Upton Sinclair, Whose Muckraking Changed the Meat Industry
President Theodore Roosevelt signed two historic bills aimed at regulating the food and drug industries into law on June 30, 1906. With decisive strokes of his pen on that oppressively hot day, Roosevelt also provided Upton Sinclair with the greatest validation for which any muckraker could hope. It was Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle” that helped spur the public outrage that led to the legislation.
“The Jungle,” a harrowing account of a Lithuanian immigrant’s experience laboring in Chicago’s meatpacking industry, was serialized in the Socialist magazine Appeal to Reason in 1905 before the installments were collected and published as a book in 1906. It came on the heels of exposés by the press and after months of reporting in Chicago’s Packingtown, as the neighborhood around the stockyards was known, by Sinclair himself.
“The Jungle’s” grotesque descriptions of conditions endured by workers and livestock, and the contaminated food that came of them, made it a runaway hit and catalyzed the public’s fear and fury.
There were cattle which had been fed on “whiskey-malt,” the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called “steerly” — which means covered with boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man’s sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could see?
The book eventually sold millions of copies, was translated into dozens of languages and cemented Sinclair’s reputation as a crusader for social justice. It remains an inspiration to journalists investigating the food industry and food health scares, workplace conditions and the environmental impact of industry.
Sinclair later said that his readers had missed the point by focusing on the health risks created by unsanitary stockyards and meatpacking facilities rather than on the dehumanization of workers and the brutal treatment of animals.
“I aimed at the public’s heart,” he said, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
Still, Sinclair was quick to harness the reaction. About a month after “The Jungle” was published, the White House started receiving “100 letters a day demanding a Federal cleanup of the meat industry,” Alden Whitman wrote in Sinclair’s obituary. (He died on Nov. 25, 1968.)
Roosevelt invited Sinclair to the White House, then ordered a federal investigation. Sinclair took every opportunity to harangue the Beef Trust, as the meatpacking industry was known, and sent a stream of telegrams to the White House demanding reform. Roosevelt soon tired of Sinclair’s outspokenness. In a note to the author’s publisher, the president wrote, “Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while.”
Sinclair did no such thing. In some 90 books and innumerable articles over the next six decades, he pushed for progressive causes, like “strong trade unions, abolition of child labor, birth control, Prohibition, utopian Socialism, an honest press, morality in business and industry, vegetarianism, mental telepathy and spiritualism, educational reform and civil liberties,” his obituary said. He won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for his novel “Dragon’s Teeth,” which dramatized the Nazi takeover of Germany during the 1930s.
Fame from “The Jungle” lasted until the end of Sinclair’s life. He was invited to the White House again in 1967, the year before his death, to witness the signing of a new food safety law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Read the obituary “Upton Sinclair, Author and Crusader for Social Justice, Is Dead ”