In Meat We Trust (12 page)

Up to that moment, Roosevelt had not been particularly interested in the pure food and drug crusade, preferring to devote his first term in office to attacking trusts, monopolies, and arrogant tycoons. By the start of his second stint as president, however, the demand for food safety legislation had reached a ferocity that he could not ignore, thanks in part to a string of journalistic exposés that regaled readers with tales of poisoned medicine, adulterated coffee, tainted canned foods, and the like, all of it, according to investigative reporters, the work of greedy, unscrupulous corporations. The president invited food reformers to meet with him and used his State of the Union message to ask Congress to protect American stomachs from conscience-deprived manufacturers. In true Rooseveltian fashion, he also traveled the highway of political expedience, asking for a law that would safeguard both consumers and “legitimate” manufacturers. Then, in early 1905,
The Lancet
, a respected British medical journal, ran a series of articles written by Adolph Smith, an Englishman with medical expertise, who detailed unsanitary conditions in Chicago packinghouses; the articles’ contents were widely reported in the American press. Here, Roosevelt realized, was a way to couple the pure food campaign with his assault on the packers. And that explains his temporary alliance with Upton Sinclair, an impetuous, publicity-starved writer who had recently completed a novel about life in Packingtown, the neighborhood surrounding the Chicago Union Stock Yards.

Sinclair, who was then in his late twenties, had thus far stomped through life burdened by a chip on his shoulder: he believed that the world owed him not just a living but fame and fortune, too. To his disgust, the rest of humanity had failed to cooperate. He routinely asked others for financial support so that he could write, always reminding those he hit up that he had a wife and child to support. At one point, he badgered novelist Owen Wister, who had written the bestseller
The Virginian
, for money. Wister suggested that Sinclair get a job; Sinclair dismissed the idea. Casting about for a way to boost his sagging morale and fatten his bank account, the author latched on to socialism as the tonic that would rejuvenate both.

In our time, socialism has come to be viewed as more of a punch line than a substantive political stance, but a century ago, many thoughtful Americans embraced all manner of communal and “cooperative” ideologies, politics, and projects as a way to mitigate the stress of urban industrialism. Women from all backgrounds banded together to operate communal child care programs and kitchens. Factory workers organized benevolent associations to support each other in times of injury and poor health, and at death. So it’s not surprising that an American version of socialism gained favor among voters interested in mitigating corporate power, in eliminating disparities between rich and poor, and in promoting social justice. The American Socialist Party enjoyed its greatest popularity in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century. Its presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, won 3 percent of the popular vote in 1904 and 1908 and 6 percent in 1912. Eighteen cities had socialist mayors, and socialists sat in the New York and Rhode Island legislatures and in Congress, too. Americans still enjoy the benefits of one popular socialist project: in many cities, voters in the early twentieth century transferred ownership of utilities—water and sewer systems, and gas and electrical services—from private companies to municipal authority.

Among the converts to socialist politics was Upton Sinclair, whose upbringing had introduced him to economic extremes. He had grown up in poverty thanks to his father’s fondness for drink (which eventually killed the elder man) but was exposed to great wealth thanks to his father’s relatives. Sinclair claimed he wanted nothing that smacked of the easy life that led, in his view, to corruption both moral and political. The wheeling and dealing of the nation’s rich, he wrote, constituted “invisible governments” that undermined democratic institutions. But Sinclair’s personal desire for fame and fortune undercut his enthusiasm for socialist reform. “One feels,”
commented a man who was asked by a potential publisher to read the manuscript that became
The Jungle
, “that what is at the bottom of his [political] fierceness is not nearly so much desire to help the poor as hatred of the rich.” Still, the writer’s newfound political passion fired his literary ambitions. “I am going to do my share,”
he wrote. “I am going to write a Socialist novel . . . I am going to write it with the feeling that a million readers are following it and demanding that it be well done”—a million readers who would, presumably, buy his book and thus relieve him of both his poverty and his anonymity. He latched on to the packing industry as a framework for the book and in 1904 traveled to Chicago during a meatpacking strike to gather material for the new book. There he met packinghouse workers as well as social reformer Jane Addams, who introduced him to Adolph Smith, then in Chicago gathering material for his
Lancet
series.

