The 1906 Meat Inspection Act was long viewed as a leap forward during Progressive Era

reform, one that the public could celebrate as a win against industrial abuse. However, beneath

its appearance, the Act was in reality a superficial victory shaped by political and corporate

elites, ultimately benefiting the very meatpacking industry it was meant to restrain. While public

outrage, sparked by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, drove a wave of demand for regulation and

reform, the legislative process was quietly guided by industry allies in Congress and moderated

by a president more concerned with stability than delivering actual change. As a result, the final

legislation protected corporate profits, reassured anxious consumers, and stabilized international

markets, all while requiring minimal changes to the corporations it supposedly targeted.

Industry influence over legislative compromises reveals how political power was used

not to restrain corporations, but to protect them. Behind closed doors, industry lobbyists and their

Senate allies constantly rewrote rules to protect profits. When Senator Albert Beveridge

introduced a bold bill in May 1906, demanding mandatory dating of canned meats, bans on

misleading branding, and inspections of processing plants, the meatpacking giants panicked.

They turned to industry-friendly senators James Wadsworth and William Lorimer, who were not

only aligned with business interests but also sat on the very House Agriculture Committee that

would judge the two bills. The two drafted a rival bill, stripping away every meaningful reform

Beveridge had proposed.

The meatpackers’ victory was no accident. In his 1906 series “Treason of the Senate”,

muckraker David Graham Phillips warned that senators like Wadsworth and Lorimer acted as

“servants” to corporate “interests as hostile to the American people as an invading army.” 1

Phillips’ metaphor perfectly captures how the meatpacking industry infiltrated Congress to

1Moss, David, and Marc Campasano. The Jungle and the Debate over Federal Meat Inspection in 1906.
Report no. 716045. Harvard Business School, 2017. p. 9.
ensure that laws served profits, not public safety. His observation that “a servant obeys him who

can punch and dismiss”2 explains why Beveridge’s reforms failed—that senators owed their

positions not to voters, but to powerful corporate backers. The result was legislation that

appeared forceful while shielding monopolies from real consequences.

This imbalance between regulatory ideals and industry reality was not limited to

meatpacking. The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), established in 1887 to restrain

railroad monopolies, became a textbook case of regulatory capture. Its first chairman, Thomas

Cooley, was a former railroad lawyer who seemed to view his job as protecting railroads from

“destructive competition”3 rather than protecting the public from monopoly abuse.

Under Cooley’s leadership, the ICC made a mockery of its mission. Though the Sherman

Antitrust Act banned price-fixing, the ICC allowed railroads to continue operating their illegal

pools. Railroads quickly learned they could ignore the rules because no one would hold them

accountable.

This failure was not accidental—it was built into the structure of the commission itself.

The ICC’s weakness proved that industries could turn well-meaning regulation into empty

promises. As one railroad president noted before the Act passed, “No matter what sort of bill you

have, everything depends upon the men who, so to speak, are inside of it, and who are to make it

work.” 4 The commission’s legacy shows that enforcement is not just a legal formality, but a

matter of political will, and ultimately, power.

2 Moss, David, and Marc Campasano. The Jungle and the Debate over Federal Meat Inspection in 1906.
Report no. 716045. Harvard Business School, 2017. p. 9.
3 Moss, David, and Marc Campasano. The Jungle and the Debate over Federal Meat Inspection in 1906.
Report no. 716045. Harvard Business School, 2017. p. 3.
4 Moss, David, and Marc Campasano. The Jungle and the Debate over Federal Meat Inspection in 1906.
Report no. 716045. Harvard Business School, 2017. p. 4
 Theodore Roosevelt’s approach to the meatpacking industry embodied the core tension of

Progressive Era reform. Even as the nation’s most popular political figure, and someone who

declared in 1902 that “the State not only has the right to control [trusts], but it is duty bound to

control them,”5 he consistently prioritized political stability over systemic change. Nowhere was

this contradiction more clear than in his handling of the 1906 meat inspection crisis.

