The Chicago Meat Works.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 8140, 2 June 1906, Page 5

The Chicago Meat Works.

President Urges Immediate Actionii (By Electric Telegraph—Copyright). (Per Press Association.) Received June 2, at 9 a.m. NEW YORK, June 1. President Roosevelt submits to Congress the Commissioner's report on the Chicago Meat Works. He advises the immediate passing of a bill authorising stringent inspection of the packing houses. The Beef Trust advise the Government to investigate the tinned salmon and lobster trades. "The Jungle."

Mr Upton Sinclair's Zolaesque Novel. Unspeakable Practices. It is not in the least surprising that President Roosevelt was moved, by reading " The Jungle," to osrder immediate action into the methods of the Chicago packing establishments, for the pictures Mr Upton Sinclair gives of life and work in these places are enough to make one shudder. The book is full of the horrors of corrupt and disgusting practices at the I yards. One of the characters tells how " he was working in the room where the men prepared the beef for canning, and the beef had lain in vats full of chemicals, and men with great forks speared it out and dumped it into trticks, to be taken to the cooking-room. When they had speared out all they could reach, they emptied the vat on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up the balance and dumped it into the truck. This floor was filthy, yet- they > set Antanas with his mop slopping the 'pickle ' into a hole that connected with a sink, where it was caught and used over again tor ever; and if that were not enough, there was a trap m the pipe, where all the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every few days it was the old man's task to clean these out, and shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat !" According to a butcher who worked for a firm which killed meat for canning only, "it seemed that they must have agencies all over the country, to hunt out old and crippled and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed on ' whisky malt,' the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called ' steerly,' which means covered with boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they ! would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face. ... It was stuff such as this that made the ' embalmed beef' that had killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards."

Jurgis, the chief character, was initiated into the mysteries of the X canned goods, which had become a national institution. " They advertised ' potted chicken ' —and it was like the boarding-house soup of the comic papers, through, which a chicken had walked with rubbers on. . . . The things that went into the mixture were tripe, and fat of pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of real, when they had any 'Devyled' ham was made out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be sliced by the machines ; and also tripe, dyed with chemicals, so that it would not show white; and trimmings of hams and corned beef, and potatoes, stins and all; and finally the hard cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavoured with spices to make it taste like something." Horrible, too, is the account of the accidents and diseases to which the workers are liable. The men in the cooking rooms, who worked in tankrooms full of steam, were liable to fail into the open vats near the level of the floor. " When they were fished out, there never was enough of them lefc to be worth exhibiting [to visitors] —sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as X 's Pure Leaf Lard!" As for the attitude of the men to their work, Mr Sinclair says: '' They hated the bosses, and they hated the owners ; they hated the whole place, the whole neighbourhood—even the whole city, with an ill-inclusive hatred, bitter and fierce. Women and little children would fall to cursing about it; it was rotten, rotten as hell—everything was rotten." As for the story itself, its realism is on something of a par with the details we quote. _____