30 June

The United States passes the Pure Food and Drug Act

1906 So what has that got to do with literature? Simply that the legislation was the direct result of pressure following revelations of life and conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906).

Sinclair was a journalist, one of the so-called ‘muckrakers’, like Lincoln Steffans, Ira Traubel and Jacob Riis, who flourished during the progressive presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. They believed that the public needed to know about the hidden lawlessness of American industry and politics, and about the foul living and employment conditions of many American workers.

Funded by the socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason, Sinclair went to work in the Chicago stockyards for seven weeks. What emerged was a searing Tendenzroman that followed the misfortunes of a family newly arrived from Lithuania in the illusory hope of well-paid work. After a number of financial disasters, including (a modern touch, this) being conned into a sub-prime loan on a house they can’t afford, the whole family – men, women, children and even an ill old father – have to go to work for the meat-packers.

The world of their work is one in which the ordinary operative is underpaid, bullied, blacklisted. As an index of the company’s indifference to its workforce, Sinclair included a typical practice in the industry, in which men in the rendering room regularly fell into the cooking vats, and ‘would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!’

Public outrage was immediate. Overseas sales of American meat fell by a half. The packers too recognised the danger, and lobbied the government for extra meat inspectors – to be funded by the taxpayer, of course. Within the year, the Pure Food and Drug Act was signed into law.

Sinclair, who went on to a long career as author and left-wing political campaigner, was always disappointed that The Jungle hadn’t aroused the same degree of outrage over the workers’ exploitation. ‘I aimed at the public’s heart’, he said ruefully, ‘and by accident I hit it in the stomach’.