The Embalmed Beef Scandal

one's stomach should make those sounds. I eat the whole burger. I'm not gonna lie. I thought, maybe if I keep going, this will get better. And then I felt the sensation of everything I've ever eaten rising up into my thoat, and I said, I'm gonna throw up. So I stood up and walked into the bathroom and put my face closer into the toilet than I ever thought I would as such an establishment, and I threw that bad boy right up.

the incident. But it's crazy that I mentioned that, because that's what I want to talk about today, because as the thing is, tomorrow, we Americans all across the land will gather and gorge ourselves on various food items to celebrate Thanksgiving, the holiday that commemorates when Pilgrims and Indigenous Americans sat down and feasted together in the ongoing crisis of a European colonialism that had already wiped out about ninety seven percent of the Native Americans in New England

from you know, white people introducing disease and other various acts of genocide. As a little treat, I just wanted to give you something to ruminate on that will just really enhance your experience of eating turkey, ham and other meats. Today's episode is about a rotten beef scandal, yes, and what it took to stop having so much poisonous meat on grocery store shelves. Theme song This is American filth. I'm Gabby Watts. Every week I tell you a film

the story from American history. Today's episode the Embalmed Beef Scandal. So let's go back in our fifth time machine to the Spanish American War. So Cuba had been trying to

get independence from Spain for a while. You know. First of all, there was the Ten Years War in eighteen sixty eight, which ended, can you believe it in eighteen seventy eight, exactly ten years later, But they continue fighting, and eventually the United States was like, hmmm, we should get involved in this conflict because you know, we love it when people fight for independence. That's what we did. Let's help you Just kidding. That was not our motivation.

The US got involved for its own political and economic interest. The US wanted to get Spain aka European mega powers out of the America region. Also, some historians have hypothesized another reason that the US might have gotten involved was that the US wanted to make sure that the black people, who made up two fits of the population of Cuba would not make their own nation state on the island. So, to summarize, the US got involved for the usual reasons

White supremacy and capitalism. At least we are consistent. What really escalated the war zeal in the public was in February of eighteen ninety eight, one of the US's battleships was destroyed in Havana by a mysterious explosion that killed two hundred and sixty eight men. And what's really fun about that was that it was it's never proven what caused the explosion, but the US was like, whoops, I guess this proves we for sure need to get involved.

So the US entered the war in April eighteen ninety eight, and it only lasted a few months. The United States emerged victorious. By August eighteen ninety eight, Cuba was independent, but somehow the US had acquired Puerto Rico Guam in the Philippines. And the cool thing about all of this is that no Cuban representatives were invited to the peace talks. During the Spanish American War, the United States deployed about two hundred and seventy four thousand soldiers and about three

thousand men died. But the thing is only two hundred and eighty got killed in battle. The rest two thousand, six hundred and thirty died from other stuff, and some people suspected that some of the soldiers were dying from the food that the army had provided to them, specifically the beef. Apparently, this beef was so good that everyone was calling it red horse mm horse. Once older described the canned beef that they had gotten. Here's what he said. A tin of red horse would be handed to one

man who opened it. He put it to his nose, smelled of it, wrinkled up his face, and took a spit. The next man did the same, and the next till the eight men of the mess had smelled, grimaced, and spit. Then that tin of red horse was thrown overboard for any of the fishes of the Atlantic Ocean who might like it. What we called red horse soon had all our country scandalized with its new name of embalmed beef. Yuma,

embalmed beef. Doesn't that sound appetizing? What do you guys think that the taste palette of this embalmed beef was? I'm thinking a rancid acid with undertones of dead grandma yummy. The soldier continued, It was so embalmed with all flavor of life and every suck of nourishment gone from it through having nevertheless a putridity of odor, more pungent than ever reaches the nostrils from a properly embalmed cadaver. They

used to talk different. Anyway, this soldier had the wisdom to not actually eat this beef, but a lot of soldiers were getting sick. So the news of this nasty meat reached the public and they were upset. They were like, oh, you send their boys to war and then you give

them nasty beef. That's horrible. One concerned mom complained to the president, President William McKinley, and was like, we are living under a generous government with a good kind man at an head, willing to give the army the best possible, and yet thieving corporations will give the boys the worst. So where did all this nasty embalmed beef come from? Most of the meat contracts that the army had were with these meat packers based out of Chicago, the land

of wind and poorly constructed pizza. Chicago became the place for meatpacking in the eighteen sixties. There are five main meat packing companies, and the men who ran these companies developed a lot of innovations that solidified their meat packing prowess. They came up with assembly lines, ice cold rooms so you could process year round refrigerated freight cars. At first,

