As the twentieth century began, Americans were increasingly concerned with their food and drug supplies. The safety of patent medicines, or nostrums, sold directly to the public and containing "secret" ingredients such as alcohol was questioned in popular magazines and medical journals. In February 1906 Upton Sinclair finally found a publisher for The Jungle, his novel of lower-class life in Chicago that contained pages exposing the horrors of the meatpacking industry. President Theodore Roosevelt chose two men, U.S. labor commissioner Charles P. Neill and New York reformer James B. Reynolds, to investigate Sinclair's charges. These impartial observers confirmed everything: the sale of rancid meat, workers suffering from active tuberculosis, the appearance of foreign matter in the processed meat. Under pressure from business interests, Roosevelt refused to release the report, but.....
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