How The Woodrow Wilson Influenza Of 1918 And The TrumpVirus Pandemic Of 2020 Brought Fascism To America

by Harvey Wasserman

The 2020 TrumpVirus pandemic that is killing so many of us today has deep roots in World War I and the Woodrow Wilson Influenza that killed 50,000,000 back then.

Along with mass death, both viruses have brought fascism to America. To avoid a full-on replay, we need to know how.

Like today’s TrumpVirus catastrophe, the global pandemic of 102 years ago was almost entirely avoidable. It was not an innocent accident or Act of Nature. It spread from the fascist decisions of one man: Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson was elected president in 1912 as a liberal democrat. He sold himself as a man of peace. But he was (like Donald Trump) a KKK-supporting White Supremacist. In 1915, for no good reason, he sent U.S. troops crashing into Mexico City to “teach a lesson” to “our little brown brothers.”

In 1916, Wilson narrowly won re-election with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” Then he dragged us in.

U.S. involvement in WWI was hugely unpopular. Its best-known opponent was the legendary Indiana-born Socialist Eugene V. Debs. Workers and unionists by the tens of millions saw him as an “American Saint.” Tireless, incorruptible, and charismatic, he drew huge crowds wherever he spoke, and might well have become our first Socialist president in 1920.

But on September 11, 1918, using dubious dictatorial powers, federal agents imprisoned Debs for speaking against the war. Wilson’s Gestapo-style “Red Scare” illegally arrested, assaulted, and murdered countless grassroots organizers, activists, and laborers. Armed federal thugs broke into private homes, trashed offices, and assaulted peaceful protestors. J. Edgar Hoover’s nascent Federal Bureau of Investigations busted citizens who merely criticized Wilson in private conversations or carried his own quotations on placards at public marches.

Wilson’s 1918-1920 federal assault on the US Constitution was every bit as totalitarian as the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 or the CIA-sponsored Chilean putsch of 1973. Its purpose was to destroy an American Socialist Party widely embraced as a legitimate alternative to the Democrats/Republicans, and to guarantee Eugene Debs did not become president.

In 1920, Gene got 900,000 votes while locked in a federal prison cell. Had he been free to campaign, with his grassroots movement intact, he might have uprooted America’s two-party system and transformed our political economy forever.

But there was also a virus on the loose. Some 650,000 Americans were dead from the infamous 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic. Like Trump in 2020, Woodrow Wilson caused its spread.

Opinions differ about where the global pandemic originated. But the virus that killed so many Americans erupted in rural Haskell County in southeastern Kansas.

Historian John Barry believes the virus may have crossed from a pig to a farmer. As the flu spread, a local doctor warned federal health officials. Had they not been distracted by war, and had they responded with reasonable medical attention, the area would have been quickly quarantined. Few would have died. The virus might have been a minor footnote.

But Wilson was beating the drums of war. A young farmer brought the disease to the Army’s Camp Funston (later Fort Riley) 300 miles away. The astonishingly contagious virus tore through a cramped, overcrowded camp with more than 50,000 recruits. Soldiers, nurses, and ordinary citizens who took sick in the morning were often dead by nightfall.

By any standard of sanity, the camp and region should have been immediately isolated. But Wilson was hell-bent on war. His hastily constructed, absurdly packed barracks stretched across the nation and became the perfect network for mass breeding and spreading a communicable disease. Countless soldiers stuffed onto deathly trains spread Wilson’s flu like wildfire. Even deadlier ships took it overseas.

Countless previously healthy young men and women were pitched into mass graves or the ocean long before they saw battle. Survivors spread the virus into Europe, then worldwide. It became known as “the Spanish Flu” because only Spain, which was neutral in the war, openly reported on the hideous death toll, which soared into the millions, on their own soil.

Wilson upped the ante by staging mass rallies to sell war bonds. In Philadelphia, some 200,000 gathered. Then at least 15,000 quickly died. Corpses were stacked in the streets, where rats and wild dogs soon roamed. Medicines, caskets, and gravesites disappeared as medical personnel fell dead. Bereaved families hid bodies at home, then dumped them into unmarked mass graves.

As today in Trump’s disease-ravaged backwaters, civilization itself hovered at the brink of collapse.





Alone among big U.S. cities, San Francisco limited 1918’s early death toll with masks and social distancing. But when the flu returned in the fall, skepticism and fatigue won out, and the dead piled up.

