Upton Sinclair's "the Jungle"

Several years before and after the turn the turn of the twentieth century, America experienced a large influx of European immigration. These new citizens had come in search of the American dream of success, bolstered by promise of good fortune. Instead they found themselves beaten into failure by American industry. Upton Sinclair wanted to expose the cruelty and heartlessness endured by these ordinary workers. He chose to represent the industrial world through the meatpacking industry, where the rewards of progress were enjoyed only by the privileged, who exploited the powerless masses of workers. The Jungle is a novel and a work of investigative journalism; its primary purpose was to inform the general public about the dehumanization of American workers. However the novel was much more effective at exposing the unsanitary conditions of the meatpacking industry.

The public's concern about the meat supply was so great that Sinclair later commented, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." He played the journalist role well, actually spending seven months in Chicago where he studied the inner workings of the meatpacking industry. The experience allowed him to describe first-hand the sickening environment of the modern industrial factory. After Jurgis loses his factory job, he begins a frustrating search for new employment. Eventually he is forced into taking a job at the fertilizer plant, the worst place in the town. Sinclair makes it clear that the worker will, in fact, be working in sewage.

The fertilizer works of Durham's lay away from the rest of the plant. This this part of the yards came all the "tankage," and the waste products of all sorts; here they dried out the bones--and in suffocating cellars where the day light bending over whirling machines and sewing bits of bone into all sorts of shapes, breathing their lungs of the fine dust, and doomed to die, every one of them, within a certain time. Here they made the blood into albumen, and made other foul-smelling things into thins still more foul-smelling. In the corridors and caverns where it was done, you might lose yourself as in the great caves of Kentucky. (p. 152)

The thought of working in the waste of Packingtown disgusts Jurgis so much that he wishes he doesn't get hired. Jurgis is a typical immigrant worker, and he realizes that this job is his "only hope." The work is brutal and leads Jurgis to alcoholism, eventually destroying the Rudkus family. Sinclair blames the company completely, and wants to make it clear that Jurgis is forced to take this job because of the lack of opportunity and the heartlessness of his former employers. However, this message does not come across effectively because the average reader is more concerned with the contamination surrounding Jurgis in the meatpacking plant:

There were the wool pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men. . . There were those who made the tins for the canned meat, and their hands too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a change for blood poisoning. . . as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; 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 a Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! (p.117)

There were no toilets, so human and rat excrement wound up in the meat, along with the rats themselves. These unsanitary details moved readers far more than the