The book created an immediate sensation. Although some reviews criticized the contrived socialist epiphany of the ending, millions of readers found Sinclair’s cast of characters and the grotesque details of the meatpacking industry compelling. “Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous,” observed the New York Evening World, “has there been such an example of world-wide fame won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.”
James Garfield was the first in the White House to read the book. “Hideous,” he termed the story, “but not more so than the place,” which he had visited during the Bureau of Corporations’ investigation of the beef trust. Sinclair, he wrote in his journal, had produced “a terrible and I fear too true account of the lives of many miserable men & women among the working class in our big cities.” During a long walk with the president, Garfield described at length his response to the book.
Intrigued by Garfield’s reaction, Roosevelt finished reading the novel and invited the author to the White House during the first week in April. Although he proceeded to disparage the socialist diatribe tacked on to the conclusion, Roosevelt assured Sinclair that “all this has nothing to do with the fact that the specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have power, be eradicated.”
By the time Sinclair arrived for lunch on April 4, a Department of Agriculture investigator was en route to the stockyards with an order from the White House to evaluate the novelist’s charges. Sending a representative of the very agency that had failed properly to inspect the plants, Sinclair objected, “was like asking a burglar to determine his own guilt.” His objections prompted Roosevelt to dispatch two additional investigators with no official ties to the department. He chose two well-respected men: Commissioner of Labor Charles P. Neill and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury James Bronson Reynolds. Sinclair was delighted, though he feared the investigators would focus on the diseased meats rather than the working conditions in the yard. “I have power to deal with one and not with the other,” Roosevelt responded.
As the investigation got under way, the Chicago Tribune ran a series of articles citing “on excellent authority” that the president’s team had already debunked the overwhelming majority of Sinclair’s charges and claiming that Roosevelt intended to castigate the novelist in an upcoming speech. In a state of panic, Sinclair barraged the president with letters, a telegram, and a phone call. Roosevelt patiently explained that the newspaper story was simply fabricated. “It is absurd to become so nervous over such an article,” he admonished. “Hundreds such appear about me all the time, with quite as little foundation.” Chastened, Sinclair maintained that he “should never have dreamed of writing,” except it seemed incomprehensible that a journalist “with a reputation to protect” would dare to disseminate false information in such an “explicit and positive way.” Roosevelt immediately assuaged Sinclair’s anxiety. “I understand entirely how you felt. Of course you have not had the experience I have had with newspapers. . . . Meanwhile, we will go steadily ahead with the investigation.”
In fact, Roosevelt’s inspectors found stockyard conditions comparable to those Sinclair had portrayed. Initial reports told “of rooms reeking with filth, of walls, floors, and pillars caked with offal, dried blood, and flesh, of unspeakable uncleanliness.” These findings were more than sufficient to convince Roosevelt to take action. On May 22, Illinois senator Albert Beveridge introduced a White House–backed bill to institute a rigid federal inspection program covering all phases of the meatpacking industry, from animal slaughter to sausage and canned meat production. If products were “found healthful and fit for human food,” a government label indicating “inspected and passed” would be attached; if not, the meat products would be marked “inspected and condemned.”
Roosevelt warned Senate leaders friendly to the packers “that unless effective meat inspection legislation were enacted without loss of time,” he would make the report public. Although he had no desire to harm the packing industry or the livestock producers, if the meatpackers moved to kill the legislation, he would feel compelled to expose the sickening work conditions. Fearing adverse publicity even more than the regulation, the packers retreated. Without “a dissenting vote” the Beveridge bill passed the Senate three days after it was introduced.
While Roosevelt was satisfied, Upton Sinclair remained disappointed by the bill’s quick passage. To release the report, he told the president, would give the public “a shock it will never get over,” prompting true, enduring reform through “an enlightened public opinion.” Disregarding Roosevelt’s directive to remain patient while the House took up the Senate bill, Sinclair leaked his information from the report to the New York Times. “I sincerely hope that the disturbance I have been making has not been an annoyance to you,” he told the president. “I had to make up my mind quickly.” Exasperated, Roosevelt wrote to Frank Doubleday: “Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for awhile.”
The legislation, meanwhile, foundered in the House Agricultural Committee, chaired by the wealthy stockbreeder James Wadsworth, a strong proponent of the beef trust. One after another, witnesses were paraded before the committee to argue that while isolated problems might exist, “conditions were as clean and wholesome as in the average restaurant, hotel and home kitchen. That there were offensive odors was natural—one ought not to expect to find a rosebud in a slaughtering house.” A series of emasculating amendments was prepared, one negating the “mandatory character” of inspection and granting packers the right of court review.
“I am sorry to have to say,” Roosevelt informed Congressman Wadsworth, “that it seems to me that each change is for the worse and that in the aggregate they are ruinous, taking away every particle of good from the suggested Beveridge amendment.” Because the packers and their representatives had reneged, producing only “sham” legislation, the president felt he was not “warranted” any longer in holding back the unfinished Reynolds-Neill Report.
