Upton Sinclair Quotes
Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906.
Sinclair had written an expose of the meat packing industry – the Jungle – which used as its setting the Armour meat packing factory. It changed the way the public thought about the industry, the role of government and regulation. President Roosevelt took up the reform role, and got Congress to Regulate the quality and cleanliness of the meat packing industry. Sinclair, however not only wanted that reform, but also wanted the labor wages and conditions reformed. He referred to the Armour plant as the fortress.
Writing about the railroad magnates and monopolists of his day:
In 1927 there was a Peasant Uprising in the Hunan Province of China. Young Mau went there and wrote a report. Mao and other young communist leaders had a much more acute appreciation of sloganeering than their older revolutionary comrades. Even into the 3rd millennium, the same “Down with Imperialism” slogan could be heard in many part of the world, long after the Soviet Union collapsed and China and become capitalistic.
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was an American writer, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.
