Upton Sinclair : The Jungle

Interior of a Chicago meatpacking factory showing hog carcasses being cleaned.

(around 1902)

Upton Sinclair: The Jungle

•"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,"•• Upton Sinclair,

Socialist (anti-capitalist)

& author of

The Jungle (1906)

What do you think this means?

•The effects from the accusations against the meat packing industry in The Jungle led to investigations into the food and patent medicine industry in general.

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle• Laws passed after Congress’

investigation:

• Meat Inspection Act– USDA (US Department of

Agriculture)

• Pure Food and Drug Act– FDA (Food and Drug

Administration)

Criticism of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle• Was Sinclair too biased? Was Sinclair just anti-

capitalist trying to attack the meat industry? Did Sinclair exaggerate about what was really taking place in the meat-packing factories?

• The Jungle’s fictitious characters tell of men falling into tanks in meatpacking plants and being ground up with animal parts, then made into “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard.”

• Historian Stewart H. Holbrook argues this was nonsense. Sinclair’s The Jungle was far from reality:

–

–"The grunts, the groans, the agonized squeals of animals being butchered, the rivers of blood, the steaming masses of intestines, the various stenches . . . were displayed along with the corruption of government inspectors and, of course, the callous greed of the ruthless packers.”

Criticism of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle•Even though his novel and sensational accusations prompted Congress to investigate the meat industry, the investigators themselves expressed doubts about Sinclair's integrity and credibility as a source of information. 

•-President Theodore Roosevelt wrote of Sinclair in a letter to William Allen White in July 1906:

“I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful.  Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods.  For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth.”

Roosevelt to William Allen White, July 31, 1906, Elting E. Morison and John M. Blum, editors, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951-54), vol. 5, p. 340.

Criticism of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle• Sinclair's fellow author/writer and philosophical

intimate, Jack London, wrote this announcement of The Jungle, a promo that was approved by Sinclair himself:

–“Dear Comrades: . . . The book we have been waiting for these many years!  It will open countless ears that have been deaf to Socialism.  It will make thousands of converts to our cause.  It depicts what our country really is, the home of oppression and injustice, a nightmare of misery, an inferno of suffering, a human hell, a jungle of wild beasts. And take notice and remember, comrades, this book is straight proletarian.  It is written by an intellectual proletarian, for the proletarian.  It is to be published by a proletarian publishing house.  It is to be read by the proletariat.  What Uncle Tom's Cabin did for the black slaves The Jungle has a large chance to do for the white slaves of today.”

–Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States, 1900-1925; vol. 2: America Finding Herself (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), p. 473.

Criticism of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

•Congressman E. D. Crumpacker of Indiana noted in testimony before the House Agriculture Committee in June 1906 that not even one of those officials from the federal, state, or local gov’t (employed for over a decade) “ever registered any complaint or (gave) any public information with respect to the manner of the slaughtering or preparation of meat or food products.”

• U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on the So-called "Beveridge Amendment" to the Agriculture Appropriation Bill, 59th Congress, 1st Session, 1906, p. 194.

Criticism of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle•At the time, all of the big Chicago meat packing companies totaled less than 50 % of the meat products made in the United States

•Few if any charges were ever made against the sanitary conditions of the packinghouses of other cities. 

•If the Chicago packers were guilty of anything like the terribly unsanitary conditions suggested by Sinclair, wouldn't they be foolishly exposing themselves to devastating losses of market share?

•U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on the So-called "Beveridge Amendment" to the Agriculture Appropriation Bill, 59th Congress, 1st Session, 1906, p. 194.

•A Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Husbandry 1906 report argues against the worst of Sinclair's allegations:

•"willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,“…  "atrocious exaggeration,“… [and] "not at all characteristic.“

Criticism of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

•When the sensational accusations of The Jungle became worldwide news, foreign purchases of American meat dropped by HALF! American meat packing companies were losing a huge market share.

•The meatpackers looked for new regulations to give their markets a calming sense of security so the public (and consumers across the world) would trust and buy their meat instead of fearing what was in it.

•Congressional hearings for what became the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 were held by Congressman James Wadsworth's Agriculture Committee:

•”Knowing that a new law would allay public fears fanned by The Jungle, bring smaller competitors under regulation, and put a newly-laundered government stamp of approval on their products, the major meat packers strongly endorsed the proposed act and only argued over who should pay for it.”

Criticism of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

• In the end, Americans got a new federal meat inspection law.

• Taxpayers paid $3 million for the law to go into effect as well as new regulations on their smaller competitors.

• Big meat packers benefited because small packers had difficulty complying with the new regulations.

• Upton Sinclair actually opposed the law because he saw it has hugely beneficial for the big meat packers, but not so much for consumers.

• Upton Sinclair, "The Condemned-Meat Industry: A Reply to Mr. J. Ogden Armour," "Everybody's Magazine," XIV, 1906, pp. 612-613.

Later in his life…

•Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California as a Democrat during the Great Depression in the 1940s and later as a Socialist for Congress.

•Many attributed his gubernatorial (governor campaign) defeat to his socialist campaign theme

•He also wrote an expose novel tilted Oil! which was later made into a 2007 film titled There Will Be Blood.