The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum
Flush with a grubstake of $1,000 (about $30,000 today), Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago’s yards, living in a settlement house operated by a friend of Jane Addams’s, often dressing in the grubby clothing of a worker to blend in. He observed and interviewed, gathering notes and sketches before returning to the East Coast, where with his wife and son he moved into a New Jersey farmhouse and settled down to write the most influential book of his prolific career.
The novel’s main character was a Lithuanian immigrant, carrying that familiar dream of building a good life in America. “I will take care of us,” he tells his wife. “I will work harder.” In the end, the hardworking laborer is nearly destroyed by working conditions at the fictional “Anderson” meat-processing company. He eventually loses his health, family, and friends in the meatpacking industry but in Sinclair’s conclusion finds some hope, at least, by embracing the brotherhood of socialism.
In February 1905 Appeal to Reason began serializing Sinclair’s novel. By pure coincidence, the publication occurred just as other tales of troubled food production were unfolding in Congress, where advocates of pure-food legislation again sought to advance their cause. Both McCumber and Hepburn were still determined supporters of the proposed food and drug law, although Hepburn, as chair of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, was now mostly working with Roosevelt on railroad legislation. And a new senator from Idaho, Weldon Heyburn, had replaced McCumber as chairman of the Committee on Manufactures.
Heyburn, fifty-one, was a Republican but not in the least a Roosevelt progressive. He was an attorney who had made a living representing bankers and timber barons in his home state. During his time in the Senate, he would oppose the president on issues ranging from creation of new national forests to child labor laws. But like McCumber, he represented a frontier state—Idaho had become the forty-third state in 1890—where consumers believed, as did their counterparts in North Dakota, that their grocery stores were being treated as dumping grounds for cheap, adulterated food ginned up in the East. He also represented one of only four states in the country that had so far granted women the vote (the others were Wyoming, Utah, and Washington). Before the 1902 election, which saw Heyburn come into office, Idaho club women had met with every one of the state’s political candidates to say that they would vote in a bloc against any who failed to support pure-food legislation.
Heyburn rose to the challenge. He found himself genuinely appalled by false claims made for mislabeled, largely useless products—especially those sold by the patent medicine industry. “I am in favor of stopping the advertisements of these nostrums in every paper in the country,” he said. When industry representatives chastised him for supporting the proposed legislation, he replied, “The object of this bill is not to protect the dealer. It is to protect the persons who consume the articles.”
The confrontational Heyburn tended to make enemies, among them Washington journalists. His press coverage was so often critical that he had fired back by describing reporters allowed into government buildings as mere guests of the state who “had no right to make disparaging remarks about senators.” He had also antagonized many of his fellow lawmakers, who often, even publicly, described him as arrogant and humorless. Still, many Capitol colleagues succumbed to the force of his determination.
By January 1905 Heyburn had a food and drug bill called up before the full Senate. Two weary veterans of the fight, McCumber and Wiley attempted to temper his expectations, suggesting strategic concessions, such as to the whiskey rectifiers. Heyburn, as was typical, refused to compromise.
Food-processing industries had hardened their opposition to reform. The National Food Manufacturers Association lobbied for Heyburn to sponsor a different Senate bill, one that permitted the use of preservatives, excluded reports from the Bureau of Chemistry, and transferred regulatory authority over food and drink from the Agriculture Department to the business-friendly Department of Commerce and Labor.
Meanwhile, the blended-whiskey interests had been outraged to learn that the straight-whiskey men had secretly given financial support to the pure-food exhibit in St. Louis. Colonel Taylor himself had delivered a $3,000 check to the Kentucky food commissioner, Robert Allen, along with several cases of good bourbon to be displayed as examples of the “right” kind of whiskey. Allen had not shared that information with the other exhibit organizers, which in turn created outrage among his allies as well as the rectifiers. Paul Pierce wrote for What to Eat several angry pieces on the corrupting influence of Taylor and his like, but rectifiers weren’t mollified.
In a story headlined LABELING RUINOUS TO LIQUOR TRADE, published in the New York Journal of Commerce, a major liquor distributor declared that if rectified whiskey was fully labeled as to dyes, additives, and synthetic alcohol, it would do untold damage to businessmen and government income derived from its sale. Taxes, the distributor predicted, would “suffer to an extent never dreamed of heretofore.” The rectifiers’ chief lobbyist, the obstreperous Hough, notified every member of Congress that his members flatly insisted on removing any whiskey-labeling requirements from the legislation. Hough further sent out a circular urging all blenders, rectifiers, and distributors to stand together against such “hostile measures” before Congress. From the baking powder producers to the patent medicine industry to the meatpackers, manufacturers joined to fight any sign of food, drink, or drug regulation.
