City College of New York

Corruption in The Jungle

Jose Diaz

HIST 24100 D[38319]

M Vaz

Due:3/11/19
 In his novel titled The Jungle Upton Sinclair proficiently details the horrors of being part

of the working class in the US during the early 20th century. He does so through the eyes of an

immigrant family coming from Lithuania in hopes of a better life. The family consists of twelve

characters: Jurgis, Antanas (Jurgis's old father), Ona (the fiancée), Teta Elzbieta (Ona's

stepmother), Jonas (Ona's step-uncle), Marija (Ona's cousin), and Ona's six step brothers and

sisters Stanislovas, Kotrina, Vilimas, Nikolajus, Juozapas, and Kristoforas. When the family

arrives in Chicago, they immediately see that America is not the place they believed it to be.

From the odd odor to the wilting grass everything about Chicago just seemed off putting to the

group of immigrants.

Sinclair displays time and time again how in this corporate society only the corrupt can

survive. In order to display this, he takes a very hardworking and ignorant Jurgis and slowly

takes away his will to achieve the American dream he wished for in the beginning of the novel.

Upon arrival the family has the desire to achieve the American dream and begin by finding work

in the meatpacking industry which mixes diseased and spoiled meat into their products. Sinclair

quickly shows that this naive way of thinking will take the family nowhere.

His first step in this process is displaying the grotesque and very dangerous working

conditions of the time. Many people are injured in factories and go months without work or

compensation. However, it is essentially impossible for a wage worker to miss out on so much

work when they have a family to feed. Jurgis receives bad tendon injury to his ankle, due to a fall

he takes when a steer gets loose half-way through the slaughtering process. In despite of his

injury he continues to try to work (concerned that his “place will be taken”), and winds up with

an aggravation and a two-month disability. This leads to him losing his job and the family losing

their main source of income. This causes young members Vilimas and Nikolajus to go earn
money in his stead. Stanislovas, only 13 years old, also gets injured at work. Due to the harsh

weather during the winter time while Jurgis was injured he would want to stay home during

snow days. Jurgis would end up beating him on the mornings because staying home was a luxury

the family could not afford. This leads to Stanislovas catching frostbite in his hands and losing

the use of three of his fingers. Later in the story, he falls asleep in the storeroom of an oil factory

and a swarm of rats attacks him and kills him. The working conditions weren’t only unsafe there

was also discrimination in the workplace. In Ona’s first job her supervisor was Miss Henderson,

the madam of a brothel. Henderson hated Ona because she was a decent married girl which led to

Henderson’s lackeys from the brothel who also worked with them to hate Ona for the same

reasons. They all attempted to make Ona’s life miserable because of this.

The author also displays the corruption that would occur during this time period daily.

The first sign of the corruption in Packingtown is when the family attempts to purchase a house.

When Ona, Marija and Teta Elzbieta meet with a real estate agent regarding an advertisement for

a new four room home he tricks them into believing that the houses are going quickly, and they

would have to make their purchase as soon as possible. In desperation, the family decide to go

see the house and are disappointed. The house was nothing like the one in the ad. It was smaller,

a different color, and the attic and basement were left unfinished, but it was newly painted; made

to look pretty on the outside but was made over fifteen years ago with very cheap materials.

They also realized that the other houses around the neighborhood were mostly vacant. When

Jokubas looks at the deed he realizes that the word rental is used which leads to the family

questioning the deal. Under the impression that the deal may be a swindle they meet with a

lawyer, who they later find out is friends with the agent, and he explains that everything is in

order. Grandmother Majauszkiene, an old Lithuanian neighbor, later explained to them that the
term rental is used in order to easily evict family’s once they miss one payment which would

cause a forfeiture of everything they had spent up until that point. She also explains that they

would have to pay interest on the house almost doubling their monthly payment of twelve dollars

to twenty dollars. Sinclair uses this situation to show how business men during this time period

were able to take advantage of less fortunate people through misleading advertising which would

lead them into a situation in which they had to pay interest and if they came up short on one

payment, they would lose out on everything they had.

