by Bee Wilson
The packers, it seemed, were engaged in outrageous profiteering. The Justice Department investigated, and in May 1902 Roosevelt ordered the attorney general to bring a bill against the meat packers in Chicago, accusing them of colluding to suppress competition in the sale of livestock and to fix the retail price of meat.142 The legal process was painfully slow; it would be 1905 before a judgement was reached. Roosevelt tried to hurry along his antimonopoly work by setting up a Bureau of Corporations in 1903 under James Garfield and getting it to investigate the Beef Trust; but to his disappointment, Garfield—who seems to have been “entertained too well at the Saddle and Sirloin Club in Packingtown” while making his inquiries—concluded that beef prices were “reasonable.”143
Meanwhile, the Beef Trust grew in power. In a series of articles for Everybody’s Magazine in August 1905, Charles Edward Russell called it “The Greatest Trust in the World” and complained that the Big Four Packers had a power greater “than in the history of men has been exercised by king, emperor, or irresponsible oligarchy.”144 Russell claimed that, by suppressing competition in the cattle market, the packers had caused ruin of many farmers and the failure of thirty-two banks.145
When The Jungle arrived on Roosevelt’s desk in early 1906, it provided the opportunity he had been waiting for. Only two years remained of Roosevelt’s second term as president, and if he was going to curtail the Beef Trust, he would have to act fast. The Jungle was the weapon he needed, but given its provenance it had to be carefully handled. It had certainly created the necessary public alarm to push through political change, selling 25,000 copies in just six weeks (and 100,000 by September). The trouble with The Jungle, from Roosevelt’s point of view, was twofold. First, he had to ascertain whether the shocking revelations it contained were true. Second, he had to do his best to ignore Upton Sinclair’s emotional brand of politics.
On 15 March 1906, Roosevelt wrote to Sinclair from Washington telling him that he had read “if not all, yet a good deal of your book” and asking him to visit in the first week of April. He then spent the bulk of the letter admonishing Sinclair for the foolishness of his socialism. “Personally, I think that one of the chief early effects of such attempt to put socialism . . . into practice, would be the elimination by starvation . . . of that same community on whose behalf socialism would be invoked.” He agreed with Sinclair that “radical action must be taken” against “the effects of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist” but could not bear what he perceived as Sinclair’s hysteria. “A quarter of a century’s hard work over what I may call politico-sociological problems had made me distrust men of hysterical temperament,” he insisted. Only at the very end of the letter, in a handwritten postscript, did he offer Sinclair the assurance he needed—“that the specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have power, be eradicated.”146
Sinclair went to Washington, as invited. He ate luncheon at the White House with Roosevelt and some members of his “tennis cabinet.” Sinclair found the president both appalling and amusing, and he was very struck by the way that he clenched his fist and shouted indiscreet abuse about his enemies, hitting “the table at every accented syllable.” Roosevelt for his part seemed to have been confirmed in his opinion of Sinclair as “hysterical, unbalanced and untruthful.” But no matter. This odd couple were together in the fight against the packers now. As Roosevelt wrote sometime later to a friend, “I could not afford to disregard ugly things that had been found out simply because I did not like the man who had helped in finding them out.”147
Roosevelt appointed two commissioners to go to Chicago and investigate the allegations in The Jungle. The commissioners—Charles P. Neill and James Bronson Reynolds—asked Sinclair to go with them, but he refused, sending two socialist friends in his place, Ella Reeve and Richard Bloor.148 Ella Reeve confirmed that “no words are adequate to paint the horrors of the packing houses.”149 In addition, she reported to Sinclair her fears that the official Neill–Reynolds report would be a whitewash. The commissioners were supposed to be operating in secret, but the packers soon rumbled them. On 10 April, the Chicago Tribune—a newspaper, needless to say, extremely favourable to the packers—ran the headline “PRESIDENT HUNTS IN ‘THE JUNGLE,’ ” claiming that Roosevelt’s commissioners had “failed to verify a single important statement made in the book.” It reported that the president was planning to “pillory the author of the book by holding him up to public disapproval.”150 Another article, the next day, claimed that The Jungle was “95 per cent lies.”151 In a state of high distress, Sinclair sent the president two letters and two telegrams protesting that Roosevelt had allowed “falsehoods to be telegraphed to the Chicago Tribune.” Roosevelt replied with typical bluff calmness, assuring Sinclair that there “has been no official whitewash or official anything sent out from Washington,” adding, in a postscript: “Really, Mr. Sinclair, you must keep your head.”152
A cartoon depicting Theodore Roosevelt and the great Meat Scandal of 1906.
