The Jungle: Upton Sinclair's Roar Is Even Louder to Animal Advocates Today

By Bernard Unti 

On February 18, 1906, amidst a flurry of publicity, Doubleday and Page released Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, a scathing indictment of one of America's most powerful industries—meatpacking—replete with descriptions of the dehumanizing conditions of labor, the unsanitary environment, and the methodical heartlessness of industrial slaughter.

One hundred years later, The Jungle is still read in countless high school and university classes in the United States because of its relationship to several quintessential reforms of the Progressive era. Sinclair had hoped his book would embolden packinghouse laborers in their efforts to unionize and gain improved conditions, while attracting the sympathy of middle class Americans to the workers' plight. Instead, The Jungle prompted the passage of two legislative landmarks marking the emergence of the modern regulatory state—the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act—and the development of a bureaucratic apparatus meant to ensure the safety of the nation's food supply. The swift ratification of the two acts, both signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt on June 30, 1906, suggested that it was the quality of the meat that mattered, not the treatment of workers—or animals.

Nowadays, there is greater sensitivity and disquiet concerning the experience of animals at slaughter, and in the modern context, Sinclair's depiction of the crude, furious process of disassembly that turned animals into food—much of it related in the context of a public tour of the turn-of-the-century slaughterhouse—remains a compelling read. It doesn't matter that Sinclair wasn't seeking to win support for more humane slaughtering practices. As a frame of reference for current debates over meat production, and its impact upon humans and animals, the influence of The Jungle endures. If anything, Sinclair's narrative resonates stronger than ever as a censure of the slaughtering industry's perpetual desire for higher production and higher profits at the expense of workers' interests and animal welfare.

Animals on the Killing Floor

Literary scholars sometimes disparage The Jungle as a melodramatic work, yet there is a stark realism to Sinclair's account of the slaughtering process. The reader's introduction to the slaughterhouse's deadly efficiency comes through Sinclair's description of a guided tour of one giant facility at Chicago's Union Stockyards. Of the enormous wheel, hook, and trolley system used to handle and slaughter pigs, he wrote, "Once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing down the room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy—and squealing."

"One by one," Sinclair continued, "they hooked up the hogs, and one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long line of hogs, with squeals and life-blood ebbing away together; until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water."

Sinclair departs from his clinical description to express a deep sympathy with the doomed animals. "It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter of fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests—and so perfectly within their rights. They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense at apology, without the homage of a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering-machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and out of memory." 

Later on, Sinclair described the methods of the "knockers," who used poleaxes to stun larger cattle before hoisting: "[T]he creatures were prisoned, each in a separate pen, by gates that shut, leaving them no room to turn around; and while they stood bellowing and plunging, over the top of the pen there leaned one of the 'knockers,' armed with a sledge-hammer, and watching for a chance to deal a blow. The room echoed with the thuds in quick succession, and the stamping and kicking of the steers. The instant the animal had fallen, the 'knocker' passed on to another; while a second man raised a lever, and the side of the pen was raised, and the animal, still kicking and struggling, slid out to the 'killing-bed.' Here a man put shackles about one leg, and pressed another lever, and the body was jerked up into the air. There were fifteen or twenty such pens, and it was a matter of only a couple of minutes to knock fifteen or twenty cattle and roll them out. Then once more the gates were opened, and another lot rushed in."

Sinclair's discussion of the "knocking" pens reflects the status quo between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries. For many decades more, the poleaxe would be the target of humane advocates' attention and a driving force for humane slaughter legislation. It was eliminated by enactments in the United Kingdom in 1933 and in the United States in 1958.

Today, with demonstrated links between Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or "mad cow" disease) and the meat industry's continued use of sick and injured animals, it is remarkable to learn that Progressive era America had its own concern about "downers"—the sick, disabled, and wounded animals unable to move on their own accord. 

"It was late, almost dark," Sinclair wrote, "and the government inspectors had all gone, and there were only a dozen or two of men on the floor. That day they had killed about four thousand cattle, and these cattle had come in freight trains from far states, and some of them had got hurt. There were some with broken legs, and some with gored sides; there were some that had died, from what cause no one could say; and they were all to be disposed of, here in darkness and silence. 'Downers,' the men called them; and the packing-house had a special elevator upon which they were raised to the killing-beds, where the gang proceeded to handle them, with an air of businesslike nonchalance which said plainer than any words that it was a matter of everyday routine. It took a couple of hours to get them out of the way."

 "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

President Theodore Roosevelt, who received Sinclair at the White House not long after The Jungle appeared, had no patience with the political convictions of the 26-year old romantic socialist. For some time, however, Roosevelt—now in the middle of his second term—had been contemplating approaches to regulation of the meat industry and other large concerns. With 100 letters a day coming in about The Jungle, the president perceived a problem that could not be ignored and an opportunity to do something about it.    

In the contentious debates that ensued, investigators confirmed Sinclair's assertions that the methods of handling and preparing meat products were unsanitary and dangerous, that some packing establishments were perpetually dirty and disease-ridden, that a traffic existed in questionable meats, that tuberculosis existed at an alarming rate amongst packinghouse employees, that inspection was inadequate, and that conditions in the plants and stockyards constituted a menace to public health. Despite Sinclair's continued attempts to make a case for improving the lot of immigrant workers, however, the president and the U. S. Congress focused their energies on legislation that would quell middle class concerns about the integrity of the American food supply. 

The main feature of the Meat Inspection Act was a permanent base of funds to prohibit from interstate and foreign commerce "meat and meat food products which [were] unsound, unwholesome, or otherwise unfit for human food." U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors were to oversee all meat processed in the nation's slaughtering, packing, and canning plants, with antemortem and postmortem examination of cattle, sheep, swine, and goats. Destruction of carcasses unfit for food purposes had to be done in the presence of inspectors, who had to have full access to all zones at "all times, by day or night." The Department of Agriculture was also responsible for the inspection of processed products, and charged with regulating hygienic conditions in plants.

The Food and Drug Act had a broader purpose of regulating a range of products destined for human consumption. But it specifically advanced the goal of safeguarding the meat supply by defining as adulterated all food substances comprised "in whole or in part of a filthy, decomposed, or putrid animal or vegetable substance, or any portion of an animal unfit for food, whether manufactured or not."

The true nature of these enactments has been the subject of vigorous historical debate. Did they comprise reforms of a truly progressive nature, or were they watered-down measures written to satisfy the very industries being regulated? Sinclair's ambivalence was clear. In The Brass Check (1919), he wrote, "The lobbyists of the packers had their way in Washington; the meat inspection bill was deprived of all its sharpest teeth, and in that form Roosevelt accepted it and prepared to let the subject drop." Of his own legacy, Sinclair wryly observed, "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

Slaughterhouse Reform in the Progressive Era

When The Jungle appeared, humane advocates had been advancing the case for reform in transport, handling, and slaughter of animals for several generations. In general, they made greater headway in dealing with livestock transportation, securing the Twenty-Eight Hour Law (1873)—whose current obsolescence was recently challenged in a rulemaking petition—than they did with the cruelties of slaughter.

Nevertheless, slaughter remained an important concern of animal protection leaders in the early 20th century, who focused their energies on direct negotiations with executives and engineers associated with the great meat factories of Chicago and other cities, seeking the introduction of humane stunners and related equipment. It was the same strategy that guided their work on cattle transportation, which involved direct negotiations with railroad interests.

At that time, animal protection was a middle-class movement with no special concern for the immigrant or the worker. Only rarely did animal protectionists condemn the poor wages, long hours, and hazards that plagued the laborers who worked in meatpacking. Perhaps because of this blind spot, few animal advocates sought to capitalize on the publicity that attended The Jungle. 

The argument that suffering rendered the flesh of animals unfit for consumption, however, had long been an important part of the case for improved treatment. Throughout the animal protection movement's history, advocates have argued that humane handling, transportation, and slaughter would ensure a better meat product in the end. In the years following the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, humane advocates persevered in their attacks on the diseased character of meat coming from a system whose cruelties they hoped to reform. In 1910, medical doctor Albert Leffingwell published a post-Jungle indictment, American Meat, in which he argued that there was a high rate of disease in cattle and that, government inspection notwithstanding, vast quantities of diseased meat continued to pass into the food supply.   

Leffingwell, who toured a number of Chicago slaughtering facilities as he prepared his book, also observed that, despite obvious attempts to address some of the sanitary concerns Sinclair's indictment had exposed, "One great evil of the former system, which in many respects does not appear to have been reformed in any notable degree, is the hideous cruelty to living animals, occasioned by the haste with which every operation pertaining to slaughter is carried on."

The Contemporary Landscape of The Jungle

A century after Sinclair wrote his polemic, the meatpacking industry remains a flashpoint for disputes over worker safety, low wages, public health, community quality-of-life, and cruelty to animals. The landscape has evolved over time and looks somewhat different than it did in Sinclair's day, but it is still a jungle out there. 

By the mid-20th century, for example, after decades of struggle, the union movement had secured meaningful gains to protect workers in the packinghouse industry. After the unions' precipitous decline in influence in the 1980s, however, meatpacking once again began to cut wages and to rely heavily upon a deunionized labor force composed of vulnerable immigrants. 

In a significant change from Sinclair's time, the great slaughtering facilities are not in urban areas but in rural communities, where union influence is especially weak. Instead of the Eastern European immigrants whose exploitation Sinclair chronicled, today's packers employ Southeast Asians and transient, often undocumented migrant workers from Mexico, Central, and South America, and hard-pressed native-born workers from the Midwest, southeast, and southwest. The industry's immigrant labor strategy has created serious burdens upon housing, school, health care, and other social services in America's heartland, exacerbating the problem of rural poverty.

One thing that hasn't changed is the status of meatpacking as a hazardous occupation. With rapidly increasing line speeds resulting in a high rate of crippling injuries, repetitive motion disorders, and stress-related ailments, it is widely considered, as one journalist put it several years ago, "the most dangerous job in America." Unfortunately, too, deregulation and budget cuts have eroded the capacity of government agencies to do much about threats to worker safety.

For the animals, of course, things have gotten much worse. Chickens, turkeys, and other birds, who comprise more than 95% of the animals used for food in the United States, aren't given any protection under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. Each year, nearly nine billion birds are shackled, cut with blades, and immersed in scald tanks—without being rendered insensible to pain. In the case of covered species, there are serious doubts about the effectiveness of the inspection system. And in the era of mad cow disease, our nation's temporary "downer" policy not only excludes certain species, but even in the case of cattle, it is just a pen stroke away from being overturned.

It must be admitted too, that while the humanity of the methods by which animals are dispatched is still a priority, intensive confinement practices, which did not exist in Sinclair's time, have shifted the focus of humane advocates away from slaughter to a greater arena of animal suffering. Today, the miseries of the battery cage, the veal crate, or the gestation crate have in some respects transformed the moment of slaughter into an occasion of release from suffering. 

Whatever the flaws of The Jungle as a literary work, and whatever the changes that have ensued since its publication, Sinclair's novel continues to haunt the industry upon which he trained his pen a century ago. The Jungle still has extraordinary metaphorical power in discussions of meatpacking, slaughter, and industrial animal husbandry. It always will.

Bernard Unti, senior policy adviser and special assistant to the president, received his doctorate in U.S. history in 2002 from American University. His book, Protecting All Animals: A Fifty-Year History of The Humane Society of the United States, is available from Humane Society Press.

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