fancy, however—though they spanned just a few pages—told a
more particular story about the meat that Americans were
consuming. Sinclair told of rats scampering across heaps of
rotting flesh, leaving droppings; of tubercular meat packaged
and sold at market; of acid corroding workers’ flesh; and,
most shockingly, of men tumbling into cooking-room vats and
ignored “till all but the bones of them had gone out to the
world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!” Those gut-churning
images would outlive any ideological message about the
workers that Sinclair intended. “I aimed at the public’s heart,”
he later wrote, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”^6After a two-year stint as governor of New York, Roosevelt briefly
served as US vice president, until McKinley’s assassination six months
into his second term. Thus did Theodore Roosevelt become the youngest
president in US history, just three years after his foray into soldiering, “the
great day of my life” in the Battle of San Juan Hill. The forty-three-year-
old now turned his progressive attention toward the unchecked industrial
growth of the preceding decades. After securing his own term in 1905,
President Roosevelt told Congress, “Traffic in foodstuffs which have been
debased or adulterated so as to injure health or to deceive purchasers
should be forbidden.” No doubt Roosevelt remembered the awful
provisions of the US Army, but remembering his own incredulity over the
austerity of the tenements or over battlefront foodstuffs, he knew he
needed a breakthrough to achieve his legislative proposal. Whether as
police commissioner, governor of New York, or president, Roosevelt
tempered his ardor for domination and conquest with a sensibility for
fairness and a zeal for stewardship. While the National Park Service is the
most obvious and visible example of Roosevelt’s enlightened, balanced
approach to enterprise and restraint, perhaps the most impactful and daily
(even hourly?) transformation of the American existence was the creation
of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and later the FDA, our first
citizen-protection agency.
There had been a war between doctors and the “patent medicine”
salesmen for a century before the 1906 bill. “The demand for ‘secret
formula’ medicines began in the Colonies with medicines from England.
But when, during the Revolution, English patent medicines could not be