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Article: Jungle, The
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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JUNGLE, THE,
JUNGLE, THE,
Upton Beall Sinclair's novel of labor exploitation in Chicago's meatpacking industry, advanced groundbreaking food and drug legislation rather than the anticapitalist outcry the author anticipated. A member of the Socialist Party of America, in 1904 Sinclair accepted a $500 commission from the socialist newspaper
Appeal to Reason
to write a fiction series comparing northern "wage slavery" to the South's antebellum slave system. Published in book form in 1906,
The Jungle
interpreted the hard-ships of ethnic workers as an odyssey toward socialist re-birth. Protagonist Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant to Packingtown, at first gladly accepts meatpacking ...