Focused on war, Wilson’s network of military camps was perfectly designed to spread the flu, which he caught himself in Paris, 1919. Deathly ill, he approved harsh German reparations that fed the rise of Hitler. A stroke soon followed, debilitating him for the final year of his term. “Madness,” he mourned, “has entered everything.”

(Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt also caught the flu. He recovered, but three years later fell victim to polio, and never walked again).

Had Wilson fought the virus instead of the war, some 675,000 Americans might have been spared their useless, painful deaths. Millions more might have avoided the terrible poverty, pain, and political terror that came with the shredding of the social fabric.

A century later, Donald Trump could also have spared America its viral catastrophe.

Before its arrival, Trump dismantled well-established agencies specifically designed to fight predictable pandemics like this one. When the virus hit, he ignored desperate medical professionals who warned him very explicitly of what was about to happen.

Desperate to preserve the illusion of a booming economy, Trump refused to protect public health. He let vital supplies and equipment run short, then made states fight for them. He promoted untested treatments like hydroxychloroquine (in which he has personal investments), advocated drinking bleach, and attacked Obamacare and other vital insurance programs.

Like Wilson’s pandemic, nearly all the Trump-COVID disease, death, and economic ruination could have been avoided.

Trump’s malignant neglect has not so far killed 650,000 Americans. But he may get there yet with the rapid escalation of the death toll by demanding “business as usual” without sane precautions.

As during WWI, the US has again been at the brink of transformation. Powered by Millennials, the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders drew in the 2016 and 2020 primaries a dozen times more votes than did Debs a century ago.

In response, like Wilson, Trump demands dictatorial powers. Authoritarian imposition, fascist death squads, illegal assault, wrongful imprisonment, vindictive retribution, armed street thugs, an anti-immigrant “final solution,” and a fascist iron fist are all on the Trump wish list.

Like Woodrow Wilson’s pandemic, today’s TrumpVirus nightmare shreds our health, kills our kin, destroys the heart of our legal infrastructure, the soul of our social fabric, and what’s left of our ravaged civilization.

If this is Mark Twain’s historic rhyming, it demands nothing less than an epic transcendent response... without which our nation and our species might well perish.

Trumpanzee-- Still The Worst White House Occupant In History

The 25th Amendment needs to be rewritten

On Sunday, our mentally ill sociopath excuse for a president told reporters that "Some have gone too far. Some governors have gone too far. Some of the things that happened are maybe not so appropriate. And I think in the end it’s not going to matter because we're starting to open up our states, and I think they're going to open up very well. As far as protesters, you know, I see protesters for all sorts of things. And I’m with everybody. I'm with everybody." Except governors Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and Ralph Northam (D-VA) who he singled out for his insane vitriol. "If you take Michigan, there were things in Michigan that I don’t think they were necessary or appropriate. Everyone knows that. I think the governor of Michigan-- we’re getting along very well-- but I think the governor of Michigan probably knows that." The functioning of a diseased mind is amazing... and like train wreck or car pileup on the highway, it's hard to turn away.

The Boston Globe's right-wing columnist, Jeff Jacoby, thinks he may have found another president as bad as Trump: Woodrow Wilson. He wrote a column whose title everyone would have thought was about Señor Trumpanzee: The pandemic raged. The president said nothing. He wrote that in his research about the Spanish flue pandemic of 1917-18 he "hadn’t seen anything at all about the conduct of the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson-- a striking lacuna, not only because of Wilson’s preeminence in national and world affairs at the time, but also in comparison with Donald’s Trump volubility on the current pandemic. Trump’s pronouncements are an inescapable part of the daily coverage of the Covid-19 crisis. Wilson’s, I should have thought, must have been as well. Not so."

From Eric Felten’s fascinating historical essay at RealClear Investigations, I learned that Wilson-- widely regarded as an outstanding president by many (though decidedly not all) historians-- had nothing to say about the influenza pandemic that raged during his second term. He apparently did nothing to try and mitigate it. This despite the fact that Wilson was an ardent exponent of expanded federal power, who believed that the president should be the preeminent figure in American politics.

According to historian Sandra Opdycke’s 2014 book, The Flu Epidemic of 1918, Wilson was “extraordinarily close-mouthed about the epidemic from the first-- so much so that historians have been unable to find a single occasion on which he mentioned it in public.” His unvarying focus was on the world war, and a key priority was to speed American troop ships to the battlefields of Europe, even if that condemned U.S. soldiers to getting infected with influenza-- and, in many cases, to dying from it.

