Jairo Alvarez
The Jungle as Propaganda
The Jungle was a novel written by Upton Sinclair that addressed a multitude of issues in 1905. This novel displays propaganda using figures such as Jurgis and his family throughout the entire story. One of the biggest issues in the book that I found most engaging was the worker’s rights at the time of the start of the industrial era. The Jungle revealed the horrific working conditions that people went through in the meat-packing industry in Chicago. Upton Sinclair’s description of the working conditions, and the meat were characterized as diseased, rotten, and contaminated, which shocked the public and led to new federal food safety laws that we have today.
The working environment described in The Jungle is undeniably sickening.This was the biggest issues that I found in this novel. Sinclair writes about how almost all immigrants had to work in unsafe, unsanitary, and inhumane conditions. Workers in Packingtown passing away due to the harsh labor was never a surprise. Packingtown is a section in Chicago where packing houses are positioned. Chicago was the worst and biggest meat packing industry in the early 1900s. Packingtown was well-known for their awful living conditions and working conditions. A significant death in the novel was that of Antana Rudkus, father of Jurgis. He was positioned in the pickle rooms, where meat is brined. “Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one…you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb “ (Sinclair 82). Upton Sinclair continues to describe the diseases that each of the different jobs possess. For instance, rheumatism for those who worked in the chilling rooms and tuberculosis for the employees that worked in artificial steam rooms and horrendous odors. As for the wool pluckers, their hands were plastered with cuts and had missing fingers. The list goes on and on which made the packing plant a living hell. According to Sinclair, All of these illnesses and complications exist because of the heartless capitalists who were trying to make more money by exploiting their workers.
Although there is no direct definition for workers’ rights, it can be described as employees attaining safe and healthy working environments, conditions, and labor. After reading this novel, I can unquestionably say that people had no working rights whatsoever at the time. Like said before, this really caught my attention when it came to the biggest issue in the book. Working rights at the time brings capitalism to the mind as well. Capitalism is the the biggest reason for these working rights in the 1900’s. The majority of events that occur in the book were chosen to purposely show aspects of capitalism and how it failed. According to an article by Monica Sedore, Sinclair saw the capitalism’s collapse as inhuman, brutal, and destructive. When looking at The Jungle, one can see how the crazy economic and social system was slowly destroying Jurgis and his immigrant family, as well as the whole working class at that time period. “Throughout the book, as in this chapter [9], he described with great accuracy the horrifying physical conditions under which immigrant packing plant workers and their families worked and lived, portraying the collapse of immigrant culture under the relentless pressure of industrial capitalism” (HISTORY MATTERS). A reader of this novel is easily capable of noticing that capitalism is easily portrayed as a complete evil. Take Antanas's death as another example; there was no kind of medical help or treatment for Antanas that could have make his golden years more certain. The author’s matter about capitalism is that it is simply most ruthless to the weak and sick.
In The Jungle, I found many reasons on how and why this book can function as propaganda. Sinclair infused propaganda into the characters