Essay 18-A: Meat Inspection Act, Public Health, and the People

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

If you like hamburgers, I would not recommend Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle.  Its appalling depiction of the early 20th-century Chicago meatpacking industry is enough to churn the stomach of even the most dedicated carnivore.

An avowed socialist, Sinclair’s motivation in writing it was to turn the public against a capitalist system that he felt oppressed the working man.  He did not succeed in winning the public over to socialism, but his graphic prose still caught people’s attention.  Mere months after The Jungle hit the presses, the U.S. Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act, the latter of which created the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

As Sinclair himself put it, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

If you read The Jungle in high school civics, it was likely presented as a triumph of the public interest.  And it certainly was that.  It shows that “We the People” can bring about significant changes just by making our voices heard.  Public opinion helped spur quick and durable congressional action.  Over a hundred years later, a visit to a modern meatpacking plant may not be anyone’s idea of a fun field trip, but it would (thankfully) prove a lot more boring.

The history of The Jungle illustrates just one of the ways that people can influence the law.  In that case, a high-profile author generated enough public outcry to get the attention of members of Congress, who then handed power over to food scientists and other experts in order to determine what needed to be done to clean up the industry.

But when the Founders drafted the Declaration of Independence and, later, the Constitution, they envisioned a role for “We the People” that involved far more than merely deferring to “the experts” to pass good laws.  Benjamin Franklin famously described the new government as “a Republic, if you can keep it,” meaning the people were to play the key role in ensuring that their elected representatives acted in the public interest.

And as the modern regulatory state took shape over the course of the 20th century, Congress and the courts tried (with varying levels of success) to maintain the same checks and balances and democratic safeguards that made the Constitution so successful.  For example, in 1946, Congress passed a law that required regulatory agencies to solicit and consider public comments when drafting a new regulation.  And in recent years, the federal courts have been increasingly emphatic that the people’s elected representatives in Congress, rather than unelected bureaucrats, must be the ones making important policy decisions.

By ensuring that the people play a critical role in regulatory decisions, regulatory reformers are drawing on an insight that would have been very familiar to the Founders: knowledge is dispersed throughout society, and every single one of us is an “expert” in how the law affects him personally.  Though our society has become far more complex in the ensuing centuries, the basic principle holds.  Laws informed by the people are far more sophisticated than those cooked up by a bureaucrat acting from a distant capital.

Like those who came before, we must be active participants in this ongoing experiment in self-government.  It is not enough simply to hear about a problem and call upon Washington bureaucrats to act.  Each of us bears a solemn responsibility to study the problems confronting us, elect representatives who offer the best solutions, and hold those representatives to account at the voting booth.

We also should not be afraid to call for an overhaul of the regulatory state when it strays from the principles of limited and representative government that undergird the Constitution.  Recent Supreme Court decisions have at least partially restored Congress’s critical role in setting policy, though much work remains to be done.  And state and local governments have developed the capacity to reclaim at least some of the powers taken over by the federal government over the years.

The Jungle is but one example of how a highly motivated citizen can speak out, influence his fellow Americans, and bring about meaningful change.  The rise of the internet and social media significantly expands our ability to play a similar role, albeit on a more limited scale.  A modern Upton Sinclair is far more likely to be an unknown blogger advocating change that may influence the local school board or city council.

But that bottom-up model was precisely what the Founders intended.  The last 250 years of American history have time and again reaffirmed their insight that the most meaningful social change is usually the result of thousands of anonymous citizens quietly working to leave the world a slightly better place than they found it.

Reeve T. Bull is the Policy Director of the Fulcrum Foundation and a Senior Advisor with the Recoding America Fund. He recently finished his term as the Deputy Director of Virginia’s Office of Regulatory Management. Prior to this role, he was Research Director of the Administrative Conference of the United States.  He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States.

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