How Sinclair Helped to Clean Up the Stockyards in Chicago

¶ … Meatpacking Industry: Progressive Reforms and the Shaping of National Policy

In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in the United States. This was the culmination of a furor that had reached tipping point with the success of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, a story based in the meat packing industry published in 1905. The novel explored the lives of a group of immigrant workers as they struggled to survive in the "jungle" of early 20th century.

The story was, however, merely the straw that broke the camel's back. The Pure Foods Movement had actually begun thirty years earlier in the post-Civil War years when Industrialization was already underway and the landscape of America was rapidly changing. It was the Pure Foods Movement that was really the driving force behind the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906.[footnoteRef:1] [1: Wallace Janssen, "The Story of the Laws behind the Labels," The Food and Drug Administration (Hauppauge: Nova Science, 2003), 24.]

The Pure Foods Movement was joined by the Ladies Health Association in the 1880s and it took steps towards energizing the movement. City health associations came together as a result of their activity and the stockyards became the focus of much attention. The Women's Christian Temperance Union also came about at this time as a result of the poor working conditions, impoverished communities, and the alcohol abuse that was rampant. The Temperance societies would play a strong role in the passing of the 18th Amendment -- Prohibition in America in 1920. Each of these Progressive societies were pivotal in the government's decision to get involved in the food industry and to make it an issue of national policy. And as they grew and steamrolled into one another, the U.S. government took it upon itself to make the food industry its business -- and the Food and Drug Administration was born in 1927, with a number of areas given for its overview -- from insecticides to cosmetics to anything that was consumed or used by the body.

The FDA along with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was largely influenced by the work of the early "muckrakers," as President Theodore Roosevelt called them -- the journalists who with a reporter's eye dug up the "dirt" on national issues that struck straight to the heart and evoked pity and fear in the breasts of Americans. Sinclair, according to Roosevelt, was one of these.[footnoteRef:2] [2: Jon Blackwell, "1906: Rumble over 'The Jungle'," Capital Century. Web. 12 Nov 2015.]

Sinclair's novel did elicit howls from the reading public and Roosevelt responded by sending federal officials to look into the Chicago slaughterhouses. The Neill-Reynolds Report, combined with The Jungle, helped drive the Act quickly through Congress.