You can read it here for free. The following snippets provide a picture of what a Deregulated America can look like. I think it important to know the dark side of our history so we can know how important it is to push back against the Less Government faction.
Hopefully, some of these things have improved; however, have they really? Or have we exported what you will read below? Personally, I do not eat packaged foods with the exception of condiments, and I have giving that some thought, too, after reading The Jungle.
So when you hear the "Less Government, Less Regulation" chant coming out of the GOP camp, remember what you are about to read and push back. America made some progress. Things got better for workers and food safety. The GOP wants to roll this back. This is a direct threat to our health and that of our children.
What is interesting about The Jungle, like most books that tell a true story, is that it is so prescient, so like today in so many ways. The Jungle is the story of a family from Lithuania who goes to America in search of their dreams. They end up in Chicago's slaughter house district. They were lured by the high wages compared to Lithuanian wages and they could get jobs without speaking English.
What they didn't realize is that the costs to survive were higher than the wages. Much higher. They didn't realize that, in order to survive, even their small children would have to work, which illegal but overlooked by The Profit Mongers that owned the slaughter houses. And worse, the lack of regulations put the health of themselves and their children in great danger.
For instance, you can read on page 41:
Their children were not as well as they had been at home (in Lithuania); but how could they know that there was no sewer to their house, and that the drainageof fifteen years was in a cesspool under it? How could they know that the pale-blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and doctored with formaldehyde besides?
When the children were not well at home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now she was obliged to go to the drugstore and buy extracts—and how was she to know that they were all adulterated?
How could they find out that their tea and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with aniline dyes?
And even if they had known it, what good would it have done them, since there was no place within miles of them where any other sort was to be had?
The family of twelve were lured into buying a house that was a scam. Sold as "new" it was 15 years old. They had no recourse because they had no money for a lawyer and the laws protected the developer not the buyer. One day another Lithuanian came into their lives, Grandmother Majauszkiene who had lived in the area for years. The truth about the "new house" unfolds
on page 35
In the first place as to the house they had bought, it was not new at all, as they had
supposed; it was about fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint, which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed to make money by swindling poor people.
Cheap as the houses were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them.
When they failed—if it were only by a single month—they would lose the house and all that they had paid on it, and then the company would sell it over again.
So, the whole family, including the children worked for years, slaves to their mortgage, working in the slaughter houses of Chicago. After injuries on the job, sexual harassment, deaths, and 30 days in jail for the main bread winner for attacking the "boss" that raped his wife several times, the family lost the house to foreclosure.
The following is probably the darkest story of what deregulation looks like. It involves the food we eat, specifically meat products. If ever a case were made for being a vegan, this would be it.
Sinclair exposes the conditions in the slaughter houses and lets the public know the dangers of eating the meat they produce.
The deregulated slaughter house business wasted nothing and the public had no idea just how disgustingly contaminated the food they bought was, much of it banned for import by other countries. Ok, this is a nauseating read; however, it shows in explicit detail what a Deregulated Market is capable of.
Chapter 14, page 71
With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles.
For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage.
With what had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they could now study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest—that they use everything of the pig except the squeal.
Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped,
any color and any flavor and any odor they chose.
In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant—a machine consisting of a hollow needle
attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds.
And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with
an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor; a process known to the workers as "giving them thirty per cent."
Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone
to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three
Grade; there was only Number One Grade.
The packers were always originating such schemes; they had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed
into casings; and "California hams," which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy "skinned hams," which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them; that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled "head cheese!"
It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta.
Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference.
There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there
would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white; it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption.
There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where
the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it.
It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but 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.
This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one; there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.
There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage.
There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the
odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there.
Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water— and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast.
Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage—but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to make it brown.
All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they
would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.
The Jungle is filled with amazingly quotable lines that apply to todays Occupy Movement. In too many ways, not much has changed. The the roots of inequality and abuse are the same:
GREED and the Corruption that allows GREED to flourish at the expense of the majority of workers. A man's soul is the price of success in this system. Good men of good conscience don't flourish, they are not allowed to. Prices, low wages, and/or lack of credit keep good men in their places.
Highly recommended book.