On June 4, the president transmitted what he called a “preliminary” report to Congress. “The conditions shown by even this short inspection,” he avowed, were “revolting.” His investigators had determined that “the stockyards and packing houses are not kept even reasonably clean, and that the method of handling and preparing food products is uncleanly and dangerous to health.” Federal legislation was imperative to prevent continued abuses. If Congress failed in its responsibility, the full report would be made public.
Released to the newspapers, this preliminary assessment produced a national uproar. The New York Post captured the public mood in a sardonic jingle:
Mary had a little lamb,
And when she saw it sicken,
She shipped it off to Packingtown,
And now it’s labeled chicken.
Faced with public outrage and disgust, the House could no longer keep the bill “chloroformed in the committees.” The most egregious of Wadsworth’s provisions were eliminated and the measure was sent to a conference committee. In the end, a fairly comprehensive meat inspection bill emerged. “We cannot imagine any other President whom the country has ever had, paying any attention at all to what was written in a novel,” the New York Evening Post remarked. “In the history of reforms which have been enacted into law,” Beveridge proudly noted, “there has never been a battle which has been won so quickly and never a proposed reform so successful in the first contest.”
THE MOMENTUM OF THE RAILROAD regulation fight and the meat inspection amendment propelled the passage of a third important bill—the Pure Food and Drug Act—producing a historic session of congressional reform. Crusaders like Dr. Harvey Wiley, chief chemist in the Department of Agriculture, had battled unsuccessfully for over a decade to secure federal legislation requiring proper labels on food and drugs. In the absence of such regulation, adulterated food products and bogus medicines flooded the market. Conservatives lampooned Wiley as “chief janitor and policeman of the people’s insides.” In t
he Senate, Nelson Aldrich emerged as the most vocal opponent of regulatory measures. “Are we going to take up the question as to what a man shall eat and what a man shall drink,” he scornfully asked, “and put him under severe penalties if he is eating or drinking something different from what the chemists of the Agricultural Department think it is desirable for him to eat or drink?”
Pressure for reform began to build, however, with the publication of two groundbreaking articles in Collier’s magazine. Interested in commissioning an investigative piece on the patent medicine industry, the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, Edward Bok, reached out to S. S. McClure to find a writer capable of painstaking research. McClure introduced Bok to Mark Sullivan, a recent graduate of the Harvard Law School. Sullivan’s article proved too technical and too extensive for the Ladies’ Home Journal, but Bok brought it to Collier’s, where it attracted widespread attention.
Sullivan’s research yielded some stunning discoveries. The Lydia E. Pinkham Company, a celebrated patent medicine firm, advertised its numerous compounds for ailing women beneath the kindly and intelligent visage of Mrs. Pinkham—offering the promise that she would personally answer letters and dispense advice to inquiring customers. When Sullivan traveled to her hometown of Lynn, Massachusetts, and learned that she had been dead for over two decades, he took a picture of the inscription on her headstone: “Lydia E. Pinkham. Died May 17, 1883.”
Less grimly humorous but far more pernicious was the young journalist’s revelation that a secret clause had been written into the advertising contracts of thousands of newspapers across the country. At that time, patent medicines provided the largest source of advertising revenue for newspapers, and this clause stipulated that the contract would be canceled if material detrimental to the industry appeared anywhere in the paper. From William White, who had refused to take patent medicine ads in the Emporia Gazette, Sullivan obtained an original copy of the contract form.
The success of Sullivan’s piece prompted Collier’s to commission a ten-part investigative series on the patent medicine industry modeled after McClure’s exposés. In fact, the writer of the series, Samuel Hopkins Adams, had been on McClure’s staff before moving to Collier’s. Adams procured experts to test more than two hundred patent medicines, a great majority of which were revealed as either “harmless frauds or deleterious drugs”: an ointment containing clay and glycerin was marketed as a cancer cure; a pink starch and sugar pill promised to remedy paralysis; Isham’s Spring Water claimed rheumatism would vanish within days. Even more worrisome, many concoctions were found to contain significant quantities of alcohol and narcotics, potentially leading the unwary toward addiction. Laboratories claiming to test these medicines turned out to be fraudulent or nonexistent.
For the first time, public pressure impelled a bill regulating food and drugs “to run the gauntlet of the upper house in safety.” After reaching the House, however, “it slept. And it slept.” For four months, Speaker Joe Cannon refused to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote. Finally, the national uproar over diseased meat forced his hand. On June 30, 1906, reformers were at last able to celebrate the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. The bill “would not have had the slightest chance” of surviving in the House, Senator Beveridge observed, had it not been for “the agitation” generated by the meat inspection amendment. This landmark bill authorized the federal government to examine the contents of processed food and patent medicines, forbade the sale of adulterated or misbranded food and drugs, and required that every package and bottle be properly labeled.
“DURING NO SESSION OF CONGRESS since the foundation of the Government,” the New York Times proclaimed, “has there been so much done, first, to extend the Federal power of regulation and control over the business of the country, and second, to cure and prevent abuses of corporation privileges.” Had Congress accomplished even one of the three major steps toward railroad regulation, meat inspection, or food and drug oversight, one midwestern paper observed, the first session of the 59th Congress would have been historic. Taken together, these three monumental measures marked “the beginning of a new epoch in federal legislation—governmental regulations on corporations and the invocation of the police power, so to speak, to stay the hand of private greed” and protect the general welfare.
