Upton Sinclair and The Jungle, The Workers He Actually Meant to Save

Upton Sinclair was twenty-six years old when a socialist newspaper hired him to go undercover in the Union Stock Yards in nineteen oh four. He spent seven weeks inside, living in the neighborhood called Back of the Yards, eating with the workers, interviewing them through interpreters, watching the kill floors and the processing rooms and the canning operations. He was there to write about the workers, not the meat. The book he produced, "The Jungle," published in nineteen oh six, was about Lithuanian immigrants on twelve-hour shifts for ten cents an hour. It was about children working the floors. It was about women in the pickle rooms developing industrial diseases from the brine. It was about men who fell into rendering vats and were, by the time anyone noticed, packaged as lard.

The American public read "The Jungle" and reacted with horror. They reacted with horror at the meat. President Theodore Roosevelt sent his own investigators to Chicago, and they confirmed that the sanitary conditions Sinclair described were accurate. Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in nineteen oh six, two of the foundational pieces of American food safety law. The country had its food supply regulated. The Lithuanian workers on twelve-hour shifts for ten cents an hour did not get their working conditions reformed.

Sinclair understood exactly what had happened. He wrote afterward: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." He had intended to write a book that would produce labor reform. He had instead produced food safety law.

The Union Stock Yards operated for another sixty-five years after the book was published. They closed in nineteen seventy-one. The stone gate at Exchange Avenue and Peoria Street, with its carved ox head above the arch, is the sole surviving structure. The rest of the yards, which once covered a square mile and processed nine million animals a year, is an industrial park.