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For the text of the Pure Food and Drug Act. More information on Patent Medicine abuse that led to the Pure Food and Drug Act. Information on muckraking.
Pure Food and Drug Act
At the turn of the 20th Century, America’s food was rotten. A good part of the reason for this were the filthy conditions in the slaughter houses and packing houses, mostly in Chicago, where cattle and other livestock were butchered and processed for the consumer. There was no law permitting the federal government to inspect what could be likened to nothing less than charnel houses and to keep bad meat and other foods from crossing into other states. Bills had been introduced in Congress to address this problem, but each time the beef industry was able to beat back any law that would force it to clean up its act.
In 1904, Fred Warren, the managing editor of the socialist journal The Appeal to Reason (its circulation of 150,000 was the fourth highest of any weekly in the United States), asked Upton Sinclair, an occasional writer for the magazine, to write a piece on immigrant workers in the meat packing houses of Chicago. Originally serialized in the magazine, The Jungle would be published as a book not long after. Though a novel, its descriptions of what went on in these packing houses was accurate - and revolting.
Indiana senator Albert Beveridge, who earlier had sought Congressional action to address the situation, gave the book to President Theodore Roosevelt, who, sickened by what he read, realized his previous lukewarm support for pure food and drug laws was not enough. He ordered a new investigation by the Department of Agriculture (an earlier one had whitewashed the problem), and when he read it, he put the weight of the White House behind legislation. But Congress still stalled. The President released part of the report to the public, so alarming it that Congress was forced to pass a remedying law. On June 30, 1906, President Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act into law.
The law now prohibited allowing diseased and otherwise bad food in interstate and foreign commerce. The use of spoiled animal and vegetable products was now illegal. Food could not have either substituted ingredients that would reduce its quality or added harmful ingredients. The act also dealt with drugs with false or misleading statements on their labels (sometimes referred to a patent medicines). Drugs had to abide by established and impartial standards of purity and quality. Offending food and drugs could be condemned and seized by the government, and offending persons could be fined and jailed.
When The Jungle was first published, more than 150,000 copies were sold. It soon became an international best seller, published in seventeen languages, and is now considered one of the most significant books of the 20th Century. President Roosevelt would meet Upton Sinclair and tell him that while he frowned on Sinclair’s embrace of socialism, he agreed with the need in this case for radical action.
But it was more than just a successful book. Upton Sinclair, his book and the Pure Food and Drug Act would generate a new type of journalism, to be called investigative journalism (or occasionally by a less congratulatory term - muckraking - coined by Theodore Roosevelt), still alive and well more than a century later.
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