“There’s no arguing that President Wilson was somehow unaware of the unfolding catastrophe,” writes Felten. “He knew very well the price that was being paid in sickness and death.” His advisers spoke to him about the toll the epidemic would take on soldiers forced to cross the Atlantic in crowded transports, but Wilson didn’t budge-- and he was backed in that decision by at least one military commander with whom he consulted.

In early October 1918, Wilson met with Gen. Peyton March at the White House. The president said, “General March, I have had representations sent to me by men whose ability and patriotism are unquestioned that I should stop the shipment of men to France until the epidemic of influenza is under control.”

The general responded, “Every such soldier who has died [of influenza] just as surely played his part as his comrade who died in France.”

That may not have been the soundest military practice. For every soldier who showed up in France debilitated by the flu, others had to care for him. Sending more troops when many of those troops were sick only reduced the power and readiness of American forces in Europe. The epidemic “rendered hundreds of thousands of military personnel non-effective,” Carol R. Byerly wrote in the journal Public Health Reports . “During the American Expeditionary Forces' campaign at Meuse-Argonne, the epidemic diverted urgently needed resources from combat support to transporting and caring for the sick and the dead.”

An estimated 16,000 American troops died of influenza during their deployment in Europe. An additional 30,000 died of the pandemic in stateside training camps.

Wilson’s seeming indifference to the virus’s devastation among the troops was matched by a comparable reticence when it came to civilian deaths. “The great advocate for federal power,” Felten recounts, “neither involved himself nor said a word about the rampant deaths in major American cities such as Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia.”

Far more than today, state governments a century ago were expected to handle disasters and disease. And yet Wilson’s silence on the influenza pandemic remains strange given his belief that public rhetoric is at the heart of presidential power and influence. The president “is the only national voice in affairs,” Wilson wrote. “If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible.” Where was Wilson’s “oratorical presidency” when the nation needed the sort of “unified action” it promised?

Previous wartime presidents had shown a greater awareness of the threat posed by infection to troops. Felten cites the example of George Washington, who, as soon as he took command of the Continental Army in 1775, imposed social-distancing restrictions to contain a smallpox outbreak. One of Washington’s first orders was to ban soldiers from congregating at Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Mass., which was near the site of a quarantined hospital. “No person is to be allowed to go . . . a-fishing or on any other occasion,” he directed, “as there may be a danger of introducing the smallpox into the army.”

But Wilson had other priorities than trying to slow the spread of a deadly disease. His foremost aims were, first, to win the war, and then to bring about the League of Nations, which he hoped would shape the postwar world. He never grasped just how much that world would be shaped by “the disease his decisions did so much to ship abroad,” Felten observes. “In the face of such epic suffering, President Woodrow Wilson-- erudite rhetorician, progressive statesman, and eminent world leader-- had no comment.”

The more I learn about Wilson, the more firmly I root myself in the camp of those who consider him one of America’s least admirable presidents. From resegregating the federal government to arresting thousands of left-wing immigrants and labor activists, from prosecuting antiwar editors to reviving the monarchical State of the Union speech, from opposing female suffrage to supporting sterilization of the disabled, from championing a federal income tax to nationalizing private industries , the sanctimonious 28th president left a terrible legacy. I hadn’t previous known about his callous apathy during the most lethal pandemic of the 20th century, but it comes as no surprise.

Of course Jacoby is outraged that Wilson backed a federal income tax; it's who Jeff Jacoby is.

Thankfully, NY Times reporter, Maggie Haberman isn't Jeff Jacoby. She noted yesterday that most Americans aren't amused by Trump's decision to stoke up civil discord based on the pandemic. She wrote that "First he was the self-described 'wartime president.' Then he trumpeted the 'total' authority of the federal government. But in the past few days, President Trump has nurtured protests against state-issued stay-at-home orders aimed at curtailing the spread of the coronavirus. Hurtling from one position to another is consistent with Mr. Trump’s approach to the presidency over the past three years. Even when external pressures and stresses appear to change the dynamics that the country is facing, Mr. Trump remains unbowed, altering his approach for a day or two, only to return to nursing grievances... Now, with Mr. Trump’s poll numbers falling after a rally-around-the-leader bump, he is road-testing a new turn on a familiar theme-- veering into messages aimed at appealing to Americans whose lives have been disrupted by the stay-at-home orders... just 36 percent of voters said they generally trusted what Mr. Trump says about the coronavirus."

