Aimed at the public's heart, but hit the stomach


June 30, 2025

"The American people will take anything if it is draped in enough emotion. Even truth."

— Sinclair Lewis


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'I hit it in the stomach'

Upton Sinclair wanted to write about the soul--the Great American Novel, with sweeping themes of poverty, hope, and the inner lives of early 20th century American workers.

Instead, readers came away thinking about the rats.

Sinclair embedded himself in the Chicago stockyards like a war correspondent before writing his best-known work, The Jungle, living among the workers, dining with them, asking questions, taking notes.

At night he returned to a boarding house that probably smelled just as bad as the slaughterhouses, and he wrote furiously.

The Jungle was published in 1906. It follows the journey of the fictional Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in Chicago full of hope--but who is slowly crushed by corruption, exploitation, and unrelenting poverty.

It was meant to be a novel of ideas, a call to arms for socialism.

But what readers couldn't stop thinking about was what ended up in in the food they bought, because of passages like this:

"A man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, 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 ...
There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit."

People dropped their forks and started writing letters.

Sinclair sent a copy of the book to President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was horrified and moved -- not so much by the politics (Roosevelt was progressive, but he thought Sinclair was a Socialist crank).

But, he was deeply disturbted by the descriptions of contamination, disease, and dishonesty.

Teddy R. sent investigators; their reports confirmed the novel's setting; frankly, it might have been a bit restrained in its descriptions.

It had real-world implications.

On June 30, 1906, just months after the book's release -- 119 years ago today -- Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act into law.

This was one of the first times the federal government assumed responsibility for protecting consumers from the worst abuses of unchecked capitalism, and it started with a novel.

Sinclair was just 26 when The Jungle was published. He'd grown up poor, lived with artists, and wasn't especially interested in fame.

What drove him was outrage at inequality, at hypocrisy, at the way American prosperity seemed to grind up so many of the very people who made it possible.

He imagined that if people could just see what was happening, they'd rise up.

His novel didn't usher in a socialist revolution, but it created a national outcry loud enough to shake Washington into action.

That led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, forced companies to change how they processed, labeled, and sold food, and began the long, messy history of federal consumer protection.

Most importantly, it demonstrated the power of story not just to entertain or provoke, but to alter the trajectory of policy.

Sinclair went on to write dozens more books. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943, but The Jungle remained the work for which he was most remembered.

In his later years, Sinclair reflected: "The American people will take anything if it is draped in enough emotion. Even truth."

That, perhaps, was the final irony. He'd wanted to awaken the conscience of a nation and instead awakened its gag reflex. But maybe that was enough.

On June 30, 1906, when Roosevelt signed the bill into law, he didn't quote Sinclair or thank him.

But the pen he held might never have moved if not for the boyish writer from Baltimore who wandered into the slaughterhouses and came out with a manuscript—a story that made people sick and made a country a little cleaner.

As Sinclair famously quipped: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

(Hey! Where are the comments?!!! Yes, we have skipped them a few weeks on Big Optimism. Long story short we had a spam problem ... and I haven't had time to fix it. I think we'll have a new solution sometime later in July. Thank you!)


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Did you see ...

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Bill Murphy Jr.

Hi. I write the Understandably daily newsletter—no algorithms, no outrage, just an essential daily newsletter trusted by 175,000+ smart people who want to understand the world, one day at a time. Plus bonus ebooks (aka 'Ubooks').

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