Roosevelt invited Sinclair to the White House, then ordered a federal investigation. 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. Still, Sinclair was quick to harness the reaction. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he said, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” ![]() 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. It remains an inspiration to journalists investigating the food industry and food health scares, workplace conditions and the environmental impact of industry. 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 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? 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. “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. 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,” 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 was Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle” that helped spur the public outrage that led to the legislation. 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. President Theodore Roosevelt signed two historic bills aimed at regulating the food and drug industries into law on June 30, 1906.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |