Upton Sinclair

“ Armour makes a great deal of the inspection of his meat by the Federal Government, and after describing in detail how the work of inspection is done, he adds: "This Government inspection thus becomes an important adjunct of the packer's business from two view-points. It puts the stamp of legitimacy and honesty upon the packer's product, and so is to him a necessity; to the public it is an insurance against the selling of diseased meats." This is a statement which the packers make continuously; it is hard for a man who knows the truth to read them and preserve his temper. ”

“ The Federal inspection has no power to say whether or not any measures shall be taken to see that poisoned rats are not ground up in the sausage meat, as man after man in the yards told me that he had seen; it has no power to prevent the "doctoring” of spoiled hams with all sorts of chemicals; to prevent the preserving of sausage with borax and salicylic acid, and the dyeing of it to save the time and expense incidental to smoking! It has no power to prevent the adulteration of sausages with "potato flour," the by-product of the manufacture of potato-alcohol ”

“ Of all the evils of the stock-yards, the canning department is perhaps the worst. It is there that the cattle from all parts of the United States are prepared for canning. No matter how scrawny or debilitated canners are, they must go the route of their brothers and arrive ultimately at the great boiling vats, where they are steamed until they are reasonably tender. Bundles of gristle and bone melt into pulpy masses and are stirred up for the canning department. ”

“ How many animal pathologists are employed by the Government who are capable of making a reliable post mortem and saying that an animal is not diseased? In round numbers, say there are fifty-a few more or less, for the sake of illustration, are not material. Say there are only fifty thousand animals killed a day at the stock-yards. This would be a thousand to each inspector, a hundred an hour, nearly two a minute. What is such inspection as that worth? It is true, there is some inspection that is well done; it is that which is done for the sharp eyes of the foreigner. ”

“ Armour's businesses familiar, I dare say, as Mr. Armour himself -and when he was fairly started at telling me what he had seen and done, my hair began to rise on end. He told me that meat which had been condemned as unfit for food, and had been dropped into tanks to be rendered into fertilizer, was taken out at the bottom of the tanks, and canned or cut up for sausage. He told me that he had done this with his own hands; he told me that his brother-in-law, who worked in another of the big packing-houses, had done it quite recently ”

“ The public has been told that meat animals and carcasses condemned as diseased are afterward secretly made use of by the packers and sold to the public for food in the form of both dressed meats and canned meats. Right here I desire to brand such statements as absolutely false as applied to the business of Armour & Co. I believe they are equally false as to all establishments in this country that are classed as packing-houses. ”

“ I selected Packingtown because I wished to give a picture of working-class life in a modern, highly concentrated industry, and because I knew that Packingtown was a place where modern commercial forces had full and unrestricted sway. ”

“ But not all the persons who have information about the practises of the Chicago packers are blackmailers. Some of them are honest and public-spirited men. One of these is Dr. William K. Jaques, of 4316 Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, a physician of large practise in the city, a professor of bacteriology in the Illinois State University, and bacteriologist in charge of the city inspection of meat during the years 1902-3. Dr. Jaques was a competent and conscientious official, who conceived it to be his duty to protect the people of the United States from eating diseased and tainted meat. ”

“ My education as a physician teaches me that disease follows the same law whether in animals or human beings. An accurate post mortem requires close inspection of all the internal organs together with the use of the microscope, before a physician can say there is no disease present. How many post mortems could the most expert physician make in a day? Ten would be a big day's work; fifty would tax the endurance of the most strenuous. It is reported that 150,000 animals have been received at the Union Stock-yards in a single day. ”

“ I have seen cattle come into Armour's stock-yard so weak and exhausted that they expired in the corrals, where they lay for an hour or two, dead, until they were afterward hauled in, skinned, and put on the market for beef or into the canning department for cans. ”

“ By October 28th six new meat inspectors had been appointed, and they destroyed in one week 496 animals, weighing 145,345 pounds. The Federal Government employs in the packing-houses of the entire country a total of 411 inspectors; and during the year 1904 these inspectors condemned 19,097 carcasses, an average of 367 per week, or less than one per week for each inspector. During one week, as we have seen, the eight or nine new appointees of the city of Chicago condemned 496 animals, or an average of over fifty for each inspector! ”

“ No microscopic examination will be made of hogs slaughtered for interstate trade, but this examination shall be confined to those intended for the export trade.'" Since one and one-half per cent. of all the hogs slaughtered in Chicago are found to be infected with trichinosis, it follows that the American people eat not only their own one and one-half per cent., but also the one and one-half per cent. of the share of Europe!
Mr. Armour dilates at length upon the fact that the Federal inspectors are appointed by the Government, and that they are all trained veterinarians. ”

“ Armour, in an article in the "Saturday Evening Post," makes the flat-footed assertion that the Government inspection of the Beef Trust slaughter-houses is an impregnable wall protecting the public from impure meat, and that not an atom of diseased meat finds its way into the products of the Armours. ”

“ This is a pretty story. It falls in so beautifully with the letter recently made public by President Roosevelt, describing how Mr. Armour's attorneys had been bribing newspaper reporters to misrepresent the evidence at the Government prosecutions in Chicago. It also falls in beautifully with Mr. Armour's statement concerning the endless blackmail to which a packer would be liable who undertook to profit by the “condemnedmeat industry." As a matter of fact, any one who knows anything at all about Mr. Armour's affairs knows that his life is made miserable by blackmailers. ”

“ Out of a slaughter of 2,000 cows, or a day's killing, perhaps one-half are with calves. My instructions from Mr. Pierce were to dispose of the calves by hiding them until night, or until the inspectors left off duty. The little carcasses were then brought from all over the packing-house and skinned by boys, who received two cents for removing each pelt. The pelts were sold for fifty cents each to the kid-glove manufacturers. This occurs every night at Mr. Armour's concern at Chicago, or after each killing of cows. ”

“ The city inspectors destroyed these cattle. The Government inspectors refused to allow the city meat inspectors to remove glands and other organs suspected of being diseased, for the purpose of microscopic examination by the laboratory bacteriologists.
At the close of the Spanish War there was held a court of inquiry which took testimony that shed a flood of light upon packing-house methods. I quote a few facts which were brought out dealing with this question of the efficiency of the Federal inspection, concerning which Mr. Armour boasts so boldly. ”

“ When mixed with food they are absorbed into the circulation from the intestinal canal. If continued for a long time in quantities not exceeding a half-grain per day they cause occasional periods of loss of appetite, bad feeling, fulness in the head, and distress in the stomach. ”

“ Hull, stated that lard and fertilizer would be the product from that tank. The tanks are in a long room. The east side is lined with tanks for manufacture of lard and fertilizer; the west side with tanks whose product is grease and fertilizer. The grease is for soap, lubricator, etc. Here is a clear infraction of the law, because it requires that such condemned meat be mixed with sufficient offal to destroy it as food. Of the six condemned hogs referred to, two were afflicted with cholera, the skin being red as blood and the legs scabbed ”