Food Safety in the Meatpacking Jungle

Now the food is safe; but the workers still aren’t

Working conditions in America’s meat processing plants are very much in the news these days, about 115 years too late, if you could ask Upton Sinclair, author of the 1905 exposé, The Jungle.

Warren’s paper, published in tiny Girard, Kansas, had a national paid circulation as high as 750,000, with special editions reaching nearly 5% of American households. The focus of the paper’s reporting was the life of the working man and woman and the socialist solutions to improve their lot.

Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago seeking out local reporters, labor organizers and Settlement House organizers Jane Addams and Mary McDowell, to find out the reality of life in “Packingtown” as the stock yard area was called. He found he was not challenged as he shuffled in and around the slaughter-houses if dressed in shabby clothes and carrying a lunch bucket.

He was horrified by what he saw and wrote in frightening detail of the filth, the danger and the inhumane conditions the workers faced each day.

Food was processed with little regard for the safety of the workers and none for the safety of the ultimate products.

Sinclair wrote his novel from the point of view of an immigrant Lithuanian worker named Jurgis Rudkus and his family who were trapped in a cycle of work-induced poverty, ultimately leading to their ruin.

Editor Fred Warren serialized shortened chapters in his newspaper beginning in 1905. Warren’s socialist readership was attuned to reading about the worst, most inhumane actions of capitalist management and the series was very popular. At the end of the run in the newspaper, the complete version was published in a socialist quarterly. Then Sinclair’s sought out a “name” publisher for a book-length version to be called The Jungle.

Major publishers didn’t believe the stories of filth and danger, including tales of injured human body parts being rendered into lard and sold to the public. Further, they didn’t see the value in publishing a book on the plight of the working man when it had already been read “for free” in the largest socialist newspaper in the country.

However, Herbert Houston, VP of Doubleday, Page & Co saw a great opportunity for a best seller if the emphasis of the story could be moved from the plight of the workers to the plight of the animals, the shockingly unhygienic conditions of the plant and the resulting danger to the American food supply.

In order to protect his potential investment, Houston sent an investigator to sneak into the packing plants and report back. His report stated, in summary, said, “It’s worse than Sinclair wrote.”

Houston bought the book and Isaac Marcosson of his editorial staff cajoled Sinclair to feature the dangerous, unsavory character of the final meat products.

President Theodore Roosevelt, who had an interest in food safety, received a pre-publication copy. He asked Frank Doubleday, Houston’s senior partner, to hold up publication while Roosevelt sent his own investigators to Chicago. The inspectors confirmed nearly all of Sinclair’s observations, even though the packing houses had advance notice of their visit and offered them sanitized tours.

The book version of The Jungle, published in 1906, sold 100,000 copies in its first year. Referring to Sinclair, Roosevelt made the first use of the word “muckraker,” a term for the person who cleaned horse manure out of the barn, to refer to what we now call investigative journalism.

The Jungle was a great financial success, turning Sinclair into a wealthy socialist. He used his windfall to establish a free-thinking, and perhaps free-loving, commune nestled among the wealthy men of Wall Street in the East Hill section of Englewood, New Jersey.

Despite his financial windfall, he was always bitter that no one seemed impressed with the hardships of the men working in “Packingtown.” They only cared about their food.

Years after publication of The Jungle” Sinclair stated in an interview in Cosmopolitan magazine, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Now, one hundred and fifteen years later after The Jungle the COVID-19 virus has turned the attention of today’s “muckrakers” to plight of the workers in the country’s meat processing plants.

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