Summary of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle shocked respectable Americans in 1906. Repeated economic crises punctuated rapidly growing industrial output, casting millions of people out of work and onto the streets. Conventional thinking was that these events were transient phenomena and that hard work and clean living would deliver individual prosperity in time. Many Americans saw slums, vice and squalor as signs of individual shortcomings – nothing more than new immigrants bringing bad habits and poor discipline with them from the old countries. The Jungle turned that way of thinking on its head. The economic system Sinclair portrayed took decent hard-working immigrants, stripped them of their savings, health, dignity and frequently their lives, in pursuit of shoddy, unsafe consumer products. It rewarded crime and political corruption, while crushing anyone foolish enough to demand fair treatment and a decent life. Unfortunately, Sinclair’s exposé of meat processing conditions in Chicago was the only part of his novel to truly upset respectable Americans’ stomachs. Food safety standards raised quickly, but improving working conditions would take decades longer. More than one hundred years on, the same questions of food quality and exploitation of the many for the benefit of a few once again resonate in debates on inequality, processed foods and pesticide residues.

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