HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ 1/HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ.iso/anarchy/essays/schoolsucks/jungle1.txt

Text File | 1996-04-27 | 11.1 KB | 180 lines

English
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

    There are many characters in The Jungle.  These characters vary
widely in their professions, social status, and economic status.  The
main character in the novel is a Lithuanian named Jurgis Rudkus.  His
wife is Ona Lukoszaite, also a Lithuanian.  Their son is named
Antanas.   Mike Scully is a powerful political leader in Packingtown.
 Phil Connor is a foreman in Packingtown, ôpolitically connectedö
(through Scully), and a man who causes much trouble for Jurgis.  Jack
Duane is an experienced and educated criminal who is also
ôpolitically connectedö.  A man called Ostrinski is a half-blind
tailor who teaches Jurgis about Socialism.  There are also the
members of OnaÆs family, each of whom play minor roles in the story.
    The story opens with the feast at Jurgis and OnaÆs wedding in
America, but soon flashes back to the time before they left
Lithuania.  Jurgis met Ona at a horse fair, and fell in love with
her.  Unfortunately, they were too poor to have a wedding, since
OnaÆs father just died.  In the hopes of finding freedom and fortune,
they left for America, bringing many members of OnaÆs family with
them.
    After arriving in America, they are taken to Packingtown to find
work.  Packingtown is a section of Chicago where the meat packing
industry is centralized.  They take a tour of the plant, and see the
unbelievable efficiency and speed at which hogs and cattle are
butchered, cooked, packed, and shipped.  In Packingtown, no part of
the animal is wasted.  The tour guide specifically says ôThey use
everything about the hog except the squeal,ö (The Jungle, page 38).
    JurgisÆs brawny build quickly gets him a job on the cattle killing
beds.  The other members of the family soon find jobs, except for the
children.  They are put into school.  At first, Jurgis is happy with
his job and America, but he soon learns that America is plagued by
corruption, dishonesty, and bribery.  He is forced to work at high
speeds for long hours with low pay, and so is the rest of the family.
 He is cheated out of his money several times.  The children must
leave school and go to work to help the family survive.  This means
they will never receive the education they need to rise above this.
Ona is not permitted to take a holiday, even for her own wedding.
    After the birth of her first son, Antanas, Ona soon becomes pregnant
again.  She becomes very upset, but will not tell Jurgis why.  After
she fails to come home one night, Jurgis confronts her.  She breaks
into tears and tells Jurgis that a foreman named Connor has forced a
sexual relationship on her.  Jurgis curses her and runs off to find
Connor.
    After beating Connor to a pulp, Jurgis is sent to jail for thirty
days.  The judge refuses to listen to JurgisÆs story seriously.  When
Jurgis is released, he finds that his family has moved to an even
poorer neighborhood, and Ona is in labor at that very moment.
Neither the baby, nor Ona, who went into labor two months early,
survive.  Jurgis pulls himself together for the sake of Antanas and
gets a job.  When Antanas drowns in the mud-filled street, Jurgis
gives up on Packingtown and his family.  He hops aboard a passing
train, and leaves Chicago.
    Jurgis enjoys a ôhoboö life, wandering across the country.  When
winter comes, he is forced to return to Chicago.  He gets into a
fight in a bar and is sent to jail.  In jail, he meets Jack Duane, an
experienced criminal.  After being freed from jail, Jurgis and Duane
team up in a luxurious, but risky life of crime.  Jurgis learns about
the connections between criminals, police, politics, and big
business.  He becomes a member of this complex network and moves into
politics.  He runs into Connor again, and beats him to a pulp a
second time.  ConnorÆs political connections cause Jurgis to lose all
his acquired profit.  Jurgis is back to wandering the streets.
    To keep warm, Jurgis walks into a Socialist meeting.  After the
meeting, he is introduced to a man named Ostrinski, who teaches
Jurgis about Socialism.  Jurgis agrees completely with the political
partyÆs ideals, and becomes an active member.  As the story ends, the
results of an election are being received.  The novel concludes on a
positive note, showing that the Socialist party made significant
progress all across the country.
    The Jungle is a novel that casts an evil light on America, business,
and politics.  It promotes the concept of Socialism, emphasizes
corruption in our society, and makes wage-earners look like slaves.
The book mentions nothing about the benefits of Capitalism.
    Jurgis and his family moved from Lithuania to America, expecting a
better life.  Instead of telling a story about their success through
hard work and dedication, Upton Sinclair tells a story about how they
were cheated before they even got off the boat.  Throughout the
story, people preyed on the familyÆs ignorance.  During the passage
to America, an agent appeared to be helping them but was really
cheating them.  After arriving, they were constantly cheated out of
their money.  The house they bought was a total fraud, full of hidden
expenses.  Many members of the family were able to get jobs only
through bribery.  Ona was exploited by Connor, who threatened to have
her, Jurgis, and the rest of the family fired if she refused the
relationship.
    When Jurgis left Packingtown, he lived by thievery, selfishness, and
bribery.  When Jurgis switched to this amoral lifestyle, he finally
