Taming the `Jungle'.

Disgusting revelations in a 1906 novel helped bring about federal food and drug regulation

FOCUS: Shocking Revelations in a 1906 Novel Help Trigger New Food and Drug Laws

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To help students understand how rising popular indignation, fueled by a 1906 novel, led to federal regulation of the production and sale of meat, other foods, and drugs, paving the way for today's Food and Drug Administration.

Discussion Questions:

* What pressures do you think the business community in the early 1900s brought on Congress to prevent it from enacting food-safety regulations?

* Do you believe the food industry would eventually have cleaned up its act if it had not been for Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or some other expose?

* Write a brief advertisement for a TV movie about the work of chemist Dr. Harvey Wiley.

CLASSROOM STRATEGIES

Critical Thinking: Tell students that the FDA's history of the agency says the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act was the result of a 20-year crusade for federal regulation of food and drugs. Ask why business would resist regulations designed to protect their customers. Ask students to weigh the benefits of government regulation against the benefits of a "laissez-faire" economy--one where the government keeps hands off.

Photo Study: Examine the photo on page 18. What title would they give the photo? Then ask students how they would react to the photo if the meat shown there were destined for their family's table.

Discussion/Research: What does the article reveal about the power of the press to inform consumers of their rights? If your local TV news has consumer reports, students can monitor them and then use the information they've learned to discuss the role of consumer-affairs reporting.

Next, examine the ad for Hamlin's Wizard Oil. Why, if the FDA has banned claims like those made for Wizard Oil, do ads for other suspect products keep popping up? Have students research teen magazines or supermarket tabloids for ads that make suspect claims for products that promise rapid weight loss. Have them bring the ads to class and use them to promote discussion of health frauds. (Remind students that physicians agree that proper diet and exercise are the only sure route to weight loss.)

Debate: Ask students to debate this statement: "The days of poisoned rats in meat are long gone, there is no need for new government regulation of the food industry."

Talk about gross. America almost lost its appetite in 1906, when Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle described how the slaughterhouses of Chicago produced sausages for the nation's breakfast tables:

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage.... There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption [tuberculosis] germs. There would be meat stored in great piles ... and thousands of rats would race about on it.... [A] men could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.

The Jungle was a bombshell. In showing the abuses of the meatpacking industry, it shone a broader spotlight on the safety of all foods and drugs. The public outcry it produced led to two new laws that became the foundation of federal food and drug regulation, paving the way for today's Food and Drug Administration.

As the 1900s dawned, federal inspection of meats was limited to interstate sale or export. No U.S. laws regulated what manufacturers could put into foods. Meat packers were using borax and glycerine to hide the smell of spoiled beef, and candy makers put shredded bone in candy bars to make coconut go farther. And nothing stopped charlatans from selling worthless potions with claims that they cured every known ill.

Harvey Wiley wanted to change all that. As chief chemist for the Department of Agriculture, he was a zealot for food purity. To test how harmful food additives were, Wiley recruited a "poison squad" of 12 healthy men and fed them diets with substances commonly used in food processing, such as soap, borax, and formaldehyde, in gradually increasing amounts until they showed symptoms of illness. A 1903 vaudeville ditty, "Song of the Poison Squad," told of the men's trials:

0, they may get over it, but they'll never look the same.

That kind of bill of fare would drive most men insane.

Armed with facts about the dangers of additives learned from studying the squad, Wiley crusaded for laws that would require labeling of ingredients and set legal standards for food purity. But powerful businessmen opposed the bills, and they didn't get through Congress. Then came The Jungle.

In 1904, the editor of a socialist journal, Appeal to Reason, gave Sinclair a $500 advance and asked him to expose capitalism's degrading impact on the working class. To research his book, Sinclair labored for seven weeks in Chicago's meatpacking houses and visited workers in their shabby homes.

The Jungle was published in 1906. Its nauseating revelations disgusted the American people. What had been meant as a blast at capitalism became a stinging expose of the meat industry.

"I aimed at the public's heart and hit its stomach," Sinclair said later.

Among The Jungle's readers was President Theodore Roosevelt. He at first suspected that the meatpacking scenes in The Jungle were fantasies. So he secretly sent two labor commissioners to Chicago to do a little spying. Their shocking report confirmed the worst. They wrote that meatpacking workers labored under conditions that are entirely unnecessary and unpardonable, and which are a constant menace not only to their own health, but to the health of those who use the food products prepared by them.

Sinclair later wrote:

The commissioners told me that the only point on which they could get no proof was my statement that men had fallen into the lard vats and gone out to the world as pure leaf lard.

Of course there was no proof, said Sinclair; the families of those men had been paid hush money and sent away.

Roosevelt called the report's findings "revolting," and pressed Congress for a bill requiring federal inspection of all meat for sale, sanitary inspections of packing houses, the use of date stamps on canned meats, and a ban on dangerous chemicals. To turn up the pressure, Roosevelt made public part of his investigators' secret report--and threatened to release the rest if Congress did not act.

It worked. In June 1906, Congress passed both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, meeting not only Roosevelt's goals but many of Harvey Wiley's as well. The laws weren't perfect--or perfectly enforced--and it wasn't until 1938 that the Food and Drug Administration itself was created, with the power to regulate the manufacturing, trade, and advertising of every food product or medicine available in the country. Even today, some foods and drugs that reach the market turn out to be unsafe. But a solid start had been made toward protecting the public--thanks to the book that grossed out a nation.