Compare And Contrast Upton Sinclair And Henry Ford

Upton Sinclair vs. Henry Ford Almost everyone has heard of Ford Motor Company. Ford sells millions of cars, trucks and SUVs and has advertisements almost everywhere. It is nearly impossible to have not. While Ford is a prominent player in American industry, little attention is paid to the industry that ensures that the hamburger we just ate is sanitary. Henry Ford started the Ford Motor Company which produced the first wide selling automobile that changed the way America moved. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, an exposé of the conditions of the meat packing industry in
America. Both were imperative, but who contributed most to American society? Born in 1863, Henry Ford was an engineer from Michigan in the early 1900’s. He was not the first to experiment with self propelled vehicles, but his was one of the first to take hold and gain popularity in America. He first created the Quadricycle, a four wheeled vehicle that used a gasoline motor to propel itself. After two
failed attempts at an automobile manufacturing company, the Ford Motor Company was established in 1903. Ford introduced The Model T in 1908 as “an automobile that was reasonably priced, reliable, and efficient” (The Henry Ford). By 1918 almost half of all cars in America were Model Ts.
To keep up with demand for Model Ts, Ford opened a large factory in Michigan. It was in that factory that Ford established what would become known as an Assembly Line. Ford took the concepts of interchangeable parts, continuous flow, division of labor, reduced wasted effort, inspiration from the meat packing industry and the use of conveyer belts and slowly implemented it all into his factory creating in 1913 the first large scale Assembly Line. Many industries quickly followed suit, able to produce cheaper and more efficiently. Ford changed the entire process of industry.
Upton Sinclair, a novelist born in 1878from Maryland wrote almost one hundred novels of many genres in his lifetime. Though he wrote many novels, his most famous and most influential was, The Jungle. Sinclair got a healthy dose of wealthy living and impoverished living growing up. His father was a liquor salesman, who was an alcoholic himself. This left his family little money. His grandparents were wealthy though and he often stayed with them. This gave Sinclair an unbiased look out of the world. Upton Sinclair entered City College of New York at age fourteen. He wrote and sold dime novels to pay for his tuition. After graduating in 1897 he studied for a while at Columbia University. In 1904, Sinclair spent seven weeks in disguise working in Chicago’s meat packing plants gathering information for his fictional novel The Jungle. It was published two years later and quickly became a bestseller.
Although Sinclair wrote the novel to expose the harsh working conditions immigrants faced, the public became more concerned with the portion of the book that exposed the unsanitary things that happened inside meat packing plants.
While the public was in uproar, the president, Teddy Roosevelt, was unconcerned, starting that Sinclair was a ‘crackpot’. Roosevelt sent in people he trusted, Charles P. Neill and James Bronson Reynolds to surprise visit the factories. What they found surprised them; Sinclair was right. Roosevelt was forced to take action. Public pressure along with Neill and Reynolds findings forced him to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug in 1906. These later became what is now The Food and Drug Administration. Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel was “aimed at the public's heart, and by accident hit them in the stomach." (Sinclair). That it did. A novel about immigrant’s hardships quickly turned into a revolution in the sanitation of America’s food and
medicine.
To say one person contributed more to American Society is hard. Both Sinclair and Ford were important in shaping America, and both had large contributions. Without Fords introduction of The Assembly line, many products we buy all the time would be luxury items or non-existent today. The Assembly Line also made work easier for laborers. Without it many workers would easily be exhausted from the hard work. Sinclair did what had to be done the hard way without even knowing it. He went into the harsh conditions of the meat packing factories and wrote down wholly and truly the account no one would dare to mention. Sinclair that wrote a novel that changed America for the better.
Sinclair’s novel and the eventual passing of the Meat Inspection Act greatly affected America’s health and well being. Can you imagine having to worry, every time you bought or ate meat, about what exactly was in it? Or what happened to it while it was being processed? Sinclair brought America from a country who accepted meat that had been on the floor, pooped on by rats, mixed with borax and rotten to a country that cared about the sanitation of what they paid for. Without Sinclair we might possibly not have the administration we have today that ensures us that things are healthy and safe. Even if it was by accident, I believe Sinclair was incomparable and had the greatest contribution to American Society.