Urban Problems and the Authors Who Revealed Them to Us

Around the 18th century, the industrial revolution began. This is when immigrants came and started to work in factories, not-so-good conditions. They worked in sorrowful rooms called sweatshops. There are some authors who were alive at the time and decided to investigate upon it. Others who were not alive at the time and they still were interested and were destined to research it. These authors were cordial to inform us the problems and vexations during that era. In this essay, I will be conducting, comparing and contrasting two books; ‘The jungle by Upton Sinclair”.

And ‘How the other half lives” by Jacob Riis. How the Other Half Lives Imagine living in a dark, unlit tenement which is windowless and about 10 feet square. Photographers would come; a flash explodes, enlightening their impoverishment. Although the dimness of the room, a document of urban poverty is made. That is the way; Jacob Riis took pictures in lower Manhattan. This pioneering work of photojournalism by Jacob Riis focused on the plight of the poor in the Lower East Side, and greatly influenced future “muckraking” journalism.

Riis mostly attributed the plight of the poor to environmental conditions, but he also divided the poor into two categories: deserving of assistance (mostly women and children) and undeserving (mostly the unemployed and intractably criminal). He wrote with prejudice about Jews, Italians, and Irish, and he stopped short of calling for government intervention. Still, the catalyst of his work was a genuine sympathy for his subjects, and his work shocked many New Yorkers.

The Jungle Upton Sinclair was a desperately poor, young socialist hoping to remake the world when he settled down in a tarpaper shack in Princeton Township and penned his Great American Novel. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose the appalling working conditions in the meat-packing industry. His description of diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat shocked the public and led to new federal food safety laws. Before the turn of the 20th century, a major reform movement had emerged in the United States.

Known as progressives, the reformers were reacting to problems caused by the rapid growth of factories and cities. Progressives at first concentrated on improving the lives of those living in slums and in getting rid of corruption in government. By the beginning of the new century, progressives had started to attack huge corporations like Standard Oil, U. S. Steel, and the Amour meat-packing company for their unjust practices. The progressives revealed how these companies eliminated competition, set high prices, and treated workers as “wage slaves. “