I-Search Paper (The Jungle)

Whenever you buy food at the grocery store, you might look at the packaging to see if it’s damaged, check the calories, or maybe the expiration date. Today we can pick up virtually anything off a grocery store shelf and know everything about it- if it’s organic, sustainably sourced, vegan, non-gmo, how many calories it has, when it expires… the list is endless. But imagine if, when you read the ingredients list, you had no idea if what it said was true? Imagine if there were no ingredients list at all? Or no expiration date? It would be a lot harder to shop consciously if you had no idea how safe the food was, where it came from, or what it was made of. I feel like we take advantage of our ability to go to the store and know everything is safe to eat

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This leads me to brainstorming my research topic. At this point, I was wondering when our food became so regulated. I remembered learning about how Upton Sinclair wrote the book The Jungle, which detailed grueling and unsanitary working conditions in meat packing plants. Upon the release of the novel, the public was outraged and disgusted by what they read, and the Meat Inspection Act was subsequently passed. In general, the topic interested me just because I wanted to know more about the gory details of the working conditions. But I also wanted to know more about the specific impact of the Jungle. Was legislature only passed to regulate meat packing plants? What about other parts of the food industry? When was the Food and Drug Administration founded? Were drugs underregulated at this time too? How much did The Jungle actually factor into the passing of this legislature? Condensing all these questions into something more succinct, my end result was this: What was Sinclair’s intended message when he wrote The Jungle, and what did its publishing actually result in? After I completed my research, I had the answers to all my questions, and more.

Initially I started research the way teachers always want you to: with the databases. I searched “food regulation” “Upton Sinclair” and “The Jungle”. I found a couple things, but nothing that related directly to my research question, or interested me enough to change it. Then I went to google, searching the same things. I found useful information, but no primary sources, except for a couple that were blocked by paywalls. I ended up doing what I always do, and consulted Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great because you can find a summary of lots of information on a topic, and once you want to know more on a piece you need, you can find the source and cite it in your paper. Also, chances are the source cited also has even more information to use than just the fragment you originally consulted it for. But since I needed to find primary sources for this assignment, I was concerned that my selection of usable sources would be a lot more narrow. But it exceeded expectations! Wikipedia provided a wide variety of sources from Sinclair’s era that were applicable to my question. However, Professor Klann reminded me that The Jungle would be one useful primary source, and, since I am writing about it after all, I started there.

When I searched for an online copy of The Jungle, I found that there is also an uncensored version. This immediately piqued my interest. Upon reading the first few pages, I learned that Sinclair struggled to get the book published. The more I read, I figured out why. Some parts were simply horrific and I had to take a break from reading. It did not come as a surprise when I read that over a third of his original book was cut before publishing because it was very graphic and depicted scenes of immigrant life deemed too “ethnic” for American readers (Sinclair & DeGrave 6). The novel was published in 1906, so there was ample tension regarding race and immigration, so it doesn’t surprise me that immigrant life was censored. It was also the Progressive Era, a time of social activism on topics addressed in this book. Roosevelt had coined the term muckraker to describe the journalists of this era who exposed corrupt institutions such as the meatpacking plants and advocated reform. Based on what I learned about Sinclair’s politics and uncensored subject matter of The Jungle, it’s clear that he wrote this The Jungle with a socialist lens, trying to expose the meatpacking industry for horrendous labor conditions. This answers the first half of my research question.

Pulling up The Jungle’s Wikipedia page, I searched for a primary source that could tell me more about the public’s reaction to the book, so I could answer the second half of my research question. I came across Our Times: America at the Birth of the Twentieth Century, a novel written by Mark Sullivan, a journalist and contemporary of Sinclair’s. It was just what I was looking for! In the chapter “The Crusade for Pure Food”, Sullivan writes “Sinclair complained that he had wished to appeal to the hearts of people, but had only succeeded in reaching their stomachs. ‘I realized with bitterness that I had been made a ‘celebrity,’ not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef.’” Sullivan then goes on to quote a citizen by the name of Mr. Dooley. “‘Dear, oh dear, I haven’t been able to eat anything more nourishin’ thin a cucumber in a week…. A little while ago no wan cud square away at a beefsteak with better grace thin mesilf. To-day th’ wurrud restaurant makes me green in the face,’” (Sullivan 223). This clearly illustrates the disjunction between Sinclair’s original message and the typical interpretation of the novel by the average American reader.

While researching this topic I learned a lot, since I went through many sources before settling on the ones I used. For example, I learned that Roosevelt had to send investigators in disguise in order to see the true conditions of the plants, because when the owners knew they were being inspected, they cleaned up their act for one day in order to evade suspicion. I learned that The Jungle is pretty much directly responsible for the founding of the Food and Drug Administration. I learned that The Jungle was a critique of capitalism and the reality of what it was like to pursue American dream first and foremost. And lastly, I learned that before the Meat Inspection Act, spoiled butter was bleached and mixed in with the new, sausage was made with rats and sawdust, and goat meat was chemically treated and relabeled as mutton!

When it comes to doing historical research, I realized that primary sources are the gold mines of information on a topic. I’m used to using articles and textbooks for research but there’s so much more detail from primary sources, especially because you know nothing was cut or paraphrased or misinterpreted by someone else. The research process changed my understanding because I did not realize that Sinclair’s plans for The Jungle were so disjointed from the public reaction and subsequent legislation that resulted from it. Yes, its impact was huge but not in the way he ever could have imagined.

My research did shape my question a little bit because I initially had a more closed, simple question and I changed it to be more open ended. This way I could work with the information I came across and not have to search so hard for something really specific. In closing, Upton Sinclair was a muckraker socialist who wanted to make change in the Progressive Era. He wrote The Jungle to criticize the treatment of immigrants and the working class, the reality of pursuing the American dream, and the corruption of capitalism. It even ends with strong socialist propaganda. But the average American did not want justice for the workers, they wanted better standards for the food they were being sold. This public uproar led to the passing of the Meat Inspection Act, the Food and Drug Act, and the formation of the Food and Drug Administration. So, no, the socialist revolution Sinclair originally hoped to spark with his novel never came to fruition, but at least we now have the luxury of knowing our food is safe to eat.

Source 1: Sinclair, Upton and Degrave, Kathleen. The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition.

Source 2: Sullivan, Mark. Our Times: America at the Birth of the Twentieth Century .