became successful.  The foremen (and foreladies) of Packingtown also
lived by corruption.  They fired union members, cheated people out of
their pay, and required ôgiftsö before hiring people.  When a
foremanÆs boss learned of this, he required ôgiftsö from the foreman
to keep quiet.  The police were also corrupt.  They let robbers go,
and demanded a percentage of what the robbers had taken.  The
politicians placed friends on the city payroll, accepted bribes from
criminals, and bribed the police to avoid arrest.
    In the book, anyone who earned a living through honesty and hard
work was trapped in poverty.  Anyone who lied and cheated to make a
living was wealthy.  This was the way a Capitalistic society was
presented in the book.  It showed that a hard worker was not
rewarded, and was disposed of when he/she became a burden.  The book
portrayed an honest, hardworking lower class, and a dishonest, lazy
upper class.  No middle class was described.
    Toward the end of the book, Upton Sinclair shows the reader how to
solve CapitalismÆs problems:  replace it with Socialism.  The
Socialist party is promoted as an international political party that
will solve all of the worldÆs problems.  Every member of the party
was told about the ôSocialist revolutionö, when the entire planet
would become Socialist.  Not once does the book mention the
possibility of failure.  It even claimed Socialists would control the
country by 1912.
    The Socialists despised the concept of competition.  They considered
the commercial world to be the essence of corruption.  The goal of
the Socialist party in The Jungle was to end the corrupt and powerful
Beef Trust.  ôIn the national capital it had power to falsify
government reports; it violated the rebate laws, and when an
investigation was threatened it burned its books and sent its
criminal agents across the country,ö (The Jungle, page 312).
    After reading The Jungle, a person would never expect the United
States to survive as a Capitalist country.  The only option shown to
the reader is Socialism.  The author never mentions the good that
Capitalism has done, nor does he mention any possible flaws in
Socialism.  Socialism is presented as perfection, while all other
philosophies are flawed.  This makes the novel surprisingly one-sided
and anti-American.
    The promotion of Socialism is understandable, though, since Sinclair
himself was a Socialist from an early age.  He was brought up in a
poor and not very successful family.  This could explain why he
became a Socialist, since one of the main ideals of Socialism is
equality for everyone.  This may also explain why he describes
Capitalists as heartless cheats, and describes working people as
oppressed heroes.
    The Jungle is, however, more than an advertisement for Socialism.
It describes the horrors of the meat packing industry in great
detail.  People were forced to work from before sunrise to after
sunset.  In the meat preserving plants, the floors were never dry.
The workers would catch horrible foot diseases, causing them to loose
toes and eventually entire legs.  The butchers would be forced to
move at a blinding pace, often cutting themselves and others.  They
would still have to work though, or loose their job.  Often, the
wounds would become infected, and the butcher would die of blood
poisoning.
    The book discusses all the things that were being shipped out to the
civilized world as ômeatö.  Sausages were not really made of sausage
meat.  They were mostly composed of ôpotato flourö; an odorless and
tasteless potato extract with almost no food value.  There were the
cattle that had been fed ôwhiskey maltö; the refuse of breweries.
These animals would become ôsteerlyö, or covered with boils.  ôIt was
a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged you knife into them
they would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff in your face,ö (The
Jungle, page 99).  According to law, diseased meat could not be sold
out of the state.  However, there were no laws restricting itÆs sale
inside the state.  As a result, the tuberculosis-infected hog meat
never left Packingtown.  It was sold to the meat workers at inflated
prices.
    Another thing that shocked me while reading the novel was the
cruelty to animals.  The animals were packed in freight cars, and
shipped across the country.  Many of them died on the trip.  Once
reaching Packingtown, each hog had a chain fastened around its leg,
was hoisted into the air, and carried into a room where its throat
was slit.  When the cattle reached Packingtown, they were stunned by
electric shock, and dropped onto a conveyor belt, where a man with a
sledgehammer pierced their skulls.  These animal existed in very poor
conditions, especially the ôsteerlyö cattle that developed boils.
    Despite the cruel conditions, the anti-American sentiment, and the
one-sided views, the novel was well-written.  Upton Sinclair did an
excellent job of describing the massive organization and efficiency
of Packingtown.  It is clear that he despised Packingtown, for being
a center of Capitalism and for its working conditions, but he was
impressed with it.  Packingtown slaughtered, processed, packed, and
shipped hundreds of thousands of cattle and hogs every day.  It ran
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and never stopped.  Even
during holidays and during union strikes, Packingtown still ran at
full speed.
    Now that I have read The Jungle, I am amazed that our country
survived to be the world superpower it is today.  I am even more
amazed that we did not all die from eating food made in such poor
conditions.  The novel did not persuade me to become a Socialist, but
I did consider a vegetarian lifestyle.  Nevertheless, I still enjoyed
reading it.