'The Jungle' is Published

On this day in 1905, a year before book publication, the first installment of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle appeared in The Appeal to Reason. The socialist newspaper had commissioned the work, hoping to get what Sinclair delivered — a sensational exposé novel about life on the meatpacking “disassembly line.” There was a public outcry over the reports of sausages made from diseased meat, of dead rats and the poison that killed them being swept into the processing vats, of immigrant workers falling in too, to be “overlooked for days,” tells Sinclair's hero, “till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Beef Lard.” Before the year was out, the Pure Food and Drugs Act, and the Meat Inspection Act were in force across the country.

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