by Maureen Ogle
Among those who perused the book’s pages was Theodore Roosevelt, who received at least four copies, including one from Sinclair himself and one from a senator. After reading it, the president invited the novelist to a meeting at the White House. Roosevelt’s enthusiasm stemmed more from his determination to battle the packers than from his approval of the novel. As a rule, he despised the sort of half-baked rabble-rousing that filled its pages. (“I have such awful times with reformers of the hysterical and sensational stamp,” he once wrote.) “Personally,” he would later tell Sinclair, “I think that one of the chief early effects” of socialism “would be the elimination by starvation . . . of the community on whose behalf [it] would be invoked.” Despite the novel’s flaws and Sinclair’s politics, however, Roosevelt recognized that The Jungle was tailor-made for generating publicity to power his anti-packer battering ram.
By the spring of 1906, he needed the help. His administration’s most recent attempt to convict the packers in court had ended, like every previous effort, in failure. Government attorneys had based this most recent case on documents compiled in 1904 during the Garfield investigation. The packers argued that the material was inadmissible: they had cooperated with Garfield because he assured them that the information they provided could not and would not be used by the Justice Department. The presiding judge agreed with the packers and granted them immunity, a move that effectively ended the trial. The “charitable view . . . of the Judge’s action,” groused Roosevelt, “is that he has lost some of the powers of his mind.” Worse, although both the House and Senate were then debating food safety legislation, as usual, bills in both houses were mired in debates about the limits of constitutional authority. Once again, a food bill seemed destined to drown in a sea of politics, and TR’s campaign against the packers doomed to failure.
And so an egomaniac socialist became Roosevelt’s weapon of desperation, and the president got busy with plans to use it. In response to both the Lancet articles and The Jungle, agriculture secretary Wilson had decided to send his own team to Chicago to investigate the packinghouses, and Roosevelt insisted that Sinclair be brought in to aid the cause. A “merely perfunctory investigation” would not suffice, the president told Wilson, and instructed the secretary to recruit a “first-class man” to meet with Sinclair and obtain from him a list of witnesses who could verify what Roosevelt still regarded as wild exaggeration. “You must keep absolutely secret your choice of a man,” he added.
Keeping secrets, however, was not on Sinclair’s agenda. Having gained the attention of the White House, he intended to use that clout to boost the book’s sales, even if doing so interfered with the president’s plans. He bombarded Roosevelt with letters and telegrams demanding that the chief executive mount a more public and vigorous defense of The Jungle. “My dear Mr. Sinclair,” Roosevelt wrote on April 11, “you seemed to be a good deal more agitated than the facts warrant.” “Keep quiet,” he demanded, in a futile effort to contain his loose cannon. “I cannot afford to be hurried any more than I can afford to be stopped from making the investigation,” which, he added, might take “months.” It was all wasted on the novelist-genius. In the time it took Roosevelt to write that letter, Sinclair had dashed off another missive plus a telegram. The barrage prompted the president to add a postscript to his letter: “Your second telegram has just come; really, Mr. Sinclair, you must keep your head,” the president wrote.
Roosevelt’s ire increased when Wilson’s men handed over their report in early April. The document, detailed, thorough, and systematic, concluded that meat inspection could and should be improved, but it also refuted most of the charges made in both The Lancet and The Jungle. Its tone and content were not much different from those of the tedious affair submitted by Garfield a year earlier and therefore no competition with Sinclair’s sensational novel when it came to convincing the public that American meat was safe. Caught between a potential media bonanza and the turgid prose of government bureaucrats and fearful that Congress would once again push food safety back into a closet, Roosevelt sent yet another team of investigators to Chicago, this time men of his choosing. A few weeks later, they handed over a study that contained precisely what the president wanted and needed: confirmation of Packingtown’s evils, couched in graphic detail but in language that avoided the reckless hysteria of The Jungle. But having gotten what he wished for, Roosevelt realized that he needed to handle it with care. American livestock producers and packers had grown accustomed to large foreign demand, but in recent years, other governments had used meat imports as tools for political bargaining with the United States. Roosevelt feared that if he released the document’s contents, an already contentious diplomatic situation would be made worse and that panicky foreign buyers would cancel orders for meat. But he also wanted Congress to pass food safety legislation, and he preferred that it do so without prodding from him. He decided to withhold the report and use it as a big stick in case the House and Senate leaned toward dismissing food safety yet again.
But Sinclair managed to lay his hands on a copy of the document, and he regarded its contents as proof that his novel was no fiction. He demanded that Roosevelt publicize the findings. The president refused. Doing so, he explained, might satisfy “the apostles of sensationalism,” but it would damage the livelihoods of “stock-growers, ranchers, hired men, cowboys, [and] farmers,” people who were “guilty of no misconduct whatever.” Upton Sinclair, fair-weather socialist to the end, was not interested in cowboys or hired hands. He leaked the contents to the New York Times, and newspapers around the country picked up the story.
