The Inevitable Impersonal Forces of The Jungle

Although thousands of men and women came here from other countries between 1865 and 1900 to better their lives, once they arrived, they were faced with nothing but problems. Among these problems were poor living conditions, dirty and crowded cities, and unfair wages. Even though all this seemed to stand in the way of many immigrants' dreams, most of them kept an optimistic view. It was this hope that allowed them to perservere, often times not making the slightest difference in their own lives, but somehow making it possible for their children to escape poverty and hardship. Upton Sinclair wrote a muckraking novel about some of these people. They worked hard for what they wanted and survived the harshest conditions in the slums of the cities. However, in his book, The Jungle, much like today, it did not matter how hard they tried. Major impersonal forces like Social Darwinism, corruption, and big business inevitably triumphed.

Social Darwinism is a term used to describe how the rich and powerful of this time period were better suited to survive in America, and thus deserved to succeed, even at the expense or exploitation of others. Social Darwinists reasoned that, in an unconstrained economy, power and wealth would flow naturally to the most capable people. The immigrant characters in The Jungle proved to be those who were less capable. In the book, status and wealth went hand in hand with power. All the powerful men were "politically connected". Those who lacked power and status, like the immigrants, were inevitably trapped in poverty. Social Darwinism provided a justification for the more exploitative forms of capitalism in which workers were paid sometimes pennies a day for long hours of back-breaking labor. It also justified big business' refusal to acknowledge labor unions and similar organizations, and implied that the rich and powerful need not help the poor or less fortunate get through life, since such people were less fit anyway. The effects of the impersonal forces of Social Darwinism were unavoidable in the late 1800s.