Sure enough, when Neill and Reynolds did report back orally to the president in May on conditions in the Chicago stockyards, they confirmed most of the revolting truth of The Jungle. The only detail they could not corroborate, as Sinclair recalled, was “of men falling into vats and being rendered into pure leaf lard. There had been several cases, but always the packers had seen to it that the widows were returned to the old country.”153 Roosevelt and Sinclair held different opinions on what should be done with the report. Sinclair wanted it published. Roosevelt argued that going public would be pandering to “the apostles of sensationalism” and would damage honest ranchers and farmers “who have been guilty of no misconduct whatsoever” by lowering wholesale meat prices.154 Besides, holding the report back could be a useful political bargaining chip for Roosevelt. In May 1906, his colleague Senator Beveridge had introduced a meat inspection bill, and Roosevelt hoped to use the threat of releasing the report as a way of bringing the packers into line: it was “a club to force the passage of the bill.” Sinclair disagreed: “genuine reform” would only come from “enlightened public opinion.”155
In the end, they both had their way. Sinclair used the press to put pressure on Roosevelt to release the Neill–Reynolds report.156 And Roosevelt got his meat inspection bill, though not without a fight in Congress from meat interests. On 26 May, the Beveridge Meat Inspection Bill passed the Senate, requiring the inspection of all “cattle, sheep, swine and goats slaughtered for human consumption.” All carcasses found unfit to eat, and all artificially dyed meat, were to be destroyed. Anyone attempting to bribe inspectors could be fined up to ten thousand dollars. “The rendering of all fats into lard” was to be “closely supervised by employees of the Department”; no more human beings were to be turned into lard, was the subtext.157 The Washington Post reported that “Fifteen minutes before it was passed not a Senator would have admitted that the bill had a ghost of a chance to become a law—certainly not this session. Its passage is the direct consequence of the disclosures made in Upton Sinclair’s novel, ‘The Jungle.’ ”158 On 30 June, Roosevelt signed it into law.
For Sinclair himself, the Beveridge bill was hopelessly inadequate, “like plugging up one leak in a dam, and making a devil of a fuss about it and letting a dozen other leaks go unnoticed.” What was needed, he thought, was not just inspection but municipal slaughterhouses owned by the government, as in Europe, where the slaughterhouses were “as cleanly as modern hospitals, and not to be compared in any way with the filthy shambles we endure here.”159 This was typical Sinclair. Municipal slaughterhouses implied a radically different politics to that of Roosevelt’s America—a fundamentally different vision of how far the state should intervene in public health. Originally, municipal slaughterhouses were one of Napoleon’s great ideas, although the first public abattoirs in Paris only opened after his fall, in 1818.160 In Britain, municipal slaughterhouses sprang up in various cities— including Manchester and Glasgow—after the Pu
blic Health Act of 1875 and were associated with mild socialism of the Fabian variety:161 not the sort of thing that would recommend them to Congress.
Roosevelt, ever pragmatic, was more satisfied with the Beveridge bill. The meat inspection law was, in his words, an “important” remedy to the “scandalous abuses” of Packingtown. In his own Autobiography, he observed an interesting after-effect. “The big beef men bitterly opposed” the new law, yet three or four years later, “every honest man” in the beef business was in favour of the bill, discovering that it actually helped their business concerns rather than harming them.162 Tougher inspection, for those willing to accept it, was a route to greater revenue, not less. This would also be true of the new rules governing the labelling of food contained in the Pure Food and Drugs Act, brought into law that same summer’s day.
