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Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Slaughterhouses and the packing companies Essay -- Literary Analysis,

â€Å"I wished to frighten the country by a picture of what its industrial masters were doing to their victims; entirely by chance I stumbled on another discovery--what they were doing to the meat-supply of the civilized world. In other words, I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach† (Bloom). With the publication of a single book, Upton Sinclair found himself as a worldwide phenomenon overnight. He received worldwide response to his novel and invitations to lectures all over the world including one to the White House by President Roosevelt. In late 1904, the editor of the Appeal to Reason, a socialist magazine sent Sinclair to Chicago to tell the story of the poor common workingmen and women unfairly enslaved by the vast monopolistic enterprises. He found that he could go anywhere in the stockyards provided that he â€Å"[wore] old clothes†¦ and [carried] a workman’s dinner pail†. Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago livi ng among and interviewing the Chicago workers; studying conditions in the packing plants. Along with collecting more information for his novel, Sinclair came upon another discovery--the filth of improper sanitation and the processing of spoiled meat. With the publishing of his novel, Sinclair received international response to its graphic descriptions of the packinghouses. The book is said to have decreased America’s meat consumption for decades and President Roosevelt, himself, reportedly threw his breakfast sausages out his window after reading The Jungle. However, Sinclair classified the novel as a failure and blamed himself for the public’s misunderstanding. Sinclair’s main purpose for writing the book was to improve the working conditions for the Chicago stockyard workers. Sinclair found it... ...ivities. Sinclair promotes socialism, government owned companies that endorse more rights for its worker’s, as government own corporations will be less about the individual profit but the common good. Sinclair publicities socialism in The Jungle in many methods: a capitalist society provides their workers with sickening working condition, a capitalist society consists of corruption all over the board, and a socialistic society will mean a perfect world. Upton Sinclair was dubbed by President Roosevelt as â€Å"a muckraker†, a writer who investigates and publishes issues happening around America. Even though Sinclair’s novel did not do as much for the poor as he hoped, it did bring about change to America: stricter meat packing regulations, standards of cleanliness in processing plants, and public knowledge of what the Chicago corporations were doing to their canned meat.

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