Letter to the Editor

331 Words1 Page

Draft 1- Letter to the Editor paper

U.S. History 4th hour
Nov. 10

1665 65th Street Chicago, Illinois
49408

Chicago Tribune
1864 Rutherford Street Chicago, Illinois
November 10, 1900

To Whom It May Concern

I am a concerned resident of the great city of Chicago who would like to express a few ideas on the following subject. For many years, the meat packing industry of this town has provided many jobs and generated great amounts of commerce. However, the meat packing plants are the epicenter of a huge health risk to Americans everywhere.

I recently read an expose called “The Jungle”, by . I had merely picked it up through a mutual friend out of curiosity, but was quickly wrapped up in reading of the atrocities of the Chicago meat packing plants. Take for example the rodent infestation of storage facilities or the recycling of rotten hams and meat scraps. If that doesn’t make your stomach turn, you should also take into concern the employee’s daily practice of washing their bacteria laden hands in water intended for a batch of sausage. None of the above is a lie or an exaggeration my friend, these are true practices of numerous meat packing facilities in the Chicago area.

I would like this letter to be published in your great newspaper to bring to light the conditions of our meat packing plants. It was said that in the Spanish American
War that the rotten canned meats killed more soldiers than bullets. We cannot allow this to continue. We must hound our legislators for tighter regulations on not only Chicago’s

Show More
Related

  • Norcross: Torturing Puppies And Eating Meat Summary

    1037 Words  | 3 Pages

    However, billions of animals endure intense suffering every year for precisely this end.” Norcross was referring to the animals in a factory farms that produce meat to sell in supermarkets. Norcross explains the factory farms animals live cramped and stress-filled lives. The animals also undergo mutilations without any anesthesia. In the end of the factory farms’ animal life, they’re butchered for the production of meat such as chicken, veal, beef and pork to sell for a profit in places such as a grocery store or

    Read More

  • Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

    1379 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...h and safety laws have been disregarded in the slaughterhouses, causing a number of deaths. Also, there is a great deal of corruption in the slaughterhouses where workers are being threatened or lied to, especially about their injuries. I couldn’t imagine a factory not providing any type of reimbursement if anybody got hurt on the job.

    Read More

  • The Progressive Movement Dbq Essay

    579 Words  | 2 Pages

    A third problem America faced in the past years are the meat-packing industries being unsanitary. The factories had paid no attention to the meats because they somehow get onto the floor filled with dirt and sawdust where the workers’ saliva and shoe prints are on (Doc D). The meats continue down the line shoveled into carts where the shoveler not care to lift out a rat off the conveyor even if he did see one (Doc D). The meat-packing industry contained horrible food conditions that shocked the whole country which caused major legislative action on this

    Read More

  • Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

    1044 Words  | 3 Pages

    The need for affordable, efficiently produced meat became apparent in the 1920’s. Foer provides background information on how Arthur Perdue and John Tyson helped to build the original factory farm by combining cheap feeds, mechanical debeaking, and automated living environ...

    Read More

  • Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and the Meat-Packing Industry Today

    2809 Words  | 6 Pages

    The. The "Meat Industry" Encyclopedia Americana. Grolier Online, n.d. -. Web.

    Read More

  • meat packing industry

    992 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the early twentieth century, at the height of the progressive movement, “Muckrakers” had uncovered many scandals and wrong doings in America, but none as big the scandals of Americas meatpacking industry. Rights and responsibilities were blatantly ignored by the industry in an attempt to turn out as much profit as possible. The meat packers did not care if poor working conditions led to sickness and death. They also did not care if the spoiled meat they sold was killing people. The following paper will discuss the many ways that rights and responsibilities were not being fulfilled by the meat packing industry.

    Read More

  • Slaughterhouses and the packing companies

    2804 Words  | 6 Pages

    “I wished to frighten the country by a picture of what its industrial masters were doing to their victims; entirely by chance I stumbled on another discovery--what they were doing to the meat-supply of the civilized world. In other words, I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach” (Bloom). With the publication of a single book, Upton Sinclair found himself as a worldwide phenomenon overnight. He received worldwide response to his novel and invitations to lectures all over the world including one to the White House by President Roosevelt. In late 1904, the editor of the Appeal to Reason, a socialist magazine sent Sinclair to Chicago to tell the story of the poor common workingmen and women unfairly enslaved by the vast monopolistic enterprises. He found that he could go anywhere in the stockyards provided that he “[wore] old clothes… and [carried] a workman’s dinner pail”. Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago living among and interviewing the Chicago workers; studying conditions in the packing plants. Along with collecting more information for his novel, Sinclair came upon another discovery--the filth of improper sanitation and the processing of spoiled meat. With the publishing of his novel, Sinclair received international response to its graphic descriptions of the packinghouses. The book is said to have decreased America’s meat consumption for decades and President Roosevelt, himself, reportedly threw his breakfast sausages out his window after reading The Jungle. However, Sinclair classified the novel as a failure and blamed himself for the public’s misunderstanding. Sinclair’s main purpose for writing the book was to improve the working conditions for the Chicago stockyard workers. Sinclair found it...

