vat; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting, sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!”(Sinclair 1906, 117). This showed how common it was to die at work that you yourself would become the product. This was the reason for the unions to get safer working conditions and higher payment. So many people were injured beyond repair which is why workers compensation was created instead of allowing the workers to sue. Being injured in those days was a death sentence and left many people homeless to starve.

The Jungle greatly shaped the way we produce products to keep disease from spreading. Factory life in 1906 was reshaped by a combined effort from progressive reforms and Theodore Roosevelt. The Jungle brought about the Pure Food and

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Upton Sinclair The Jungle Analysis