America's Coming of Age
Dr. Ketcher's 8th grade project
By: Aurora Calma
Upton Sinclair, Jr.
Upton Sinclair, Jr was an author, journalist, and activist. He is most famous for writing a novel titled, "The Jungle". The book described the mistreatment of workers in the meatpacking industry.
The book was rejected by several publishers but was eventually published in 1906. His vivid descriptions of the cruelty to animals and the unsanitary conditions caused enormous public outcry and quickly changed the way people shopped for food.
The book immediately became a best sellar and had been translated into 17 diiferent languages. One of the several million readers was President Theodore Roosevelt. After Roosevelt read the book, he invited Sinclair over to the white house for further information on about the meatpacking industries. Roosevelt then ordered and inspection of all meat packing factories. As a result, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were both passed in 1906.
"There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one-- there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage."
After Sinclair became famous for "The Jungle", he went on to do even greater things. He opened Helicon Hall, a utopian co-op he constructed in New Jersey in 1906 with the money he received from "The Jungle". Not even a year later, the building had burned down. He abandoned his plans and went on to write more books. But the Sinclair’s persistent focus on ideology often did little or nothing to help sales, and most of his fiction during this period was commercially unsuccessful. He founded the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and as a candidate for the Socialist Party he launched unsuccessful bids for Congress.