The Jungle - Chicago Will Be Ours"Their home! Their home! They had lost it! The pain, the desperation, the anger overwhelmed him: what a fantasy there was 'was of that thing? this heartbreaking, crushing reality of it... Just think of what he had suffered for that house - what miseries they had all suffered for that house - the price they had paid for it!' “The Jungle,” by Upton Sinclair, offers a harrowing portrait of the hardships faced by countless poverty-stricken workers in Chicago's slaughterhouses. As in the quote above, a struggling family was subjected to months of backbreaking labor only to lose their home in the blink of an eye. It was a desperate and unforgiving time when an accidentally broken ankle cost a man his job, food and shelter for his family. In the early 1900s, strikes, riots, unions, and new political parties sprang up across the country. The government, with its laissez-faire attitude, has allowed businesses to consolidate into trusts and, in the absence of competition, into powerful monopolies. These multi-million dollar monopolies have been able to exploit every opportunity to amass greater fortunes, regardless of the human consequences. Sinclair illustrates the harsh conditions of Packingtown through a family of Lithuanian immigrants and their struggles to survive. Ona, a young, fragile woman, and Jurgis, a strong, hard-working man and Ona's husband, come to America with some of their family members to find work and build a new and better life. Since everyone quickly finds work, the family begins their life in America with optimism, enthusiasm and ignorance. Taking a huge risk, they buy a small, rickety house. Slowly, they awaken to the harsh reality of their surroundings. There is the mortgage... middle of paper... the worker is the common ownership and democratic management of production. Schliemann, a socialist, explains that "anyone could support themselves with an hour of work a day". Sinclair goes even further by referring to socialism as “humanity's new religion” to oppose the “jungle” in which workers are slaves. Finally, Sinclair seeks to convert his readers to socialism and reject capitalism using numbers. At the end of the novel it shows the growing popularity of socialism as the number of votes increases. In Chicago, the number of votes for socialism began almost at zero, and by the end of the book, the votes were almost fifty thousand. Leaving the reader with a sense of optimism that socialism may one day triumph, Sinclair ends the novel with hope for the worker as he zealously writes, "Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours".!"