The time period between 1850 to 1900 saw a significant change of emphasis from agriculture to industry in the U.S. economy . This change resulted in a huge concentration of financial power in the hands of a few people. During this time, the number of factory workers increased ten times. Large businesses grew prosperous, but their increasing wealth failed to benefit the workers, whose wages dropped even though prices steadily rose. Faced with unsafe, unsanitary, and unstable working conditions, factory workers lacked both economic and emotional security (Moss and Wilson 174). They would find powerful allies in the American press, who investigated the mistreatment of workers and sought to expose the corruption of industrial capitalism. Thes

hey also are painfully aware of the death that awaits them if they do not keep up with the pace of the work. In a process called "speeding up the gang" (Sinclair, 56), the bosses pay a worker extra to frantically work and set the pace for the rest of the factory. Any man who cannot keep up with the others is easily replaced by one of the hundreds outside the factory that are begging to work. Jobs were scarce, and being fired in what was already a hand-to-mouth existence surely meant starving or freezing to death. Ultimately, the assembly line is a "very river of death" (Sinclair33) for both the animals that are slaughtered and the workers who race to avoid death by unemployment.

nd, like a hog, had no fate other than to be discarded when all the life and energy inside him had been extinguished.

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Moss and Wilson, eds. Literature and Its Times. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1997.

There is a saying that went around Packingtown, "They use everything about the hog except the squeal" (Sinclair 33). The same is also true of the human beings who live and work there. The factory owners squeeze every ounce of energy and vitality from their workers' bodies until they reduce them to nothing more than carcasses and discard them like the squeal of a hog. When Rudkus first came to Packingtown, he stood and watched the hog killing, and thought how cruel and savage it was, and came away thankful that he was not a hog. However, when he converts to Socialism, he realizes that a hog is just what he had been. Sinclair describes the vast majority of the unemployed as "the worn-out parts of the great merciless packing machine" (Sinclair 124). What the factory owners wanted from hogs were all the profits that could be extracted from them, and they viewed their workers in exactly the same way. The worker "simply becomes a cog in the industrial machine" (Sinclair xi) a!

e journalists were known as "muckrakers." They focused their early attention on the meat-packaging and patent medicines industries and used their influence to get the Pure Food and Drug Bill entered in the Senate in 1902, even though it!

James P. Draper. Vol. 5. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992.

remained untouched by Congress until 1905 (Moss and Wilson 176).

ble, that it overshadowed his original intention, and instead focusing on the product rather than the worker.

In 1904, the Socialist weekly, The Appeal to Reason commissioned Sinclair to investigate and document living and working conditions in Chicago's stockyards. Sinclair spent seven weeks in the autumn of 1904 researching his novel in the Packingtown district of Chicago, where the stockyard workers had just lost a strike for improved wages. Although an outsider, Sinclair interviewed workers, lawyers, doctors, saloon keepers -- anyone who knew anything about the corruption and working conditions in the packing houses. To better collect his evidence, he often penetrated the meat-packing plants disguised as a worker. In Packingtown he found his inspiration for both his setting and his protagonist for his novel, The Jungle. Sinclair modeled his protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, after a Lithuanian meat packer he met at a wedding feast. In 1906 Sinclair succeeded in havin

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