William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Evening Journal, wrote: “There is a bill in the Senate of the United States called the Pure Food Bill. Its purpose is to prevent food adulteration, the swindling and poisoning of the public. Nobody in the Senate says a word against this bill; nobody dares go on record, of course, in behalf of adulteration. Yet it is certain that the bill will not be passed.” The business of Congress was to take care of businessmen, Hearst wrote, and even some of the country’s most “respectable” businessmen reaped huge profits by producing, misrepresenting, and selling adulterated, diluted, and downright faked food and drink. “Who is that shabby looking, patched-up individual trying to get on the floor of the House?” mused the editors of Life magazine. “O, that’s old Pure Food Bill. When he first came around here he looked pretty good, but now he has been knocked around and changed so much that his friends don’t know him at all. In a minute you’ll see him thrown out bodily again.”
As predicted, the proposed legislation collapsed in both houses within just a couple of months. “What now?” wrote the chairman of the Federation of Women’s Clubs pure-food committee to Wiley. “Does this mean the [final] defeat of the Pure Food Bill or shall we keep on with our petitions and letters?” Wiley could almost imagine himself as the living incarnation of that shabby, patched-up bill described by Life. His advocacy for the legislation had increasingly made him a public target. An editorial in the California Fruit Grower, titled “Chemistry on the Rampage,” had demanded, “Let somebody muzzle the yellow chemist who would destroy our appetite with Borgian tales,” and the trade journal Grocery World, which represented the wholesalers, had chimed in: “The greater part of Dr. Wiley’s time seems to be taken up in the delivering of sensational lectures on food frauds and the writing of articles on such subjects” as poisoned foods. “Dr. Wiley seems to thirst deeply for notoriety. He is happiest when looking complacently into the horror-stricken eyes of women he has just scared half to death.” The journal’s editors had even recommended that Wilson officially reprimand Wiley. The secretary had not done so, but he had once again called his chief chemist into his office to recommend discretion.
Wiley—somewhat to the secretary’s frustration—instead returned to the lecture trail with renewed vigor. “I believe in chemistry and its application to the welfare of humanity,” he told students at Cornell University. “But at the same time I can’t help noticing how it is abused.” He put the whole force of his personality behind the arguments, observed the muckraking progressive journalist Mark Sullivan: ??
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The serialized version of Sinclair’s novel, which he titled The Jungle, had a limited socialist readership, but he was counting on his editor at Macmillan to grow that audience. He mailed the installments to the publishing firm and, chapter by chapter, his editor became more dismayed. The book described diseased cattle arriving by railroad in Chicago to be butchered and sold to American housewives. “It was a nasty job killing these,” Sinclair wrote, “for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foul smelly stuff into your face.” Sinclair also evoked the embarrassing food scandals of the Spanish-American War: “It was stuff such as this that made the ‘embalmed beef’ that killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was old stuff that had been lying around for years in cellars.”
Pickled beef had to be bathed in acid; the men working that line had their fingers eaten away by repeated exposure. Tuberculosis germs thrived in the moist, stinking air of the processing plants and spread from animal to animal, worker to worker. In the rendering rooms, there were open vats of acid set into the floor, to help break down the carcasses. Workers occasionally fell in, and “when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting.” Sometimes, Sinclair wrote, an exhausted worker, staying after hours to earn a little more, would slip into a vat and “be overlooked for days till all but the bones of them had gone out into the world as Anderson’s [his thin disguise for Armour’s] Pure Leaf Lard.”
His editor sent chapters out for review by well-connected friends and advisers. Equally dismayed, they wrote back to insist that the descriptions couldn’t be true. In late summer a new chapter recounted the ways that meat in a state of decay, even when fuzzed over with mold, could be cleaned, “dosed with borax and glycerin and dumped into hoppers and made over again for home consumption.” It related that the packers routinely put out poisoned bread to keep the rat population down, and “then the rats, bread and meat would go into the hoppers together.”
It was too much. His editor declared that the book was “gloom and horror unrelieved.” Macmillan asked Sinclair to remove objectionable passages. Sinclair took the recommendations to some of his fellow writers, among them reformist journalists Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker. Both those journalists had made names for themselves writing for the muckraking magazine McClure’s with articles centered on government and corporation corruption. Both encouraged Sinclair to reject the cuts that Macmillan wanted and to keep his novel rich in the blood-spattered details of the Chicago stockyards. Steffens did warn him, though, that he should expect continued resistance and revulsion. Sometimes, the veteran journalist noted gloomily, “it is useless to tell things that are incredible, even though they may be true.” Baker, whose exposés of the railroad industry had led to Roosevelt’s obsession with reforming it, thought Sinclair should have written a nonfiction book instead of a novel, but he counseled his friend not to back down.