people were very suspicious of refrigerated beef. It was like, what you want me to eat meat that has been out for more than a week after it has been killed. That's crazy. But the thing is money. The refrigerated beef was a lot cheaper than fresh meat, so people were like, never mind, give me that Old Meat. Side note, I did briefly have a country band called Old Meat, but

it never took off. Here are some of the song titles Highway sixty nine, fat Boys in big trucks, road Headache, drinking whiskey on the Lord's Day, and of course big old Pussy. So yeah, I have no idea why nobody liked us anyway. Not only was their refrigerated meat, canned meat was also on the up and up, and canned meat was generally the worst meat out there, just very low grade. It was boiled, packed into cans and broth

and then sterilized technically. And if you can believe it, the meatpacker bosses didn't really give a fuck about their workers. They were all about doing it fast. All the meatpacking plants weren't a part of Chicago that everyone called packing town. The plants were these huge, sprawling yards, and most of the laborers were immigrants working in these very dangerous and crowded conditions. The rooms were dark and unventilated, and they

were paid atrociously mere pennies an hour. The only people who got a better wage were the people who did the pace setting, basically the managers on the floor who had just speed up the assembly lines so they had to work at a faster and faster rate. And because these meat packer dudes controlled so much of the production, they were able to set their own prices. A lot of muckraking journalists at the time were doing stories on

them and called them the Beef Trust. I would have called them the Beefy and the piggy Boys, but that's just me. But yeah, as you can imagine, in these working conditions, nothing bad could ever happen with the meats. But anyway, back to the embalmed beef in the Spanish American Wars. President McKinley was taking these embalmed beef accusations very seriously, you know, because he was concerned about the

quality of beef in his soldier's health. He was definitely not concerned about the fact that Congress might lose its Republican lead in the upcoming election if he didn't do anything about it. Anyway, McKinley set up a commission to investigate. They found a witness, Major General Nelson A. Miles, who was convinced that the beef had something injected into it that was making all the soldiers sick, and that the

beef was being preserved with secret evil chemicals. Miles talked about the accounts of a doctor who was a chief surgeon with the army in Tampa. The doctor had seen a large hunk of meat hanging on the deck of a boat in the sun, and he said that after sixty hours, instead of it being brotten and decomposing, the meat looked fine, and he was like, that would have

been impossible without the use of dangerous chemicals. The doctor also observed some other beef that had an odor similar to an involved human body, and when cooked, it tasted like decomposed boric acid, and some of the soldiers said it smelt like a bouquet of cesspools. Mmm. Miles report about what this doctor had seen made the Commissary General Charles Patrick Egan pissed because he was like, Wow, are you accusing me of buying poisoned beef for the army?

Fuck you, Miles, you bitch ass cook. You're a goddang stupid ass liar. He didn't say that exactly, but he did use such foul language against Smiles that Egan got court martialed for conduct unbecoming of an officer and was suspended from the Army for six years. Whoopsies. Anyway, most of this meat had been provided by one of the beefy and piggy boys, Philip Armor, whose company was called

Armor and Company. Can you believe it? He had sold five hundred thousand pounds of beef to the army in May eighteen ninety eight, and an Army inspector tested this meat specifically, and he found that there were seven hundred and fifty one cases of rotten meat. And then in the canned meat he found several tins that had been busted open and quote the effervescent futrid contents of which

were distributed all over the cases. So, anyway, there is a bunch of various cases from soldiers to generals who were like, yeah, this beef was nasty, it smelled bad. There was probably something evil injected into it. Also, it's rotten. You gave us bad meat. But the meatpackers were like, actually, the refrigerator beef was fine. Y'all just didn't handle it properly. Yeah, y'all didn't have enough ice for the refrigeration. I heard that y'all transported the meat in wagons that had also

transported manure and garbage and was crawling with maggots. So that's not our fault. You guys are dumb. Also, no, we didn't put dangerous chemicals in the canned meat. Who do you think we are? And actually, the meat packers did directly address that beef that was hanging up on the deck of the boat. They were like, yeah, we sent some cows that had some preservatives in them, but we were just doing an experiment. We weren't meaning for anyone to eat those beefs. We were just seeing what

would happen. Okay. So, yet, no one can prove that harmful chemicals had been used to preserve the beef that were making the soldiers sick and die. What the studies did conclude was that maybe the beef wasn't poison it was just normal gross meat. You're getting nauseated not because

it's poisoned, but because it tastes bad. Easy mistake. Also, through these investigations, it was becoming clear that a lot of the death and sickness during the war was due to unsanitary conditions at the army camps, which led to a lot of people getting typhoid fever. Like, for example, a one camp, all the soldiers were drinking well water that hadn't been boiled. But this well was within three feet of an outhouse. So basically people were getting sick

