Liberalism: Power, Economic Crisis, Reform, War 77was Upton Sinclair, a Socialist who went to Chicago to investigate the stockyards
where America’s livestock was slaughtered and sold to consumers for food. But
when Sinclair got to the meatpacking factories, what shocked him, more than
the poor conditions and low-wages the workers got, was the disgusting nature
of the stockyards. Americans were eating unsafe meat. The book that resulted
from his work, The Jungle, is still today one of the more important studies of
U.S. Capitalism. Sinclair described a filthy meatpacking industry without safe-
ty standards or safety codes for workers. Among his discoveries was that “there
would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs
would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too
dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these
piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats.... and the
packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats,
bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together” and the resulting product
would be sold to consumers. Americans were outraged and, so the story goes,
demanded government action, and that led to the Pure Food and Drug Act and
the Meat Inspection Act—so now the government would do inspections and
assure those buying meat that it was safe.
Though Roosevelt thought the muckrakers were mostly troublemakers,
out to make America look bad, many saw them as idealists exposing the prob-
lems of everyday life, and more and more social liberals, who sought “social
justice,” emerged to carry on the work of Tarbell, Sinclair and the others. In
1900, the Charity Organization of New York held an exhibit of tenement
houses, huge apartment buildings where poor workers lived. It included pho-
tos of the sordid conditions in the apartments, statistics on poverty and disease
for the tenement inhabitants, and other information on the failures of
Capitalism to give people a decent life. This would motivate concerned
Americans to develop the field of, and educational programs in, social work.
Two of the better-known social workers of the era were Jane Addams and
Helen Keller. Addams helped publicize the plight of mothers and children
living in poverty, as well as the many problems facing immigrants who had
recently arrived in America to take on industrial and domestic work, and
motivated various public officials to enact laws regarding the poverty, living
conditions, and diseases of the poor [and even received a Nobel Peace Prize
in 1931]. Keller was deaf and blind and was an advocate for people with dis-
abilities. A Socialist, she also worked for women’s suffrage [the right to vote,