Most Americans would be surprised to know that government meat inspection did not begin in 1906. The inspectors Holbrook cites 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 testimony before the House Agriculture Committee in June 1906 that not even one of those officials “ever registered any complaint or [gave] any public information with respect to the manner of the slaughtering or preparation of meat or food products.”
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.” If the packing plants were as bad as alleged in The Jungle, surely the government inspectors who never said so must be judged as guilty of neglect as the packers were of abuse.
Some two million visitors came to tour the stockyards and packinghouses of Chicago every year. Thousands of people worked in both. Why did it take a novel, written by an anti-capitalist ideologue who spent but a few weeks in the city, to unveil the real conditions to the American public? And why, to this day, do we not know the name of the men who supposedly fell into tanks and became “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard”? Didn’t one of their co-workers, friends or relatives ever come forward and ask, “Hey, what happened to Bob?”
All the big Chicago packers combined accounted for less than 50 percent of the meat products produced in the United States, but few if any charges were ever made against the sanitary conditions of the packinghouses of other cities. If the Chicago packers were guilty of anything like the terribly unsanitary conditions suggested by Sinclair, wouldn’t they be foolishly exposing themselves to devastating losses of market share?
In this connection, historians with an ideological axe to grind against the market usually ignore an authoritative 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 allegations, some of which they labeled as “willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,” “atrocious exaggeration,” and “not at all characteristic.”
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 meat-packing business and spent a grand total of two and a half weeks in the spring of 1906 investigating and preparing what turned out to be a carelessly written report with predetermined conclusions. Gabriel Kolko, a socialist but nonetheless a historian with a respect for facts, dismisses Sinclair as a propagandist and assails Neill and Reynolds as “two inexperienced Washington bureaucrats who freely admitted they knew nothing” of the meat-packing process. Their own subsequent testimony revealed that they had gone to Chicago with the intention of finding fault with industry practices so as to get a new inspection law passed.
According to the popular myth, there were no government inspectors before Congress acted in response to The Jungle, and the greedy meat packers fought federal inspection all the way. The truth is that not only did government inspection exist, but meat packers themselves supported it and were in the forefront of the effort to extend it so as to ensnare their smaller, unregulated competitors.
When the sensational accusations of The Jungle became worldwide news, foreign purchases of American meat were cut in half and the meat packers looked for new regulations to give their markets a calming sense of security. The only congressional hearings on what ultimately became the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 were held by Congressman James Wadsworth’s Agriculture Committee between June 6 and 11. A careful reading of the deliberations of the Wadsworth committee 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 rivals under controls, and put a newly laundered government seal of approval on their products, the major meat packers strongly endorsed 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 the competition, and another myth entered the annals of anti-market dogma.
To his credit, Sinclair actually opposed the law because he saw it for what it really was—a boon for the big meat packers. He had been a fool and a sucker who ended up being used by the very industry he hated. But then, there may not have been an industry that he didn’t hate.
Sinclair published more than 90 books before he died (at the age of 90) in 1968—King Coal, Oil!, The Profits of Religion, The Flivver King, Money Writes!, The Moneychangers, The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education, The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools, et cetera—but none came anywhere close to the fame of The Jungle. One (Dragon’s Teeth), about the Nazi rise to power, earned him a Pulitzer in 1942, but almost all the others were little-noticed and even poorly written class warfare screeds and shabby “exposés” of one industry or another. Many were commercial flops. Friend and fellow writer Sinclair Lewis took Sinclair to task for his numerous errors in a letter written to him in January 1928:
I did not want to say these unpleasant things, but you have written to me, asking my opinion, and I give it to you, flat. If you would get over two ideas—first that anyone who criticizes you is an evil and capitalist-controlled spy, and second that you have only to spend a few weeks on any subject to become a master of it—you might yet regain your now totally lost position as the leader of American socialistic journalism.
On three occasions, Sinclair’s radical socialism led him into electoral politics. Running on the Socialist Party ticket for a congressional seat in New Jersey in 1906, he captured a measly three percent of the vote. He didn’t fare much better as the Socialist candidate for governor of California in 1926. In 1934, however, he secured the nomination of the Democratic Party for the California governorship and shook up the political establishment with a program he called EPIC (“End Poverty in California”). With unemployment in excess of 20 percent and the state seething in discontent, most Californians still couldn’t stomach Sinclair’s penchant for goofy boondoggles and snake oil promises. Nonetheless, he garnered a very respectable 38 percent against the incumbent Republican Frank Merriman.
