Industrialization, Capitalism and American Dream

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a fiction whose reality actu wholey became a conkic of federal investigation, provides anformer(a) eliciting compositors case of the complex relation between fact and fiction and between naive realism and otherwise literary and nonliterary discourses. The Jungle in m some(a)(prenominal) shipway presents the appearance of a conventional novel it has tone, event, theme. Yet it is also deeply shaped by the documentary strategy.Although the novel is organized biographic each(prenominal)y, the course of the adept Jurgis Rudkuss serve follows a path which ensures that he will observe phenomena that interest Sinclair he is conducted through a series of experiences that are non notwithstanding representative moreover when comprehensive, for this account of the amount-packing industry and the considerations of life for immigrant workers attempts to be encyclopedic.When the Rudkuses father in boodle the first thing they do is tour the packing houses, braggy occasion for sentences like this one The chutes into which the hogs went climbed heights up to the very top of the distant buildings and Jokubas explained that the hogs went up by the power of their own legs, and therefore their tilt carried them back through all the processes necessary to essentialon them into pork. As Jurgis and other members of his family take jobs in various parts of the plants, the different operations slaughtering, processing, plunderning and so on are described in more detail.Jurgis also plant life in a harvester factory and a steel mill, going away through periods of prosperity and of unemployment and want eventually roughly every conversion of working-class life befalls Jurgis or one of his relatives. Jurgis himself begins as a potent and successful wage earner, notwithstanding he is injured on a job and has slap-up difficulty supporting himself while recovering, spends time in jail after a conflict with a foreman, tramps in deuce the country and the city, joins a union but afterwards works as a scab and wherefore as a foreman, reaps the benefits of corrupt railway car politics, and finally becomes a Socialist.His wife is sexually exploited by her political boss and dies in kidbirth with tabu competent medical care. His intelligence drowns in a muddy street in Packingtown. His father dies of an illness caused by a job. His cousin becomes a prostitute. What Jurgis cannot experience at firsthand he learns nigh from others for example, his cousin tells harrowing stories of women forced into prostitution and explains why she cannot save any money working in a brothel I am charged for my room and my meals and such prices as you neer heard of and then for extras, and drinks for everything I hold fast, and some I dont. . . . Seeing that Jurgis was interested, she went on Thats the way they bring through the girls they let them run up debts, so they cant get away (p. 352). Jurgis even rounds out ou r map of the sociable order when he chances to meet the drunken son of a packing-house owner and is taken into a mansion built by a meat pile to see how the other half lives. The novel is episodic, even disjointed, if one attempts to organize it in terms of plot its viscidness derives from the documentary strategy.Its events are linked not directly to one some other but through their popular connection with the abstraction of the jungle and their relevancy to the topic of the Chicago meat-packing industry and the lives of its wage slaves. The Jungle demonstrates the metonymic, accretive temper of the documentary strategy, for despite its aspiration to provide a totalizing map of Chicago its most characteristic procedure is to pile horror upon horror mediocre as London does in The mickle of the Abyss.The action of The Jungle is produced slight by the characters choices than by their reactions as one disaster after other bursts upon them. When Jurgis and his family buy a hou se, they discover that it was not untried at all, as they had supposed it was close to 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 of a whole row that was built by a company which existed to make money by swindling lamentable people.The family had paid fifteen hundred dollars for it, and it had not cost the builders five hundred, when it was new (p. 77). They call up that they owe not simply the monthly payments they consume been told of but interest, so that it will be almost impossible for them to keep up the payments, and when they failed if it were sole(prenominal) by a angiotensin-converting enzyme month they would lose the house and all that they had paid on it, and then the company would sell it over again (pp. 77-78).Portraying a political rouse is one way of suggesting the possibility of profound complaisant change without violating the conventions of re alism, and it is a strategy that emerges still more strongly in a later genre that has many affinities with naturalism, the proletarian novel. Jurgiss transformation strikes the reader as such a dissonant and discontinuous element in this novel because it so obviously requires him to leave his autochthonal realm of victimage to become a character who exercises free will.There is no pretense in The Jungle that the group Sinclair is theme about is the analogous or even has much in common with the group he is writing for. In a gesture we nourish encountered before, we find the narrator and reader clearly marked off from the characters by the very languages they use Sinclair prefaces one description with the remark that the reader, who perhaps has never held much converse in the language of far-off Lithuania, will be glad of the explanation that . . . (p. 2).Although the only things that are recognizably Lithuanian about the Rudkuses are their names ( Sinclair even provides a footno te to tell us how to pronounce Jurgis), they are accreditedly foreigners. One might debate the occupy degree of irony in that perhaps I think it is hefty and attempt to measure the exact width of this chasm between classes, but its institution is taken for granted. Throughout the novel the naturalist plays the role of the readers guide and vox in an alien land. nevertheless he is not a native of that land either.Sinclair tells us in his autobiography that his own painful experiences of want that is, his confrontation with proletarianization, to which his autobiography testifies at length imbue the book with anguish, but that he is a stranger to the jungle of Chicago. The book is based on his research during seven weeks lived among the wage slaves of the Beef Trust, as we called it in those days. People used to ask me afterward if I had not spent my life in Chicago, and I answered that if I had done so, I could never have written The Jungle I would have taken for granted t hings that in a flash hit me a sudden violent blow.I went about, white-faced and thin, partly from undernourishment, partly from horror. 