The Jungle by Upton Sinclair – One of the Great Muckraking Works of the Progressive Era

Sinclair had intended to expose the horrible conditions faced by immigrants as they tried to survive in Chicago’s Meat-Packing District in his 1904 novel, The Jungle. While he did an admirable job of showing the unfair labor, housing, and economic conditions in Packingtown he did an even better job describing the horrible conditions which America’s meat was produced. His descriptions of the filthy and unsavory additions to sausage and other meat products woke up politicians to the problem, including President Theodore Roosevelt.

The Jungle is directly credited with helping to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act as well as The Meat Inspection Act in 1906. Examples of how truly horrific meatpacking plants in Chicago really were. The main protagonist of the novel, Jurgis, saw men in the picking room with skin diseases. Men who used knives on the sped-up assembly lines frequently lost fingers. Men who hauled approximately 100-pound hunks of meat crippled their backs. To where workers with tuberculosis coughing constantly and spit blood on the floor. And right next to where the meat was being processed, workers often used primitive toilets without any access to soap and water to clean their hands. In some areas, no toilets existed, and workers would occasionally urinate in a corner. Lunchrooms were pretty scarce at the time and often rare, so much so that workers ate where the worked.

Following along through the novel, Jurgis suffered a series of heart-wrenching misfortunes that began when he injured his foot on the assembly line. And the aftermath of it all resulted to ‘no workers compensation’ being around the time, as well as the employer not claiming responsibility for Jurgis being injured on the job. Due to this Jurgis’s life fell apart, eventually losing his family, home, and job. Sinclair also included a chapter on how diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat products were processed, doctored by chemicals, and mislabeled for sale to the public. He wrote that workers would process dead, injured, and diseased animals after regular hours when no meat inspectors were around. He also details on how pork fat and beef scraps were canned and labeled as “potted chicken”. Due to the revolting nature of meat processing companies; the passage of The Meat Inspection Act opened the way for Congress to approve a long-blocked law to regulate the sale of most other foods and drugs.

The uproar over The Jungle revived Harvey W. Wiley’s lobbying efforts in Congress for federal food and drug regulation. And eventually tested chemicals added to preserve foods, finding that many food products were dangerous to human health. Roosevelt overcame meat-packer opposition and pushed through The Meat Inspection Act of 1906. The law authorized inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to stop any bad or mislabeled meat from entering interstate and foreign commerce. This law greatly expanded federal government regulation of private enterprise. Sinclair did not like the laws regulating approach. True to his socialist convictions, he preferred meatpacking plants to be publicly owned and operated by cities, as was commonly the case in Europe. Sinclair was dismayed, however, when the public reacted with outrage about the filthy and falsely labeled meat, rather than the plight of the workers. Thus giving us the term “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident, I hit it in the stomach” describing the reaction on how he saw his novel affecting society. Though some of the population thought of Sinclair as a ‘muckraker’, he thought of himself novelist. But The Jungle took on a life of its own as one of the great muckraking works of the Progressive Era.