Sinclair began writing his manuscript in late December 1904, and in late February 1905, the editor of a socialist magazine,
Appeal to Reason
, started publishing the work as a serial. The magazine had a paid circulation of nearly three hundred thousand readers and offered Sinclair $500 for the rights. But even socialists, it transpired, weren’t sufficiently interested in the great American diatribe; the magazine’s editor declined to publish the entire manuscript because readers had lost interest. Sinclair began hunting for a mainstream publisher. One editor expressed interest but complained that the novel’s emphasis on “blood and guts”
detracted from the “vital human interest” necessary to carry the story. When the novelist refused to make changes, the editor canceled the contract. Five more publishers turned him down. The tide turned when Sinclair visited the offices of Doubleday, Page & Company, which published books and a popular national magazine,
World’s Work
. An editor and publicist there decided that the combination of Sinclair’s bravado and the novel’s gory details marked a sure winner, and in February 1906, the book arrived in stores. The publicist, enthusiastic despite being “seriously embarrassed
at times” by the novelist’s impetuous behavior, hauled Sinclair from one interview to the next, determined to make a bestseller of the polemic.

Among those who perused the book’s pages was Theodore Roosevelt, who received at least four copies, including one from Sinclair himself and one from a senator. After reading it, the president invited the novelist to a meeting at the White House. Roosevelt’s enthusiasm stemmed more from his determination to battle the packers than from his approval of the novel. As a rule, he despised the sort of half-baked rabble-rousing that filled its pages. (“I have such awful times
with reformers of the hysterical and sensational stamp,” he once wrote.) “Personally,”
he would later tell Sinclair, “I think that one of the chief early effects” of socialism “would be the elimination by starvation . . . of the community on whose behalf [it] would be invoked.” Despite the novel’s flaws and Sinclair’s politics, however, Roosevelt recognized that
The Jungle
was tailor-made for generating publicity to power his anti-packer battering ram.

By the spring of 1906, he needed the help. His administration’s most recent attempt to convict the packers in court had ended, like every previous effort, in failure. Government attorneys had based this most recent case on documents compiled in 1904 during the Garfield investigation. The packers argued that the material was inadmissible: they had cooperated with Garfield because he assured them that the information they provided could not and would not be used by the Justice Department. The presiding judge agreed with the packers and granted them immunity, a move that effectively ended the trial. The “charitable view
. . . of the Judge’s action,” groused Roosevelt, “is that he has lost some of the powers of his mind.” Worse, although both the House and Senate were then debating food safety legislation, as usual, bills in both houses were mired in debates about the limits of constitutional authority. Once again, a food bill seemed destined to drown in a sea of politics, and TR’s campaign against the packers doomed to failure.

And so an egomaniac socialist became Roosevelt’s weapon of desperation, and the president got busy with plans to use it. In response to both the
Lancet
articles and
The Jungle
, agriculture secretary Wilson had decided to send his own team to Chicago to investigate the packinghouses, and Roosevelt insisted that Sinclair be brought in to aid the cause. A “merely perfunctory investigation”
would not suffice, the president told Wilson, and instructed the secretary to recruit a “first-class man” to meet with Sinclair and obtain from him a list of witnesses who could verify what Roosevelt still regarded as wild exaggeration. “You must keep absolutely secret your choice of a man,” he added.

Keeping secrets, however, was not on Sinclair’s agenda. Having gained the attention of the White House, he intended to use that clout to boost the book’s sales, even if doing so interfered with the president’s plans. He bombarded Roosevelt with letters and telegrams demanding that the chief executive mount a more public and vigorous defense of
The Jungle
. “My dear Mr. Sinclair,”
Roosevelt wrote on April 11, “you seemed to be a good deal more agitated than the facts warrant.” “Keep quiet,” he demanded, in a futile effort to contain his loose cannon. “I cannot afford to be hurried any more than I can afford to be stopped from making the investigation,” which, he added, might take “months.” It was all wasted on the novelist-genius. In the time it took Roosevelt to write that letter, Sinclair had dashed off another missive plus a telegram. The barrage prompted the president to add a postscript to his letter: “Your second telegram has just come; really, Mr. Sinclair, you must keep your head,” the president wrote.