Roosevelt was furious, although as events unfolded, he would have been forced to release the report anyway. A member of the Senate had introduced legislation that would expand federal meat inspection, but the bill had then been trapped in the House agriculture committee, whose chair came from an old livestock-producing family and who had no intention of sending it to the House floor. Nor did the committee member from Illinois, William Lorimer, a seasoned political boss who represented the district that contained the stockyards. A meat inspection bill, he announced, would never get out of committee, “not if Little Willie can help it.”
But Little Willie had met a bill—and a president and a novelist—he could not stop. Thanks to publicity generated by the new report and Sinclair’s hunger for publicity, Congress could no longer avoid the issue of food safety. In late June 1906, Roosevelt signed both a pure food bill and a meat inspection act. In theory the nation’s stomachs were now protected from doctored maple syrup and tainted meat. Upton Sinclair got what he wanted, too: fame and fortune, as his novel became a bestseller (proving, perhaps, the publicity power of congressional hearings and bureaucratic reports). Ironically, beef consumption rose. Sinclair’s book had prejudiced the public against processed meats—canned goods, sausage, bologna, and the like—so consumers satisfied their carnivorous urges with fresh beef. In 1908, Americans consumed eight more pounds per capita than in 1906.
In the end, neither Roosevelt nor Sinclair inflicted much damage on the packers. In 1912, Armour, Swift, and Morris dissolved their jointly owned holding company, but only because it had proved to be more trouble than it was worth. They divvied up their holdings, which had grown during National Packing’s short life, and dumped the profits into expanding their respective companies, buying out smaller packing operations and building new plants. Swift and Armour also set up shop in South America, building what were at the time some of the largest meat-processing facilities in the world. Their motivation for doing so was connected directly to U.S. agriculture: American cattle ranchers and farmers could not keep pace with the demands of both U.S. consumers and the global market. The packers hoped to ease the burden on American meat supplies by using South American cattle to fill export orders. Some people even recognized that whatever crimes the packers may or may not have committed, their focus on cost cutting, efficiency, and diversification made it possible to eat well at a low price. As an essa
yist wrote in a magazine article about the Swift empire, “We make great outcry against the concentrated bigness of the packers, yet the probability is that we would make yet greater outcry if the modern system of food supply were suddenly cut off and we were put back on the basis of local butcher-shops.” He was right. In the United States, the mechanisms of food supply were so efficient that they had become taken for granted—and when it came to food, Americans took nothing for granted so much as low price. In the end, it was the high price of meat that fashioned the snare that tripped the packers.
American food prices had risen steadily since the beginning of the century thanks to a growing population—up by a third in the first decade or so of the century—and high demand for foodstuffs in the United States and around the world. American farmers, however, could not keep pace, and the chronic gap between supply and demand pushed prices for all foods up, ever up. In 1910, millions of Americans joined a meat boycott to protest what they regarded as exorbitant prices. But when war broke out in Europe in 1914, demand for American grains and meat soared, as did the prices and public fury. In 1916, Congress convened hearings on high food prices, but as had been the case in 1888 and 1902, Americans were not interested in relationships between and among food prices, war, weather, global demand, agricultural technology, and population size. They only knew they were paying more at the butcher shop, a fact to which an Armour vice president was resigned: when summoned to testify at the hearings, he commented that there were “a hundred and one million people in this country” with no interest in the price farmers received for cattle. They cared only about “how cheap they [could] buy their beef steak.”
True enough. In early 1917, just weeks before the United States officially entered World War I, food riots erupted in several cities. “We shall have in this country a political revolution, if not something worse,” warned one government official, “unless the question of the furnishing of foods to the people at the lowest possible price is taken up.” President Woodrow Wilson, then starting his second term in office, could not ignore the outrage. He ordered the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate the national food supply system, from farming and food processing to food storage and retail sales.
The commission’s analysts ignored Wilson’s orders. Most of them supported socialist ideals or were progressives who favored using federal authority to foster both economic efficiency and social justice. They were convinced that the Beef Trust was to blame for the nation’s food woes, and that the packers had escaped legal prosecution because they had bribed judges, jurors, or both. What was supposed to be a general analysis of American food production and distribution morphed into a microscopic analysis of the meatpacking industry. FTC researchers combed through packers’ company records, hoping to accomplish what courts had failed to do: find evidence that the meat men had violated interstate commerce and antitrust laws, or used cold storage to hoard food and thus control prices. The resulting six-volume report, which often oozed the biases of its authors and sometimes merged fact and fiction in order to score points, concluded that the sheer size of the “trust” rendered it so inefficient that it functioned as a drag on the nation’s food supply; that, analysts concluded, had caused rising food prices. They recommended that federal authorities seize the railroad and stockyard facilities used to transport, buy, and sell livestock, as well as the packers’ refrigerator railcars and cold-storage facilities, and combine all of it into a meat production system owned and operated by the federal government. Doing so, the analysts contended, would break the trust’s lock hold on the nation’s food supply, allow smaller packers to compete, and drive down food prices.
