Sinclair, Upton

Before the summer of 1905, food safety was monitored by just two men, who made up the Department of Agriculture’s entire Bureau of Chemistry. The United States Senate had contemplated a “pure food and drug” bill for three years with little enthusiasm, until a novel, in serial form, was published in the socialist magazine Appeal to Reason by Upton Sinclair (1878–1968). Sinclair’s depiction of conditions in Chicago’s stockyards and packing plants aroused the wrath of the meat-consuming public and forced the creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the Beef Inspection Act, and—ultimately—the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. The serial was published in book form in 1906 as The Jungle. The book, filled with disturbingly squalid details, was typical of the muckraking journalism of the day. Sinclair had been a student in New York City in the 1890s, and his book was an emotionally charged and convincing extension of Jacob Riis’s 1890 exposé of tenement conditions, How the Other Half Lives.