Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was a remarkably impactful novel which directly impacted how many Americans thought about industrialization and urban life in the first decade of the 1900s. Early in his career, Sinclair spent 6 months living in a meatpacking district in Chicago to research the conditions described within the novel. Following a young Lithuanian immigrant, the novel depicts the horrors and hardships that these workers regularly encountered in industrialized American cities. For this assignment, please read the linked passage from this novel and then answer the following questions in at least 3 paragraphs (total, not per question).
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5727/
1. Do you see any pattern in the sorts of injuries that workers in the meat industry suffered? Explain.
2. Why might President Teddy Roosevelt believed initially that Sinclair was making up most of his book? Do you find these details believable?
3. Upton Sinclair did most of the research for this book by interviewing stockyard workers in the middle of a labor strike. Why might this have made it easier for him to get the material and details necessary to write this book?
