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Originally Posted by Hamlet53
The Jungle was a very influential book and help launch "muckraking journalism" in the United States. This led to many much needed reforms in food and drug safety, worker rights, and trust busting during the Progressive Era. That and Upton Sinclair could really write.
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To provide a little more (disgusting) detail, the
History Matters web site contains this description:
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The book is best known for revealing the unsanitary process by which animals became meat products. Yet Sinclair’s primary concern was not with the goods that were produced, but with the workers who produced them. Throughout the book, as in this chapter, he described with great accuracy the horrifying physical conditions under which immigrant packing plant workers and their families worked and lived, portraying the collapse of immigrant culture under the relentless pressure of industrial capitalism. Despite his sympathies, as a middle-class reformer Sinclair was oblivious to the vibrancy of immigrant communities beyond the reach of bosses, where immigrants found solidarity and hope. Sinclair’s graphic descriptions of how meat products were manufactured were an important factor in the subsequent passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Act in 1906. Sinclair later commented about the effect of his novel: "I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit its stomach."
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