The Role Of Public Outcry In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

Upton’s Sinclair’s earth-shattering novel, The Jungle, includes a moment of reckoning by its protagonist, Jurgis: “The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie” (85). What Jurgis and his family find is a system, meat production, that is only out to make a profit with little regard to humans or animals. The novel created waves in the years after its 1906 publication. Due to the journalistic nature of the work, and its very revealing look at the actual production of meat in Chicago, the public outcry was harsh. The book played a pivotal role in the passing of a “pure-food-and-drug bill”. It was used by President Roosevelt to influence the House of Representatives (then heavily lobbied by the meat-packing industry) to not diminish the strength of the bill (Cherny). …show more content…
The Bush administration eroded that progress, a process Republicans started under Reagan, slashing the amount of food inspectors and placing a former cattle industry lobbyist at the helm of the Agriculture Department. This weakening of food regulations became apparent in the 2007 E. coli outbreak. Spinach became contaminated with E. coli when exposed to cattle farming waste. The outbreak killed three and injured over 200 in 26 states. Food regulations had been so weakened that the unsafe cattle farming was not properly inspected and early knowledge of the bacteria was not reported. The meat industry has set itself up as the gold-standard for production, but much like Sinclair prophesied, their methods of production are solely based on money not