President Picks Up Where ‘The Jungle’ Author Sinclair Left Off in 1906

Many years after he wrote his best-selling novel “The Jungle,” social reformer Upton Sinclair observed: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

The blow to the public’s stomach was so acute in 1906 that Congress enacted its first pure-food laws and meat inspection system. The power of Sinclair’s novel was recalled Saturday when President Clinton, alluding to the era of muckrakers like Sinclair, announced what he described as the first major changes to the meat inspection system since those days.

The novel narrated the story of an immigrant family that worked in the Chicago stockyards. While evoking pity for the family, the book shocked readers far more with its description of the filth in the meatpacking plants.

“There never was the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage,” the 27-year-old Sinclair wrote then. “ . . . There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about it. . . . . These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poison bread out for them, they would die, and then rats, bread and meat would go into the hoppers together.”

Sinclair, who died in 1968 at the age of 90, wrote more than 80 books, mostly novels on social issues. He ran for governor of California on the ticket of his socialist End Poverty in California (EPIC) Party in 1934, and came close to winning. In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel “Dragon’s Teeth.”

For some time now, Clinton has sounded a little like a follower of the Sinclair tradition in his discussions of contaminated meat. He has not disputed that meat is generally safe in the United States. But in a radio address more than a year ago, Clinton told Americans:

“The federal government has been investigating meat the same old way since the turn of the century. Believe it or not, inspectors basically use the same method to inspect meat that dogs use. They touch it and smell it to see if it’s safe--instead of using microscopes and high technology. That’s crazy.”