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摘要

The trusting walked to the killing beds only to be knocked out with sledgehammer blows, hoisted in the air by one shackled foot, and then stabbed in the jugular. The pigs and cows wailed, but the so human-like protests fell on deaf ears as they bled to death, perhaps watching the men, who despite their best efforts, waded through the half-inch of blood that never drained. The players in Upton Sinclair's literary work The Jungle butchered livestock furiously in Chicago's Packingtown, where conditions defied sanitization. "There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs," he wrote. Ironically, The Jungle, published in January 1906, did not bolster Sinclair's main theme: The exploitation of immigrant labor and the need for socialism. Instead, it fueled the roaring fires of public indignation stoked over such scandals as the "embalmed beef" supplied to U.S. troops in the Spanish-American War of 1898, as well as the "muckraking" exposes of journalists like Samuel Hopkins Adams on deadly patent medicines.