Roosevelt’s ire increased when Wilson’s men handed over their report in early April. The document, detailed, thorough, and systematic, concluded that meat inspection could and should be improved, but it also refuted most of the charges made in both
The Lancet
and
The Jungle
. Its tone and content were not much different from those of the tedious affair submitted by Garfield a year earlier and therefore no competition with Sinclair’s sensational novel when it came to convincing the public that American meat was safe. Caught between a potential media bonanza and the turgid prose of government bureaucrats and fearful that Congress would once again push food safety back into a closet, Roosevelt sent yet another team of investigators to Chicago, this time men of his choosing. A few weeks later, they handed over a study that contained precisely what the president wanted and needed: confirmation of Packingtown’s evils, couched in graphic detail but in language that avoided the reckless hysteria of
The Jungle
. But having gotten what he wished for, Roosevelt realized that he needed to handle it with care. American livestock producers and packers had grown accustomed to large foreign demand, but in recent years, other governments had used meat imports as tools for political bargaining with the United States. Roosevelt feared that if he released the document’s contents, an already contentious diplomatic situation would be made worse and that panicky foreign buyers would cancel orders for meat. But he also wanted Congress to pass food safety legislation, and he preferred that it do so without prodding from him. He decided to withhold the report and use it as a big stick in case the House and Senate leaned toward dismissing food safety yet again.

But Sinclair managed to lay his hands on a copy of the document, and he regarded its contents as proof that his novel was no fiction. He demanded that Roosevelt publicize the findings. The president refused. Doing so, he explained, might satisfy “the apostles of sensationalism,”
but it would damage the livelihoods of “stock-growers, ranchers, hired men, cowboys, [and] farmers,” people who were “guilty of no misconduct whatever.” Upton Sinclair, fair-weather socialist to the end, was not interested in cowboys or hired hands. He leaked the contents to the
New York Times
, and newspapers around the country picked up the story.

Roosevelt was furious, although as events unfolded, he would have been forced to release the report anyway. A member of the Senate had introduced legislation that would expand federal meat inspection, but the bill had then been trapped in the House agriculture committee, whose chair came from an old livestock-producing family and who had no intention of sending it to the House floor. Nor did the committee member from Illinois, William Lorimer, a seasoned political boss who represented the district that contained the stockyards. A meat inspection bill, he announced, would never get out of committee, “not if Little Willie
can help it.”

But Little Willie had met a bill—and a president and a novelist—he could not stop. Thanks to publicity generated by the new report and Sinclair’s hunger for publicity, Congress could no longer avoid the issue of food safety. In late June 1906, Roosevelt signed both a pure food bill and a meat inspection act. In theory the nation’s stomachs were now protected from doctored maple syrup and tainted meat. Upton Sinclair got what he wanted, too: fame and fortune, as his novel became a bestseller (proving, perhaps, the publicity power of congressional hearings and bureaucratic reports). Ironically, beef consumption rose. Sinclair’s book had prejudiced the public against processed meats—canned goods, sausage, bologna, and the like—so consumers satisfied their carnivorous urges with fresh beef. In 1908, Americans consumed eight more pounds per capita than in 1906.

In the end, neither Roosevelt nor Sinclair inflicted much damage on the packers. In 1912, Armour, Swift, and Morris dissolved their jointly owned holding company, but only because it had proved to be more trouble than it was worth. They divvied up their holdings, which had grown during National Packing’s short life, and dumped the profits into expanding their respective companies, buying out smaller packing operations and building new plants. Swift and Armour also set up shop in South America, building what were at the time some of the largest meat-processing facilities in the world. Their motivation for doing so was connected directly to U.S. agriculture: American cattle ranchers and farmers could not keep pace with the demands of both U.S. consumers and the global market. The packers hoped to ease the burden on American meat supplies by using South American cattle to fill export orders. Some people even recognized that whatever crimes the packers may or may not have committed, their focus on cost cutting, efficiency, and diversification made it possible to eat well at a low price. As an essayist wrote in a magazine article about the Swift empire, “We make great outcry
against the concentrated bigness of the packers, yet the probability is that we would make yet greater outcry if the modern system of food supply were suddenly cut off and we were put back on the basis of local butcher-shops.” He was right. In the United States, the mechanisms of food supply were so efficient that they had become taken for granted—and when it came to food, Americans took nothing for granted so much as low price. In the end, it was the high price of meat that fashioned the snare that tripped the packers.