re: #177 funky chicken

Upton Sinclair was a sincere, big S Socialist. He wrote

as a political tract, but didn’t succeed in drafting many people to his larger cause. We can all thank him for so shocking Theodore Roosevelt and his advisors that they created the FDA.

I never read

except for the one famous chapter.

I’m not sure it was a shock that moved TR to act. The Jungle was also very much intended as an anti-corporate book, but TR was able to focus attention onto the food safety aspects of it and thus cast the anti-corporate aspects into shadow. A very nice piece of political deflection by TR, that still ended up producing a useful reform.

I will, however, that Upton Sinclair was not the kind of radical I was talking about. He left-wing, to be sure, but he would never have accepted the idea of “liquidating class enemies”.