Faced with Beveridge’s original reform bill and the industry-friendly Wadsworth-

Lorimer rewrite, Roosevelt himself called the latter a “sham bill.” 6 He knew it stripped the

strongest provisions, like expiration dates and industry-funded inspections. Yet he ultimately

endorsed the weakened version to avoid what he called “an obstinate and wholly pointless

fight.”7

Roosevelt’s surrender was more political than principled. With the public’s anger sparked

by The Jungle beginning to cool, he feared losing momentum. So he accepted weak reform over

none at all. The final bill preserved the illusion of progress while maintaining industry demands

of no mandatory dating, no penalties for deceptive branding, and taxpayer-funded inspections.

Roosevelt justified these concessions by framing radical reforms as “trivial matters,” 8 revealing

that he prioritized managing public anger over controlling corporate power.

This compromise mirrored Roosevelt’s broader approach to regulation. Just as he had

tolerated the ICC’s corruption under Cooley, he now allowed meatpackers to write their own

5 Moss, David, and Marc Campasano. The Jungle and the Debate over Federal Meat Inspection in 1906.
Report no. 716045. Harvard Business School, 2017. p. 12.
6 Moss, David, and Marc Campasano. The Jungle and the Debate over Federal Meat Inspection in 1906.
Report no. 716045. Harvard Business School, 2017. p. 14
7 Moss, David, and Marc Campasano. The Jungle and the Debate over Federal Meat Inspection in 1906.
Report no. 716045. Harvard Business School, 2017. p. 16.
8 Moss, David, and Marc Campasano. The Jungle and the Debate over Federal Meat Inspection in 1906.
Report no. 716045. Harvard Business School, 2017. p. 16.
rules too. The reality is that these reforms were designed to stabilize capitalism instead of

challenging it.

The result of these elite compromises was a system of inspections that functioned more

like a publicity campaign than genuine consumer protection. Rather than imposing mandatory,

rigorous oversight, the law created optional inspections that primarily benefitted large

meatpackers while failing to address systemic safety issues. Meatpackers could selectively

request USDA inspections which, if passed, would earn them an official stamp of approval to

boost consumer confidence. Meanwhile, unsafe meat continued to flow unchecked through

interstate markets, as the law did not require all products to be examined. This voluntary system

gave large packers a competitive advantage, since smaller producers often could not afford to

participate in even this weak oversight program.

Even as inspections occurred, they were designed to avoid disrupting business. As

Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson admitted, officials feared that rigorous enforcement

would not “get to the bottom of this matter,”9 since it would reflect badly on the Agriculture

Department’s previous inspections. This pressure led inspectors to routinely overlook violations,

allowing filthy conditions and dangerous practices to continue unchecked. The Neill-Reynolds

investigation revealed that slaughterhouses were majorly unsanitary to the extent where facilities

contained “drippings from the refrigerator rooms above trickled through the ceiling.” 10 This

proved that inspectors were passing the meatpackers despite workers staying and meat being

packed in completely unsanitary spaces.

9 Moss, David, and Marc Campasano. The Jungle and the Debate over Federal Meat Inspection in 1906.
Report no. 716045. Harvard Business School, 2017. p. 13.
10 Moss, David, and Marc Campasano. The Jungle and the Debate over Federal Meat Inspection in 1906.

Report no. 716045. Harvard Business School, 2017. p. 13

government-certified credibility with consumers without having to improve their practices or

increase spending significantly. This outcome demonstrated how regulatory systems could be

manipulated to maintain the status quo while creating an illusion of reform to keep sales and

public trust intact.

The 1906 Meat Inspection Act may have been packaged as public reform, but its contents

were written by and for the regulated. Corporate elites and political powerbrokers worked

together to make sure that reform would be loud enough to silence public outrage but weak

enough to avoid real disruption. Whether through industry-backed senators rewriting legislation,

commissions staffed by insiders, or Roosevelt compromising under pressure, each stage of the

process reinforced one reality: regulation served the interests of the powerful. What looked like a

victory for the public was actually a carefully staged illusion. These systems of reform provided

political cover while allowing elite interests to continue operating without challenge. The result

was a sanitized label on the same rotten system.