No sooner had journalists illuminated a problem than the fight to secure a remedy had begun. By the spring of 1906, it was virtually certain that Congress would pass measures to regulate the railroads and the food and drug industry; only the timing and nature of those regulations remained to be determined. “For pass them they must,” McClure’s biographer noted. “That verdict had already been reached by the people.”
The momentum of the progressive agenda continued with an employer’s liability law for the District of Columbia; the Antiquities Act that granted the president authority to declare national monuments on federal lands; and statehood bills for Arizona and New Mexico. Conservatives railed against “the most amazing program of centralization” ever enacted, and Wall Street warned that Roosevelt was only “sowing the seeds” of revolution. But the American people overwhelmingly agreed with the president’s declaration that this Congress had accomplished “more substantive work for good than any Congress has done at any session since he became familiar with public affairs.”
Even Democratic newspapers “reluctantly” acknowledged the unprecedented efficacy of the 59th Congress and the remarkable leadership of the president. “The public confidence has been greatly restored in our law-makers,” observed the Detroit Free Press, “inasmuch as strongly reformative measures have been adopted in the face of tremendous private interests, the sole spur necessary being an insistent pubic demand, clearly defined.”
Yet even as he gloried in the moment, Theodore Roosevelt sensed that he would never again achieve this magnitude of success in directing domestic policy. “I do not expect to accomplish very much in the way of legislation after this Congress, and perhaps after this session,” he wistfully confided to Kermit. “By next winter people will begin to think more about the next man who is to be President; and then, too, by that time it is almost inevitable that the revulsion of feeling against me should have come. It is bound to come some time, and it is extraordinary that it has not come yet.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Cast into Outer Darkness”
In this 1906 cartoon, Puck portrays “The Muck Rakers”—including Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker—in the aftermath of Roosevelt’s celebrated “Muckraking-Man” speech.
TO MCCLURE’S MATCHLESS TEAM OF journalists, the legislative record of the 59th Congress represented not a fait accompli, but the first successful skirmishes in a much larger war on the corrupt consolidation of wealth and power. “Signs everywhere now show a great moral awakening,” Baker told his father, “the cleaning out of rotten business & still more rotten politics. But we’ve only begun!” For the first time, Baker explained, “men were questioning the fundamentals of democracy, inquiring whether we truly had self-government in America, or whether it had been corrupted by selfish interests.” Most important, he continued, “this questioning came not alone from what one might call the working class,” but from middle America as well.
Investigative journalism, one historian has observed, had “assumed the proportions of a movement,” exerting an influence on the American consciousness “hardly less important than that of Theodore Roosevelt himself.” Magazines like McClure’s had become so politically significant that William Allen White quipped it was as if we had “Government by Magazine.” During these heady days, Finley Peter Dunne’s Irish bartender Mr. Dooley waxed poetic on the power of the printed word, noting that it had the strength “to make a star to shine on the lowliest brow” or to “blacken the fairest name in Christendom.” A mere three years before, Dooley explained, John D. Rockefeller had enjoyed the reputation of undiluted success and civic rectitude, until, “lo and behold, up in his path leaps a lady with a pen in hand and o
ff goes John D. for the tall timbers.” More astonishingly, Dooley marveled, the same few years had seen a work of fiction rout the beef trust, and Ray Baker’s lead pencil produce “a revolution” in Congress, and “when a state [wanted] to elect a governor or a city a mayor,” it turned not to professional politicians but to Lincoln Steffens. “Yes,” decried Mr. Dooley, “the hand that rocks the fountain pen is the hand that rules the world.”
To outsiders, the solidarity of McClure’s enterprise appeared impregnable. By 1906, Sam McClure was considered among the ten most important men in America. His gifted writers operated more like an intimate team, an extended family, than the staff of a magazine. For Ida Tarbell, now in her twelfth year at McClure’s, the magazine provided freedom, security, and comradeship. “Here was a group of people I could work with, without sacrifice or irritation,” Tarbell later reflected in her autobiography. “Here was a healthy growing undertaking which excited me, while it seemed to offer endless opportunity to contribute to the better thinking of the country.” Ray Baker felt the same way, recognizing the “rare group” McClure had assembled—all “genuinely absorbed in life, genuinely in earnest in their attitude toward it, and yet with humor, and yet with sympathy, and yet with tolerance.” The magazine was “a success,” Lincoln Steffens recalled. “We had circulation, revenue, power. In the building up of that triumph we had been happy, all of us; it was fun, the struggle.”
In the spring of 1906, however, just when “the future looked fair and permanent,” Ida reminisced, “the apparently solid creation was shattered and I found myself sitting on its ruins.” Ray Baker’s memoir registers similar grief and disbelief: “The institution that had seemed to me as permanent as anything could be in a transitory world—I mean McClure’s Magazine—seemed to be crumbling under my feet.” The schism that ended McClure’s glorious era shocked the publishing world and devastated the staff.
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 67
