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Uncited statements from a magazine that a mission to promote free market ideology isn't a very good citation at all. On the other hand, here's President Roosev

Uncited statements from a magazine that a mission to promote free market ideology isn't a very good citation at all. On the other hand, here's President Roosevelt's own speech about the matter: http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/txtspeeches/963.pdf http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/txtspeeche... "Under existing law the National Government has no power to enforce inspection of the many forms of Prepared meat food products that are daily going from the packing houses into interstate commmerce. Owing to an inadequate apropriation the Department of Agriculture is not even able to place inspectors in all establishments desiring them. The present law prohibits the shipment of uninspected meat to foreign countries, but there is no provision for inspected meats in interstate commerce, and thus the avenues of interstate commerce are left open to traffic in diseased or spoiled meats." This from the mouth of a President who thought Sinclair was a socialist jackass. So, which source to trust… a first-hand source, who hired the inspectors and commissioned the report, who ran the country and was presumably informed about legal jurisdiction, who thought the original author was a jackass… or a magazine that has its mission statement to promote free market ideology 50 years later?

glenra 13y ago
(HN weirdness - I couldn't "reply" to you a moment ago and now I can. Oh well...I'll recap what I wrote above.) Here is the report on FEE relied - it was, in my opinion, accurately represented by FEE's summary: http://books.google.com/books?id=xGU-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA350 http://books.google.com/books?id=xGU-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA350 I'm not claiming Upton Sinclair's claims were unrealistic, I'm just claiming they were false. He said stuff that clearly was not true. The stuff about rats and dried rat dung going into the meat: false. The stuff about workers falling into the vat and, again, becoming part of the meat: false. (there actually was one case one time of somebody falling into the vat, but the body was recovered and buried, not turned into sausage.) Sinclair clearly invented stuff in order to entertainingly disgust his readers, which makes him an unreliable narrator, not a valid witness. The fact that the government introduced new inspection laws to reassure the nauseated populace doesn't mean the guy whose lies nauseated them was correct. Nor does the fact that Roosevelt, like any politician, liked taking credit for the laws he signed and making grandiose claims for how much good those laws were likely to do.

glenra 13y ago

(HN weirdness - I couldn't "reply" to you a moment ago and now I can. Oh well...I'll recap what I wrote above.) Here is the report on FEE relied - it was, in my opinion, accurately represented by FEE's summary: http://books.google.com/books?id=xGU-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA350 http://books.google.com/books?id=xGU-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA350 I'm not claiming Upton Sinclair's claims were unrealistic, I'm just claiming they were false. He said stuff that clearly was not true. The stuff about rats and dried rat dung going into the meat: false. The stuff about workers falling into the vat and, again, becoming part of the meat: false. (there actually was one case one time of somebody falling into the vat, but the body was recovered and buried, not turned into sausage.) Sinclair clearly invented stuff in order to entertainingly disgust his readers, which makes him an unreliable narrator, not a valid witness. The fact that the government introduced new inspection laws to reassure the nauseated populace doesn't mean the guy whose lies nauseated them was correct. Nor does the fact that Roosevelt, like any politician, liked taking credit for the laws he signed and making grandiose claims for how much good those laws were likely to do.