The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum
In late February Wiley gave a pro-legislation speech to a national convention of the canning industry, held in Philadelphia. The president of the Midwest canners’ group, A. C. Frasier of Wisconsin, had invited him. Frasier, who specialized in peas processed without preservatives, found Wiley’s arguments compelling. But when the chief chemist arrived at the Philadelphia train station, he found his host pacing the platform in a state of alarm. He feared for Wiley’s safety, Frasier said, should he attend the meeting. “What is the matter?” Wiley asked. “Well, they say you are trying to ruin their business,” Frasier replied. “I can not help what they say,” Wiley replied. “I am trying to save their business.” He was not going to be a government employee who ran in fear from a roomful of American businessmen. That would send a terrible message to the canners. But he agreed that it made sense to have a backdoor exit ready, just in case.
The hall was packed with canners, food jobbers, and brokers, none of them smiling. An Iowa canner, William Ballinger, stood up to explain that he was opposed to allowing Wiley to become “dictator” of his industry. “I want to declare the job too big a one for Professor Wiley and his assistants,” Ballinger said. “Furthermore it has been my observation, and I want Professor Wiley to know I do not mean anything personal, that a man who lives in an atmosphere of microbes and bacilli not only becomes a crank but absolutely monomaniacal on the subject upon which he is interested.”
Wiley didn’t deny that he could appear to be a crank. But he defended his record and that of the Chemistry Bureau in helping, rather than trying to control, the canning industry. “The canners of this country have a serious responsibility placed on them,” he said. “Let me pay you the compliment of having progressed steadily in preserving the food you can, but there should never be a relaxation of efforts to move onward as there are some things that can be bettered.”
He restated his belief that the canners’ mushrooming use of dyes and preservatives, often to disguise poor-quality food, was driving consumers away from American products. “Honesty is what the American public demands and canned goods will have an ever-growing market as long as people are confident that the goods are free from anything injurious.”
He could stand for both consumer protection and the American businessman, Wiley insisted, and he hoped those seated in the room could respect that. “You are honest businessmen,” he continued. “Is there one man in this room that wants to take one dollar from an American citizen which, if that American citizen knew what he was selling him, he would not give?” To the surprise of both Frasier and himself, Wiley received a standing ovation. Some of the leading canners even promised to back the proposed pure-food legislation. Not all of them would do so, of course. Some of the canners had already allied themselves with the hostile National Food Manufacturers Association. But even among that contingent, there were attendees who agreed with Wiley that public perception of a chemically tainted and adulterated food supply was hurting their business.
Wiley told the story of his meeting with the canners at a congressional hearing about that canners’ conference, stressing that he wanted to allay legislators’ concerns about political retribution if they passed a pure-food law. There were plenty of processors who would welcome uniform safety standards, he told them. He offered the examples of Pittsburgh’s H.J. Heinz and the Chicago-based Reid, Murdoch and Co. The latter had written to him in mid-February, “From the newspapers we notice that the attitude of the so-called National Food Manufacturer’s Association is, in some instances, taken to represent the views of manufacturers generally. We desire to state that we have no connection whatsoever and we believe that none of the large manufacturing grocers of this country are identified with it. We are unreservedly for a National Pure Food Law.”
Senate passage of Heyburn’s bill had rallied supporters as well as opponents. “Your wonderful tenacity of purpose and persistence seems to have at last won out triumphantly,” wrote a former state food commissioner from Ohio. Charles Reed of the AMA, who had successfully threatened Nelson Aldrich in the Senate, said he planned to put similar pressure on legislators in the House. “When the Pure Food Bill begins to draw to a focus in the House, let me know,” he wrote to Wiley in early March. “It is my intention to do with the House what I did with the Senate, but in addition, I propose having telegrams pour into the members from all over the United States.”
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In early March Frank Doubleday received a visit from a lawyer representing meatpacking titan J. Ogden Armour. The Chicago meatpacking titan had organized the industry response to Sinclair’s book, publicly declaring that the products were “without blemish,” privately pressuring newspapers not to review the book and libraries not to carry it. The attorney invited the publisher to lunch with Armour, the meal to be served in a private car now awaiting his pleasure at Grand Central Station. The lawyer explained that Armour wanted to offer a generous advertising contract to the publishing firm, on the condition that Doubleday, Page curtail further publication plans for The Jungle, in particular any plan to publish the book abroad. As it happened, Doubleday had just received an offer from an English publisher, Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, seeking to buy both British and European rights to The Jungle. Harmsworth had founded two tabloid newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, and he’d become famous—or notorious, depending on one’s point of view—for his sensationalistic presentation of news stories. Doubleday had been personally and patriotically disinclined to accept the offer. He had only reluctantly followed Page’s lead in agreeing to publish Sinclair’s book at all. If he accepted Northcliffe’s deal, he worried that he would be showing the world an unsavory side of American business, and he “did not care to wash our dirty linen in all the capitals of Europe.”
