doctrine of low wages, low taxes, and few social services. But in 1882,
Roosevelt had a revelation, instigated by union activist Samuel Gompers.
A bill was introduced in the New York legislature in 1882, that would
have banned tenement-house cigar manufacture, on the grounds that it put
an unsustainable burden on cigar workers.^1 At the time, the cigar
companies in New York City required workers to “take their work home
with them,” storing their tools and, worse, housing wet bundles of tobacco
leaves in their already overcrowded tenement apartments. Gompers
challenged the skeptical Roosevelt to see conditions for himself, and
liking “the idea of testing arguments against evidence,”^2 he toured the
New York tenements with Gompers.
What Roosevelt discovered astonished and revolted him. Not only were
conditions appalling for workers, but the living conditions for families
with children unconscionable. Roosevelt could not abide a laissez-faire
attitude that was as rotten as the pungent tobacco stacked in immigrant
workers’ living quarters. The young Harvard graduate returned twice to
the tenements by himself, and in the end said, “Instead of opposing the bill
I ardently championed it.”^3 A man who loved the strenuous life, and could
never countenance weakness, had learned that “self-sufficiency and
competitive spirit, important as ideals, are negated when life is unfair.”^4
Upton Sinclair, while not a core member of the muckrakers, published a
book in the spring of 1906, that epitomized the “literature of exposure,”
The Jungle, about the wretched world of Chicago meatpackers.^5
To write The Jungle, Sinclair had spent seven weeks in the
slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants of Chicago, donning
grubby clothes and carrying a lunch bucket to mix in with the
immigrant workers. During the daytime, he visited the
squalid, lethally dangerous workplaces, documenting the
indifference of management to the workers’ hardships and the
lack of government oversight. In the evenings, he knocked on
the workers’ doors, his pencil ready to record their accounts.
Sinclair wanted to steer attention to the plight of the
exploited Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago’s “Packingtown,”
and his novel was a melodramatic yarn of desperate working-
class life. The passages in the book that caught the popular