Sinclair determined that “I had to tell the truth and let people make of it what they would.” In September 1905 Macmillan canceled his contract, generously offering that he keep the $500 advance. Disappointed, Sinclair shopped The Jungle around to other publishers but found no takers. He arranged to publish a “sustainers edition,” essentially self-publishing. Issued under the Jungle Publishing Company imprint, it was offered to subscribers of the Appeal, and sold surprisingly well—netting him almost $4,000—but, to his disappointment, failed to gain any real national attention.
Meanwhile, other writers continued to drive interest in the subject of the country’s appalling food supply. The illustrated monthly Everybody’s Magazine published an investigation into the National Packing Company, a trust established by Armour, Swift, and Morris. Its author, investigative journalist Charles Edward Russell, then published a book, in that fall of 1905, called The Greatest Trust in the World, devoted to the further evils of the meatpacking industry. Its angry dissection of price-fixing, inhumane working conditions, and corrupt practices at the Chicago stockyards would help Upton Sinclair sharpen many of the demoralizing descriptions in subsequent editions of The Jungle. Crusading women’s magazines also took aim at the toxic nature of processed food. In the spring of 1905, the Woman’s Home Companion, a monthly magazine founded in 1873 and with a circulation approaching two million, published a three-part series titled “The Truth About Food Adulteration,” written by Henry Irving Dodge. The journalist had worked in collaboration with none other than Willard Bigelow, chief of the Division of Foods at the Bureau of Chemistry. “The series is therefore a thoroughly authoritative account of this most dangerous and growing practice,” read the magazine’s promotional copy.
Bigelow described for Dodge some of the clever ways that American businessmen legally deceived consumers. He cited a popular product, Old Reliable Coffee, which was described on its elaborately scrolled label as “a compound of delicious drinking coffee, guaranteed to please those who like a full-bodied cup of coffee.” There was not, Bigelow said, one grain of coffee inside the can. But the use of the word “compound” allowed the manufacturer to make coffee claims under both state and federal law. Bigelow encouraged Dodge to examine food samples through a microscope, revealing to the journalist the ground pumice stone in baking powder, the pulverized olive pits in spices, demonstrating the difference between a rectilinear crystal of lard and a bush-shaped crystal of beef fat. None of these fakes, Dodge wrote admiringly, escaped the department’s chemistry analyst, whom he further described as a “man of blue blazes and sulfurous smokes.”
Part 2 of the series was titled “How the Baby Pays the Tax: The Food Poisoner Reaches the Height of His Crime When He Attacks the Baby, upon Whose Well-Being the Fate of the Nation Depends.” The story was illustrated by a drawing of a child dining at one end of a well-stocked table and a skeleton watching him from the other. The words “Glucose, Sulphate of Copper, Boracic Acid, Aniline Dyes, Benzoic Acid, Formaldehyde” were embroidered along the edge of the tablecloth. “The man who poisons food for gain builds a palace of bones upon a graveyard” was the opening sentence of Dodge’s next salvo.
The focus was milk, still widely adulterated and either filthy with bacteria or poisoned with formaldehyde. Dodge cited a plethora of anecdotes to support this conclusion, from Brooklyn to Chicago, where authorities had been recently forced to condemn almost five hundred vats of milk in a single week. A doctor in New Jersey had recently blamed an uptick in child deaths on continued used of formaldehyde in milk, and another in Ne
Dodge had learned from a friend in the U.S. Senate that manufacturers were prepared to spend more than $250,000 to defeat any regulations and had already made major contributions to the campaigns of senators considered friendly to the cause. No wonder the proposed food legislation was going nowhere, he wrote: “The Senate does not indulge in bawling opposition to the bill. Oh no, its weapons are much more effective and more deadly. It lets the bill die.” The American government, he concluded, would rather protect wealthy business interests than protect the American people.
Also in 1905, Pierce’s magazine, What to Eat, published a four-part series titled “The Slaughter of Americans.” In his opening editor’s note, Pierce wrote: “In view of the widespread adulteration of foods in America, that is adding so greatly to the death roll and causing more sickness and misery than all the other sources combined, What to Eat has decided to publish a series of carefully compiled articles revealing to Americans the actual condition of the food we eat today.” The series provided a detailed list of the reasons that Pierce and his food-reform allies were so frustrated and angry. In one article Pierce assured his readers that butter now contained enough coal-tar dye to kill a cat. Another article in the series said that more than 400,000 infants were killed by unwholesome food and formaldehyde-tainted milk every year in the United States. A restless urgency crackled through Pierce’s series and through the writings, speeches, and letters, both private and public, of all of Wiley’s growing army of food-reform allies. They were fed up with foot-dragging federal lawmakers.