Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair was a socialist and American writer of nearly one hundred books, as well as essays, magazine articles, and other works, but he remains most well-known for his novel The Jungle, published in 1906. Prior to publishing the novel in book form, Sinclair had the chapters published in serial form in a socialist newspaper called Appeal to Reason in 1905. The series and novel were intended to promote socialism rather than reform the meatpacking industry. Instead its readers were primarily concerned with the unhealthy practices and unsanitary conditions under which the meat they consumed was processed.
In 1904 Sinclair spent seven weeks employed in a Chicago meatpacking plant, taking note of the conditions of both the plant and the workers there. He was sent to the plant under the sponsorship of Appeal to Reason, which wanted a series which focused on the mistreatment of workers as an argument to advance socialism. Sinclair’s experience in the plant was the inspiration to write the articles which became a novel, using a fictional immigrant family which encountered sexual harassment of female members, work related illnesses, and injuries at the plant. The completed work as considered too shocking by at least five publishers.
When the book was published by Doubleday, (as well as a limited edition published by the Socialist Party) it became an immediate bestseller, but not because the public was shocked at the exposure of the exploitation of the working man as its writer intended. Instead the public was appalled that diseased beef and pork was being sold for their consumption. The depictions of humans being rendered into lard after accidents, and human digits and even limbs being ground into sausage caused a public outcry, but not for safer working conditions. The outcry was heard in Washington, where President Roosevelt expressed doubts over Sinclair’s veracity.
Nonetheless, Roosevelt sent federal officials to investigate the meatpackers, and their report back to the President confirmed much of what was in the novel. Rather than release their report to the public Roosevelt sent it directly to Congress, which was already hearing the clamor for government action. The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act were passed by Congress that summer, less than six months after the appearance of the novel, and over the protests of the Bureau of Animal Husbandry (part of the Department of Agriculture), which claimed that the conditions described in The Jungle had never existed.
Sinclair protested over the new meat inspection laws as well, claiming that it was another burden on the taxpayer rather than on the meatpackers, who received the benefit of free inspection of their products. Though he wrote many other works in the muckraking genre, none of them created the fervor for change more than The Jungle, about which he complained for the rest of his life. His view was that the public had missed entirely the point of the book – exploitation of the workers – in its concern for its own well-being. “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach”, he later said in an interview. The Jungle has never been out of print.