Of Meat and Myth; L.W. Reed

It seems that as soon as we put out one fire, opponents of the market manage to ignite ten others. We spend as much time explaining the workings of the market as we do debunking myths and cliches about it. Statists and interventionists spout an endless stream of put-downs and one-liners that pass as thor ough critiques of the market, each one requiring a time-consuming, painstaking re sponse and appeal to reason. We are con stantly rewriting prejudiced accounts of his tory to match what really happened. Nearly ninety years ago, muckrakingnov elist Upton Sinclair wrote a book titled The Jungle which wove a tale of greed and abuse that reverberates to this day as a powerful case against laissez faire. Sinclair's focus of scorn was the meatpacking industry. The objective of his effort was government reg ulation. The culmination of his work was the passage in 1906 of the famed Meat Inspec tion Act, enshrined in most history books as a sacred cow (excuse the pun) of the inter ventionist state.

Were Sinclair's allegations of a corrupt industry foisting unhealthy products on an Dr. Reed, economist and author, is President of The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market research and educational organization headquartered in Midland, Michigan. Lawrence W. Reed unsuspecting public really true? And if so, should the free market stand forever in dicted and convicted as a result? A response from advocates of freedom is long overdue. Here's a healthy start. The Jungle was, first and foremost, a novel. It was intended to be a polemic-a diatribe, if you willand not a well-re searched and dispassionate documentary. Sinclair relied heavily on both his own imagination and on the hearsay of others. He did not even pretend to have actually witnessed the horrendous conditions he as cribed to Chicago packinghouses, nor to have verified them, nor to have derived them from·any officialrecords.

Sinclair hoped the book would ignite a powerful socialist movement on behalf of America's workers. The public's attention was directed instead to his fewer than a dozen pages of supposed descriptions of unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking plants. "I aimed at the public's heart," he later wrote, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach. ,,1 Though his novelized and sensational ac cusations prompted later congressional in vestigations of the industry, the investiga tors themselves expressed skepticism of Sinclair's integrity and credibility as a source of information. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote of Sinclair in a letter to WilliamAllenWhite in July 1906,"1 have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute false600 hoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth. ,,2 Sinclair's fellow writer and philosophical intimate, Jack London, wrote this an nouncement of The Jungle, a promo that was approved by Sinclair himself: Dear Comrades: ... The book we have been waiting for these many years! It will open countless ears that have been deaf to Socialism. It will make thousands of con verts to our cause. It depicts what our country really is, the home of oppression and injustice, a nightmare of misery, an inferno of suffering, a human hell, ajungle of wild beasts.

And take notice and remember, com rades, this book is straight proletarian. It is written by an intellectual proletarian, for the proletarian. It is to be published by a proletarian publishing house. It is to be read by the proletariat. What Uncle Tom's Cabin did for the black slaves The Jungle has a large chance to do for the white slaves of today.3 The Jungle's fictitious characters tell of men fallinginto tanks in meatpacking plants and being ground up with animal parts, then made into "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard." Historian Stewart H. Holbrook writes, "The grunts, the groans, the agonized squeals of animals being butchered, the rivers of blood, the steaming masses of intestines, the various stenches ... were displayed along with the corruption of gov ernment inspectors,,4 and, of course, the callous greed of the ruthless packers. Most Americans would be surprised to know that government meat inspection did not begin in 1906. The inspectors Holbrook refers to as being mentioned in Sinclair's book were among hundreds employed by federal, state, and local governments for more than a decade. Indeed, Congressman E. D. Crumpacker of Indiana noted in tes timony before the House Agriculture Com mittee in June 1906 that not even one of those officials "ever registered any com plaint or [gave] any public information with respect to the manner of the slaughtering or preparation of meat or food products."5 601 To Crumpacker and other contemporary skeptics, "Either the Government officials in Chicago [were] woefully derelict in their duty, or the situation over there [had been] outrageously overstated to the country.,,6 If the packing plants were as bad as alleged in The Jungle, surely the government in spectors who never said so must be judged as guilty of neglect as the packers were of abuse.

