Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle (1905) to expose the brutal and dangerous working conditions in Chicago’s meat-packing industry. Workers, most of them Eastern European immigrants, earned pennies an hour, for 10-hour days, six days a week. They lived in tenements in Packingtown, next to the stinking stockyards and four city dumps. Almost as an afterthought, Sinclair included a chapter on how diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat products were doctored, mislabeled, and sold to the public. He was dismayed when the public reacted with outrage about the filthy meat but ignored the plight of the workers. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he said, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Read more about the meat-packing industry a hundred years ago in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).
