1905

 

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“Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.”

 

Former President Grover Cleveland

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The first jukeboxes appear, offering a choice of 24 songs. Nickelodeons show “flickers,” or early motion pictures, for only a nickel.

Elizabeth Wharton Drexel by Boldini.

 

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Back in Ohio, the Wright brothers are having increasing success, on one flight traveling 24 miles in 39 minutes. They are still being ignored. The Frenchman Leon DeLagrange is getting worldwide notice, for flying two-and-a-half miles in six minutes. (See: 1900, 1903, 1904 for more on the brothers.)

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 November 4: Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, is published. I gave this brief reading to my students: 

A Law for Meat Packers 

Upton Sinclair’s famous book, The Jungle, was published in 1905. In it the author described the business methods of Chicago meat-packing companies. He had hoped to stir sympathy for the men and women who labored in the factories. For they had been treated horribly.  

They survived, said Sinclair, by “the law of the jungle.” 

A small part of the novel dealt with unclean methods used to process meat. Yet it was this section which grabbed the nation’s attention. Sinclair would later remark, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Little wonder, as you will see, when you read the following description: 

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 all moldy and white. It would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers [mixing vats], and made over again [to be sold in the United States]. There would be meat that had tumbled out onto the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had trampled 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...[a problem] 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 tale 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.

 

[To save money]...there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water. Cart load after cart load 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 gelatin 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.     

 

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Public reaction to Sinclair’s work was sudden, sickened, and powerful.  There were immediate demands for Congress to take action. A familiar nursery rhyme was changed as follows: 

Mary had a little lamb,

And when she saw it sicken,

She shipped it off to Packingtown,

And now it’s labeled chicken.

 

The well-known newspaper critic, “Mr. Dooley,” described his feelings after reading the book.  “I haven’t been able to ate annything more nourishin’ thin a    cucumber in a week,” he told a friend.  “Today th’ wurrud resthrant makes me green in th’ face.” According to Dooley, President Teddy Roosevelt, was having breakfast one day when he first looked at the novel: 

Well sir, [he tells his friend] it put th’ Prisident in a tur-rble stew. Oh, Lawd,    why did I say that?...Anyhow, Tiddy was toying with a light breakfast an’ idly turnin’ over th’ pages iv th’ new book with both hands. Suddenly he rose fr’m the table, an’ cryin’: “I’m pizzened,” he begun throwin’ sausages out iv th’ window.  Th’ ninth wan sthruck Sinitor Biv’ridge on th’ head an’ made him a blond. It bounced off, exploded, an’ blew a leg off a secret-service agent, an’ th’ scattered fragmints desthroyed a handsome row iv ol’ oak trees...Since thin th’ Prisidint, like th’ rest iv us, has become a viggytaryan.

 

 

Later a friend asked Dooley what went into a “potted” (canned) ham. Dooley explained:  “It is made in akel parts iv plasther of Paris, sawdust, rope, an’ incautious laborer.”  

Then he invited his comrade into the back room of the saloon for a snack.  “Cut me a slice iv th’ ham,” he says, “an’ sind f’r th’ priest.” (See: 1906, for the Pure Food and Drug Act.)

 

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A quick item in The New Yorker notes the importance of books during wartime and other periods of turmoil. One writer was especially unhappy with the portrayal of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 

A full half century after Stowe’s book was published, a stage production of her story so outraged a North Carolina Baptist minister named Thomas Dixon, Jr., that he wrote what became the most influential anti-Tom novel of all, The Clansman. Published in 1905, it told of bestial Black rapists and of white avengers from the noble Ku Klux Klan, offering ostensible justification for the resegregation then occurring under Jim Crow laws. By the time Dixon was writing, the Klan had been extinct for decades, but his novel – adapted as D. W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation” – helped revive it. This monstrous cinematic masterpiece was released in 1915, and the Klan reestablished itself as a newly vindictive force of terror the same year. Astonishingly, the burning cross set high on Stone Mountain, in Georgia, the night it was reborn – a symbol that cut deep into the nation’s psyche for many years – derived not from the historic Klan but from Dixon’s novel.