100 pages • 3 hours read
Upton SinclairA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapters 1-3
Chapters 4-6
Chapters 7-9
Chapters 10-12
Chapters 13-15
Chapters 16-18
Chapters 19-21
Chapters 22-24
Chapters 25-27
Chapters 28-30
Chapters 31-33
Chapters 34-36
Chapters 37-39
Chapters 40-42
Chapters 43-45
Chapters 46-48
Chapters 49-51
Chapters 52-54
Chapters 55-57
Chapters 58-60
Chapters 61-63
Chapters 64-66
Chapters 67-69
Chapters 70-72
Chapters 73-75
Chapters 76-78
Chapters 79-81
Chapters 82-84
Chapters 85-92
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
A small contingent of college graduates are, like Tom Shutt, “concerned about [...] problems of industry,” and although they don’t agree about everything, they are more or less in contact and agree more or less about their immediate shared goals, including “to make personal contacts with the workers, and find out what they were thinking and perhaps suggest new thoughts to them” (197). These graduates join companies, get to know their colleagues, and position themselves to join unions, “if and when such a thing might come into being” (198).
To these young people, income inequality seems to be the obvious cause of unemployment:
Too large a share of the product of industry went to the owners, who spent it in new investments, rather than to the workers, who could have spent it for food and clothing and other needs. The wages of the workers wouldn’t buy their product, and so production slowed down, and wages fell still lower, and the farmers had no market for their […] corn (198).
Worst of all, the New Deal was reviving industry without significantly lowering unemployment:
Production had come back to pre-depression levels with only two-thirds of the former number of workers. So it appeared that ten million unemployed were to be a permanent feature of American life; and of course they would always be at the factory gates, beating down wages of the others (198).