But the lawyer drew out of his briefcase a can of corned beef and placed it, with a smile, on the publisher’s desk, a gesture meant to symbolize a lucrative relationship. Doubleday, known for his quick temper, lost it.
“This chap made me so angry,” he said. “I showed him [Northcliffe’s] telegram and told him we would give permission to have the book reprinted in Europe.” His visitor expressed bafflement, leading the still infuriated Doubleday to insult the attorney as a moral degenerate and throw him out of his office.
The Jungle was on its way to U.S. sales of more than 150,000 in its first year of publication, which would also see it translated into more than seventeen languages. In England the rising political star Winston Churchill recommended that all citizens read it; the playwright George Bernard Shaw called it an example of “what is going on all over the world under the top layer of prosperous plutocracy.” Sinclair appreciated his sudden prosperity, but he did not enjoy every aspect of his newfound celebrity.
Meatpacking interests planted stories in friendly newspapers, claiming that the young author had spent more time in Chicago whorehouses than in the yards. The hostile Chicago Tribune had printed an editorial titled “Investigating a Novel,” which described the book as “garbage fiction,” Sinclair as a “pseudo-reformer,” and Roosevelt as barely interested but concerned that “the American export trade in meat would be destroyed if foreigners were led to believe that the novel dealt with facts.” Sinclair was in a resentful mood, discontented even with the public’s response to his book. Despite incredible sales, no one was talking about the struggles of the workingman or socialist ideals. They were talking about filthy, germ-infested food and the possibility that their morning sausage contained scraps of rat and possibly human meat as well as the standard pork. “I aimed for the public’s heart,” he would later say, bitterly. “And by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
Beginning the first week of publication in February, letters and telegrams of outrage arrived at the White House, demanding to know how Roosevelt planned to fix the problem of the country’s disgusting food supply. The president had been one of the book’s earliest readers and had also been a
Doubleday, Page had also sent the president early proofs of the supporting articles scheduled to appear in World’s Work, one of them a microbiologist’s detailed discussion of dangerously prolific germ cultures in Chicago processing plants and the failure of government inspectors to address the problem. Dismayed, Roosevelt asked Secretary Wilson to explain what was going on with the Inspection Division of the Department of Agriculture. Its employees were supposed to make sure that diseased animals were not sent from the slaughterhouses into production of canned, dried, smoked, and chopped meat. In The Jungle, which Sinclair claimed was based on his own reporting directly from the yards, the packers simply paid the government inspectors either to look the other way or stay away.
The question threw Wilson on the defensive and he replied with an attack on Sinclair’s “willful and deliberate” portrayal of corrupt inspectors. An irked Roosevelt warned Wilson that his department seemed to be more interested in hiding a problem than in solving it. The president then sought less self-protective points of view, including one from Chicago progressive activist Mary McDowell, a colleague and friend of Jane Addams, who had provided housing for Sinclair during his book research. McDowell had worked for years to help packinghouse laborers, earning her the nickname “Angel of the Stockyards.” She told him that the novel was based in truth, allowing for some slight exaggeration. Like Doubleday, Roosevelt did not admire the book’s socialist ideas, and he wrote to Sinclair directly to tell him so, but he also decided to invite the young author to the White House in early April to discuss the realities of the stockyards.
Roosevelt told Sinclair that he was bypassing the Agriculture Department and sending two independent investigators to Chicago: his commissioner of labor, Charles P. Neill, and the social reformer James B. Reynolds, a manager of settlement houses on the East Side of Manhattan. The president invited Sinclair to meet with them and perhaps suggest avenues of inquiry. Neill and Reynolds were leaving so soon that Sinclair managed only a brief discussion on the train platform. He returned home to find a letter from a friend in Chicago, saying that packers had been alerted to the new inquiry—purportedly by the White House itself—and were busily cleaning up the factories.
