Due to the publication of the Communist Manifesto, mid nineteenth century America gained a great deal of immigrants from Europe. This immigration came with an influx of new socialist beliefs, causing the development of political parties founded on these beliefs. In 1901, the Socialist Party of America was formed. Up until World War I, the Socialist Party gained large numbers, its members being mostly foreign-born people of the urban working class or native-born farmers. One of the party’s most well-known members was writer Upton Sinclair. Sinclair began reading a widely-published socialist newspaper called Appeal to Reason and decided to join the Socialist Party of America in the summer of 1904. It was then that Sinclair chose to abandon
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The majority of his book dwells on the plight of the immigrant worker and his family. The socialist message comes through in the end when Jurgis, the main character, finds and joins the socialist party. Sinclair attempted to show the difficult lives of the workers, not to simply focus on the conditions in which they worked. The intent was to shed light on and to rid the nation of wage-slavery, a term for a situation in which the worker’s life depends directly and immediately on the wages he makes. However, the gruesome details of the factories were the ones that left a lasting mark on the readers of the novel. For that Sinclair was painted as a muckraker, a word coined in reference to a character in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which was used to refer to those who worked to expose the dishonesty of big business and government (Harmon 356.) “‘I aimed at the public’s heart’ said Sinclair, ‘and by accident I hit it in the stomach’” (qtd. in American Writers 282.) The novel acted as a proponent for social change, and ultimately prompted the passage of new food and drug legislation. Sinclair never achieved the socialistic reforms he had hoped to inspire, but his book helped to present the details of the grim lives of poor American workers in an unforgettable way. It also managed to cause the passage of the Pure Food and Drug and the Meat Inspection Acts of 1906 which had been stuck in Congress before the publication of the novel (Kraft.) It was rumored that president Teddy Roosevelt became sickened by reading Sinclair’s account of the conditions in the meatpacking plants
The majority of his book dwells on the plight of the immigrant worker and his family. The socialist message comes through in the end when Jurgis, the main character, finds and joins the socialist party. Sinclair attempted to show the difficult lives of the workers, not to simply focus on the conditions in which they worked. The intent was to shed light on and to rid the nation of wage-slavery, a term for a situation in which the worker’s life depends directly and immediately on the wages he makes. However, the gruesome details of the factories were the ones that left a lasting mark on the readers of the novel. For that Sinclair was painted as a muckraker, a word coined in reference to a character in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which was used to refer to those who worked to expose the dishonesty of big business and government (Harmon 356.) “‘I aimed at the public’s heart’ said Sinclair, ‘and by accident I hit it in the stomach’” (qtd. in American Writers 282.) The novel acted as a proponent for social change, and ultimately prompted the passage of new food and drug legislation. Sinclair never achieved the socialistic reforms he had hoped to inspire, but his book helped to present the details of the grim lives of poor American workers in an unforgettable way. It also managed to cause the passage of the Pure Food and Drug and the Meat Inspection Acts of 1906 which had been stuck in Congress before the publication of the novel (Kraft.) It was rumored that president Teddy Roosevelt became sickened by reading Sinclair’s account of the conditions in the meatpacking plants