Sinclair began to write novels but had difficulty getting them published. As he was struggling to make a living as a writer, he began reading about socialism. He came to believe in the idea of a peaceful revolution in which Americans would vote for the government to take over the ownership of big businesses. He joined the Socialist Party in , and a year later he began to write for Appeal to Reason , a socialist magazine.
In , the meat-packer's union in Chicago went on strike, demanding better wages and working conditions. The Big Four companies broke the strike and the union by bringing in strikebreakers, replacements for those on strike.
The new workers kept the assembly lines running while the strikers and their families fell into poverty. The editor of Appeal to Reason suggested that Sinclair write a novel about the strike. Sinclair, at age 26, went to Chicago at the end of to research the strike and the conditions suffered by the meat-packing workers. He interviewed them, their families, lawyers, doctors, and social workers.
He personally observed the appalling conditions inside the meat-packing plants. The Jungle is Sinclair's fictionalized account of Chicago's Packingtown. The title reflects his view of the brutality he saw in the meat-packing business. The story centered on a young man, Jurgis Rudkis, who had recently immigrated to Chicago with a group of relatives and friends from Lithuania.
Full of hope for a better life, Jurgis married and bought a house on credit. Jurgis soon learned how the company sped up the assembly line to squeeze more work out of the men for the same pay. He discovered the company cheated workers by not paying them anything for working part of an hour. Jurgis saw men in the pickling room with skin diseases. Men who used knives on the sped-up assembly lines frequently lost fingers. Men who hauled pound hunks of meat crippled their backs.
Workers with tuberculosis coughed constantly and spit blood on the floor. Right next to where the meat was processed, workers used primitive toilets with no soap and water to clean their hands.
In some areas, no toilets existed, and workers had to urinate in a corner. Lunchrooms were rare, and workers ate where they worked. Almost as an afterthought, Sinclair 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 explained how pork fat and beef scraps were canned and labeled as "potted chicken. Sinclair wrote that meat for canning and sausage was piled on the floor before workers carried it off in carts holding sawdust, human spit and urine, rat dung, rat poison, and even dead rats. His most famous description of a meat-packing horror concerned men who fell into steaming lard vats:.
Jurgis suffered a series of heart-wrenching misfortunes that began when he was injured on the assembly line. No workers' compensation existed, and the employer was not responsible for people injured on the job. Jurgis' life fell apart, and he lost his wife, son, house, and job. Then Jurgis met a socialist hotel owner, who hired him as a porter. Jurgis listened to socialist speakers who appeared at the hotel, attended political rallies, and drew inspiration from socialism.
Sinclair used the speeches to express his own views about workers voting for socialist candidates to take over the government and end the evils of capitalist greed and "wage slavery. In the last scene of the novel, Jurgis attended a celebration of socialist election victories in Packingtown. Jurgis was excited and once again hopeful. A speaker, probably modeled after Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, begged the crowd to "Organize! Chicago will be ours!
The Jungle was first published in as a serial in The Appeal to Reason and then as a book in Sales rocketed. It was an international best-seller, published in 17 languages. Sinclair was dismayed, however, when the public reacted with outrage about the filthy and falsely labeled meat but ignored the plight of the workers. Meat sales dropped sharply. Sinclair thought of himself as a novelist, not as a muckraker who investigated and wrote about economic and social injustices.
But The Jungle took on a life of its own as one of the great muckraking works of the Progressive Era. Sinclair became an "accidental muckraker.
The White House was bombarded with mail, calling for reform of the meat-packing industry. The president then appointed a special commission to investigate Chicago's slaughterhouses. The special commission issued its report in May The report confirmed almost all the horrors that Sinclair had written about. One day, the commissioners witnessed a slaughtered hog that fell part way into a worker toilet.
Workers took the carcass out without cleaning it and put it on a hook with the others on the assembly line. The commissioners criticized existing meat-inspection laws that required only confirming the healthfulness of animals at the time of slaughter.
The commissioners recommended that inspections take place at every stage of the processing of meat. They also called for the secretary of agriculture to make rules requiring the "cleanliness and wholesomeness of animal products.
President Roosevelt called the conditions revealed in the special commission's report "revolting. Roosevelt overcame meat-packer opposition and pushed through the Meat Inspection Act of The law authorized inspectors from the U. 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.
The meat packers, however, won a provision in the law requiring federal government rather than the companies to pay for the inspection. Sinclair did not like the law's regulation approach. True to his socialist convictions, he preferred meat-packing plants to be publicly owned and operated by cities, as was commonly the case in Europe.
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. For over 20 years, Harvey W.
Wiley, chief chemist at the Department of Agriculture, had led a "pure food crusade. The uproar over The Jungle revived Wiley's lobbying efforts in Congress for federal food and drug regulation. Roosevelt signed a law regulating foods and drugs on June 30, , the same day he signed the Meat Inspection Act. The Pure Food and Drug Act regulated food additives and prohibited misleading labeling of food and drugs. The two laws ended up increasing consumer confidence in the food and drugs they purchased, which benefitted these businesses.
The laws also acted as a wedge to expand federal regulation of other industries, one of the strategies to control big business pursued by the progressives. The Jungle made Upton Sinclair rich and famous. He started a socialist colony in a room mansion in New Jersey, but the building burned down after a year. In , his wife ran off with a poet.
He divorced her, but soon he remarried and moved to California. During his long life, he wrote more than 90 novels. King Coal was based on the massacre of striking miners and their families in Colorado. Boston was about the highly publicized case of Sacco and Vancetti, two anarchists tried and executed for bank robbery and murder in the s. None of these novels, however, achieved the success of The Jungle.
Several of Sinclair's books were made into movies. In , Hollywood released a movie version of The Jungle. Recently, his work Oil! Progressives determined that Standard Oil was a monopoly and used the courts to force its dissolution. Urban reformers established settlement houses to provide services for immigrants and other poverty-stricken city dwellers. Both of these pieces of legislation increased the federal government's ability to protect consumers from unsanitary products.
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