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Upton Sinclairs book The Jungle
condition under the current wage-slave system or due, to the fact, that the managers, superintendents, clerks were never taken from the laboring class. These people of power in the work place held the workingman in contempt and considered themselves far superior to them. As stated in the book, “The managers and superintendents and clerks of Packingtown were all recruited from another class, and never from the workers: they scorned the workers, the meanest of them.” This system of management created tension in the workplace and drove a wedge between the workers and their managers. They were not only treated poorly at work but seemingly everywhere they turned someone was using them as stepping stool, i.e. the purchasing of their house.
Their ethnicity contributed to their socio-cultural and socio-economic problems that they faced. First and foremost, Lithuanians (eastern Europeans) were considered to be on the bottom of the “ladder of worth” in relation to other European immigrants. Also their illiteracy of the English language caused them to be ignorant of the workings of Packingtown. This in turn caused them an enormous amount of grief, hardship, and maybe even more devastating was the loss of their money.
All of this injustice in the meatpacking industry was a type and shadow of what was going on everywhere in Industrial America. Examining Packingtown and the meatpacking industry there, would be like analyzing the true character of Industrial America. Packingtown gets it life and vitality from the meatpacking industry it houses. And, in all reality, it is its foreman. The industry is the one that really determines, directly or indirectly, what the future holds for Packingtown. In the same way, the large trusts of the American Industry are the powers that are actually governing the country, mainly the Railroad Trust, which is opposed by the Beef Trust. The book clarifies this when it says, “you would understand that the power which really governs the United States today is the Railroad Trust…and all the trust I have named are railroad trusts – save only the Beef Trust! The Beef Trust has defied the railroads.” These trusts are where we find the corrupted men of America. They are only looking out for there own interest and wish to gain power, money, and fame. These men, like the powerful men in Packingtown, are not at all opposed to the crushing of the lives of people to reach their goals.
The Industrial America, the only America that many Immigrants new, and the environment it created did not reflect the ideology of democracy, supreme power held by the people. The people with money held the real power, and the vote that empowered the people was just another chance for the wealthy to turn the tide of power in their direction by buying off the large voting blocks of the poor. Of course, if you look at the big picture, America itself was prospering beyond belief and becoming a true world power from an economical viewpoint but the American Immigrant [next page]