The Letter that Told the President of the United States What to Do

Pseudonym here. I recently came across this letter to President Theodore from Upton Sinclair dated March 10, 1906, regarding the issue on how to handle federal government investigations in the food industry. This letter was the start of many more to come between the two. For the sake of saving space, I only enclosed the first page of the letter, but one can find the full letter in the National Archives and Records Administration. In the letter, Upton Sinclair describes how bribery is a common practice in the meat-packing industry and gives advice to President Roosevelt on how to solve this issue.

Sinclair adds in his letter on how an employee of Armour & Company, responded to his request to show another journalist, Ray Stannard Baker, around in the factory. Armour & Company is one of America’s meat-packing companies based in Chicago for those who don’t know what it is. The employee responded, “He will have to be well disguised, for 'the lid is on' in Packingtown; he will find two detectives in places where before there was only one.” Once The Jungle was published and read, a variety of journalists wanted to go undercover to discover what Sinclair had discovered. To assuage the public, Mr. Philip D. Armour, one of the founders of Armour & Company, stated in Saturday Evening Post, “In Armour and Company’s business not one atom of any condemned animal or carcass, finds its way, directly or indirectly, from any source, into any food product or food ingredient.” However, in the 6th page of his letter, Sinclair states he has a statement from a man named Thomas F. Dolan, who is now the head of the Boston & Maine News Bureau. Previously, he was the superintendent in Armour’s plant. Thomas Dolan states in his affidavit that he made “an oath to Armour’s custom of taking condemned meat out of the bottom of the tanks, into which they had been dropped with the idea of rendering them into fertilizer. It seems that the tanks are built with a false bottom, which lets down on a hinge; and that when you stand at the top and see the meat dropped in, you are flooded by blinding clouds of steam…” Armour & Company paid Dolan $5,000 to write another one contradicting himself, but Dolan took the money and published the whole story in the Evening Journal. Typical.

In the beginning of the letter, Sinclair tells Roosevelt how he is glad the Department of Agriculture has taken up the issue of inspecting, or, according to Sinclair, “lack of one,” in the food industry. During his own undercover investigation, Sinclair has seen inspectors leave the factories, their heads turned the other way with false assurance on the quality of the meat. In the letter, Sinclair states, “A man has to be something of a detective, or else intimate with the workingmen, as I was, before he can really see what is going on.” In order for a man to see what really is going on inside the factories, he has to spend time as one of the workmen and just be “one of the guys.” Sinclair suggested that Roosevelt find a man whose “intelligence and integrity” he trusts, send him to Sinclair, and disclose all the occurrences he saw happen inside the meat-packing factories. Then the said man should go to Chicago and enlist as a worker in one of the factories to experience first-hand what the other workers are going through. Figuratively speaking, of course, for one to feel the pain, he must experience the pain. I have to give props to Sinclair for him to be able to tell the President of the United States on what to do with his country.