The EPIC platform is worth a mention, if only to underscore Sinclair’s lifelong, unshakeable fascination with crackpot central-planning contrivances. It called for a massive tax increase on corporations and utilities, huge public employment programs (he wanted to put the unemployed to work on farms seized by the state for failure to pay taxes), and the issuance of money-like “scrip” based on goods produced by state-employed workers. He thought the Depression was probably a permanent affliction of capitalism and seemed utterly unaware of the endless state interventions that had brought it on in the first place (see my “Great Myths of the Great Depression” at FEE.org).
Was Upton Sinclair a nincompoop? You decide. This much is clear: early in the 20th century, he cooked up a work of fiction as a device to help in his agitation for an economic system (socialism) that doesn’t work and that was already known not to work. For the next six decades he learned little if anything about economics, but he never relented in his support for discredited schemes to put big government in charge of other people’s lives.
Myths survive their makers. What you’ve just read about Sinclair and his myth is not at all “politically correct.” But defending the market from historical attack begins with explaining what really happened in our history. Those who persist in the shallow claim that The Jungle stands as a compelling indictment of the market should take a look at the history surrounding this honored novel. Upon inspection, there seems to be an unpleasant odor hovering over it.
(Editor’s Note: Versions of this essay have appeared in print in several places since 1994, notably in FEE’s ma
gazine, The Freeman, and Liberty magazine.)
SUMMARY
•Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, is treated by progressives as though it were a documentary, but it was nothing of the kind. It was a work of fiction, full of fabrications. Even Teddy Roosevelt said the author was “hysterical and untruthful.” Sinclair was hired to write it for the purpose of advancing socialism in America
•Government meat inspection existed before Sinclair’s book was ever written. If even a portion of what he wrote really described what was happening routinely in meatpacking plants, either the government inspectors were complicit or else they were inexcusably ignorant—neither of which makes for a strong case for new regulation
•In the end, the meat packers actually supported the Meat Inspection Act because it put the government seal of approval on their product and got the taxpayers to pay for it
#30
“CAPITALISM’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION CURSED THE WORLD WITH THE HORROR OF CHILD LABOR”
BY LAWRENCE W. REED
PROFOUND ECONOMIC CHANGES TOOK PLACE IN GREAT BRITAIN IN THE CENTURY after 1750. This was the age of the Industrial Revolution, complete with a cascade of technical innovations, a vast increase in production, a renaissance of world trade, and rapid growth of urban populations.
Where historians and other observers clash is in the interpretation of these great changes. Did they represent improvement to the citizens or did these events set them back? Perhaps no other issue within this realm has generated more intellectual heat than the one concerning the labor of children. Critics of capitalism have successfully cast this matter as an irrefutable indictment of the capitalist system as it was emerging in nineteenth-century Britain.
The many reports of poor working conditions and long hours of difficult toil make harrowing reading, to be sure. William Cooke Taylor wrote at the time about contemporary reformers who, witnessing children at work in factories, thought to themselves, “How much more delightful would have been the gambol of the free limbs on the hillside; the sight of the green mead with its spangles of buttercups and daisies; the song of the bird and the humming of the bee.” But as any honest historian will tell you, most children before the Industrial Revolution did not survive past the age of five; those who did went to work at an early age because productivity was so low that most parents couldn’t afford the children to be idle. In pre-capitalist, feudal times, passing a law to prevent children from working would have meant mass starvation.
Of those historians who have interpreted child labor in industrial Britain as a crime of capitalism, none have been more prominent than J. L. and Barbara Hammond. Their many works have been widely promoted as “authoritative” on the issue.
The Hammonds divided the factory children into two classes: “parish apprentice children” and “free labour children.” It is a distinction of enormous significance, though one the authors themselves failed utterly to appreciate. Having made the distinction, the Hammonds proceeded to treat the two classes as though no distinction between them existed at all. A deluge of false and misleading conclusions about capitalism and child labor has poured forth for years as a consequence.
“Free labour” children were those who lived at home but worked during the day in factories at the insistence of their parents or guardians. British historian E. P. Thompson, though generally critical of the factory system, nonetheless quite properly conceded that “it is perfectly true that the parents not only needed their children’s earnings, but expected them to work.”
Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist, put it well when he noted that the generally deplorable conditions extant for centuries before the Industrial Revolution, and the low levels of productivity that created them, caused families to embrace the new opportunities the factories represented: “It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchen and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.”