not from beef, but from drinking their own shit. Aha, we love to hear it. So even despite these findings, a lot of people were still like, I don't trust the beefy and the piggy boys. I think something suspicious

is going on. In nineteen oh three, a New York Times article quoted an official from the Association of Manufacturers and Distributors of Food Products that said quote, since the embalmed beef scandal after the Spanish American War, everyone has looked with doubt on any food which has been known to contain preservatives, and in general, at the turn of the twentieth century, people were more and more concerned about

adultery in food. There was the pure foods movement. It was a hot button issue because you know, as cities populations were dramatically increasing, that meant that I was taking longer to transport enough food from farms to markets, so they needed solutions, hence preservatives. One of the main purveyers of the clean food movement was Harvey Washington Wiley, who became the chemist for the Secretary of Agriculture and eventually became the first Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

So interesting, but that's all later. But even Wiley had participated in the involved beef studies and he hadn't found any dangerous preservatives inside of the meat. So in the end, the meat packers were not at fault at all, and nothing bad has ever happened with American food. Everything is great haha. So yeah, the embalmed beef scandal, it does have a bit of an anti climactic ending, but that's

not the end of the episode. People were still going after the meat packers, but it would take the work of an unsuccessful socialist writer to really make things change. Okay, I feel like probably most of you had to read The Jungle in high school, right right. It was written by Upton Sinclair, who later went on to write almost one hundred books, won the Pulitzer Prize YadA, YadA, YadA, but before that he was an unsuccessful loser like the rest of us. Sinclair was also getting into socialism at

the time. He had joined the Socialist Party in nineteen oh three. He was like, yep, big corporations are evil. The government should take over the ownership of big business. I'm sick of this shit. He was inspired to go to Chicago when meat packing workers were on strike in nineteen oh four. But the big corporations, the Beefy and the piggy Boys, they just hired replacement workers who kept the businesses going, and so the strikers fell into poverty

and lost everything. Sinclair went to Chicago incognito at the meat packing factories to see what was going on, and what he found was that it was nasty and gross, and the workers were treated terribly. What can you believe it a corporation treating its employees badly? Uh huh. Luckily it's nothing like that today. And here are some of the terrible things he observed at the meat packing plants

that he included in the book. He found that the meat packing workers worked on assembly lines and moved at a dangerous pace, leading to bodily injuries like lost fingers and limbs. Men had to haul one hundred pound hunks of meat on their backs, which would lead to debilitating injuries. They are often sick. Sometimes they even had tuberculosis and

would cough constantly and spit blood on the floor. And the thing is, if you got injured or sick on the job, the beeping the piggy boys didn't give a toot. No workers comped for you. And besides these grueling and hazardous work conditions, the sanitation and the meat packing plants was abysmal. There weren't enough toilets, so sometimes workers would just pee on the ground, and there was no soap

or water to clean your hand ants anyway. Sinclair also wrote about how disease rotten and contaminated meat was still processed and then filled with harmful chemicals for preservation and then mislabeled when sold to the public. Mmmm. And after the meat was slaughtered, they just put it on the ground.

And on the ground, remember there was urine and blood spit all over the floor, and then it would be transported around the plants and these carts that also had sawdust, rat, dung rat poison, and sometimes even dead rats in them, and then all of that was just tipped into the

hoppers to make a canned meat and sausage yummy. And finally, the most disserving thing was sometimes workers would fall into the vats and when this happened, quote when they were fished out, there was never enough of them to be worth exhibiting. Sometimes they would be overlooked for days till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's pure leaf lard. Anyway, Sinclair faced a lot of challenges when trying to publish The Jungle.

At first, it was distributed as a serialized version that circulated in a socialist newspaper, and he had found a publisher who was going to print the whole thing as a novel, but then the company backed out because some of the claims in the novel were so salacious that they were like, uh, I don't want to put the bill for a lawsuit against the Beefy and the piggy boys. So Saint Clair started looking around for other publishers. He mostly got rejections, but then had a meeting with a

publishing house called Doubleday, Page and Company. One of their editors had the book was fabuloso but also cuckoo crazy, so they wanted to get fact checked. They sent the manuscript to the Chicago Tribune and they were like, does this sound like it's for real. A representative from the Tribune wrote back and was like, this book is definitely cuckoo crazy and definitely not for real. But Saint Clair

was like, h that's dumb. This is for real, And even the editors at the publishing house were like, yeah, it is kind of sus how much they are denying these claims. They sent like a multi page document. So then the publishing house had their own investigation into the Tribune and found that a publicist at the paper had written the critique and that that publicist worked for the

