Term Paper on "Jensen's Book"

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The thesis of Jensen's book is rooted in the idea that media muckrakers are "individuals, journalists, and other social reformers, whose words helped to change the course of history and improve life for others."[footnoteRef:4] Jensen claims that these individuals, and the stories they produced, had an indelible consciousness-changing impact on American society. These stories changed the course of history, because they removed the veil of deception that corporate propaganda can create. Jensen also claims that the stories selected for Stories that Changed America had a "major positive impact on society."[footnoteRef:5] the author is ultimately successful in showing (a) that muckrakers were and are social reformers that helped to change the course of history and improve the lives of others; and (b) that muckrakers like the ones whose words are published in Jensen's book have worked hard in spite of and because of "corporate and political corruption."[footnoteRef:6] Furthermore, Jensen achieves the goal of demonstrating why each and every story was included in the book and also why each of the stories did not just change America, but changed it for the better. For example, the author points out that civil rights leaders like Malcolm X raised awareness about the need for black empowerment independent of white pity. Jensen similarly identifies the ways that Rachel Carson's work directly led to the ban on DDT. [4: Carl Jensen. Stories that Changed America (New York: Seven Stories, 2002), 20.] [5: Jensen, Stories that Changed America, 20.] [6: Jensen, Stories that Changed America, 20.]

One of the exemplary muckrakers of the early twentieth century was Upton Sinclair. In Stories that Changed America, Jensen provides the reader with excerpts from Sinclair's most famous and groundbreaking work of semi-fiction on industrialization called "The Jungle." Although cloaked as a novel, the underlying story of the Jungle is based on Sinclair's journalistic interest in the meatpacking industry. Sinclair's imagery is poignant, in that it fuses the slaughter of animals with the suffering of the human beings working in the meat packing plants. "In these chutes the stream of animals was continuous; it was quite uncanny to watch them, pressing to their fate, all unsuspicious -- a very river of death," writes Sinclair.[footnoteRef:7] at the time the Jungle was published, immigrants were not given a voice. They were politically, economically, and socially disenfranchised just like the animals in the meat packing plant. Using the meat packing plant to represent the plight of low-wage immigrant workers all over America was a skillful choice for Upton Sinclair. [7: Upton Sinclair, "The Jungle," in Stories that Changed America, ed. Carl Jensen (New York: Seven Stories, 2002), 59.]

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