Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" - ever Verified?

[bup]

Sinclair made many and various accusations in “The Jungle.”

Among them, that people’s digits ended up in meat, that people fell into vats and became soap, that spoiled meat was disguised with colors and smells and sold anyway, and that ‘potato powder,’ which he described as a nutritionless by-product of processing potatoes, was put into fake sausage, which tasted like real sausage but had no nutritional value.

How much of this was ever verified, or falsified?

[BrainGlutton]

Most of it was verified.

Upton Sinclair originally intended to expose “the inferno of exploitation [of the typical American factory worker at the turn of the 20th Century],”[4] but the reading public instead fixated on food safety as the novel’s most pressing issue. In fact, Sinclair bitterly admitted his celebrity rose, “not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef”.[4]

Sinclair’s account of workers falling into rendering tanks and being ground, along with animal parts, into “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard”, gripped public attention. The morbidity of the working conditions, as well as the exploitation of children and women alike that Sinclair exposed showed the corruption taking place inside the meat packing factories.

President Theodore Roosevelt considered Sinclair a “crackpot”[5] and wrote to William Allen White, “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.”[6] The President was leery of aligning himself with Sinclair’s politics and conclusions in The Jungle, so he sent Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds, men whose honesty and reliability he trusted, to Chicago to make surprise visits to meat packing facilities. Despite betrayal of the secret to the meat packers, who worked three shifts a day for three weeks to clean the factories prior to the inspection, Neill and Reynolds were still revolted by the conditions at the factories and at the lack of concern by plant managers. Their oral report to Roosevelt tentatively supported Sinclair, failing only to substantiate the claim of workers falling into rendering vats and being left to be sold as lard.[7] Neill testified before Congress that they had reported only “such things as showed the necessity for legislation” and that he did not think it was also necessary to “praise things where they were worthy of praise.”[8] A report by the Bureau of Animal Industry rejected Sinclair’s severest allegations, characterizing them as “intentionally misleading and false,” “willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,” and “utter absurdity.”[9]

Roosevelt, not in favor of the heavy regulation the public outcry would have caused, did not release the findings of the Neill-Reynolds Report for publication. Instead, he helped the issue by dropping hints from the report, alluding to disgusting conditions and inadequate inspection measures. Public pressure led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Bureau of Chemistry that would become the Food and Drug Administration in 1930.

Sinclair rejected the legislation, as he viewed it as an unjustified boon to large meat packers partially because the U.S., rather than the packers, was to bear the costs of inspection at $30,000,000 a year.[10][11] He famously noted the limited effect of his book by stating, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

[joebuck20]

@bup

Sinclair made many and various accusations in “The Jungle.”

Among them, that people’s digits ended up in meat, that people fell into vats and became soap, that spoiled meat was disguised with colors and smells and sold anyway, and that ‘potato powder,’ which he described as a nutritionless by-product of processing potatoes, was put into fake sausage, which tasted like real sausage but had no nutritional value.

How much of this was ever verified, or falsified?

Don’t forget people relieving themselves in the sausage vats.

[bup]

@joebuck20

Don’t forget people relieving themselves in the sausage vats.

I don’t remember that being in the book.

[joebuck20]

@bup

I don’t remember that being in the book.

I don’t think he says it outright, but rather uses some euphemism like “washing of their hands,” which was apparently a nice way back then of saying “taking a piss.”

At least according to a history prof I had in college.

[bup]

@joebuck20

I don’t think he says it outright, but rather uses some euphemism like “washing of their hands,” which was apparently a nice way back then of saying “taking a piss.”

At least according to a history prof I had in college.

I did not know that. I guess it’s this bit:

@The Jungle

…there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage.

I guess that makes sense, otherwise ‘washing their hands in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage’ seems a lot less vile than poisoned rats going in.

[HubZilla]

What about the housing scam? Jurgis buys a house, and gets the contract checked by 2 different lawyers. The agent neglects to mention the $7 interest, but both lawyers, too? Even when they were repeatedly asked if $12 was all they had to pay.

[bup]

Good question. I wonder if there were neighborhoods where builders kept ‘selling’ the same houses over and over, evicting each person thinking they were buying when they missed the payments.

[Kent_Clark]

I just want to point out that The Jungle was a novel – i.e., a work of fiction. While Sinclair had based it on what he had seen while working in a meatpacking plant, it’s not meant to be a documentary.

[Two_Many_Cats]

Only coming into say that in all the years I’ve been reading slang history, I’ve never heard of “washing the hands” meaning “taking a piss”.

[BrainGlutton]

@kunilou

I just want to point out that The Jungle was a novel – i.e., a work of fiction. While Sinclair had based it on what he had seen while working in a meatpacking plant, it’s not meant to be a documentary.

Not a documentary strictly speaking, but it certainly is meant to be an Author Tract.