Private factory owners could not forcibly subjugate “free labour” children; they could not compel them to work in conditions their parents found unacceptable. The mass exodus from the continent to increasingly capitalist, industrial Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century strongly suggests that people did indeed find the industrial order an attractive alternative. And there’s no credible evidence suggesting that parents in these early capitalist days were any less caring of their offspring than those of pre-capitalist times.
The situation, however, was much different for “parish apprentice” children. Close examination reveals that the critics were focusing on these children when they spoke of the “evils” of capitalism’s Industrial Revolution. These youngsters, it turns out, were under the direct authority and supervision not of their parents in a free labor market, but of government officials. Most were orphans; a few were victims of negligent parents or parents whose health or lack of skills kept them from earning sufficient income to care for a family. All were in the custody of “parish authorities.” As the Hammonds themselves wrote, “[T]he first mills were placed on streams, and the necessary labour was provided by the importation of cartloads of pauper children from the workhouses of the big towns. . . . To the parish authorities, encumbered with great masses of unwanted children, the new cotton mills in Lancashire, Derby, and Notts were a godsend.”
Though consigned to the control of a government authority, these children are routinely held up as victims of capitalist greed. But as historian Robert Hessen writes, those very children “were sent into virtual slavery by a government body; they were deserted or orphaned pauper children who were legally under the custody of the poor-law officials in the parish, and who were bound by these officials into long terms of unpaid apprenticeship in return for bare subsistence.” Indeed, the first act in Britain that applied to factory children was passed to protect these very parish apprentices, not “free labour” children.
Though it is inaccurate to judge capitalism guilty of the sins of parish apprenticeship, it would also be inaccurate to assume that free labor children worked under ideal conditions in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. By today’s standards their situation was clearly bad. Such capitalist achievements as air conditioning and high levels of productivity would in time substantially ameliorate working conditions, however. The evidence in favor of capitalism is thus compellingly suggestive: From 1750 to 1850, when the population of Great Britain nearly tripled, the virtually exclusive choice of those flocking to the country for jobs was to work for private capitalists.
Conditions of employment and sanitation were best, as the Factory Commission of 1833 documented, in the larger and newer factories. The owners of these larger establishments, which were more easily and frequently subject to visitation and scrutiny by inspectors, increasingly chose to dismiss children from employment rather than be subjected to elaborate, arbitrary, and ever-changing rules on how they might run a factory employing youths. The result of legislative intervention was that these dismissed children, most of whom needed to work in order to survive, were forced to seek jobs in smaller, older, and more out-of-the-way places where sanitation, lighting, and safety were markedly inferior. Those who could not find new jobs were reduced to the status of their counterparts a hundred years before—that is, to irregular and grueling agricultural labor or, in the words of Mises, “to infest the country as vagabonds, beggars, tramps, robbers, and prostitutes.”
Child labor was relieved of its worst attributes not by legislative fiat but by the progressive march of an ever more productive capitalist system. Child labor was virtually eliminated when, for the first time in history, the productivity of parents in free labor markets rose to the point where it was no longer economically necessary for children to work to survive. The emancipators and benefactors of children were not legis
lators or factory inspectors but factory owners and financiers. Their efforts and investments in machinery led to a rise in real wages, to a growing abundance of goods at lower prices, and to an incomparable improvement in the general standard of living.
(Editor’s Note: This essay is condensed from one the author first published in 1976, entitled “Child Labor and the British Industrial Revolution,” available at Mackinac.org.
SUMMARY
•Children worked before the Industrial Revolution. It was the Industrial Revolution, in fact, which improved productivity so that eventually parents could earn enough to afford to leave their children at home
•In Britain, the distinction between “free labour” children and “parish apprentice” children must be understood. The latter were under the care of often indifferent government officials, and the result can hardly be laid at the exclusive doorstep of capitalism
#31
“LABOR UNIONS RAISE WAGES AND THE STANDARD OF LIVING”
BY HANS F. SENNHOLZ
TO BELIEVE THAT LABOR UNIONS ACTUALLY IMPROVE THE LOT OF WORKING PEOPLE is to suggest that the capitalist economy fails to provide fair wages and decent working conditions. It is to imply that a free economy does not work satisfactorily unless it is “fortified” by union activity and government intervention.
The truth is that the unhampered market society allocates to every member the undiminished fruits of his labor. It does so in all ages and societies where individual freedom and private property are safeguarded. (Editor’s Note: The process works faster and more efficiently in our high-tech, information age with a labor force more mobile than ever before but it worked in previous times too, so long as individuals were free to accept or reject the offers of employers, or to leave one employer and work either for another or for himself.)
Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism Page 12