The idea was not as far-fetched as it sounds. The transition to an industrial economy had provoked a deep-rooted anxiety about capitalism and free markets, expressed in part by the middle-class embrace of socialism. Advocates of nationalization argued that government ownership and management would create a more efficient, productive economy and equalize the distribution of wealth and prosperity. When the United States entered World War I, the government had taken over the nation’s transportation and shipbuilding systems, and the American Federation of Labor, one of the nation’s most powerful unions (at a time when unions commanded attention), favored a plan to allow railroad workers to share management duties and profits with company owners.
In late 1918 and early 1919, the House of Representatives held weeks of hearings on legislation that would nationalize meatpacking and livestock trading. Fortunately for the packers, those hearings coincided with a “red scare” sparked by pitched battles between workers and employers. Many people blamed the violence on Bolsheviks who were believed to have infiltrated American factories and mills as part of a larger Russian plot to convert the world to communism. (The Russians had entered the war as a monarchy and departed as a communist state.) Socialism was one thing; in Americans’ hands it had become a comfortable middle-class belief. But the prospect of communists running amuck in the streets and on factory floors was too much to bear. When persons unknown bombed the homes of public officials around the country, opinion turned against anything and everything that smacked of socialism, nationalization, or communism. The Justice Department launched a crusade to root out infiltrators, and the Senate delved into alleged communist-sponsored activities. An Indiana senator demanded that the FTC analysts who had penned the meatpacking report be investigated for “sedition and criminal anarchy.” The Senate obliged with an internal witch-hunt that included sifting through the trash at the homes of several FTC staff members.
That ended the effort to nationalize meatpacking, although the packers did not escape unscathed. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose political ambitions outweighed his scruples, seized the opportunity to have his reds and his packers, too. Although most of his attention was devoted to tracking down and deporting communist sympathizers, he let the packers know he was preparing a new criminal case against them. The companies’ leaders, weary of endless court battles, fended off what was sure to become a noisy and expensive contest by agreeing to divest their companies of most of their non-meat-related holdings: according to the consent decree they signed, they could no longer own shares of stockyards and newspapers, they could not function as retailers, and they could use their cold-storage facilities only for meat. In exchange, Palmer dropped his case.
The consent decree proved a mixed blessing for the packers. Louis Swift, who had taken control of the family business after his father’s death in 1903, shared the elder Swift’s eye for detail, cost cutting, and opportunity. In the wake of the decree, he and his colleagues streamlined operations and focused on extracting profit from what remained. Armour’s post-decree fortunes proved more fragile. When Phil Armour died in 1901, leadership had passed to his son, J. Ogden, who expanded what his father had begun but committed the one sin the old man had warned against: he funded that growth with debt. Worse, he dumped company funds into firms that had nothing to do with meat or food and everything to do with his (mostly unwarranted) belief in his skills as a magician of profit. Burdened with a bewildering array of holdings and a mountain of debt, in 1923 the company went into receivership and ended up in the hands of its bankers. They nursed the money machine back to health; acquired Nelson Morris’s packing company, which was also teetering on the brink; and combined the assets, eliminating dead weight.
The consent decree wasn’t the only woe the packers faced. Per-capita meat consumption spiraled downward during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and for that, ironically, the packers had themselves to blame. They had built an efficient infrastructure for processing, transporting, and distributing an array of foodstuffs. As a result, Americans’ plates were filled with so much food and such a variety of it that meat no longer dominated the nation’s diet. But the kinds of food Americans wanted changed, too. Consider the breakfast cereal mania that gripped the nation in the first decade of the century, as shoppers snapped up new products like Corn Flakes, Cream of Wheat,
Malta Vita, and Granula. Critics complained that those cereals were no more nutritious than crackers or bread, and because they were highly processed, consumers paid anywhere from $5 to $12 for the privilege of eating a bushel of wheat that sold for a dollar. “It is not so much that the new foods are better than the old,” argued the editors of a national weekly magazine, than that Americans had “been persuaded to eat them” thanks to advertising that featured “kindly old gentlemen, pretty maidens and chubby children” urging Americans to “partake of their diet and so to share in their health, beauty and benevolence.” But the critics missed the point. Urban Americans wanted what the cereals offered: convenience. Why waste time cooking and eating when there were so many other ways to spend it? The early-twentieth-century city offered a host of entertainments, from nickelodeons and vaudeville to beer gardens and amusement parks. The great wonder of the age, the automobile, of which Americans purchased some 9 million in the first twenty years of the century, allowed the nation to move faster and do more. The new breakfast foods may have been processed and (relatively) expensive, but they epitomized convenience. Open the package, pour some into a bowl, add a splash of milk, and eat. What could be simpler?
