The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was an attempt to regulate the meatpacking industry and to assure consumers that the meat they were eating was safe. By 1900, industrialization had changed food production in the United States. Throughout much of history, ordinary people either raised and slaughtered their own meat or purchased it from local butchers. As the nation became more urban and industrial, however, a national meatpacking industry emerged to capture the market. By 1900, livestock was being raised on large-scale farms and ranches and driven to centralized slaughterhouses in Kansas City and Chicago. Once slaughtered, the livestock was then divided into various cuts of beef and pork, and shipped across the country on refrigerated railroad cars. Mass production and the assembly line were introduced into meatpacking, and livestock was brought to slaughterhouse employees by conveyor belts. As the meatpacking industry changed, giant corporations such as Armour, Wilson, and Swift quickly came to dominate the industry. These large-scale producers attempted to maximize profits by introducing technological changes to increase efficiency and by pushing employers to work more quickly.
Working conditions and the cleanliness of the industry deteriorated as meatpacking companies attempted to increase profits at a time when food prices were steadily declining. Those calling for closer scrutiny of the food processing industry included the American Medical Association and journalists Samuel Hopkins Adams and Upton Sinclair. In 1904, Sinclair published a series of articles in McClure’s magazine exposing hazards facing slaughterhouse workers and the unsanitary conditions in the stockyards of Chicago. Later that year, he published The Jungle (1906), a novel based on his research. The conditions of the Chicago stockyards horrified consumers across the country and led to demands that the government take action to ensure the quality and purity of the nation’s meat supply.
Ironically, Sinclair had focused his attention on the hazardous working and living conditions of slaughterhouse employees. The public turned out to be more concerned about the food they were eating. Pressure on the federal government mounted. The Neill-Reynolds report, a Department of Agriculture inquiry into the working conditions and sanitation of the industry, convinced many politicians of the need to act. The proposed legislation, however, was not without its critics. Conservatives in Congress, including Speaker of the House JosEPH Cannon, argued that the Constitution did not grant the federal government the authority to regulate industry. The meatpacking industry lobbied aggressively to get the legislation blocked. Public concern, however, convinced President Theodore Roosevelt and progressive congressmen of the need to act. The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act were both passed in 1906. Concluding that distribution of meat constituted interstate commerce and hence fell under federal jurisdiction, Congress prohibited the sale of tainted meat and authorized the Department of Agriculture to investigate meatpacking plants. The momentum generated by the passage of the Meat Inspection Act helped secure the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which had been stalled in Congress since 1905. With these two pieces of legislation, the federal government took important steps to assure the public that the food they were eating met minimum safety standards and, in the process, restored public confidence.
Further reading: Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991).
—Robert Gordon
World History