Honest Labels and Pure Ketchup
It was said of Harvey Washington Wiley that he was so unyielding in his hatred of mislabelled food that he would even object to lady finger biscuits unless it could be proved that they actually contained amputated female digits. Something of the same spirit animated the Pure Food Act of 1906. It was a law that placed a great emphasis on accurate labels. Twice as many regulations dealt with misbranding as with adulteration (fourteen as against seven).163 Primarily, these labelling clauses were there to protect the consumer. Regulation 17 forbade “false or misleading” labels; regulation 25 banned the substitution of a “recognized” substance for another unless it was stated on the label; regulation 26 insisted that when “refuse materials, fragments or trimmings” were used, they must be declared as such on the label. All of these requirements conformed to Wiley’s definition of purity in food. “I never used the word ‘purity’ except in one sense. A pure food is what it is represented to be.”164
There was, however, another dimension to these labelling regulations. As well as protecting the consumer, they sought to regulate trade practice; two aims that were not necessarily the same. Regulations 20, 21, and 27 dealt with products with “distinctive names,” stating that “a ‘distinctive name’ is a trade, arbitrary or fancy name which clearly distinguishes a food product, mixture or compound from any other food product, mixture or compound.”165 It was now illegal to sell counterfeit versions of these “distinctive name” products. This was no longer simply a question of selling margarine as “genuine butter” or potted pork as “chicken”; no longer a question of purity, in Wiley’s sense. It was about protecting the manufacturer’s trademark.
A commemorative stamp marking the anniversary of the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906.
Trademarks in the modern meaning only came into being in the 1870s. The idea was to give goods a brand equivalent to the old guild marks—a mark of quality that would offer assurance to the consumer and instil brand loyalty. Trademarks are designed to make you, the consumer, feel safe. Your feeling of safety matters to the manufacturer not for its own sake, though, but because it will make you buy more of the product, and possibly pay a higher price for it. Branded goods are there to make you feel you are not being swindled. Yet this in itself can become a kind of scam, as happened in the United States after 1906.
Though its ostensible purpose was to make food labels more accurate, the Pure Food and Drugs Act also made possible a new dimension to trademarking. To license a trademark in the United States, permission had to come from the patent commissioner, in the Department of Commerce. If you wanted to market Aunt Jemima’s pancake flour, say, or Campbell’s soup, or Brer Rabbit molasses, you needed to register the label with the Patent and Trademark Office. Hundreds of packers used the opportunity provided by the new law to apply to the patent commissioner to register labels containing the phrase “guaranteed under the Pure Food and Drug Act, June 30th 1906,” as if the government itself had overseen the creation of the food in the factories. Finally, in November 1908, the then commissioner of patents cracked down on this. From now on, he announced, he would license no more labels containing this phrase. The new law, he insisted, was not to be seen as a “warranty for purity.”166
But many food retailers had tried to do just that: use the new law as a warranty for purity, and thus turn it to profit. Wiley represented it as the triumph of government and science against the swindlers of big business, but the case was more complicated than this, as he well knew. It was true that those business interests whose livelihood was threatened by the pure food agenda protested loudly in the run-up to June 1906. Chief among these were the food processors who used chemical preservatives—such as fruit dryers, who relied on sulphur dioxide, or sellers of dried codfish, who coated their product with borax—and the whiskey rectifiers. As Wiley said, “rectifier” was a misnomer, since far from rectifying anything, the whiskey rectifiers actually made “crooked whiskey” from raw alcohol mixed with flavourings, colours, and “ageing oils” to make a very nasty substance look like fine old whiskey.167 In 1906, the rectifiers controlled 85–90 percent of all distilled spirits. Wiley was not himself a whiskey drinker, but he hated the deception involved. “A man is entitled . . . to get the character, quality and kind of material he asks for, and if you ask for whiskey you ought not to get a bottle of slush.”168 The congressman from Kentucky (a state where real whiskey was still made) agreed with Wiley, complaining that “the rectified stuff will eat the intestines out of a coyote.”169 It was inevitable that the whiskey rectifiers should have fought against the new law; and their fight paid off in part, given that the final bill, rather than banning rectified whiskey, only required it to be plainly labelled “compound,” “imitation,” or “blend.”170
