The Jungle, Muckrakers, and Teddy Roosevelt

The Progressive movement flourished during the first two decades of the twentieth century. A diverse group of thinkers, journalists, legislators, and middle-class citizens (the Progressives) grappled with the dramatic social and economic transformations produced by the Industrial Revolution. They opposed Gilded Age abuses and promoted salutary reforms. In a rapidly changing world, they took the side of the exploited and the weak and sought to make political institutions more responsive to popular will.

The most well-known group among Progressives were the journalists who through their graphic and sometimes sensational reporting opened Americans’ eyes to dangerous working conditions in factories. Upton Sinclair was one such journalist.  Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, was published in early 1906 and created an international sensation with his expose of the unsafe and unsanitary inner workings of the meat packing industry.

Ironically, the socialist Sinclair had set out to write a “consciousness raising” novel about the miserable lives of factory workers—the “wage slaves of the Beef Trust”—hoping to do for wage slavery what Harriet Beecher Stowe had done for chattel slavery. But readers largely ignored the story of his workers and seized on the graphic descriptions of the disgusting things that went into their meat. Sinclair was disappointed at the public’s reaction. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he later said, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Although President Theodore Roosevelt was a proud Progressive, he had mixed feelings about journalists, as he made clear in a speech known as “The Man with the Muck-Rake.” On the one hand he praised the virtues and benefits of hard-hitting investigative journalism, when it is necessary to expose scandal, corruption, or other evil; but on the other, he found such journalism problematic when it besmirched the good character of  public figures and undermined faith in public institutions.

After reading Lewis’s novel, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an investigation. The result, he said, was “hideous” and he threatened to publish the entire “sickening report” if Congress did not act. Meat sales plummeted in the United States and Europe. Demand for reform grew. Alarmed, the meatpackers themselves supported a reform law.

A second measure the Pure Food and Drug Act had been championed by Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, the chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture. Over the years, to bring conditions to the public attention, Wiley had organized a volunteer group of young men called the Poison Squad who tested the effects of chemicals and adulterated foods on themselves.

The sensation caused by the novel, echoed by newspaper reports by Sinclair and others and backed up with President Roosevelt’s threats to release his report, overwhelmed opponents of the bills in the House. On June 30, 1906, two bills were passed: the Meat Inspection Act which set rules for sanitary meatpacking and government inspection of meat products, and the Pure Food and Drugs Act, which banned foreign and interstate traffic in adulterated or mislabeled food and drug products. Wiley, who had written the latter act, was appointed to oversee the administration of both laws through the Bureau of Chemistry, later renamed the Food and Drug Administration in 1930. The federal government was now permanently in the business of protecting American consumers from unsafe food and drugs.