The Jungle - Public and Federal Response

Public and Federal Response

Upton Sinclair first intended to expose "the inferno of exploitation ," 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". This has been attributed in part to the novel's protagonists, most of whom, including Jurgis, have unpleasant qualities themselves, and the last part of the book about the socialist rally Jurgis attended was considered by some to be the worst part of the book, so much so that Sinclair later disavowed it. His description of the meatpacking contamination, however, was something everyone could relate to.

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" 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." However, he read The Jungle and while he was opposed to socialism, agreed with some of Sinclair's conclusions. He stated "radical action must be taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist." 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. 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." 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."

Winston Churchill praised the book in a review, although he did not share Sinclair's socialist political views.

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. Roosevelt submitted the Neill-Reynolds report to Congress on June 4, 1906. 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. taxpayer, rather than the packing companies, were to bear the costs of inspection at $30,000,000 a year. He famously complained about the public's misunderstanding of the point of his book in Cosmopolitan Magazine in October 1906 by stating, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."