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Upton Sinclair attempts to appeal to the readers' emotion through the use of pathos. He describes the horrible conditions of the immigrants' lives to try to spark response from the American public and the federal government. Sinclair wants change and justice for the poor working class (Rideout).

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Despite its dramatizations, The Jungle helps convey the strong need for reform in the labor movement. Jurgis and his family suffer long work days with no breaks for low wages, like many Americans at the time. Many immigrants were desperate for any work to earn money (Woodress).

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Paraphrase: Sinclair's purpose (Lit Crit)

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Paraphrase: Sinclair's purpose (Lit Crit)

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Although Sinclair aimed to sweep the nation with the devastating lives of Jurgis Rudkis and his family, he accidentally "hit the [public] in the stomach" with his gross depiction of the meatpacking industry (Woodress).

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Woodress describes The Jungle as melodramatic at times because Sinclair writes so intensely about Socialism, even ending the novel with one of his own speeches. Jurgis Rudkus also faces endless moral disasters which Sinclair exaggerates (Woodress).

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Wade describes Beef Trust bosses as "the most fearsome monsters...they cheated cattle raisers, set high market prices on their meat products, bribed federal inspectors to pass diseased animals, and chiseled on workers' wages" (Wade).

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Paraphrase: Congress' Response to "The Jungle" (Lit Crit)

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Paraphrase: Congress' Response to "The Jungle" (Lit Crit)

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Once Sinclair wrote about the gross details of the meatpacking industry, Congress began to pay attention and passed the Pure Food and Drug Act. President Teddy Roosevelt even became vegetarian for a while after reading the novel (Wade).

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In Packingtown, Jurgis loses his individuality. He first submits to the bosses: he works in the corrupt Beef Trust. Next, he works for the politicians and helps rig elections. Finally, he lets Socialism define him, spreading the idea with him everywhere he goes (Rideout).

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Rideout explains how Sinclair shaped Jurgis' journey to socialism. Jurgis bears "all the circles of the workers' inferno and [Sinclair attempts] to show that no other savior except Socialism exists" (Rideout).

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Paraphrase: "Capitalist jungle" (Lit Crit)

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Paraphrase: "Capitalist jungle" (Lit Crit)

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Upton Sinclair uses socialism in The Jungle to help explain the "capitalist jungle" Jurgis Rudkis and his family are stuck in. The corrupt politicans do not care about the working class people, allowing them to fall into poverty (Rideout).

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Quote: Effect of "The Jungle" (Lit Crit)

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Quote: Effect of "The Jungle" (Lit Crit)

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Sinclair wrote about the dirty conditions of meatpacking, which caused "effectively heightened fears about contamination and adulteration of packinghouse products" (Wade).

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Paraphrase: Sinclair's main concerns were politics and economics demonstrated through his novels. For example, Sinclair wrote Oil! to expose Warren G. Harding for scandals during his presidency (Bloodworth).

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Quote: Another one of Sinclair's works is Boston, "a two-volume fictional account of the Sacco-Venzetti case...Sinclair's best effort at using the novel as a means to publicize and interpret contemporary events that he felt had not been adequately covered by the news media" (Bloodworth). Boston is another work focused on reforming American corruption.

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Paraphrase: Following The Jungle, Sinclair became interested in a different group of people: the difficult lives of miners and their families in the west. He traveled to Colorado and wrote King Coal to depict the labor and social problems happening in the region (Bloodworth).

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Paraphrase: Sinclair left a large impact on American life after The Jungle: Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act. After this, Sinclair had difficulty continuing his train of success (Bloodworth).

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Paraphrase: In The Jungle, Sinclair took the difficult life of an immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, and introduced him to Socialism in order to improve his life. Jurgis becomes "born again" due to Socialism because of Sinclair's association with the party (Bloodworth).

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Paraphrase: One of Sinclair's editors wanted him to write about the "wage slaves" of American industry. So, Sinclair traveled to the meatpacking district of Chicago and spent two months working, living, and observing the lives of citizens there. This way, he saw the horrible conditions first hand and turned his experience into The Jungle (Bloodworth).

