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| The Meat Inspection Act |
Of Meat and Myth By Lawrence W. Reed @ Mackinack.org
http://www.mackinac.org/4084
Advocates of the spontaneous order of freedom and free markets are
forever stomping out the fires of fallacious reasoning, anti-capitalism
bias, and twisted history. It seems that as we set the record
straight, opponents of the market manage to pervert ten others.
We spend as much time explaining the workings of the
market as we do debunking myths and cliches about it. Statists and
interventionists spout an endless stream of put-downs and one-liners
that pass as thorough critiques of the market, each one requiring a
time-consuming, painstaking response and appeal to reason. We are
constantly rewriting prejudiced accounts of history to match what
really happened.
Almost one hundred years ago, muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair wrote a book titled
The Jungle that
wove a tale of greed and abuse that reverberates to this day as a
powerful case against laissez faire. Sinclair's focus of scorn was the
meat packing industry. The objective of his effort was government
regulation. The culmination of his work was the passage in 1906 of the
famed Meat Inspection Act, enshrined in most history books as a sacred
cow (excuse the pun) of the interventionist state.
Were Sinclair's allegations of a corrupt industry
foisting unhealthy products on an unsuspecting public really true? And
if so, should the free market stand forever indicted and convicted as a
result? A response from advocates of freedom is long overdue. Here's
a healthy start.
The Jungle was, first and foremost, a novel. It
was intended to be a polemic—a diatribe, if you will—and not a
well-researched and dispassionate documentary. Sinclair relied
heavily on both his own imagination and on the hearsay of others. He
did not even pretend to have actually witnessed the horrendous
conditions he ascribed to Chicago packinghouses, nor to have verified
them, nor to have derived them from any official records.
Sinclair hoped the book would ignite a powerful socialist
movement on behalf of America's workers. The public's attention was
directed instead to his fewer than a dozen pages of supposed
descriptions of unsanitary conditions in the meat packing plants. "I
aimed at the public's heart," he later wrote, "and by accident I hit it
in the stomach."
1
Though his novelized and sensational accusations prompted
later congressional investigations of the industry, the investigators
themselves expressed skepticism of Sinclair's integrity and credibility
as a source of information. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote of
Sinclair in a letter to William Allen White in July 1906, "I have an
utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful.
Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For
some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth."
2
Sinclair's fellow writer and philosophical intimate, Jack London, wrote this announcement of
The Jungle, a promo that was approved by Sinclair himself:
Dear Comrades: . . . The book we have been waiting for
these many years! It will open countless ears that have been deaf to
Socialism. It will make thousands of converts to our cause. It
depicts what our country really is, the home of oppression and
injustice, a nightmare of misery, an inferno of suffering, a human
hell, a jungle of wild beasts.
And take notice and remember, comrades, this book is
straight proletarian. It is written by an intellectual proletarian,
for the proletarian. It is to be published by a proletarian publishing
house. It is to be read by the proletariat. What Uncle Tom's Cabin did for the black slaves The Jungle has a large chance to do for the white slaves of today.3
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 over-stated
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
As popular myth would have it, there were no government inspectors before Congress acted in response to
The Jungle
and the greedy meat packers fought federal inspection all the way.
The truth is that not only did government inspection exist, but meat
packers themselves supported it and were in the forefront of the effort
to extend it!
When the sensational accusations of
The Jungle became
worldwide news, foreign purchases of American meat were cut in half
and the meatpackers looked for new regulations to give their markets a
calming sense of security. The only congressional hearings on what
ultimately became the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 were held by
Congressman James Wadsworth's Agriculture Committee between June 6 and
11. A careful reading of the deliberations of the Wadsworth committee
and the subsequent floor debate leads inexorably to one conclusion:
Knowing that a new law would allay public fears fanned by
The Jungle,
bring smaller competitors under regulation, and put a newly-laundered
government stamp of approval on their products, the major meat packers
strongly endorsed the proposed act and only quibbled over who should pay
for it.
In the end, Americans got a new federal meat inspection
law. The big packers got the taxpayers to pick up the entire $3 million
price tag for its implementation as well as new regulations on their
smaller competitors, and another myth entered the annals of anti-market
dogma.
To his credit, Upton Sinclair actually opposed the law
because he saw it for what it really was—a boon for the big meat
packers.
10 Far from a crusading and objective truth-seeker,
Sinclair was a fool and a sucker who ended up being used by the very
industry he hated.
Myths die hard. What you've just read is not at all
"politically correct." But defending the market from historical attack
begins with explaining what really happened. Those who persist in the
shallow claim that
The Jungle stands as a compelling indictment
of the market should clean up their act because upon inspection, there
seems to be an unpleasant odor hovering over it.
This essay originally appeared in the November 1994 issue of "The
Freeman," the journal of the Foundation for Economic Education, based in
Irvington, New York (www.fee.org). In his research for the article, he
was assisted by Dr. Timothy Nash of Northwood University and Justin
Marshall of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy staff.
1 Gabriel Kolko,
The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), p. 103.
2 Roosevelt to William Allen White, July 31, 1906, Elting E. Morison and John M. Blum, editors,
The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951-54), vol. 5, p. 340.
3 Mark Sullivan,
Our Times: The United States, 1900-1925; vol. 2:
America Finding Herself (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), p. 473.
4 Stewart H. Holbrook,
The Age of the Moguls (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1953), pp. 110-111.
5 U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture,
Hearings on the So-called "Beveridge Amendment" to the Agriculture Appropriation Bill, 59th Congress, 1st Session, 1906, p. 194.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., pp. 346-350.
8 Kolko, p. 105.
9 Hearings, p. 102.
10 Upton Sinclair, "The Condemned-Meat
Industry: A Reply to Mr. J. Ogden Armour," "Everybody's Magazine," XIV,
1906, pp. 612-613.
An Exchange On The Subject
The Question of
'NothingEverDies'
If competition takes care of quality, then why do we need the Meat Inspection Act?
Or laws against monopolies? Or monopsony power?
Riddle me that, Mr. Sheeple.
The Response by
'Asderathos'
You presume a need for something merely because we have it, without questioning as to how we got it!
The meat inspection act was a response to a socialist polemic written as fiction devoid of actual sources "by an intellectual proletarian, for the proletarian. It is to be published by a proletarian publishing house. It is to be read by the proletariat" -Upton Sinclair
Gabriel Kolko, a socialist Historian (no less), dismissed Sinclair as a propagandist and assailed inspectors Neill and Reynolds as "two inexperienced Washington bureaucrats who freely admitted they knew nothing" Their own 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.
The Meat industry was FOR the TAX PAYER FUNDED brand of approval which would cure the Damage (In Europe of the market for US Meat being cut in half) DIRECTLY CAUSED BY SINCLAIR's POLEMIC!!! that is why we HAVE the "Meat Inspection Act"; we Do Not Neeed It. This is the SAME THING That theChina Syndrom" did to Nuclear Power.
As a specific that was rather easy to explain "Monopoly Laws" are a little broader, "[Monopsony] Power" still more so
But I think the riddle is solved, go read Thomas Sowell.
