Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"
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A look at the work that stimulated reform in workplace safety and eventually the Food and Drug Act of 1906
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2016-12-12T13:56:52-08:00
Before Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle there was almost no regulation in the food and drug sector and even fewer regulations on workplace conditions and sanitation. Following the model of many investigative journalists of the time, Sinclair worked undercover at the meatpacking plants in Chicago that employed a large population of unrepresented lower-class workers. These workers were forced to work in terrible conditions for minimal pay. What Sinclair found in his investigation was frankly disgusting. He published his findings as a serial work in the Chicago newspaper "Appeal to reason" and later published the final work in 1905. His means of exposing corruption was more artistic in nature than most other muckrakers, as he wrote the book as a fictional tale about an immigrant family that worked in the factory; while ensuring to articulate his findings like a reporter. An excerpt from the novel can be found below that vividly describes several dangerous work conditions that workers endured.
"Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss- crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails, – they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off." (Sinclair, 1906)
Due to his socialist views, Sinclair was deemed a fool by President Roosevelt, who was usually an avid supporter of muckrakers. His claims however, could not go unnoticed and resulted in the Meat Inspection Act of 1905. The inspections that followed backed up Sinclair's claims. A year later the government would go on to pass the Food and Drug Act of 1906, a precursor to the FDA, an important federal agency that protects the lives of U.S. citizens against unsanitary foods and harmful medications.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Penguin, 1985. Print.
