Roosevelt pioneered many of the techniques presidents use today to achieve policy goals. He toured the country to promote favored legislation. He courted the Washington press corps—upgrading the shabby White House pressroom and hosting informal press conferences during his afternoon shave. He kept tabs on photographers at his statements (the better to make the front pages), hired the first government press officers, and staged ingenious publicity stunts. (He descended to the bottom of the Long Island Sound by submarine to show support for the new vessels and rode 98 miles on horseback to prove the reasonableness of new Army regulations.)

Roosevelt thus ushered in an age in which presidents would be perpetually engaged in the work of publicity and opinion management—the work of spin. Perhaps no incident better illustrates this than his historic 1906 quest to clean up the shoddy and predatory practices in the stockyards and meatpacking houses where Americans got their daily diet of beef.

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After decades of unchecked industrial growth, American businesses and industries were in need of federal regulation—to protect workers, consumers, farmers, or simply other competitors in the marketplace. Addressing the issue of unregulated meatpacking and other foods had been on Roosevelt’s to-do list for some time when he raised it in his December 1905 message to Congress. “Traffic in foodstuffs which have been debased or adulterated so as to injure health or to deceive purchasers,” he declared, “should be forbidden.” The Senate, dominated by business interests, resisted, but Roosevelt hoped to prevail by enlisting public support. To do so, he seized on a popular outcry triggered that spring by the reporting of a crusading, 27-year-old socialist with whom, despite profound ideological disagreements, Roosevelt locked arms.

Upton Beall Sinclair wasn’t a core member of the group of journalists—like Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker—who were close to Roosevelt and whom he famously labeled “muckrakers.” But more than any other writer, Sinclair’s name would come to epitomize their intrepid “literature of exposure,” which pulled back the curtain on seamy business practices and corrupt politics in the hope of inciting reform. Sinclair’s fame derived mainly from the success of The Jungle, his 1906 novel about the wretched world of Chicago meatpackers.

Like other muckrakers who wrote fiction, Sinclair didn’t mind that his art read like agitprop. He saw his fiction as akin to his journalism, rooted in reportage and designed to spur social change. To write The Jungle, Sinclair had spent seven weeks in the slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants of Chicago, donning grubby clothes and carrying a lunch bucket to mix in with the immigrant workers. During the daytime, he visited the squalid, lethally dangerous workplaces, documenting the indifference of management to the workers’ hardships and the lack of government oversight. In the evenings, he knocked on the workers’ doors, his pencil ready to record their accounts.