The Jungle :: essays papers

The Jungle From the point of view of history, The Jungle, is both a detect on and a product of its own times. Those times most decidedly need to be viewed in relation to what happened in the last half of the nineteenth century. This incredible time period saw the making of commodious industries and great fortunes (for those who were in control of the industries). So far as the kin between product line and government was concerned, it was a time of laissez-faire, where government had precise little to do with what business was doing. If as Calvin Coolidge said in the 1920s, the business of America is business, what did this mean for individuals, their rights and expectations? The Jungle appeared in January of 1906. It is completely understandable to me that the edition public responded to details on meat production and plant sanitisation instead of the conditions of workingmen or Sinclairs Socialist message. In turn, The Jungle helped to do something completely different than what the books author meant for it to do. The Jungle helped to urge on the Pure Food and Drug Bill break of a theater of operations committee and force president Teddy Roosevelt to jump into action. Roosevelt quickly quest the Department of Agriculture to send an investigating committee and through redundant pressure, including Sinclairs personal appeal, Roosevelt sent in an additional committee (Neill-Reynolds Commission). Also, at the same time a Beef Inspection Act was submitted in the Senate, all of this with Roosevelts complete approval. Somehow, when the meat industry found out about all this they were able to get articles published which defended present practices. Since Roosevelt was non able to exert the pressure he himself felt, he released a particle of the Neill-Reynolds report, which basically confirmed the truths of the packinghouse conditions that were depicted in The Jungle. It is my opinion that the item that The Jungle could cause such a large industry to fighting back powerfully attests to its own power as a ingratiatory medium. Upton Sinclairs often quoted remark about aiming for the heart and hitting the die hard definitely rings true when reading The Jungle. Most readers mistook it for another muckrake effort, on unsanitary conditions in the packinghouses. If Sinclair had not written the last tierce of four chapters of the book then it would have read much more(prenominal) like a social protest novel. Most definitely the role of The Jungle is to promote socialism as the only answer to the enlist slavery enforced by capitalism.