In 1904, Upton Sinclair,
an American author, spent seven weeks in Chicago to learn more about the
stockyards. He arrived during a strike by approximately thirty thousand
packinghouse workers demanding wages higher than what they were being paid. The
wages ranged from $0.16 an hour for the easier labor, like washing the cattle,
to $0.47 & ½ an hour for the harder labor, like splitting the beef (those
wages in today’s dollar value would be $4.09 and $12.13, respectively).
The meat-packing facilities did not even bat an eye, however, as nearly five thousand of Chicago’s unemployed were lining up every morning, looking for jobs at the packinghouses. After several days of futile striking, the employees drifted back to work. Sinclair ended up using the information he found to write The Jungle, an exposé on the American meat-packing industry. He published The Jungle on February 26, 1906. The publication of The Jungle immediately shook the public. It showed people what they were eating, which was very upsetting to most. In 1906, Upton Sinclair said “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit its stomach." President Theodore Roosevelt originally called Sinclair a “crackpot” and a “muckraker,” but reading The Jungle piqued his interested. Disgusted with the possibility of such tainted meat, he took responsibility and sent two inspectors, Charles Neill and James Reynolds, to visit meat-packing facilities in Chicago. |
"'They don't waste anything here,' said the guide, and then he laughed and added a witticism, which he was pleased that his unsophisticated friends should take to be his own: 'They use everything about the hog except the squeal.'" -- The Jungle |