    Read More

  • The Meat Inspection Act of 1906

    726 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was an attempt to regulate the meatpacking industry and to assure consumers that the meat they were eating was safe. In brief, this act made compulsory the careful inspection of meat before its consummation, established sanitary standards for slaughterhouses and processing plants, and required continuous U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection of meat processing and packaging. Yet, the most important objectives set by the law are the prevention of adulterated or misbranded livestock and products from being commercialized and sold as food, and the making sure that meat and all its products are processed and prepared in the adequate sanitary and hygienic conditions (Reeves 35). Imported meat and its various products are no exception to these conditions; they must be inspected under equivalent foreign standards.

    Read More

  • Socialism Exposed In Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle'

    1907 Words  | 4 Pages

    Although the immigrant workers of Packingtown are the back bones of the corporations, they are devalued, marginalized, abused, and overall treaded like they are disposable goods. Corporations within the meatpacking industry have little regard for their predominantly immigrant employees, as such, the work environment is deplorable. The slaughterhouses are disease-ridden due to sanitation, or lack thereof, and they are also very dangerous on account of all the sharp tool and hazardous chemicals used by the industry. The text states “As for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open units near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting—sometimes they would be overlooked for days” (Sinclair, 108). This is a more literal example of how corporate abuse can prevent immigrants from attaining the American Dream. In this case, the slaughterhouse corporation neglected to put some type of safety mechanism overtop of the vats to prevent workers from falling into the toxic liquid. Thus, those who would fall into vats would die a painful death, as the toxic liquid chemicals in said vats, would burn the immigrant workers till only their marrow remained. Consequently, the fallen immigrant stockyard workers would forfeit attaining their American Dreams, as they were not dead, at the hands of reckless superiors, who compromised employee safety for saving money. In addition, Packingtown officials demonstrated their abuse of corporate power in the cavalier way they would let go of individuals. Sinclair writes “The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jurgis saw so plainly the meaning of it. In the beginning, he had been so fresh and strong, and he had gotten a job the first

    Read More

  • Animals Should Get the Same Treatment as Humans

    756 Words  | 2 Pages

    In today’s day and age, meat is one of the most common portions of a human meal. According to the Census statistics from 2009 and 2010, United States is amongst the leading meat producing as well as meat consuming countries in the world, especially in beef and chicken.1 On the contrary, there is no census on human meat because no one consumes it. Yet, human meat and horsemeat are the same because it is meat from a body that has the capability of suffering as Singer proposed.

    Read More

  • The Impact Of The Progressive Era

    1985 Words  | 4 Pages

    Despite many people working for companies that cared so little for their employees, upper class citizens had no idea what was going on behind closed doors. It took muckrakers, investigative journalists who exposed the horrors of factory jobs, for the wealthy to see what poor, immigrant workers had to do for a living. Even the president at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, was not fully aware of what conditions these workers were subjected to. He sent two trusted men to investigate a certain meat-packing facility, and The Neill-Reynolds Report was the result. In this report, it was revealed to Roosevelt, along with the nation, that the men “saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors… in most cases damp and soggy…” and that the workers arrived every day to their jobs only to face “the expectoration of tuberculosis and other diseased workers,” (Doc B). Not only did people in the meat-packing industry have to work in dangerous conditions, but their health was at serious risk as well, from both fellow employees and the raw meat that was handled daily. Fortunately, once word of this reached President Roosevelt, he passed the Federal

    Read More

  • Hand Hygiene In Health Care

    1709 Words  | 4 Pages

    Hand hygiene and staphylococcus infection are the main ideas and topics studied within this booklet, with hand hygiene being the main focus and Staphylococcus aureus blood stream infection rates being data to support the necessity for hand hygiene.

    Read More

  • the jungle

    617 Words  | 2 Pages

    From the start of the Civil War until the 1920's Chicago was home to the countries largest meat packing facilities; Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Nelson Morris. As much as 85 percent of consumer meat in the US came from Chicago's vast packing plants. Behind the companies were around 25,000 employees, making up almost half of the entire US meatpacking work force. Most of the employees were underpaid immigrants who spoke little to no english and made a meager one cent an hour. The highest an employee could aspire to was being a "butcher" who were considered the most skilled workers and made up to fifty cent an hour. Workers slaved away in gruesome, unsafe conditions for ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week. Laboring through the ear deafening shrieks of animals a slaughter, treading over slick blood soaked floors, suffering in unventilated rooms and constantly breathing in the vile, putrid smell of every that was the slaughter house. In 1904 the meatpacker union in Chicago went on strike and demanded better wages and working conditions, but the strike didn't even slow down p...

    Read More

  • Efficacy of Feratox® Cyanide Pellets to Control Introduced Brushtail Possums on Middle Island

    3708 Words  | 8 Pages

    ... P., Inglis, I.R. and Swinney, T. (1992) The influence of stored food on the effectiveness of farm rat control. Brighton Crop Protection Conference, 291-300.

    Read More

  • Essay On Factory Farming

    790 Words  | 2 Pages

    Factory farms have portrayed cruelty to animals in a way that is horrific; unfortunately the public often does not see what really goes on inside these “farms.” In order to understand the conditions present in these factory farms, it must first be examined what the animals in these factory farms are eating. Some of the ingredients commonly used in feeding the animals inside factory farms include the following: animal byproducts, plastic, drugs and chemicals, excessive grains, and meat from members of the same species. (Adams, 2007) These animals are tortured and used for purely slaughter in order to be fed on. Typically large numbers of animals are kept in closed and tight confinements, having only little room to move around, if even that. These confinements can lead to suffocation and death and is not rare. Evidence fr...

    Read More

More about Letter to the Editor

Open Document