"Cliff Notes - Jungle, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Still, he tried his hand at another novel, Manassas, about
the Civil War, while living on thirty dollars a month provided
by a wealthy socialist. The book was published in 1904 and
earned Sinclair five hundred dollars. His total earnings from
four novels in four and a half years came to less than a
thousand dollars.

Fortunately, Sinclair didn't have to give up writing. The
editor of a socialist magazine, the Appeal to Reason, offered
him $500 for the right to serialize a novel about "wage slaves"
(industrial workers). Sinclair snapped up the offer. Leaving
his wife and son in Princeton, New Jersey, he took a train to
Chicago, which was the world center of the meat-packing
industry. He lived among stockyard workers for seven weeks,
collecting information for his novel.

What he saw appalled him. There was nothing "enlightened"
about the way industrialists of the day viewed their employees.
Profits came first; the workers' well-being, second. In the
absence of strong unions, workers were treated brutally and paid
wages much too low for a family to live on.

But the workers dared not complain. Outside the packing
plants, newly arrived immigrants--men and women desperate for
jobs--offered to work for even lower wages.

Data gathered by the historian Oscar Handlin show just how
desperate they were. For every dollar a native-born American
earned in 1900, Italian immigrants earned 84 cents, Hungarian
immigrants 68 cents, and other European immigrants 54 cents.

Sick pay and unemployment benefits, standard in the 1980s,
didn't exist for the average worker in 1904. When the
bread-winner lost his job or was too sick to work, his family
often went hungry.

At the time, there were few laws governing healthy living and
working conditions. The packing plants were dangerous
places--sites of accidents and sources of all kinds of diseases,
from pneumonia and blood poisoning to deadly tuberculosis. The
hovels where stockyard workers lived were overcrowded firetraps.
The unpaved streets in the slums became open sewers when rains
flooded the cesspools behind the houses.

Sinclair also noted how little the government did to protect
consumers against fraud. Sawdust and rat droppings were mixed
into the sausage meat and deviled ham. Spoiled meat regularly
found its way into cans. One U.S. Army general estimated that
spoiled meat, first treated with dangerous chemicals and then
canned, had killed three thousand U.S. soldiers during the