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Food And Drug Act 1906 Essay

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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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Sinclair worked undercover in a meatpacking plant to gather information firsthand, before he began writing the book. Its influence on the labor practices and regulations governing the food industry cannot be understated. It tackles subjects as varied as the poor living conditions of the immigrants, exploitation of cheap labor by industrialists, and the unsanitary conditions of the meatpacking plants and stockyards of Chicago. The descriptions of the disgusting processes that were conducted in the meatpacking plants made for shocking reading and turned the book into a bestseller. The President Teddy Roosevelt ordered an investigation into the lack of sanitation in meatpacking plants and caused the creation of legislation governing the food industry in the form of the Food and Drugs Act of 1906.

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The Meat Inspection Act and The Pure Food and Drug Act were created. The Pure Food and Drug Act led to the development of the federal Food and Drug Administration. Ida Tarbell, “The History and the Standard Oil Company,” after written it in serial form for Mcclure's Magazine. The expose was composed after she spent several years investigating the business practices of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Her investigative reporting led to the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911.

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When I first read Chapter Ten of “After the Fact”, by James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, I was shocked at the methods meat factories use in preparing their products. I was especially shocked seeing as now; we have so many food regulations that most people don’t think twice about the food that is going in their bodies. I am now thinking, do these things still appear in our lives today? It was nice to know that Theodore Roosevelt took action in an attempt to fix these major problems. He became aware of the poor conditions of the meat industry through the book “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair.

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Four months later, the first Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 was passed. This act dismissed interstate commerce of tainted and misbranded food and drugs. The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 affected the producers of these companies, because they lost all of their business, however, it was a good thing since they were selling narcotics in medicine. Consumers were affected by this act, because they no longer had to worry about whether or not they would become addicted to the medicine that they need to

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At the time, the conditions of the meat packing industry included toxic chemicals in all the meats, how they were kept, and how they were packed. But, progressives such as Teddy Roosevelt made efforts to help it. One instance was when he pushed Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act, which would significantly improve the industry. Document 1 explains how unsanitary and

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A muckraker is what is considered today an investigative journalist. In Sinclair’s case, he is considered a muckraker because he “wanted to investigate the meat-packing industry” in order to write about the working class, especially the immigrants working in them. As he began his investigation, however, he discovered dirty and unhealthy conditions in a workplace with unsafe standards. The applicable theme would be Culture and Society (CUL) because although he speaks about the working class and work conditions, he focuses on society as a whole. He writes “The Jungle” to describe to them the dirty, “unhealthy conditions, and general absence of meaningful safety standards in the workplace”.

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The Jungle was released to expose meatpacking industries’ ways of treating workers and meat. With this release, changes occurred. President Roosevelt urged Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. This act required the Department of Agriculture to inspect every hog and steer whose carcass state lines. In other words, it required companies to pay to get their facilities and practices checked by an inspector to assure everything was being done correctly.

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These workers would produce meat products that were contaminated, processed, and rotten. They would sell products that had chemicals on them but then label the package differently so the public would not know. Sinclair shows how the workers would still process the dead and diseased animals once the inspectors left the factories. “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” (161).

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Muckrakers were people that became upset by politics and wanted to expose the corruption to America. Famous muckrakers included, Ida Tarbell, Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair, who is the author of The Jungle, a book about the unsanitary conditions in meatpacking plants, leading to food regulations and ultimately the establishment of the FDA, which is very

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The 1906 book, The Jungle, caused an uproar that completely shifted focus to these issues of these workers and the safety of their conditions. This work should be considered a milestone in itself because of how wide-reaching and accessible it was. It also sparked the need for the government to get involved, which happened almost immediately after Sinclair’s book was published. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 paved the way for health inspections of both facilities and meat, even though the bar was set extremely low and inspectors were often still disgusted. Both this act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1907 resulted in much higher quality ingredients in the United States.

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Those writers and journalists were called “Muckrakers”, Upton Sinclair was one of them. In order to stay on his position and support the muckrakers, he chose to tell the truth to American public instead of keeping silence. Then, “The Jungle” became his weapon to oppose the trusts and some corrupt officials. Although the content is dangerous and risky, it’s also effective and worth. People responded dramatically to this book, the risk has valuation for Upton Sinclair to take and hook the

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Although it may seem that the meat packing industry is still in turmoil because of their unwillingness to make known what foods have Genetically Modified organisms present, the meat packing industry was much worse during the 1900’s because of the unsafe working conditions, and uncleanliness of the food. Body 1: The meat packing industry’s working conditions were much worse in the 1900’s than they are today. In the novel The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, working conditions were horrible for immigrants who were employed in these factories. People in these factories were worked very hard and used up till they could not work anymore. In the novel Jurgis broke his ankle because of the unsafe

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Upton Sinclair wrote in The Jungle, “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 it.” The conditions in the meatpacking industry were unsanitary and needed to be changed. “Sinclair’s expose led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.” This is also known as the FDA. The FDA is in place to make sure that food is safe to

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633 Words | 3 Pages

Ever since the 1900s the Federal Government has had several growths of expansion, some good and some bad, in this article the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 as well as the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 will be discussed and how it expanded government, and whether this growth of government was beneficial or not. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which can be labeled as the founding date of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had the purpose to essentially “ban foreign and interstate traffic in adulterated or mislabeled food and drug products… (and) It required that active ingredients be placed on the label of a drug’s packaging and that drugs could not fall below purity levels established by the United States Pharmacopeia or the National Formulary” [1]. This meant that food and drug products couldn’t be lined with “mysterious” substances and everything had to be labelled according to what it contained.

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The Pure Food and Drug act of 1906 was the 1st consumer protection law by the Federal Government, this act was passed by President Theodore Roosevelt. The main purpose of the Pure Food and Drug act was to prohibit transportation of contaminated, poisonous, and misbranded foods, drugs, medicines and liquors. Without the pure food and drug act our food, medication, and other product would be filled with dangerous chemicals that would have harm in our health and potentially cause death. Before the 20th century, there were no laws or regulations that protected Americans from hazardous foods and medicines. This meant that there were no restrictions of what chemicals could be put in one’s food or medicine, leaving the open to mass deaths of contaminated or poisonous products.

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