The Food and Drug Act of 1906 At the start of the twentieth century, America’s food was not suitable for consumption. There were no laws or guidelines on how food and drugs should be manufactured. Meat manufacturers were using grounded up rats as meat substitutes, animal guts were packaged and sold as other meats such as ham. They used spoiled meats and vegetables in order to save money and slaughtered animals with disease and took no care in handling the meat. Drug creation was bad as well, since labels didn’t tell the consumer what was actually in the medicine. Often times it contained poisonous substances and didn’t do what it was suppose to do. The Act rose due to the people such as Upton Sinclair , Samuel Hopkins Adams, Florence Kelley, …show more content…
He wrote it to show the lives of immigrants working in meatpacking industries in Chicago and the conditions in which they worked. It showed the public how unsanitary the meat industry was and how many health violations they break. This book got a lot of attention for these violations, eventually making it to Theodore Roosevelt. Samuel Hopkins Adams, another muckraker, wrote “The Great American Fraud” which was about the medicine business. He exposed many false claims made by medicine manufactures and showed how often medicine did more harm then help. Florence Kelley was a female social activist who helped promote the Meat Inspection Act of 1904 and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 by encouraging consumers to only purchase goods from places that treated their workers right. The most important influence on this act was Harvey W. Wiley. Wiley who was known as the father of the food and drug act, was the chief chemist at he Department of Agriculture. He created a group in 1902 called the Poison squad, which tested the effects of chemicals and food additives on themselves for the better of the public. The Poison Squads research got national attention and Wiley used this to campaign for a law to regulate food