That bacteria were everywhere was frightening; that milk could make you sick was disheartening; but charges that bacteria could make eating beef deadly were potentially the most upsett ing of all. Thanks in large part to the persistence of the British culinary heritage, beef was by far the pre-ferred meat of nineteen-century Americans, even though they actually consumed much more pork. As a mid-nineteenth-century newspaper proudly proclaimed, “We are essentially a hungry beef-eating people.”¹ The American food that Mark Twain missed most during his European tour in 1867 was “a mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputt ering from the griddle.”² Twenty years later, the common refrain of new cookbooks was that middle-class cooking was mired in a rut of roast beef, porterhouse steak, and potatoes.³ It was this iconic status that would help protect beef from some of the next century’s most spectacular food scares.
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As a result, fresh beef prices dropped, quality rose, and the number of Americans, particularly middle-class ones, who were able to enjoy fresh beef increased exponentially.⁶ At the same time, marked improvements in canning allowed packers to make reasonably priced canned beef avail-able to poorer people. By 1900 Americans were eating much more beef than pork.⁷
But just as this pinnacle was reached, a dark cloud loomed. In Decem-ber 1898, as much of the nation still gloried in the recent victory over the Spanish in Cuba, General Nelson Miles, the U.S. Army commander there, came out with a shocking charge. He told a commission investigating the war eff ort that much of the beef supplied to his troops had been adulter-ated with chemicals. Fresh beef had been treadulter-ated with “secret” chemicals to hide the fact that it had turned rott en. Canned roast beef was no bett er:
when opened, it smelled as if it had been “embalmed.”⁸ Another army offi cer then testifi ed that aft er his men became sick on fresh beef, he tested it and discovered that it contained the preservative salicylic acid.⁹ Subsequently, the great hero of the confl ict, Theodore Roosevelt, the new governor of New York, weighed in. He told another army inquiry that the canned beef supplied by the major packers, which he also described as “embalmed,” oft en sickened those of his men who could overcome its distasteful smell and bring themselves to eat it. He himself, he said, would sooner eat his hat.¹⁰
The implications were obvious: The “Beef Trust”—the fi ve large pack-ers who controlled much of the country’s beef supply and had the con-tracts to supply the army with beef—had used chemicals to mask the deadly bacteria in spoiled meat. The irate mother of a soldier wrote to President McKinley that “thieving corporations will give the boys the worst.”¹¹ However, the government’s chief chemist, Harvey Wiley, failed to turn up any chemical additives in the companies’ beef, and the two army commissions refused to att ribute more than some upset stomachs to the problem, which they blamed on poor handling of the beef in tropi-cal conditions.¹²
Much of the public, however, was not convinced. When the secre-tary of war made an appearance in Boston, he was heckled by a crowd chanting, “Yah, yah, yah! Beef! Beef!” In the national election campaign of 1900, the Democrats had a fi eld day, charging that the Republican ad-ministration had knowingly fed the soldiers embalmed beef.¹³ Before long, it was commonly thought that bad beef had killed more American soldiers than had the Spanish.
Confi dence in beef was further weakened two years later, when the
Columbia asks Uncle Sam, “Who Is the Criminal?” as they stand over poisoned soldiers on ships returning from Cuba after the Spanish-American War in 1898. The culprits were thought to be the
“Beef Trust,” the meat packers whose “embalmed beef” was said to have killed more soldiers than the Spanish. (Harper’s Weekly, 1898)
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German government banned the import of most American meats. It gave as the reason the very thing that Miles had charged: that borax and other chemicals were used to preserve and camoufl age meat that may have been spoiled by bacteria.¹⁴ Then, in 1906 came the publication of Upton Sinclair’s sensational novel, Th e Jungle, which described the ap-palling conditions in the Chicago slaughterhouses that processed much of the nation’s beef. The story of how this book led to regulation of the beef industry is well known, but the extraordinary fact that the frighten-ing thfrighten-ings it exposed seems to have had hardly any impact on the Ameri-can love aff air with beef has never been recognized.
