Progrssive_Upton

March 10, 2006
 * =The Jungle: Upton Sinclair's Roar Is Even Louder to Animal Advocates Today= ||
 * from http://www.hsus.org/farm/news/ournews/the_jungle_roar.html ||

By Bernard Unti On February 18, 1906, amidst a flurry of publicity, Doubleday and Page released Upton Sinclair's //The Jungle//, a scathing indictment of one of America's most powerful industries—meatpacking—replete with descriptions of the dehumanizing conditions of labor, the unsanitary environment, and the methodical heartlessness of industrial slaughter. One hundred years later, //The Jungle// is still read in countless high school and university classes in the United States because of its relationship to several quintessential reforms of the Progressive era. Sinclair had hoped his book would embolden packinghouse laborers in their efforts to unionize and gain improved conditions, while attracting the sympathy of middle class Americans. Instead, //The Jungle// prompted the passage of two legislative landmarks marking the emergence of the modern regulatory state—the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act—and the development of a bureaucratic apparatus meant to ensure the safety of the nation's food supply. The swift ratification of the two acts, both signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt on June 30, 1906, suggested that it was the quality of the meat that mattered, not the treatment of workers—or animals. Nowadays, there is greater sensitivity and disquiet concerning the experience of animals at slaughter, and in the modern context, Sinclair's depiction of the crude, furious process of disassembly that turned animals into food -- much of it related in the context of a public tour of the turn-of-the century slaughterhouse -- remains a compelling read. It doesn't matter that Sinclair wasn't seeking to win support for more humane slaughtering practices. As a frame of reference for current debates over meat production, and its impact upon humans and animals, the influence of //The Jungle// endures. If anything, Sinclair's narrative resonates stronger than ever as a censure of the slaughtering industry's perpetual desire for higher production and higher profits at the expense of workers' interests and animal welfare.

. . . President Theodore Roosevelt, who received Sinclair at the White House not long after //The Jungle// appeared, had no patience with the political convictions of the 26-year old romantic socialist. For some time, however, Roosevelt—now in the middle of his second term—had been contemplating approaches to regulation of the meat industry and other large concerns. With 100 letters a day coming in about //The Jungle//, the president perceived a problem that could not be ignored and an opportunity to do something about it. In the contentious debates that ensued, investigators confirmed Sinclair's assertions that the methods of handling and preparing meat products were unsanitary and dangerous, that some packing establishments were perpetually dirty and disease-ridden, that a traffic existed in questionable meats, that tuberculosis existed at an alarming rate amongst packinghouse employees, that inspection was inadequate, and that conditions in the plants and stockyards constituted a menace to public health. Despite Sinclair's continued attempts to make a case for improving the lot of immigrant workers, however, the president and the U. S. Congress focused their energies on legislation that would quell middle class concerns about the integrity of the American food supply.
 * "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach."**

The main feature of the Meat Inspection Act was a permanent base of funds to prohibit from interstate and foreign commerce "meat and meat food products which [were] unsound, unwholesome, or otherwise unfit for human food." U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors were to oversee all meat processed in the nation's slaughtering, packing, and canning plants, with antemortem and postmortem examination of cattle, sheep, swine, and goats. Destruction of carcasses unfit for food purposes had to be done in the presence of inspectors, who had to have full access to all zones at "all times, by day or night." The Department of Agriculture was also responsible for the inspection of processed products, and charged with regulating hygienic conditions in plants. The Food and Drug Act had a broader purpose of regulating a range of products destined for human consumption. But it specifically advanced the goal of safeguarding the meat supply by defining as adulterated all food substances comprised "in whole or in part of a filthy, decomposed, or putrid animal or vegetable substance, or any portion of an animal unfit for food, whether manufactured or not."

When //The Jungle// appeared, humane advocates had been advancing the case for reform in transport, handling, and slaughter of animals for several generations. In general, they made greater headway in dealing with livestock transportation, securing the Twenty-Eight Hour Law (1873)— whose current obsolescence was recently challenged in a rulemaking petition —than they did with the cruelties of slaughter. Nevertheless, slaughter remained an important concern of animal protection leaders in the early 20th century, who focused their energies on direct negotiations with executives and engineers associated with the great meat factories of Chicago and other cities, seeking the introduction of humane stunners and related equipment. It was the same strategy that guided their work on cattle transportation, which involved direct negotiations with railroad interests.
 * Slaughterhouse Reform in the Progressive Era**

At that time, animal protection was a middle-class movement with no special concern for the immigrant or the worker. Only rarely did animal protectionists condemn the poor wages, long hours, and hazards that plagued the laborers who worked in meatpacking. Perhaps because of this blind spot, few animal advocates sought to capitalize on the publicity that attended //The Jungle//. The argument that suffering rendered the flesh of animals unfit for consumption, however, had long been an important part of the case for improved treatment. Throughout the animal protection movement's history, advocates have argued that humane handling, transportation, and slaughter would ensure a better meat product in the end. In the years following the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, humane advocates persevered in their attacks on the diseased character of meat coming from a system whose cruelties they hoped to reform. In 1910, medical doctor Albert Leffingwell published a post-Jungle indictment, American Meat, in which he argued that there was a high rate of disease in cattle and that, government inspection notwithstanding, vast quantities of diseased meat continued to pass into the food supply. Leffingwell, who toured a number of Chicago slaughtering facilities as he prepared his book, also observed that, despite obvious attempts to address some of the sanitary concerns Sinclair's indictment had exposed, "One great evil of the former system, which in many respects does not appear to have been reformed in any notable degree, is the hideous cruelty to living animals, occasioned by the haste with which every operation pertaining to slaughter is carried on."