meat packers. Uh, whoopsies. They decided to publish the book, but they also wanted Sinclair to make it less preachy about socialism, and Saint Clair, being so desperate at this point, was like, fine, I'll do it. So he cut about thirty thousand words like can you imagine how many social speeches? That was? And the book finally came out as a

novel on February twenty six, nineteen oh six. In its first year alone, it sold more than one hundred and fifty thousand copies and was translated into seventeen languages and has since been forced upon every American high schooler. Saint Clair was stoked. He was like, hell, yeah, people are

reading it. But he was also kind of upset because in the book, the main character loses everything because of the meat processing plant, but he finds hope at the end because of socialism, and that was Sinclair's main reason for writing it. But what the public latched onto wasn't socialism, but how all the meat was icky. Saint Clair was like, I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident, I

hid it in the stomach. Sinclair's publishers and several other people send the novel to the President, who was now Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had actually been in the Spanish American War and really did think that beef was embalmed. He'd been a colonel in Cuba and he had testified about how gross the meat was. He said that he would have eaten his old hat as soon as he would have eaten embalmed the beef. So Roosevelt, like so much with the public, was like, yeah, that meat was trash.

I don't care if you think it wasn't poisoned. There was something wrong with it. Roosevelt was far from being a socialist, but he was also anti trust. And at this point, the beef and piggy boys had created their own meat oligarchy, just reigning supreme, and Roosevelt thought it was sus because as the cost of labor and production was going down, the consumer price was going up. Roosevelt was like, no, no, no, I don't like that. I want

to bust up this trust. So Roosevelt read The Jungle, or had someone at least summarize it for him, and at first he was like, yeah, okay, things might be bad at the meat packing plants, but this is a novel, not an article. We need to verify some of this info. So he also sent some investigators to the plants and they're like, hey, President, it's actually kind of worse than

what the book says. One of the investigators saw a slaughtered hog fall into a toilet and then the workers just pulled the carcass out and without cleaning it, hung it back on the rack. Yum yam a diarrhea bacon. This book was exactly what Roosevelt wanted. It proved that legislation was necessary. Also, at this point in time, Europe was already like, we don't want this American meat. It's gross. And then once the Judgle came out, meat sales in

the US were dropping. All around the country. People were writing to the White House and their legislators being like, there needs to be reformed, We need things to change. The meat needs to be inspected at every step of the process. So Roosevelt was like, brus, look how bad it is. We got to pass this legislation. And so in June nineteen oh six, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act.

This law authorized inspectors from the US Department of Agriculture to make sure that the meats weren't contaminated or mislabeled in any way. And the law also expanded federal government regulation of corporations and other private businesses. And then the same day that the Meat bill was passed, Congress also passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which regulates food

additives and prohibits misleading labels of food and drugs. And then this Act eventually led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration and all this this was a huge deal because this was the first time that food was being regulated in the US. And so, yeah, today all of our food is safe to eat now and nothing ever goes wrong. Sure, according to the CDC, every year about forty eight million people in the US get sick from food born illnesses. But that's just like a

six of Americans. We're fine anyway. What about the beefy and the pay boys, Well, obviously they weren't pleased with this shit. But when the Meat Inspection Act was being passed at nineteen oh six, the meat packing lobbyists, they were actually able to persuade legislators to water down some of the requirements. One of them was that it would be the federal government, not the meat packer, who would

have to pay for all these additional inspections. And the thing about these lobbyists, while they're still active today, they're like, this is still too much regulation. I want to sell old, nasty, poisoned meat, please, And in fact, under sith Lord Trump, he did roll back some of the key elements of the Meat Inspection Act for pork processors, So now in pork processing plants, the duty of inspecting the meats has gone back to the pork processors, not Federal safety inspectors. Cool.

So it's basically the same way it was before The Jungle was published. H huh. And the beef boys, they're trying to get the same thing passed for them. The end is nigh. Ha ha. I don't know why I'm still not a vegetarian after doing this episode. And Saint Clair, well, you know, he was still a little better about how people didn't suddenly become socialist, but after the Jungle came out he did become. I'm very rich and famous, so

how socialist is that? Really? As always, we learn a lesson from American filth, and the lesson here is that if you drop a hog in a toilet, wash it off. Wash off your hogs. Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving, I hope you enjoy all your meats. American Film is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast. This episode was written hosted by me Gabby Watts. Our senior producer is Amelia Brock, and our executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Chide Poli, and

Brandon Barr. If you liked this episode, leave us a review, subscribe, Do All the Things. Also, you can find the podcast on Instagram at American Filth Pod. Follow me please, School of Humans