Some two millionvisitors came to tour the stockyards and packinghouses of Chicago every year. Thousands of people worked in both. Why is it that it took a novel written by an anti-capitalist ideologue who spent but a few weeks there to unveil the real condi tions to the American public? All of the big Chicago packers combined accounted for less than 50 percent of the meat products produced in the United States; few if any charges were ever made against the sanitary conditions of the pack inghouses of other cities. If the Chicago packers were guilty of anything like the terribly unsanitary conditions suggested by Sinclair, wouldn't they be foolishly expos ing themselves to devastating losses of mar ket share? Historians with an ideologicalaxe to grind against the market usually ignore an author itative 1906 report of the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Husbandry. Its investigators provided a point-by-point refutation of the worst of Sinclair's allega. tions, some of which they labeled as "willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact, "

"atrocious exaggeration," and "not at all characteristic. ,,7 Instead, some of these same historians dwell on the Neill-Reynolds Report of the same year because it at least tentatively supported Sinclair. It turns out that neither Neill nor Reynolds had any experience in the meatpacking business and spent a grand total of two and one-half weeks in the spring of 1906 investigating and preparing what turned out to be a carelessly-written report with preconceived conclusions. Gabriel Kolko, a socialist but nonetheless an histo rian with a respect for facts, dismisses Sinclair as a propagandist and assails Neill 602 THE FREEMAN • NOVEMBER 1994 and Reynolds as "two inexperienced Wash ington bureaucrats who freely admitted they knew nothing"S of the meatpacking pro cess. Their own subsequent testimony re vealed that they had gone to Chicago with the intention of finding fault with industry practices so as to get a new inspection law passed. 9 As popular myth would have it, there were no government inspectors before Con gress acted in response to The Jungle and the greedy meatpackers fought federal in spection all the way. The truth is that not only did government inspection exist, but meatpackers themselves supported it and were in the forefront of the effort to extend it!

When the sensational accusations of The Jungle became worldwide news, foreign purchases of American meat were cut in half and the meatpackers looked for new regu lations to give their markets a calming sense of security. The only congressional hearings on what ultimately became the Meat Inspec tion Act of 1906were held by Congressman James Wadsworth's Agriculture Committee between June 6 and 11. A careful reading of the deliberations of the Wadsworth commit tee and the subsequent floor debate leads inexorably to one conclusion: Knowing that a new law would allay public fears fanned by The Jungle, bring smaller competitors under regulation, and put a newly laundered gov ernment stamp of approval on their prod ucts, the major meatpackers strongly en dorsed the proposed act and only quibbled over who should pay for it. In the end, Americans got a new federal meat inspection law. The big packers got the taxpayers to pick up the entire $3 million price tag for its implementation as well as new regulations on their smaller competi tors, and another myth entered the annals of anti-market dogma.

To his credit, Upton Sinclair actually opposed the law because he saw it for what it really was-a boon for the big meatpack ers .10 Far from a crusading and objective truth-seeker, Sinclair was a fool and a sucker who ended up being used by the very industry he hated. Myths die hard. What you've just read is not at all "politically correct." But defend ing the market from historical attack begins with explaining what really happened. Those who persist in the shallow claim that The Jungle stands as a compelling indict ment of the market should clean up their act because upon inspection, there seems to be an unpleasant odor hovering over it. D The author wishes to thank Professor Timothy G. Nash of Northwood University in Midland, Michigan, for his research as sistance in the preparation of this column. 1. Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Re interpretation ofAmerican History, 1900-1916(Chicago: Quad rangle Books, 1967), p. 103.

2. Roosevelt to WilliamAllen White, July 31,1906, Elting E. Morison and John M. Blum, editors, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951-54), vol. 5, p. 340. 3. Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States, 1900 1925; vol. 2: America Finding Herself (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), p. 473. 4. Stewart H. Holbrook, The Age of the Moguls (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1953),pp. 110-111. 5. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on the So-called "Beveridge Amendment" to the Agriculture Appropriation Bill, 59th Congress, 1st Session, 1906, p. 194. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., pp. 346-350. 8. Kolko, p. 105. 9. Hearings, p. 102. 10. Upton Sinclair, "The Condemned-Meat Industry: A Reply to Mr. J. Ogden Armour," Everybody's Magazine, XIV, 1906, pp. 612-613.