The conditions in the meatpacking plants were so terrible that several men would died on the job. The things that were in the meat that the public ate were so revolting that Sinclair found it a need to write about it. Sausage meat would be shipped to Europe and be rejected and sent back to the U.S. By the time it reached the U.S., the sausage would be moldy and white, and then it would be "dosed with borax and glycerin, dumped into h

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York. Robert Bently Inc., 1946

Mitchell, Greg. "How Media Politics Was Born." American Heritage, sept/oct 1988.

Sinclair told about the enormous stockyards Chicago had;

The Jungle had a wide variety of influences on just about everybody who read the novel. Sinclair's descriptions of the meat made people "stare with horror at the corned beef on their dinner tables and promptly write to their congressmen" (Fischer 1). Long before Sinclair's novel, a good many voters had suspected something was wrong in the Packing Industry, because hundreds of soldiers had gotten sick on embalmed beef during the Spanish-American War. Disease had swept the ranks; death rates had soared. It was later reported, with no exaggeration , "that more American fighting men had been killed off by the meat packers than by Spanish bullets" (Cook 115). The novel appeared for sale on February 16, 1905. Having investigated the Chicago packinghouses, Sinclair hoped to arouse sympathy for the conditions of the workers and promote the cause of socialism, but in the process he also included graphic description of the filth and poisons that was put into canned meats. Sinclair was disappointed that the public read The Jungle as an appeal for food legislation, he later stated, "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit their stomach" (2). Readers didn't care about the political philosophy imbedded in his message, what got them was the revolting details about the meat they were eating. After the release of The Jungle, a parody on a familiar childhood rhyme appeared in the press. It read:

A person in Packingtown said that, "they use everything in the pig except the squeal" (Frakes 111). Hams that were spoiled "with and odor so bad a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them" (Frakes 111) were pumped full of a strong pickle to destroy the odor, then sold to the public. Sinclair wrote of a case where a physician made the discovery of steer carcasses that were condemned as tubercular by government inspectors, therefore contained ptomaine's, which are deadly poisons, were carted away to be sold in the city. Another case told about a whole spoiled ham that was spoiled and was cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed up with half a ton of other meat. "No odor was in a ham could make any difference" (Aryes 1). Meatpackers would accidentally drop the meat onto the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers tramped and split uncounted billions of consumption germs.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Jurgis Radix, Evening Post, War Disease, Globe Indiana, Lard Cook, Department Labor, , Theodore Roosevelt, Act Roosevelt, Packing Industry, packing industry, american heritage, meatpacking plants, gale 1999, conditions meatpacking plants, meat inspection, cattle cattle, cared money, pure food, money money, cared money money, frakes 111,
Approximate Word count = 2298
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)