Upton Sinclair Accidentally Created the FDA

It's Saturday, September nineteenth. In 1906, a twenty-seven-year-old socialist writer published a novel about Chicago's slaughterhouses. He wanted Americans to be so horrified by how immigrant workers were being treated that they would rise up and overthrow capitalism. Instead, Americans were horrified by what was going into their sausages. The public panic was so intense that within months, the government passed the first federal food safety laws, creating the regulatory system we still rely on today — more than a century later.

The writer's name was Upton Sinclair. The book was The Jungle. He never meant to fix your dinner. He meant to start a revolution. He failed at that. But the story doesn't end there. Twenty-eight years later, Sinclair ran for governor of California, came within striking distance of winning, and his opponents had to invent the modern political attack ad — fake newsreels, radio smear campaigns, the whole toolkit — just to stop him. Here's what happened.

In the fall of 1904, Upton Sinclair boarded a train to Chicago. He was twenty-six years old and a committed socialist. He wanted to write a novel that would expose the exploitation of immigrant workers so brutally that Americans would demand change. He spent seven weeks in Packingtown — the dense complex of stockyards and slaughterhouses on Chicago's South Side — wearing grimy clothes and carrying a dinner pail so he could blend in with the workers.

The novel followed a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis Rudkus (YUR-gis ROOD-kus) and his family as the meatpacking industry slowly destroyed them. Sinclair documented what happened to workers in clinical detail. Thumbs slashed so many times they became lumps of flesh. Fingers that spread out like fans because the knuckles were permanently swollen. Men in the cooking rooms breathing tuberculosis germs that were renewed every hour. Fertilizer men who smelled so bad they couldn't be shown to visitors.

The public did not care about any of that. What they cared about was what was in the food. Sinclair described dead rats swept into the meat grinder along with the poisoned bread that had been laid to kill them. Moldy sausage returned from Europe, dosed with borax and glycerine, and repackaged for American tables. Hams that had gone bad, pumped full of a stronger chemical pickle to destroy the odor, then sold as Number One Grade.

And then there was the detail that stuck with readers more than any other. Workers sometimes fell into the open rendering vats — the massive tanks used to boil down animal fat into lard. If nobody noticed right away, a man could stay in there for days. And when he finally came out, it wasn't as a body. It was as lard. Pure beef lard, sold to the public, with no way to know who, or what, was actually in it.

The book sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first year. President Theodore Roosevelt read it, ordered a federal investigation, and on June 30, 1906, signed both the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act on the same day. The Bureau of Chemistry — which eventually became the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA — was given the job of enforcing the laws.

Sinclair was not happy about this. He later wrote: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

He had spent months documenting human suffering, and the country responded by worrying about what was in their breakfast. Before The Jungle, there had been decades of scientific research pushing for food regulation. A chemist named Harvey Washington Wiley (WHY-lee) had been running what the press called the Poison Squad since 1902 — feeding volunteers measured amounts of borax, formaldehyde, and salicylic acid to prove these preservatives were dangerous. Multiple food safety bills had been introduced in Congress and stalled. The Jungle broke the logjam in a way that twenty years of science couldn't. A novel that failed at socialism created the modern regulatory state entirely by accident.

Sinclair didn't stay a novelist. By 1933, he was fifty-five years old, one of the most famous writers in America, and still a committed socialist. Franklin Roosevelt had just been elected president, and Sinclair saw an opening. In September of that year, he walked into the Beverly Hills city hall and switched his party registration to Democrat. A few days later, he declared his candidacy for governor of California.

His platform was called End Poverty in California, or EPIC (EE-pick). The plan: the state would seize idle factories and farmland where owners had failed to pay property taxes, put the unemployed to work in them, and essentially create a parallel cooperative economy. He published the platform as a book called "I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future." The book was written as if it were already history — by 1938, poverty in California would be gone.

EPIC clubs sprang up across the state. His campaign newspaper had a massive circulation. In August 1934, Sinclair won the Democratic nomination with more votes than any primary candidate in California history. He was on the cover of Time magazine. A socialist novelist was suddenly the frontrunner to govern the most populous state in the country.

The opposition panicked and got creative. A political consulting firm called Campaigns, Inc., run by Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter (lee-OH-nee BAX-ter), was hired to destroy Sinclair. They pioneered techniques no one had used before. Fake newsreels shown in movie theaters depicted hordes of unemployed people flooding into California to take advantage of EPIC. Radio attack ads ran constantly. The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page box with a misleading Sinclair quote every single day for six weeks. Hollywood studio heads threatened to move their operations to Florida if Sinclair won.

Sinclair lost in November. But twenty-four EPIC candidates won seats in the state legislature. Four years later, Culbert Olson (CULL-bert OLE-son), the leader of the EPIC caucus, was elected governor of California. And in late 1934, Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt's top New Deal advisers, proposed an "End Poverty in America" program that the New York Times said "differs from Sinclair's plan in detail, but not in principle." The ideas that were too radical for California voters in 1934 shaped national policy within months.

The Jungle was supposed to start a socialist revolution. It started the FDA instead. The EPIC campaign was supposed to make Sinclair governor. It lost at the ballot box, but its ideas filtered into the New Deal, and the campaign against it invented modern political advertising — the fake newsreel, the attack ad, the daily newspaper smear. All of it was built to stop one novelist who got too close to power. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.