Sinclair, a socialist, based the book on interviews with slaughterhouse workers and wrote it intending to expose their horrendous working con-ditions.¹⁵ However, the public was most aff ected by his disgusting de-scriptions of the production process itself. Many of slaughtered catt le, he said, were covered with boils or were tubercular, goitered, or dead on arrival at the slaughterhouse. The worst specimens, those covered with boils, went into canned beef. “It was stuff such as this,” wrote Sinclair,
“that went into the ‘embalmed beef’ that had killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards.” Much of the rot-ten meat also went into sausages. Old sausage, moldy and white, that had been rejected by Europeans “would be dosed with borax and glycerine and dumped into the hoppers and made over again for home consump-tion.” The hoppers would also be loaded with “meat that had tumbled out on the fl oor, in the dirt and sawdust, where workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption [tuberculosis] germs.” In dark storage places, there were large piles of meat covered in rat dung.
The packers would put out poisoned bread to get rid of the rats, but the workers would not bother to remove the dead rodents from the pile and
“rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.” Fresh beef was hardly safer. When it spoiled, borax was used to camoufl age it, just as it had been in Cuba.¹⁶
Later Sinclair famously said, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by acci-dent I hit it in the stomach.”¹⁷ However, the disclaimer was rather disin-genuous, for he clearly hoped that the gruesome revelations would turn people’s stomachs and impel them to rise up against the large packers. He therefore followed up the book with a slew of magazine articles amplify-ing his disgustamplify-ing stories. These prompted General Miles to come out in his support, saying the charges were not news to him. Had the matt er been taken up seven years before, he claimed, thousands of lives would
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have been saved. “I believe,” he said, “that 3,000 United States soldiers lost their lives because of adulterated, impure, poisonous meat.”¹⁸
The most disgusting of the charges concerned ground meat products.
When Theodore Roosevelt, who was now president, let it be known he had been shocked by Sinclair’s book, the humorist Peter Finley Dunne had “Mr. Dooley,” the Irish immigrant protagonist of his popular news-paper column, imagining the president reading the book over breakfast.
Suddenly crying “I’m pizened,” he began throwing sausages out the win-dow, one of which exploded and blew the leg off a Secret Service agent and “desthroyed a handsome row iv ol’ oak trees.”¹⁹
Whatever Roosevelt’s real reaction, he could hardly ignore the loud de-mands for government action. He invited Sinclair to a much- publicized (sausage-less) lunch at the White House. Aft er hearing the writer out, he threw his weight behind a meat inspection bill that had been languish-ing in Congress, helplanguish-ing to ensure its quick passage.
Dunne’s piece ended by saying, “Since thin, th’ President, like th’ rest iv us, has become a viggytaryan.” However, there is no evidence that Sin-clair’s revelations caused a signifi cant decline in beef or other meat con-sumption.²⁰ There were a number of reasons for this. One is that it was the height of the Progressive Era, a time when the middle classes had considerable confi dence that government intervention could cure many of the problems brought on by the new industrial system. Previous scares about the epidemics caused by impure water had led to public health regulations and sanitary improvements that had clearly produced posi-tive results. There was good reason to be confi dent, then, that the federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 would clean up the nation’s beef supply.
At the outset, this confi dence seemed to be justifi ed. As oft en hap-pened with such reforms, the act, which covered the large packers who shipped meat between states, really owed its quick passage through Con-gress to the support of the very people who were to be regulated. Ini-tially, these “Big Five” packing companies had resisted the bill, especially the provisions calling for the government to station inspectors in their slaughterhouses. However, faced with the possible loss of confi dence in their products sparked by Sinclair’s revelations, they soon realized that government inspection would assure consumers of their safety. They threw their support behind the bill, leading Sinclair to charge that Con-gress had tailored it to their interests.²¹ He was right, for meat now left their plants bearing an offi cial U.S. Department of Agriculture stamp, guaranteeing its healthfulness. The packers could now claim, as Armour
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and Company immediately did, that “the U.S. Inspection stamp, on every pound and every package of Armour goods, guarantees purity, whole-someness, and honest labeling of all Armour food products.” Bett er still, it did not cost them a penny, as the many lawmakers who were at their beck and call made sure that the inspection system was funded by taxpayers.²²
The packers then supplemented this by literally cleaning up their acts, or at least the part of them that could be seen by the public. Barely two
After the stomach-churning descriptions of their slaughterhouses led to the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, the large Chicago meat packers cleaned up their acts and opened parts of their facilities to the public. Visitors were shown reassuring sights such as these women putting “Veribest” la-bels and U.S. government stamps of approval on Armour products. (Library of Congress)
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months aft er two federal inspectors had been physically sickened when touring its facility, Armour threw it open to the public, welcoming tour groups to gaze upon carefully selected parts of the process. Other slaugh-terers followed suit, adding a new twist to modern tourism.²³Another reason the scare had litt le impact on meat consumption had to do with class. In general, it is the educated middle and upper classes who are most aff ected by modern food scares. Yet most of the horror stories about beef involved the kinds of canned meats and sausages that were staples of the urban working class, a large proportion of whom were foreign-born im-migrants or poorly educated im-migrants from rural America—hardly the readership of McClure’s or Th e Jungle.²⁴ The satirist Dunne’s description of the president eating sausage may have been funny, but it was doubt-ful if such fare was served to Roosevelt, who was about as upper class as one could be in America. Even at breakfast, where they oft en ate meat, people of his class would eat a small beef steak or smoked ham rather than sausage. The steaks, along with other cuts of beef, would be pur-chased in butcher shops, where what one historian has called a more or less reassuring relationship of “tension and trust” prevailed between the customer and butcher.²⁵
As for the lower classes, suspicion of ground meat products was prac-tically as old as urban life itself, yet it has rarely deterred people from eating them.²⁶ Moreover, the many immigrants among them would also be reassured by trust in producers of their own ethnicity. And even if they wanted to shun sausages and canned beef and pork, what would they replace them with? Fresh beef, chicken, and pork were generally too expensive for everyday eating.