Another instance where corruption prevails is when Ona’s boss Phil Connor forces

himself upon her. During this section of the story Ona is working at a packing plant and twice

she fails to come home at night. During the second night Jurgis goes out looking for her and

discovers that she has been lying about her whereabouts. He forces a confession out of her, and

Ona explains that Connor had the connections to ruin their entire family and make sure that they

would never find work in packing town again. Upon hearing this Jurgis goes and attacks Connor

at the packing plant is eventually sentenced to a month in jail. During this time the family is

evicted from their home and must go back to the boarding house where they stayed when they

first arrived in Chicago. Upon Jurgis’ return he is astonished to discover that the agent sold the

house within a week of their eviction. He arrives back at the boarding house to witness Ona give

her last breath as she dies giving birth to a dead premature baby. Once Jurgis recovers from this

he has difficulty finding work because Connor made certain to get him blacklisted everywhere in

Packingtown. In this instance Sinclair displays the level of powerlessness of Jurgis and shows

why resistance to the corruption in Packingtown is futile during this time period.

Jurgis eventually finds work far away from Packingtown which made it so that he would

only be able to return and see his son on weekends. He returns home one day and comes to find
out that his son died by drowning in a puddle. This completely breaks Jurgis and he forgets

completely about trying to live a better life because his son was the only thing keeping him going

after all the terrible experiences he has had. He abandons the family and becomes a traveler for

some time eventually returning to Chicago. When Jurgis is jailed again due to being cheated out

of some money he meets with Jack Duane an acquaintance from his first time in jail. He

concludes that a life of crime is the only way to survive in this unjust country and enters a life of

crime alongside Jack. Through Jack he meets multiple new criminal associates. With his new

acquaintances he goes on a series of corrupt crimes. With Jack he mugs multiple people, with

Halloran he picks up other people’s paychecks under different names and through Scully he

obtains a job as a hog trimmer back in Packingtown and partakes in the rigging of a municipal

election, a scheme he once fell victim to, which ends up making him three hundred dollars

richer. With the crimes he has committed Jurgis realizes that this corrupt style of life is more

sustainable as “there was always a living, inside of a jail, if not out of it”. He would never have

to miss a meal again because they were provided in jail and if he was out, he was making enough

money to sustain a comfortable lifestyle without the exhausting and repetitive work. He begins to

regain hope that he can keep moving up the food chain and have a chance at a better life.

One day by chance Jurgis runs into Connor and he attacks the man brutally once more.

He is once again jailed and uses all his savings to pay for bail and leaves to the other end of

Chicago. He later meets with Marija at a brothel and she explains to him what happened after he

left. She tells him that Stanislovas died at work and that her and Teta Elzbieta were unable to

support the kids with legitimate jobs, so they turned to a brothel in order to survive. Once again

Sinclair displays that wage labor isn't enough to achieve the American dream. This furthers the

argument that while the working class spends most of their day working unreasonable hours for
measly pay while the higher ups get to reap the fruits of their labor. However, she confesses that

she is addicted to morphine and that the rest of the prostitutes are also somehow forced to remain

prostitutes either because of drug addiction or because of debt. In a way this is worse than wage

labor because this form of labor somewhat resembles slavery as the women are chained down to

the brothel, leaving the madam with workers she can easily take advantage of while having them

come back time and time again.

In the end, Sinclair effectively portrays the immigrant experience during this time period.

He depicts everyone of higher class as corrupt and apathetic to the suffering of the working class.

He explains early in the novel that the ones who turn corrupt are the only ones who survive the

horrors of Packingtown and become completely uncaring to the suffering of the working class

which they were once a part of. Most of the characters which Jurgis met who are corrupt were

Irish, part of the wave of immigrants that came before the Lithuanians. The house selling agent

and Connor are two such examples of this.