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Paraphrase: Either through socialist and idealist views, Sinclair structures his novels to fight against the oppression of capitalistic bosses and corrupt politics in American society (Bloodworth).

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Quote: Bloodworth describes Sinclair as a "muckraker, a propagandist, an interpreter of socialism and a critic of capitalism" (Bloodworth). Sinclair focused on improving American society through exposing corrupt practices in his books.

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Paraphrase: Sinclair battled for social justice through his books and attacks on Hollywood. Because of his Socialist beliefs, he thought the only way to solve this issue in America was through economic equality (Soderbergh).

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Quote: Peter A. Soderbergh reflects on Upton Sinclair's achievements: "(1) the Federal interest in food inspection stimulated by his 1906 work The Jungle; (2) his EPIC (End Poverty in California) program of the early Depression years; and (3) the anti-Nazi novel, Dragon's Teeth (1942), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize" (Soderbergh). Sinclair accomplished many tasks through his writings.

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"And then, as Jurgis came out from this meeting, some one handed him a paper which he carried home with him and read; and so he became with the "Appeal to Reason" (Sinclair 338).

The Jungle was originally published in "Appeal to Reason", which is a magazine full of Socialist propaganda. Upton Sinclair most likely agreed with the viewpoints of the Socialists he describes.

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"It was the task of Socialists to teach and organize them, and prepare them for the time when they were to seize the huge machine called the Beef Trust, and use it to produce food for human beings and not to heap up fortunes for a band of pirates" (Sinclair 327).

The first speech about Socialism Jurgis hears paves the path of a new attitude for him. Socialism quickly sweeps the working-men of Chicago.

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"The man had gone back to a seat upon the platform, and Jurgis realized that his speech was over...someone started a song, and the crowd took it up, and the place shook with it. Jurgis had never heard it, and he could not make out the words, but the wild and wonderful spirit of it seized upon him-it was the Marseillaise!" (Sinclair 319).

The French national anthem celebrates revolutionary resistance to tyranny. After a socialist speech, the song is supposed to inspire the working-men to agree withe speaker's viewpoints.

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"If it isn't that, it's drink. If the girls didn't booze they couldn't stand it any time at all. And the madame always gives them dope when they first come, and they learn to like it...That's the way they keep the girls-they let them run up debts, so they can't get away. A young girl comes from abroad, and she doesn't know a word of English, and she gets into a place like this" (Sinclair 305).

Girls become trapped in brothels because they have no where else to turn. The women are used their whole lives, and dropped on the street when they become older.

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"Just about this time one of the Chicago newspapers, which made much of the "common people," opened a "free-soup kitchen" for the benefit on the unemployed" (Sinclair 295).

People come to these soup kitchens, but the lines are so long they usually do not end up getting food.

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"All night long gangs of strike-breakers kept arriving. As very few of the better class of working-men could be got for such work, these specimens of the new American hero contained an assortment of the criminals and thugs of the city, besides negroes and the lowest foreigners. They had been attracted more by the prospect of disorder than by the big wages; and they made the night hideous with singing and carousing, and only went to sleep when the time came for them to get up to work" (Sinclair 278).

The bosses bring in strike-breakers, also called "scabs" by the strikers. These men are rowdy and do not want to do any work. The strikers also hate the scabs and start fights with them on the streets.

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"Sometimes [Jurgis] would ride down-town with a party of friends to the cheap theatres and the music halls and other haunts with which they were familiar" (Sinclair 273).

While working for the bosses, Jurgis acquires a lot of wealth. He would have dreamed for a surplus of money when he first moved to America.

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"Jurgis got a glimpse of the high-class criminal world of Chicago. The city, which was owned by an oligarchy of business men, being normally ruled by the people, a huge army of graft was necessary foe the purpose of effecting the transfer of power" (Sinclair 261).

Cities are controlled by the bosses that graft off of the men. The politicians are some of the worst bosses.

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"All outdoors, all life, was to him one colossal prison, which he paced like a pent-up tiger, trying one bar after another, and finding them all beyond his power" (Sinclair 240).

