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Food And Drug Act 1906 Essay

522 Words3 Pages

Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) During the Progressive era, the public wanted the government to take charge and make decisions. They wanted them to deal with the major social and economic problems that confronted the nation due to the Industrial Revolution. The Progressives accepted industrialization and the growth of cities, but they believed that the government needed to do more to oversee and control these changes. The public needed the government to realize that not everyone in the economy was doing as well as they might have thought. It left people in horrible conditions whether it be at home or in the work place. In 1898, the first signs of something being terribly wrong with the food industry appeared. During this time in the Spanish American War, soldiers died from eating badly preserved meat. Some saying that it had an “odor like an embalmed dead body.” In 1902 the chief chemist in what is now the Department of Agriculture, was Dr. Harvey Wiley. He is now considered the father of the Food and Drug Act. To bring attention to the public, he carried out a study involving a group of twelve healthy male volunteers, also called the “poison squad”. These men …show more content…

They found and wrote about corruption in politics and business. When the public found out about it, sometimes it forced the government to take action. Muckrakers wrote about the unsanitary conditions of a lot of manufacturing plants. In February of 1906 a muckraker, by the name of Upton Sinclair, wrote and published The Jungle. It was supposed to reveal the horrible conditions that the workers in the meat packing industry of Chicago had to work in. While it still succeeded in doing so, it also exposed the unsanitary conditions that the meat was processed in. Then the public and soon the government were aware of this. Upton stated “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit its

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