Eleven score and ten years ago today, a formal declaration was ratified by the Continental Congress that began the imperfect continuing experiment in democracy that is our United States.

At three different points in U.S. history, Congress has passed laws restricting the ability of citizens to criticize the government generally, or criticize the Congress and the President specifically. Congress also passed laws allowing the President to deport aliens in times of peace and war if the President considers them dangerous, a move that was and is considered to have been politically motivated.

One hundred years ago, corporate conglomerates operated slaughterhouses with no thought given to the health and safety of workers or consumers. Newspapers praised the efficiency of the slaughterhouses and railed against unions, blaming the unions alone for violent conflicts during strikes. Businesses blacklisted prominent union members and worked employees, some of them children, for long hours and low wages. The slaughterhouses continuously increased the speed of their operations despite the parallel increase in worker injuries, employed undocumented alien workers, and placed production quantity and profitability ahead of the interests of the consumers.

Today, the country celebrates the anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. The United States no longer is a minor world player but is at the forefront of the global stage. The Government still curbs freedom of expression and restricts access to information, and when certain activities are revealed to the public there are politicians who call the action treasonous. There still are unresolved foreign threats to the country. Slaughterhouse owners continue to create unsafe working conditions that result in numerous workplace injuries and continue to put production and profitability ahead of the health of the public.

All of this is to say the issues that faced our country in the past still are relevant today and bear continued examination. Covering global political issues is somewhat beyond the scope of this blog (unless the issues relate to food), but global politics were at the heart of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle when it appeared first in a magazine in installments and then, in 1906, in book form. The primary message of the book is strong in the “uncensored” edition (there is scholarly debate about which version Sinclair intended for publication), and that message is one of Socialism. Sinclair missed his target, the emancipation of workers from the wage system, and hit another target that was more important to the public: their stomachs.

I chose this particular version not because of the claim to authenticity but because the Foreword and Introduction promised a story more lurid that the official version, replete with graphic descriptions of ears being rubbed off and vivid depictions of why the working poor were so miserable, not just that they were miserable. Sinclair wrote during an era known for its Yellow journalism and his work is marked by that heavy-handed style. Yet, just as Hearst is alleged to have taken the facts and furnished a war, Sinclair took the experiences of the workers in the stockyards and slaughterhouses and produced a violent reaction of his own. The result, the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts of 1906 and the founding of the Food and Drug Administration, established the current system of food inspection.

Reading The Jungle, it is clear why the national and international public were concerned about the quality of U.S. meat. Sinclair subtly begins by comparing the workers to the meat that they make.

The men and women who work in this department were precisely the color of the “fresh country sausage” they made.

He also compares the workers to the animals they slaughter, which probably caused more concern among readers for their food than sympathy for the men and women in the slaughterhouses.

Once or twice in these outbreaks he caught Ona’s eye, and it seemed to him like the eye of a hunted animal; there were broken phrases of anguish and despair now and then amid her frantic weeping.

Later in the book, he states that pieces of workers severed by spinning knives were allowed to fall into the sausage vats, and he makes much of the fact that the workers themselves will not eat certain products that come from the slaughterhouses. One of the outrageous claims that came from the book was that an abandoned baby would have been turned into meat products had someone not heard its cries.

Sinclair gives ample consideration to how slaughterhouses mask spoilage, a tactic that still exists in different forms today.

[T]here would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the frugal packers had a second and much stronger pickle [pickling solution] which destroyed the odor–a process known to the works as “giving them thirty per cent.”

This sounds like the process noted by Consumer Reports of using carbon monoxide to mask the discoloration of spoiled meat, and the practice noted in Fast Food Nation of mixing spoiled ground beef with good ground beef. Although the book openly repulses consumers with the descriptions of their food, it also aims to reduce the workers and the consumers to food. This passage was not published in the original book, but its message is found throughout the novel.

Jurgis recollected how, when he had first come to Packingtown, he had stood and watched the hog-killing, and thought how cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just what he had been–one of the packers’ hogs! Labor was their hog, and the public was their hog, and they themselves were the biggest hogs of all.

Consumption is all-encompassing. If we do not pay attention to what we consume, we will descend into a mindless consumption. Sinclair calls the workers and public and conglomerates “hogs”, but a more apt term is locusts.

A friend with an MBA, G., likes to point out that a company must think about the long-term benefit to the company, and not just the short-term profit. Companies that do not look to the long run will not be around for the long run. Sinclair identifies this as a problem with the meat packers and other companies of his era.

[It] was the incarnation of blind and insensate Greed, and it was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs….

Sinclair likens Capitalism to a pirate on the ocean of commerce and accuses Capitalism of having declared war on civilization. I have often heard it stated that the Mafia and piracy are the purest forms of Capitalism, but the issue that we as citizens turn to time and again is not the purity of Capitalism but how it and commerce integrate into society. The meat industry looked to the future and realized that something must be done to salvage their image and their sales, which dropped rapidly especially in overseas markets. Their lobbying brought about the bureaucratic inspection regime that is the bane of small producers and the disappointment of the informed public. Sinclair singles out the inspectors for criticism in his book, claiming that they were in cahoots with the meat packers and all too willing to look the other way when a bad piece of meat came down the line. While such corruption may or may not be widespread today, what is certain is that shortages of meat inspectors endanger the public’s welfare as much as the foul practices of a century ago.

Sinclair opposed the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts because they did not address the societal ills that were his concern. It is ironic, then, that Sinclair held great faith in the beneficient nature of automation.

To picture the great potato-digging machine, run by electricity, perhaps, and moving across a thousand-acre field, scooping up earth and potatoes, and dropping the latter into sacks! … To picture the harvest-fields of the future, to which millions of happy men and women come for a summer holiday, brought by special trains, the exactly needful number to each place

The same view of automation as savior led to the implementation of antibiotic regimes and grain feeding to produce animals of uniform size and shape that could be slaughtered and butchered using automatic methods. At one point, the workers who slaughtered and butchered animals were considered skilled laborers and were paid high wages for their work. As animals were bred with standard characteristics, the skills of workers were replaced by machines. Unskilled, low-paid labor now is the rule in slaughterhouses, and it still is common for slaughterhouses to ship in illegal immigrants and pay them less than a living wage.

Sinclair should be forgiven for the histrionic quirks of his writing and for his earnest faith in Socialism and automation. It would be another 30 years until a Socialist nation had risen to power and it’s leader, Stalin, directed the destruction of millions of the USSR’s peoples in the push toward industrialization. Sinclair would not live to see the full revelation of Stalin’s crimes. (Sinclair died on the date of my birth, missing out on a number of wonderful things.)

Vigilance is a small price to pay, whether for the safety of our food, or for the hard-won liberties that are threatened by those who do not enjoy those liberties and by those who misguidedly seek to protect liberty by taking it away.