Sinclair compares the life of immigrants to prison, because they are trapped in poverty their entire lives. Like a tiger, they want to break free from the bosses.

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"According to an unwritten law, the buying a drink included the privilege of loafing for just so long; then one had to buy another drink or move on" (Sinclair 235).

Men sit in saloons for the warmth, but have to buy a drink. Or, they buy a drink for the free meal that comes with it. Many, however, become addicted to the alcohol and spend all of their money.

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"Not much thought was given to the laborers. There would be falling rocks and crushed supports and premature explosions-and in addition all the dangers of railroading" (Sinclair 233).

Miners also faced rough conditions, when they dug tunnels and worked underground.

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"[In the newspapers] there was battle and murder and sudden death-it was marvellous how they ever heard about so many entertaining and thrilling happenings; the stories must be all true. for surely no man could have made such things up" (Sinclair 216).

Men read the newspapers for the fascinating stories to help them forget about their hard lives. The yellow journalism created by Hearst and Pulitzer made stories more thrilling than they actually were.

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"There were often one or two chance-but there were always a hundred men for every chance, and his turn would not come. At night he crept into sheds and cellars and doorways-until there came a spell of belated winter weather, with a raging gale, and the thermometer five degrees below zero at sundown and falling all night. Then Jurgis fought like a wild beast to get into the big Harrison Street police-station, and slept down in a corridor, crowded with two other men upon a single step" (Sinclair 210).

Unemployed men wait outside of factories and packing-houses hoping to receive a job. They wait in freezing cold weather, and sleep where ever they can.

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"The street-car monopoly saw fit to put on so few cars that there would be men hanging to every foot of the backs of them and often crouching upon the snow-covered roof. Of course the doors could never be closed, and so the cars were as cold as outdoors" (Sinclair 207).

Monopolies eliminate competition. So, the men are forced to ride in these street cars because of the monopoly.

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"All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centred upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census-taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet-halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy" (Sinclair 206).

The bosses are hypocritical. They praise the workers efficiency, when really they are scaring them with the "speeding-up" process.

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"They had [Jurgis] on a secret list in every office, big and little, in the place. They had his name by this time in St. Louis and New York, in Omaha and Boston, in Kansas City and St. Joseph" (Sinclair 203).

Jurgis assaulted a boss named Connor for hurting his wife, and now is unable to acquire a job because of it. The bosses blacklist people who have hurt them, and make it extremely difficult for them to find work ever again.

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"The long, cruel battle with misery and hunger had hardened and embittered him, but it had not changed her" (Sinclair 200).

The horrible conditions the immigrants face change their outlook on life and how they perceive America. Their idealistic views of America are quickly changed.

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"That trap of the extra payments, the interest, and all the other charges that they had not the means to pay, and would never have attempted to pay! And then all the tricks of the packers, their masters, the tyrants who ruled them,-the shutdowns and the scarcity of work, the irregular hours and the cruel speeding-up, the lowering of wages, the raising of prices! The mercilessness of nature about them, of heat and cold, rain and snow; the mercilessness of the city. of the country in which they lived, of its laws and customs that they did no understand" (Sinclair 185).

The immigrants soon realize all the corruption in America. In the conditions, they plunge themselves into debt and cannot get out of it. They are always being grafted off of.

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"There was no justice, there was no right, anywhere in it-it was only force, it was tyranny" (Sinclair 167).

America is ruled by bosses. They control every factory and price in America. There is no rest or justice for the poor. All of society is at the bosses' command.

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"They put [Jurgis] in a place where the snow could not beat in, where the cold could not eat through his bones; they brought him food and drink-why, in the name of heaven, if they must punish him, did they not put his family in jail and leave him outside?" (Sinclair 167).

Jurgis feels he's better off in jail than his family is at home. He thinks being outside in the cold is  a worse punishment than being in jail.

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"They had dreamed of freedom; of a chance to see their child grow up to be strong. And now it was gone-it would never be! They had played the game and they had lost" (Sinclair 143).

Immigrants come to America hoping for a better life, but end up living and working in horrible conditions. They struggle in poverty their entire lives.

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"After the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade-there was only Number One Grade" (Sinclair 140).