Overall, however, there were probably more commercial interests who came out strongly in support of the bill than opposed it. “CANNERS FOR PURE FOOD read a headline in the New York Times on 16 February 1907, announcing that the National Association of Canners and Packers had declared in favour of the law.171 Once the bill was a reality, many in the food business recognized that, far from being threatened by it, they could make good money out of it. Even the swindlers of Packingtown spotted an opportunity. “PURE FOOD CENTRE OF THE WORLD,” trumpeted a long article in the Chicago Daily Tribune on 25 February 1907, the same paper that had slated Upton Sinclair only a year earlier. This has led some historians to see the bill as fundamentally corrupt—as a story of “business control over politics,” as Gabriel Kolko put it. For Kolko, the 1906 act was just an opportunity for the big food manufacturers trying to get a competitive advantage over their rivals.172 On this interpretation, the so-called progressives of the Roosevelt era were really conservatives in disguise, willing to protect big commercial interests at all costs. This is going too far. There were plenty of officials in Roosevelt’s government who recognized the need for better protection for consumers. Robert Allen, a government chemist, argued that better labelling of food was necessary because “when purchasers know where a product was made, when it was made and who made it, and are informed of the true nature and substance of the article offered for consumption, it is almost impossible to impose upon [even] the most ignorant and careless consumers.”173
But the new consumer awareness of pure food could certainly cut both ways. Not only might consumer interests be opposed to business interests, business might also exploit the need to allay consumer anxieties. This was shown most clearly in the case of one of the most famous of all American food brands, Heinz tomato ketchup. Around the turn of the twentieth century, almost all commercial ketchups were preserved with benzoic acid, a colourless and odourless antiseptic that is found in nature in cranberries. Nineteenth-century formulas for ketchup were thinnish and tomatoey, with much less sugar and vinegar than modern recipes. Ketchup manufacturers argued that a small amount of benzoic acid was necessary to stop the ketchup from going off after it was opened. G. F. Mason, for example, who worked as the manager of Henry J. Heinz’s research laboratory, found that when he tried to make benzoate-free ketchup, it blew the cork out of the bottle.174
Doubts were beginning to be raised
, though, about the safety of benzoates. In 1904, Wiley had tested benzoates on his poison squad and found symptoms ranging from sore throats to dizziness, weight loss, and severe stomach pains.175 Defenders of benzoic acid said that it was safe in small quantities—after all, the Lord himself put it in cranberries! Wiley was not convinced. The fact that the Lord put it in cranberries was neither here nor there. Cranberries were inedible in their natural state; anyway, “no chemist can ever imitate nature’s combinations.”176 Wiley disliked benzoic acid not just because it was harmful in itself but because it could be used to make ketchup out of inferior-quality tomatoes swept off the floor.
The question still remained, though, as to whether good commercial ketchup could be made without benzoates. Most ketchup manufacturers claimed that it was impossible. When they tried to make their existing recipes without the benzoate, the ketchup fermented soon after it was opened. Some of the fault for this, argued Wiley sternly, lay with sloppy consumers, who did not look after their ketchup bottles properly.
The habit of leaving a tomato ketchup bottle upon the table where the material adheres to the rim and becomes hardened to a gummy paste, serving as a pabulum for flies, does not appeal with any great force to the aesthetic sense relative to dining rooms. A ketchup bottle carefully opened and used in such a way as to avoid infection and then returned to the ice box can be kept for many days without danger of fermentation.177