The relative imperviousness of the working classes to Th e Jungle scare is perhaps best refl ected in how litt le impact it had on the popularity of hamburgers, which in the early twentieth century were regarded as quintessentially working-class food. Butchers were regularly prosecuted for using sulfi tes to make hamburger meat look fresh, and hygienists warned that eating hamburgers was litt le bett er than eating from a gar-bage pail. Yet their popularity at working-class fairs and carnivals was undiminished. They were also standard fare at the food wagons that clus-tered outside factory gates.²⁷
The ingredients in frankfurters, or hot dogs, which also became working-class favorites in the fi rst two decades of the century, were even more questionable. There were frequent reports in the middle-class press that they were made from a disgusting mixture of ground
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mings, fat, gristle, and corn starch, with saltpeter and red food coloring added to turn the resulting gray sludge pink.²⁸ A New York Times article charged that frankfurters destined for Coney Island were made from of-fal and scraps from hotels and were “the rott enest of them all.” Yet this seems to have had no impact at all on sales at the amusement park’s many hot dogs stands.²⁹ When one particularly gruesome report did cut into sales at the stand owned by Nathan Handwerker (the original Na-than), he quickly revived its fortunes by hiring college students to dress as white-coated physicians and gather there, with stethoscopes around their necks, spreading the rumor that the doctors at the local hospital all ate there.³⁰
The years immediately following Th e Jungle scare provided another illustration of how Americans simply regarded beef too highly to give it up. In 1910 many thousands of them roused themselves not over its healthfulness, but over not being able to get enough of it. A mere four years aft er the publication of Sinclair’s book, the very people he looked to for support—workers and reform-minded women—took to the streets not to protest rott en beef, but soaring beef prices. Thousands of mem-bers of the nation’s women’s clubs pledged not to buy beef until its price fell. Five hundred government printing offi ce employees in Washington, D.C., signed on to the boycott , while 4,000 female garment workers in New York City distributed circulars calling on that city’s workers to sup-port it. In Pitt sburgh, 125,000 men, claiming to represent 600,000 people in their families, signed boycott pledges.³¹ But going beef-less proved to be more easily said than done. Too many people, it seemed, agreed with Harvey Wiley, who warned against continuing the boycott , saying that
“meat is a necessity, and abstinence from it will result, in the vast majority of cases, in lowered vitality.” American men needed to eat plenty of beef, he said, to prevent them from becoming “a race of mollycoddles.” The boycott soon petered out, leaving nary a blip on beef consumption.³²
It all seemed to bear out the German sociologist Werner Sombart’s fa-mous observation in 1906 that American socialists’ hopes of turning the working class against capitalism were “dashed on the reefs of roast beef and apple pie.”³³ Ironically, aft er the United States entered the Great War in 1917, one of the nation’s leading capitalists ran aground on the same reefs. When Herbert Hoover, the head of the government’s food conser-vation program, tried to have Americans cut back on beef consumption by observing “meatless days,” his proposal was met with massive resis-tance from American workers. Rather than declining, beef consumption actually rose 17 percent. The reason, the crestfallen future president
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cluded, was that the workers were using their newly fatt ened pay packets to “lay on the porterhouse steak.”³⁴