And then, in the midst of this growing outrage, in 1906, the writer Upton Sinclair published his novel about conditions at the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle. It was effectively oil on growing fire and issue exploded.
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The Jungle was a critique of laissez faire capitalism. The fact America got food regulations and nothing more, says everything about what Roosevelt felt about Sinclair’s book. He had to do something, and it was never going to be the tackling of the exploitation of the working class.
Agreed. As you remember, Sinclair himself complained that he had "aimed for America's heart and hit it in the stomach." And Roosevelt, for all his showy progressivism, was firmly on the side of big business.
It might not have been so powerful but Sinclair had gone undercover in the stockyards and the meat-packing plants before writing the book. Both his publisher and Roosevelt sent fact-checkers to verify. And Roosevelt used those reports to force Congress to pass a Meat Inspection Act in June 1906.
In the momentum of that moment, Congress finally passed the Food and Drug Act the following week, marking a paradigm shift in which the federal government agreed that part of its job was to protect American consumers.
So many of our modern agencies are built on that, including the eventual creation of the modern FDA, following passage of the 1938 Food, Drugs and Cosmetic Act. Including the EPA. Including OSHA. We owe so much to crusaders like Wiley who fought for simple, basic safety rules & for labels on foods.
Medical historians will tell you that food was considered one of the top ten causes of death in the 19th century. Food today is NOT perfect, not always safe, but it is so much safer because of the rules we've put in place.
Thank you for an excellent thread and a very interesting book! (I must read it.) Do you remember the Chinese children a few years ago who got their kidneys destroyed due to babymilkpowder which had been mixed up with poisonous material? In a country where politicians become corrupted this happen.
One interesting bit of trivia I recently learned is the EU requires expiration dates on some cosmetics but similar labeling in the US is completely voluntary.
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