In The Jungle by Upton Sinclair the lives of immigrants during the turn of the 20th century are shown. Jurgis Rudkus a young Lithuanian like many other young European men of the time plans to move to America and start a new life with his fiancé and become rich. Though he finds out that things are not as easy as they’re made out to be. He is beaten down again and again by the corporations and the politicians of Chicago. The immigrants who become the lowest class of American society are not that way because of lack of hard work or effort; they toil in factories and yards just managing to scrape together a living.
The book starts with Jurgis and Ona his fiancé being married in traditional Lithuanian style. As custom the guests are required to give money to the newly wedded so they have something to begin their new lives with. “What made all this the more painful was that it was so hard on the few that had really done their best. There was poor old Jokubas, for instance -he had already given five dollars, and did not everyone know that Jokubas Szedvilla had just mortgaged hisdelicatessen store for two hundred dollars to meet several months overdue rent?”(21).This acts as a foreshadowing of the life that Jurgis and his family are to live. It seems little at the time but as the story progresses it hints at the hardships that will befall them in America. In the beginning all immigrants are ignorant of the hardships they have agreed to face.
This was one of my thoughts as I read this passage and at the time it didn’t seem like anything to draw concern but upon further reflection it showed me how truly ignorant and how unlucky they were. This passage struck me as unnecessarily melancholy as I read it, and now it seems almost commonplace after reading the book. As Jurgis sets out to look for work he is quickly picked due to his size and health. He is told to heed factory work but brushes of the warnings due to his belief in himself. “Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young.
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They told him stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of Chicago, and of what happened afterward – stories to make your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh.”(26) This helps to set the mood of the beginning of the story as carefree and for a while it seems that the family is destined to live the American dream. The moment I read that quote doubt started to set in, at that moment I doubted that the future of the family was secure. I started to wonder if Jurgis would get injured of if some unseen fee would manage to trap the family but they persevered. They managed to buy a house and for a time all was well for the Rudkus family. Until they found out about interest, after that I started to notice a pattern.
The family would prosper for a short period of time and then would be hit by a catastrophe. During a harsh blizzard Ona doesn’t come home and she says she spent the night over at a friend’s home. Jurgis finds out that this actually isn’t the case, what’s really happening is that Ona is being raped by a boss of one of the factories. When Jurgis hears this he storms out and beats the life out of the Connor the boss and is jailed for thirty days for it. During the thirty days the family is kicked out of their house due to them being unable to pay rent because of the loss of Jurgis’s income. “And their house was gone – every cent of it. And their house was gone – they were back where they had started flung outinto the cold to starve and freeze” (210).
For years the family worked to pay the rent and interest on the house only to have it striped away from them in a heartbeat. It’s almost ridiculous how heartless the tenant company is for carrying out the eviction during the harsh Chicago winter with little to no notice. It absolutely horrified me to see the family cast out and have to start all over again, but the troubles don’t end here. Ona becomes pregnant with a new child and then dies in childbirth, and soon after that little AntanasJurgis’s only child dies. After all that has already happened this was saddening to say the least. It makes me think about how many immigrants shared the same fates as the Rudkus and why no one in Europe knew about these terrible and ghastly conditions.
This is what I consider to be the lowest point of the book because it sends Jurgis into a type of soul searching journey around the countrythat eventually leads him to the same place he started. He then begins to associate with the wrong crowda crowd that he would have despised when he first landed in America. When he first arrives in America he is told by his co-workers about the corrupt politicians and gigantic trusts and he learns to despise them. When he returns to Chicago he begins to find himself slowly dragged into the crime underbelly of the city. He begins to get into politics and he begins to climb the corrupt ladder of power in the city. He goes to the “Boss” of Chicago known as Scully looking for a job and a chance to gain footing in the political realm.
“It was Scully who was to blame for the unpaved street in which Jurgis’s child had been drowned. It was scully who had put into office the magistrate it was scully who was principal; stockholder in the company which sold him the ramshackle tenement and had robbed him of it.”(311) Jurgis stays ignorant to the fact that Scully’s actions have caused him so much pain in his life. This helped show the reader how truly ignorant people of that time were. They trusted those who would backstab them in a heartbeat and believed in the doubletalk of nearly every politician. The quote made me question if anything like this was happening in today’s time.
The conclusion I came to was that it was entirely possible, and so I thought what would I do or what would Jurgis have done if he knew that Scully had caused him so much pain. Then answer is nothing and that is what the book is supposed to convey; the complete and utter inability of the common man to stand up to the companies that ruled that era of history. It is heart wrenching to even contemplate how many lives were ruined by the trusts of that era and why the government was so slack in defending its citizens but so diligent in creating opportunities for big businesses to rip off and steal from the common man. Though the big businesses of the 19th and 20th centuries brought about many great advances in technology, communication, and commerce the methods they used are highly questionable. They men who advocated and headed these businesses are either called Titans of Industry or as they are portrayed in this book as Robber Barons.
“Upon the ocean of commerce it sailed a pirate ship it had hoisted the black flag and declared war upon civilization. Bribery and corruption were its everyday methods” (378). They paid the mayors of big cities so they could be allowed whatever they wanted this helped to create the horrendous atmosphere in the factories that Jurgis had to work in his whole life. The words the author used struck me as beautiful and a perfect representation of the companies in the book and the tools they used to make the lives of those who worked day in day out terrible. It lets you form a bond between the plundering nature of pirates and the similar nature of big business. It strips away the softness and propaganda that businesses use to promote themselves and shows them for what they really are. This passage helps the reader understand what businesses really are. They’re thieves who desire nothing but money and will beat down and destroy everything in their path to achieve it.
There are many passages in the book that could have served as the quote of the book but there was one that stood out and really makes the reader have to think. “And Jurgis was a man whose soul had been murdered, who had ceased to hope and to struggle – who had made terms with degradation and despair; and now, suddenly in one awful convulsion the blank and hideous fact was made plain to him! There was a falling in of all the pillars of his soul, they sky seemed to split above him – he stood there, with his clenched hands upraised his eyes bloodshot, and the veins standing out purple in his face, roaring in the voice of a wild beast,frantic, incoherent, maniacal.”(368).
This passage explains what happens to immigrants who came to America, and shows the effects of it. They believed they were going to make it rich but instead they were unknowingly dragged into a life of poverty made to eat the lowest standard of food and work the lowest standard of job and arguably live the lowest standard of life. Meanwhile they managed to hold on to a shred of hope and struggle on but eventually they are stripped of this to and their existence becomes meaningless. The immigrants who become the lowest class of American society had no voice any by writing this book I think Upton Sinclair was trying to give those people a voice that wouldn’t sugarcoat the facts and would affect the government. We must acknowledge what these people went through so it can never happen again. The standards since the book was written have improved but slowly. We need to get rid of these poor living conditions not tomorrow or when the big businesses fell like it but today. My only question is: What are we ignorant of today?
