The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Fame for the Wrong Reason Essay

In the early 1900’s America begin to transform rapidly. Many immigrants started moving to the United States in the early 1900’s with the hopes of living the â€Å"American Dream.† However, that glittering and gleaming American lifestyle is merely a distant ideal for the immigrants living in Packingtown, the meatpacking district of Chicago. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle portrays life through the eyes of a poor workingman struggling to survive in this cruel, tumultuous environment, where the desire for profit among the capitalist meatpacking bosses and the criminals makes the lives of the working class a nearly unendurable struggle for survival. The novel The Jungle is a hybrid of history, literature, and propaganda. Sinclair, a muckraking†¦show more content†¦The Chicago stockyards, where the immigrants live and work, are described as a vile and nauseating place. The ditches in the stockyards and in the town were filled with a stinking green liquid. â€Å"Swarms of flies† hung over the stockyards and â€Å"blackened the air† (Mookerjee 79). â€Å"The strange, fetid odor, of all the dead things of the universe† was rampant in the stockyards (Mookerjee 79). Sinclair then goes on to explain that it isn’t just the conditions of the stockyards and the atmosphere of where the workers live and conduct business he describes what ghastly objects went into the meat that serve the American public. Sinclair effectively displays the grotesqueness and barbaric sanitation conditions by commencing the novel by explaining about the â€Å"rotten hams and rat adulterated sausage† (Bloodworth 59). Old sausage that had been deemed not able to be processed that contained significant traces of borax and glycerine that had been thrown on the floor and dumped into several different hoppers would be reprocessed and served to the American public as if it were new, fresh meat (Bloodworth 59). The reproces sing and fraudulent claims that the meat was pure were grotesque lies made by the meatpacking companies. One of the most fundamental claims that Sinclair makes to demonstrate the horrid conditions is that occasionally some of the workers would fall into the cooking vats, â€Å" and when they were fished out,