The original 1906 Act authorized the
Secretary of Agriculture to inspect and condemn any meat product found unfit for human consumption. The law was partly a response to the publication of
Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle, an exposé of the Chicago
meat packing industry, as well as to other
Progressive Era muckraking publications of the day. While Sinclair's dramatized account was intended to bring attention to the terrible working conditions in Chicago, the public was more horrified by the prospect of bad meat. The book's assertions were confirmed in the Neill-Reynolds report, commissioned by
President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Roosevelt was suspicious of Sinclair's
socialist attitude and conclusions in
The Jungle, so he sent labor commissioner
Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds, men whose honesty and reliability he trusted, to Chicago to make surprise visits to meat packing facilities. Despite betrayal of the secret to the meat packers, who worked three shifts a day for three weeks to thwart the inspection, Neill and Reynolds were still revolted by the conditions at the factories and at the lack of concern by plant managers (though neither had much experience in the field). Following their report, Roosevelt became a supporter of regulation of the meat packing industry, and, on June 30, signed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. The FMIA mandated the
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspection of meat processing plants that conducted business across state lines. The
Pure Food and Drug Act, enacted on the same day (June 30, 1906), also gave the government broad jurisdiction over food in
interstate commerce. The four primary requirements of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 were: • Mandatory inspection of
livestock before slaughter (cattle,
sheep,
goats,
equines, and
swine); • Mandatory
postmortem inspection of every
carcass; • Sanitary standards established for
slaughterhouses and
meat processing plants; and • Authorized U.S. Department of Agriculture ongoing monitoring and inspection of slaughter and processing operations. After 1906, many additional laws that further standardized the
meat industry and its inspection were passed. == Preemption of state law ==