Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [259]
Knowing how ruthlessly Aldrich operated, Roosevelt did not put it past him to allow the bill to be strengthened excessively, and then passed—aware that it would alarm the Supreme Court. “The one thing I do not want is to have a law passed and then declared unconstitutional.”
THE COSMOPOLITAN’S SERIES “The Treason of the Senate” began to run in earnest in mid-February. It attacked Senator Depew for being rich, and worse still, jovial. David Graham Phillips’s literary style exemplified what was emerging as a common characteristic of the progressives: their fierce, preachy, perpetual grimness. They could no more convey the humor of a situation than they could view a perquisite without frowning. For fifteen minutes or a thousand words, they bracingly commanded attention, even admiration; then they lost it. They simply went on too long and too loudly. LaFollette noticed that when he got up to speak, his colleagues drifted out of the chamber.
Perhaps the fiercest of the young progressives making headlines in February 1906 was a socialist. Upton Sinclair, a bony, driven twenty-seven-year-old, proclaimed himself as dedicated to the equalization of wealth. Yet in the past year, he had managed to sell the same novel to four different publishers—an achievement any capitalist might envy. His book was entitled The Jungle. It detailed unsanitary practices in Chicago’s meatpacking houses with a relish verging on the pathological. First serial rights went to The Appeal to Reason, a socialist sheet with an enormous readership. The quarterly journal One Hoss Philosophy followed up with longer extracts, minus only an episode in which a female meatpacker, forced to give birth on the job, inadvertently allows her baby to be made into sausages.
Macmillan and Company, meanwhile, had bought book rights to the novel, before allowing Sinclair to move it to Doubleday, Page. Now, at last, The Jungle was between hard covers and selling as fast as clerks could count change. Sinclair had shortened, sanitized, and sentimentalized the plot, but it still presented a nauseating picture of the largest unregulated industry in the United States.
Doubleday had cannily timed its release to coincide with Senate debate on a pure-food bill. But the book’s success was so great that proponents of the legislation used it to drum up public support. Senator Beveridge sent a copy to the White House. Roosevelt hardly needed to be reminded of the bill, having initiated it himself in his Fifth Message. That document read quaintly now, to eyes scorched by Upton Sinclair’s prose:
I recommend that a law be enacted to regulate interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks, and drugs. Such law would protect legitimate manufacture and commerce, and would tend to secure the health and welfare of the consuming public. Traffic in foodstuffs which have been debased or adulterated so as to injure health or to deceive purchasers should be forbidden.
In requesting such legislation, Roosevelt was merely echoing a regulatory sentiment that had been growing on Capitol Hill during his presidency—growing, indeed, as fast as the American population was outgrowing its dependence on local and seasonal meats, fruits, and vegetables. The railroad age had brought the phenomenon of factory foods refrigerated for distant transport and sale, scientifically preserved for longer shelf life, artificially flavored for better taste. Mechanized techniques transformed large animals into rows of cans, reduced whole orchards to juice, or, even more efficiently, made juice out of nonfructile chemicals—would wine out of water be next? The ancient triple unit of man, horse, and plow became the single “combine harvester,” an inexorably advancing, all-too-obvious symbol of combination in the American economy.
Sinclair was but the most recent and passionate of the radical protesters against all this cutting up