25 Despite the novels affirmation of the possibilities for change, the realms of knowledge and experience, the earths of the observer and the participant, remain polarized, joined only by the narrators pity and good intentions. Nevertheless, The Jungle is famous as a novel that changed the world an important progressive reform, the passage of the Meat recapitulation and beautiful Food and Drug Acts in 1906, is widely attributed to the public passion over conditions in the meat-packing industry that it created.(It was this that motivated the intense scrutiny of Sinclairs facts. ) But as Sinclair himself recognized, the movement for the inspection of meat had originated with the big packers themselves and ultimately benefited them by providing a guarantee of quality at government expense and removing obstacles to meat exporting. 26 And the refo rms demanded by the horrified readers of The Jungle addressed not the condition of the workers but the menace of the unsanitary practices Sinclair reported what bothered them was less the drive that men fell into the cooking vatsand died agonizing deaths than the revolting idea that all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durhams Pure Leaf Lard (p. 117). Sinclair wrote, I aimed at the publics heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. 27 He was neither the first nor the detain socialist to set out to write of the iniquities of class society and find himself enmeshed in the mysteries of consumer society.In a characteristic naturalist gesture, Sinclair appeals to his readers to pity the miserable, scotch lives of the other half yet he also pays a great deal of attention to unclean meat and does not distinguish the two concerns so clearly as his lament would seem to suggest. The revolting fairness about meat revealed an avenue by which the unclean horrors of a world outside the campfire found their way into that well-lighted, respectable circle and exposed a potentially contaminating contact between the disorder of the slaughterhouse regularize and the haven of the middle-class home.Although it clearly did not capture Sinclairs full intent, the liking to regulate and rationalize the meat-packing industry was a perfectly consistent receipt to Sinclairs plea for reform. The connection illustrates the fundamental structural similarity, seen here in plaything and in Chapter 4 at length, between naturalism and progressivism. The social problems of industrialisation As depicted in The Jungle this century has seen dramatic changes in this pattern.With the advent of legal equalitarianism, Industrialization, and a general rise in humanitarianism, social fixity has been succeeded, for thousands of groups, by a high degree of mobility. With the blurring of traditional social class lines and the removal of the more flagrant legal and economic p rivileges of certain classes, there has been marked change in the whole status building of modern society. With a culture in which the ethic of success is compelling, it is only to be expected that status striving will become obsessive for large numbers of persons.The push to succeed, to belong, to influence, lies behind remarkable achievements in all areas of our society. But it also lies behind some of the tragedies lives broken by the struggle individuals driven to means that are not tolerated by society, even though the ends which dictate the means are tolerated children, as well as adults, who sample status security where they can find it, even when it lies in abominable or unmoral contexts. There is wreckage as well as achievement written in the story of social mobility.Wherever the worlds population is experiencing Industrialization, family systems are also undergoing some changes, though not all these are being recorded. This means that at least some of the elements of the old family patterns, such as arranged marriages in China, are dissolving. Of course, if a family system is undergoing change, the rates of occurrence of these forms of disorganisation, such as divorce, separation, illegitimacy, or desertion, may change. However, the new system may have decline rates of occurrence of certain forms of disorganization.For example, the divorce rates in Arab Algeria and in Japan have been declining for half a century. In several Latin American countries, the rate of illegitimacy has apparently been decreasing. Prolonging life in industrialise countries has meant that fewer children must face orphan hood. Aside from these facts, the main grammatical construction of a family system may be altered only about by such changes in rates. Finally, though the old set of patterns is in part dissolved, it is usually replaced by a new set of patterns which is as determinate and controlling as the old one was.Despite the importance of these forms of family d isorganization for the individuals in the family, and thus for the society, the legal and established structures of the society reflect pocketable concern with these problems. If a couple in the United States decides to separate, no federal agency of the society acts, or is even empowered to find out that a separation occurred, unless the wife seeks financial support. There are few springer to guide the illegitimate mother or father, and once again the enunciate moves only in narrowly defined circumstances (e. g.if the mother wants to get on the relief rolls). If a wife becomes schizophrenic, or a child is born an idiot, few customs exist to help guide the family members and the formal agencies of the society do not act unless asked to do so. How Capitalism is dirty to the American Dream? The American Dream has been that every generation could look forward to a better life for its children. Is the dream becoming a nightmare? It is now actively discussed that Capitalism can not overturn a housing crisis that makes the word home a mockery to millions of families.Capitalism can not avoid laying off men in elevate of more profitable machines. It can not avoid depressions, when consumers can not buy, nor threats of war to stimulate business. Capitalism can not avoid inch to the brink of war, constantly, to secure raw materials and markets, and to exploit the labor power of other countries. Capitalism makes a travesty of political republic when a poor mans vote gives him choice only among candidates and polices which may be good for the largest corporations, but not for him. We have a noble traditon of democracy in this land.The changes, as it has moved from an economy of scarcity in an undeveloped country to high production in a mechanized economy, demand that democracy be brought up to date. The rule of a few families controlling the nations resources is not the same thing as the rule of the people of the United States over themselves. either we must ha ve economic democracy, or we shall lose the political democracy our fathers fought and died to win. References Acemoglu, Daron. 2003. Cross-country inequality trends. Economic ledger 113 (February) 12149. Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson.2002. Reversal of fortune Geography and institutions in the making of the modern world income distribution. Quarterly Journal of Economics 117 (November) 123194. 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