"The Jungle"'s fictitious characters tell of men falling into tanks in meat packing plants and being ground up with animal parts, then made into "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard." Historian Stewart H. Holbrook writes, "The grunts, the groans, the agonized squeals of animals being butchered, the rivers of blood, the steaming masses of intestines, the various stenches . . . were displayed along with the corruption of government inspectors"4 and, of course, the callous greed of the ruthless packers.
Most Americans would be surprised to know that government meat inspection did not begin in 1906. The inspectors Holbrook refers to 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."5
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."6 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 is it that it took a novel written by an anti-capitalist ideologue who spent but a few weeks there to unveil the real conditions to the American public?
All of the big Chicago packers combined accounted for less than 50 percent of the meat products produced in the United States; 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?
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."7
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 one-half weeks in the spring of 1906 investigating and preparing what turned out to be a carelessly written report with preconceived conclusions. Gabriel Kolko, a socialist but nonetheless an 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"8 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.9
