Sinclair had intended to expose the horrible conditions faced by immigrants as the tried to survive in Chicago's Meat-Packing District in his 1904 novel, The Jungle. While he did an admirable job of showing the unfair labor, housing, and economic conditions in Packingtown he did an even better job describing the horrible conditions which America's meat was produced. His descriptions of the filthy and unsavory additions to sausage and other meat products woke up politicians to the problem, including President Theodore Roosevelt.
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'The Purpose of Upton Sinclair's Novel The Jungle'
The Jungle is directly credited with helping to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act as well as The Meat Inspection Act in 1906. Examples on how truly horrific meat packing plants in Chicago really were. The main protagonist of the novel, Jurgis, saw men in the picking room with skin diseases. Men who used knives on the sped-up assembly lines frequently lost fingers. Men who hauled approximately 100-pound hunks of meat crippled their backs. To where workers with tuberculosis coughing constantly and spit blood on the floor. And right next to where the meat was being processed, workers often used primitive toilets without any access to soap and water to clean their hands. In some areas, no toilets existed, and workers would occasionally urinate in a corner. Lunchrooms were pretty scarce at the time and often rare, so much so that workers ate where the worked.
Following along through the novel, Jurgis suffered a series of heart-wrenching misfortunes that began when he injured his foot on the assembly line. And the aftermath of it all resulted to ‘no workers compensation’ being around the time, as well as the employer not claiming responsibility for Jurgis being injured on the job. Due to this Jurgis’s life fell apart, eventually losing his family, home and job. Do to the revolting nature of meat processing companies; the passage of The Meat Inspection Act opened the way for Congress to approve a long-blocked law to regulate the sale of most other foods and drugs.
