THE POWER OF ONE NEWS STORY in the early 1900s Chicago Illinois was the center of the meat processing industry One part of the city came to be known as Packingtown As many as 12 million hogs and beef cattle were processed there each year Many workers were poor immigrants Women and children as young as 14 years old worked there too Life in Packingtown was hard The working conditions were terrible even dangerous Employees worked in dark and stuffy rooms that were stiflingly hot in summer and freezing cold in winter Many were Meatpackers prepare hog carcasses for processing at Armour's Packing Plant in Chicago in 1909
scheduled to work ten hours a day six days a week They worked on floors covered with animal blood meat scraps and dirty water Sometimes the skin on their hands was eaten away by acid Others lost fingers in the machines Most of the workers earned only a few pennies per hour Some workers died Horrible working conditions were not the only problem Meat was piled on the floor before it was processed It got scooped off the floor along with sawdust rat droppings rat poison dead rats and human saliva Then it was packaged and sold to consumers The Packingtown companies made employees work at night They did not want meat inspectors to see them using diseased and rotten meats Food that should have been thrown away was instead injected with chemicals Then it was processed into cans and packages that were not properly labeled In 1904 workers went on strike to demand better working conditions and wages The Packingtown
companies brought in replacement workers Those who continued to strike fell into IN THE REAL WORLD poverty and debt It seemed impossible to force the businesses to change their practices ENTER SINCLAIR Then the editor of THE NEED FOR JOURNALISTS President Theodore Roosevelt said There should be relentless exposure of and attack on every evil man whether politician or business man every evil practice whether in politics business or social life He knew that there would be unethical people who would do harm to others for their own gain With this statement he pointed out that the best way to stop unethical people was for other people to expose them This is the main role of investigative journalists They uncover bad and often dangerous practices and help stop them a newspaper called Appeal to Reason asked writer Upton Sinclair to investigate Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago The owners of the meatpacking plants had no idea who
