Doubleday, Page and Company published “The Jungle,” and it became the best-selling book, not only in America, but also in Great Britain and its colonies, and was translated into seventeen languages. It became also the subject of a terrific political controversy.
The packers, fighting for their profits, brought all their batteries to bear. To begin with, there appeared in the “Saturday Evening Post” a series of articles signed by J. Ogden Armour, but written, I was informed, by Forrest Crissey, one of the staff of the “Post.” The editor of this paper, George Horace Lorimer, was for nine years an employee of the Armours; he is author of “The Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son,” a text-book of American business depravity. From first to last his paper was at the service of the packers, as it has always been at the service of every great financial interest.
Some of the statements made under Armour’s signature made me boil, and I sat down to write an answer, “The Condemned Meat Industry.” I had the facts at my fingers ends, and wrote the article in a few hours, and jumped on the train and came up to New York with it. I took it to the office of “Everybody’s Magazine” and asked to see E. J. Ridgway, the publisher. I was wise enough by this time to understand that it is the publisher, not the editor, you need to see. I read the article to Ridgway, and he stopped the presses on which “Everybody’s Magazine” was being printed, and took out a short story and shoved in “The Condemned Meat Industry.”
“Everybody’s Magazine” at this time was on the crest of a wave of popularity. It had finished Tom Lawson’s exposé of Wall Street, upon the strength of which it had built up a circulation of half a million. Its publishers, Ridgway and Thayer, were advertising men who had bought a broken-down magazine from John Wanamaker, and had made the discovery that there was a fortune to be made by the simple process of letting the people have the truth. They wanted to go on making fortunes, and so they welcomed my article. It gave the affidavits of men whom the Armours had employed to take condemned meat out of the destructors and sell it in Chicago. It told the story of how the Armours had bribed these men to retract their confessions. It gave the reports of State health authorities, who showed how the Armours had pleaded guilty to adulterating foods. It was a mass of such facts fused in a white heat of indignation. United States Senator Beveridge told me that he considered the article the greatest piece of controversial writing he had ever read.
You may find it in the library, “Everybody’s” for May, 1906. Whatever you think of its literary style, you will see that it is definite and specific, and revealed a most frightful condition in the country’s meat supply, an unquestionable danger to the public health. It was therefore a challenge to every public service agency in the country; above all, it was a challenge to the newspapers, through which the social body is supposed to learn of its dangers and its needs.
It was my first complete test of American Journalism. Hitherto I had tried the newspapers as a young poet, clamoring for recognition; they had called me a self-seeker, and although I felt that the charge was untrue, I was powerless to disprove it to others. But now I tried them in a matter that was obviously in the public interest—too obviously so for dispute. I was still naïve enough to be shocked by the result. I had expected that every newspaper which boasted of public spirit would take up these charges, and at least report them; but instead of that, there was silence—silence almost complete! I employed two clipping-bureaus on this story, and received a few brief items from scattered papers here and there. Of all the newspapers in America, not one in two hundred went so far as to mention “The Condemned Meat Industry.”
Meantime “The Jungle” had been published in book form. I will say of “The Jungle” just what I said of the magazine article—whatever you may think of it as literature, you must admit that it was packed with facts which constituted an appeal to the American conscience. The book was sent to all American newspapers; also it was widely advertised, it was boosted by one of the most efficient publicity men in the country. And what were the results? I will give a few illustrations.
The most widely read newspaper editor in America is Arthur Brisbane. Brisbane poses as a liberal, sometimes even as a radical; he told me that he drank in Socialism with his mother’s milk. And Brisbane now took me up, just as Robbie Collier had done; he invited me to his home, and wrote one of his famous two-column editorials about “The Jungle”—a rare compliment to a young author. This editorial treated me personally with kindness; I was a sensitive young poet who had visited the stockyards for the first time, and had been horrified by the discovery that animals had blood inside them. With a fatherly pat on the shoulder, Brisbane informed me that a slaughter-house is not an opera-house, or words to that effect.
I remember talking about this editorial with Adolph Smith, representative of the “London Lancet.” He remarked with dry sarcasm that in a court of justice Brisbane would be entirely safe; his statement that a slaughter-house is not an opera-house was strictly and literally accurate. But if you took what the statement was meant to convey to the reader—that a slaughter-house is necessarily filthy, then the statement was false. “If you go to the municipal slaughter-houses of Germany, you find them as free from odor as an opera-house,” said Adolph Smith; and five or six years later, when I visited Germany, I took the opportunity to verify this statement. But because of the kindness of American editorial writers to the interests which contribute full-page advertisements to newspapers, the American people still have their meat prepared in filth.
Or take the “Outlook.” The “Outlook” poses as a liberal publication; its editor preaches what he calls “Industrial Democracy,” a very funny joke. I have dealt with this organ of the “Clerical Camouflage” in five sections of “The Profits of Religion”; I will not repeat here, except to quote how the pious “Outlook” dealt with “The Jungle.” The “Outlook” had no doubt that there were genuine evils in the packing-plants; the conditions of the workers ought of course to be improved, BUT—