The meats are spoiled injected with chemicals and sold anyway. The people buying the meat do not know the difference, and the government does not supervise the factory very well.

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"[The children] were learning to swear in voluble English; they were learning to pick up cigar-stumps and smoke them, to pass hours of their time gambling with pennies and dice and cigarette-cards...And worse yet, the boys were getting out of the habit of coming home at night" (Sinclair 137).

The children sell newspapers to make money instead of going to school. However, they are picking up vices because of the Chicago area they are in.

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"She got this [job] because the boss saw that she had the muscles of man, and so he discharged a man and put Marija to do his work, paying her a little more than half of what he had been paying before" (Sinclair 111).

Marija does the same exact work as the man before her, but is paid less money simply because she is a woman.

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"The managers and superintendents and clerks of Packingtown were all recruited from another class, and never from the workers; they scorned the workers, the very meanest of them. The people who worked with their hands were a class apart, and were made to feel it" (Sinclair 109).

The working-men are constantly cheated, discriminated against, and treated unfairly even though they are doing the hardest work.

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"They might never have nor expect a single instant's respite from worry, a single instant in which they were not haunted by the thought of money" (Sinclair 106).

The people in Packingtown do not enjoy their lives, they spend all their time working and trying to survive. The immigrants only have time for work, not any hobbies or other activities.

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"Now he found that each of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the killing-beds, the source and fountain of them all. The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases" (Sinclair 103).

The horrible working conditions of the jobs in Packingtown take horrible tolls on the workers. Many acquire rheumatism, blood poisoning, or have fingers/limbs cut off by accident.

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"The same night-watchman took Jurgis and the rest of his flock into the back room of a saloon, and showed each of them where and how to mark a ballot, and then gave each two dollars, and took them to the polling place, where there was a policeman on duty especially to see that they got through all right" (Sinclair 98).

The bosses pay men to vote for them. The men soon come to realize that this is not right, continue to do it because everyone else does and for the money.

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"[The bosses] did not pay for any fraction of an hour-for "broken time." A man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no work to fill out the hour, there was no pay for him" (Sinclair 93).

The bosses pay the men for only a part of the work they do, explicitly trying to cheat them.

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"The cruelest thing of all was that nearly all of them-all of those who used knives-were unable to wear gloves, and their arms would be white with frost and their hands would grow numb, and then of course there would be accidents. It was to be counted as a wonder that there were not more men slaughtered than cattle" (Sinclair 85).

The working-men are rushing with knives in their hands in steam-filled rooms full of blood. The bosses cruelness (of the working conditions) causes many accidents.

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"All the clothing that was to be had in the stores was made of cotton and shoddy, which is made by tearing old clothes to pieces and weaving the fibre again. If they paid higher prices, they might get frills and fanciness, or be cheated; but genuine quality they could not obtain for love nor money" (Sinclair 81).

Immigrants are even cheated when buying clothes. The winter clothes do not even keep them warm in the cold months.

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"Hour after hour, year after year, it was fated that he would stand upon a certain square foot of floor from seven in the morning until noon, and again from half-past twelve till half-past five, making never a motion and thinking never a thought, save for the setting of lard-cans. In summer the stench of the warm lard would be nauseating, and in winter the cans would all but freeze to his naked little fingers in the unheated cellar. Half the year it would be dark as night when he went to work, and dark as night again when he came out, and so he would never know what the sun looked like on week-days. And for this, at the end of the week, he would carry home three dollars to his family, being his pay at the rate of five cents per hour-just about his proper share of the total earnings of the million and three-quarters children who are now engaged in earning their living in the United States" (Sinclair 76, 77).

Stanislovas' work is work many other children face in America at this time. The child labor conditions are horrible, but the families have no other choice but to endure them for the money.

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"It was against the law for children to work before they were sixteen. The law made no difference except that it forced people to lie about the ages of their children" (Sinclair 72).

Families are so poor, they lie about the ages of their children because they need more money. This also takes them away from an education.