Sinclair had little trust in the president. In Roosevelt’s speech that spring at the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, he’d railed against investigative journalists as “muckrakers,” filling the pages of periodicals and books with dirt while “ignoring at the same time the good in the world.” The president’s attack wasn’t inspired by Sinclair or his friends at McClure’s but by David Graham Phillips, author of a series titled “The Treason of the Senate,” running in William Randolph Hearst’s magazine Cosmopolitan. Phillips had characterized the Senate as an “agent of interests as powerful as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous.” The opening article focused on corrupt Republicans and attacked New York senator Chauncey Depew, Roosevelt’s friend and political ally. Roosevelt wanted to respond by excoriating Phillips personally, but advisers persuaded him to deliver a broader critique of overzealous, reform-seeking writers—a category that could be interpreted to include Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Ida Tarbell, Henry Irving Dodge, and more. In defense of his profession, Steffens, long a cordial acquaintance of the president, visited the White House the day after the Gridiron speech to criticize the intemperate language. The resolute Roosevelt brushed off the scolding and reprised the speech in expanded form before the Senate itself. There he clarified that he would not abide corruption, but that overweening journalists could do more harm than good in their eagerness to expose wrongdoing: “The men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.”
The president’s nuances were lost on Sinclair. He took the speeches personally, convinced that Roosevelt was a progressive only when it suited him. He’d learned that the meatpacking interests had quietly donated $200,000 toward Roosevelt’s election campaign in 1904. He doubted that the president’s investigators would or could confirm the truths that he’d depicted in The Jungle—at least not without help. He took the pragmatic step of persuading a longtime journalist friend to meet with Neill and Reynolds in Chicago and to arrange interviews for them with sources he had talked to for his book. At the same time, he took the undiplomatic step of writing to Roosevelt, expressing his fear that the government had no genuine interest in the truth. This was prompted, at least in part, by a report in the Tribune that the president planned to give another speech, this one attacking The Jungle. Roosevelt wrote back dismissively, counseling, “Really, Mr. Sinclair, you must keep your head.” Roosevelt himself had read hundreds of lies about his own life, and all with “quite as little foundation” as the recent Tribune fabrication. To Doubleday, Roosevelt wrote with irritation, “Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a change.”
Despite Sinclair’s worries and despite the packers’ efforts to polish things up before the investigators’ visit, the Neill-Reynolds report deeply dismayed the president. The facts were as bad as or worse than the scenes in the novel. The findings read, in part: “Many inside rooms where food is prepared are without windows, deprived of sunlight, and without direct communication with the outside air. . . . Usually the workers toil without relief in the humid atmosphere heavy with the odors of rotten wood, decayed meats, stinking offal and entrails. The tables on which meat was handled, the tubs, and other receptacles were generally of wood, most of which were water-soaked and only half cleaned. The privies, as a rule, were sections of workrooms, enclosed by thin wooden partitions, ventilating into the workrooms. In a word, we saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts, in all of which processes it was in the way of gathering dirt, splinters, floor filth and expectoration of tuberculous and other diseased workers.”
One dead hog had fallen out of a box cart and into a privy. Workers had simply dragged it out and sent it down the line with the other carcasses. “When comment was made to floor superintendents about these matters, it was always the reply that this meat would afterward be cooked, and this sterilization would prevent any danger from its use.” But this, Neill and Reynolds noted, wasn’t entirely true. A considerable amount of the meat went into sausages, uncooked and unsterilized. The leavings from the sausages were piled into a heap that also included floor sweepings of desiccated meat scraps, rope strands, and “other rubbish. Dismayed inquiry evoked a frank admission this garbage heap was to be ground up and used in making potted ham.”
The factual report was, the president recognized, potentially even more explosive than The Jungle. The latter bore the label “fiction,” after all, and had been penned by a self-avowed socialist. It could be dismissed. What Neill and Reynolds had found out could not. Roosevelt decided not to publish their report, holding it back as political leverage. But he showed some of the findings to a few trusted members of Congress,
The appropriations bill then went to the House, where the meatpackers indeed had exceptionally good friends. The House Committee on Agriculture, chaired by a wealthy New York farmer and cattle dealer, James Wadsworth, held the necessary hearing on the Beveridge amendment. But Wadsworth filled the witness list with executives from the packinghouses and their friends. Most of the hearing was spent mocking both The Jungle and the Neill-Reynolds report. Congressman Charles Wharton, a Chicago Republican whose district included the yards, described the packinghouses as just as “clean and wholesome” as any home kitchen. The government inspectors, he continued, were simply not smart enough to understand how a reputable business operated.
“If a commission of men of average intelligence should investigate the meat producing businesses, they would find it conducted in a proper and sanitary manner,” said Louis Swift, who had inherited Swift & Company from his father, Gustav. In turn, Neill replied that he was intelligent enough to avoid all products from the Chicago packinghouses. From the moment he had returned from the yards, he had insisted that no meat be served at his house unless it was fresh beef and mutton from local farms.