Holly Watkins
Professor Patrick Kirkwood
History 100C: Tuesday
25 September 2015
Historical Response: The Jungle In the famous 1906 novel, The Jungle, the author Upton Sinclair, represents the severe conditions of meat-packaging industries in Chicago. This piece can be labeled with many genres but the main two are political fiction and social criticism. Other genres could include a little bit of realism (for how brutally honest Sinclair was about the harsh environment), or philosophical fiction (the intention of socialism throughout the novel). Muckraking was also used throughout the piece, along with satire.
“Uneasy middle-class Americans applauded muckrakers for telling these types of stories and became interested in reform. Progressivism crystallized around the abuses that muckrakers exposed.” (Norton, 480). Sinclair wanted to put socialism in a good light, and hopefully convert his audience into the political movement of socialism. Socialists wanted “industry to go from private to public control, and transfer the political power from elites to the laboring masses.” (Norton, 483).…show more content… Sinclair was disappointed and more concerned on embracing socialism. The novel caused madness over the unsanitary qualities rather than the oppression of the poor. During the progressive era, Theodore Roosevelt supported Congress on passing the Pure Food and Drug act, which protected the public from fraudulently marked foods and medications. In the same year, he also campaigned for the Meat Inspection Act, which obligated the government to monitor the quality and safety of meat being sold to American