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"[The house] was about fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint, which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The house was one a whole row that was built by a company which existed to make money by swindling poor people. They used the very flimsiest and cheapest materials; they built the houses a dozen at a time, and they cared about nothing at all except the outside shine. Cheap as the houses were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them. When they failed-if it were only by a single month-they would lose the house and all that they had paid on it, and then the company would sell it over again" (Sinclair 70).

Naive immigrants are taken advantage of by agents because they simply do not know any better.

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"Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going to make himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would soon find out his error-for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good work" (Sinclair 64).

The working-men in Packingtown stay poor. The only people who can "rise" are those who work for the corrupt bosses and politicians.

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"The bosses grafted off the men, and they grafted off of each other; and some day the superintendent would find out about the boss, and then he would graft the boss" (Sinclair 64).

Workplaces are full of corrupt bosses.

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"There were portions of the work which determined the pace of the rest, and for these they had picked men whom they paid high wages, and whom they changed frequently. You might easily pick out these pace-makers, for they worked under the eye of the bosses, and they worked like men possessed. This was called "speeding up the gang," and if any man could not keep up with the pace, there were hundreds outside begging to try" (Sinclair 61).

Factories work the men to death out of fear of losing their jobs.

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"The stench [of the killing-beds] was almost overpowering, but to Jurgis it was nothing. His whole soul was dancing with joy-he was at work at last!" (Sinclair 46).

Jurgis is happy to work even though the conditions are horrible. The immigrants just want to be able to provide for their families.

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"No tiniest particle of organic matter was wasted at Durham's" (Sinclair 44).

The bosses are greedy, they use all parts of the animals to make as much money as possible.

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"Every yard there was a man, working as if a demon were after him" (Sinclair 41).

All the men work extremely quickly, which causes many accidents. The demons are the bosses that supervise them.

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"Jokubas whispered maliciously that the visitors did not see any more than the packers wanted them to see" (Sinclair 39).

No one sees the gross work that goes on behind the scenes in the factory.

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"A very few days of practical experience in this land of high wages had been sufficient to make clear to them the cruel fact that it was also a land of high prices, and that in it the poor man was almost as poor as in any other corner of the earth; and so there vanished in a night all the wonderful dreams of wealth that had been haunting Jurgis" (Sinclair 31).

It does not take long for the family to realize America is not everything they had heard about.

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"They knew nothing about the country, and had no one to tell them, and it was easy for a man in a blue uniform to lead them away, and to take them to a hotel and keep them there, and make them pay enormous charges to get away. The law says that the ratecard shall be on the door of a hotel, but it does not say it shall be in Lithuanian" (Sinclair 28).

Bosses and policemen easily take advantage of immigrants because they are in an unfamiliar place and do not speak English.

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"In that country, rich or poor, a man was free, it was said; he did not have to go into the army, he did not have to pay out his money to rascally officials,-he might do as he pleased, and count himself as good as any other man" (Sinclair 27).

Jurgis hears good things about America and wants to move there to achieve the American Dream.

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"If one of them be a minute late, he will be apt to find his brass check turned to the wall, which will send him out to join the hungry mob that waits every morning at the gates of the packing house" (Sinclair 23).

The working-men never receive holidays, even Jurgis and Ona after their wedding.

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"So she dances, and will dance the entire evening, and would dance forever, in ecstasy of bliss. You would smile, perhaps, to see them-but you would not smile if you knew all the story" (Sinclair 15).

The immigrants look happy at the wedding but in reality are living difficult lives. The wedding is a respite.

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"Of these older people many wear clothing reminiscent of some detail of home-an embroidered waistcoast or stomacher, or a gayly colored handkerchief, or a coat with large cuffs and fancy buttons. All of these things are carefully avoided by the young, most of whom have learned to speak English and to affect the latest style of clothing" (Sinclair 14).

The younger people tend to dress more American than the older. The older people tend to hold on to their native culture and traditions.

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"It was one of the laws of the veselija that no one goes hungry; and, while a rule made in the forests of Lithuania is hard to apply in the stockyards district of Chicago, with its quarter of a million inhabitants, still they did their best" (Sinclair 7).

Jurgis, Ona, and their family keep their Lithuanian traditions even though they are in a new place.