But the president, who ran as an insurgent in 2016, is most comfortable raging against the machine of government, even when he is the one running the country. And while the coronavirus is in every state in the union, it is heavily affecting minority and low-income communities.

So when Mr. Trump on Friday tweeted “LIBERATE,” his all-capitalized exhortations against strict orders in specific states-- including Michigan-- were in keeping with how he ran in 2016: saying things that seem contradictory, like pledging to work with governors and then urging people to “liberate” their states, and leaving it to his audiences to hear what they want to hear in his words.

...“These are people expressing their views,” Mr. Trump said. “They seem to be very responsible people to me.” But he said he thought the protesters had been treated “rough.”

...So far, the protests have been relatively small and scattershot, organized by conservative-leaning groups with some organic attendance. It remains to be seen if they will be durable.

But Mr. Trump’s show of affinity for such actions is in keeping with his fomenting of voter anger at the establishment in 2016, a key to his success then-- and his fallback position during uncertain moments ever since.

In the case of the state-issued orders, Mr. Trump’s advisers say his criticism of certain places is appropriate.

Stephen Moore, a former adviser to Mr. Trump and an economist with FreedomWorks, an organization that promotes limited government, said he thought protesters ought to be wearing masks and protecting themselves. But, he added, “the people who are doing the protest, for the most part, these are the ‘deplorables,’ they’re largely Trump supporters, but not only Trump supporters.”

On Sunday, Mr. Trump again praised the protesters. “I have never seen so many American flags,” he said.

But Mr. Trump’s advisers are divided about the wisdom of encouraging the protests. At some of them, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, has been compared to Adolf Hitler. At least one protester had a sign featuring a swastika.

One adviser said privately that if someone were to be injured at the protests-- or if anyone contracted the coronavirus at large events where people were not wearing masks-- there would be potential political risk for the president.

But two other people close to the president, who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, said they thought the protests could be politically helpful to Mr. Trump, while acknowledging there might be public health risks.

One of those people said that in much of the country, where the numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths are not as high as in places like New York, New Jersey, California and Washington State, anger is growing over the economic losses that have come with the stringent social-distancing restrictions.

Crackpot Gov. Kristi Noem wouldn't be any more guilty of causing the 1,635 cases of COVID-19 in South Dakota if she injected the virus into each of the patients herself

...[A]s Mr. Trump did throughout 2016, as when he said “torture works” and then walked back that statement a short time later, or when he advocated bombing the Middle East while denouncing lengthy foreign engagements, he has long taken various sides of the same issue.

Mobilizing anger and mistrust toward the government was a crucial factor for Mr. Trump in the last presidential election. And for many months he has been looking for ways to contrast himself with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and a Washington lifer.

The problem? Mr. Trump is now president, and disowning responsibility for his administration’s slow and problem-plagued response to the coronavirus could prove difficult. And protests can be an unpredictable factor, particularly at a moment of economic unrest.

Vice President Mike Pence, asked on NBC’s Meet the Press about the president’s tweets urging people to “liberate” states, demurred.

“The American people know that no one in America wants to reopen this country more than President Donald Trump,” Mr. Pence said, “and on Thursday the president directed us to lay out guidelines for when and how states could responsibly do that.”

“And in the president’s tweets and public statements, I can assure you, he’s going to continue to encourage governors to find ways to safely and responsibly let America go back to work,” he said.

With the political campaign halted, Mr. Trump’s advisers have seen an advantage in the frozen-in-time state of the race. Mr. Biden has struggled to fund-raise or even to get daily attention in the news cycle.

But Mr. Trump himself has seemed at sea, according to people close to him, uncertain of how to proceed. His approval numbers in his campaign polling have settled back to a level consistent with before the coronavirus, according to multiple people familiar with the data.

His campaign polling has shown that focusing on criticizing China, in contrast with Mr. Biden, moves voters toward Mr. Trump, according to a Republican who has seen it.

“Trump finally fired the first shot” with his more aggressive stance toward the Chinese government and its leader, Xi Jinping, said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist. “Xi is put on notice that the death, economic carnage and agony is his and his alone,” Mr. Bannon said. “Only question now: What is America’s president prepared to do about it?”

Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has advocated messages that contrast Mr. Trump with Mr. Biden on a number of fronts, including China.

But inside and outside the White House, other advisers to Mr. Trump see an advantage in focusing attention on the presidency.

Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor, has argued in West Wing discussions that there is a time to focus on China, but that for now, the president should embrace commander-in-chief moments amid the crisis.

Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and a friend of Mr. Trump’s, said on ABC’s This Week that he did not think ads criticizing Mr. Biden on China were the right approach for now.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s advisers said, most of his team is aware that it can try to drive down Mr. Biden’s poll numbers, but that no matter what tactics it deploys now, the president’s future will most likely depend on whether the economy is improving in the fall and whether the virus’s spread has been mitigated. Those things will remain unknown for months.

“This is going to be a referendum,” Mr. Christie said, “on whether people think, when we get to October, whether or not he handled this crisis in a way that helped the American people, protected lives and moved us forward.”

Once There Were No Primaries-- And The Party Bosses Just Picked The Presidential Nominees

There dream of the Republican establishment this year-- stopping Herr Trumpf and the hated Ted Cruz with a deadlocked, brokered convention-- looks pretty moribund at this point. It looks like Trumpf is on the way to be able to march into Cleveland with all the delegates he needs for a first-ballot nomination. And the Establishment seems resigned to convincing themselves that the world is wonderful because at least they won't have to deal with Cruz. But deep in their hearts I bet they're longing for another era, when party bosses picked presidential candidates, not primaries and caucuses. The interview with Geoffrey Cowen, author of Let the People Rule, gives you a good look into how presidential candidates were picked irrespective of the will of ordinary voters up until quote recently.

A few days ago Ari Berman, author of Give Us The Ballot, penned a review of the book for the NY Times and, with the threat of a Mike Bloomberg third party presidential run, a look at the 1912 presidential race Cowen highlights is well worth reexamining. The election itself pitted Republican President William Howard Taft against Democrat Woodrow Wilson, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt running as a Progressive, and Socialist Eugene Debs. Before we get into Berman's review of Cowan's book, let's get the results out of the way:

• Wilson- 6,296,284 (41.8%)-- 40 states, 435 electoral votes
• Roosevelt- 4,122,721 (27.4%)-- 6 states, 88 electoral votes
• Taft- 3,486,242 (23.2%)-- 2 states (Utah and Vermont), 8 electoral votes
• Debs- 901,551 (6.0%). no states, no electoral votes

At the Democratic Party convention, Gov. Wilson was nominated on the 46th ballot-- beating the Wall Street candidate (Champ Clark). At the Republican convention, Taft beat Roosevelt with the help of the conservative GOP establishment that hated Roosevelt for his anti-trust policies. The GOP nomination battle was further complicated by Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, who was further left than Roosevelt. La Follette won 2 primaries, Roosevelt won 9 and Taft won 1. The rest of the states didn't give voters a role in picking the party nominees. As Berman reminds us in his review, Roosevelt said, in finally coming around to backing primaries, that "The right of the people to rule is the great fundamental issue now before the Republican Party."

But at 9:28 p.m. on June 22, 1912, William Howard Taft was renominated by Republicans at their presidential convention in Chicago. Only minutes later, 150 delegates loyal to Teddy Roosevelt marched out of the Chicago Coliseum, mimicking the rumbling sound of a steamroller, and headed for Orchestra Hall, where thousands had raucously gathered to inaugurate Roosevelt as the leader of the new Progressive Party. “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” Roosevelt proclaimed. The machinations that led to Roosevelt’s exit from the Republican Party and the creation of what became known as the Bull Moose Party is the subject of Geoffrey Cowan’s Let the People Rule.

After leaving the presidency in 1908, Roosevelt had named Taft as his handpicked successor. Yet, upon returning from a lengthy trip to Africa and Europe, Roose­velt grew disillusioned with Taft and decided to challenge his former secretary of war.

Cowan explains how Roosevelt’s shrewd support of primaries gave him an opening against Taft while co-opting the message of more radical reformers like the Wisconsin governor Robert ­LaFollette. Roose­velt’s campaign “popularized presidential primaries and increased the number of states that embraced them,” Cowan writes. “His rhetoric helped to enshrine the cause of popular democracy in the nation’s vocabulary.” But Taft still maintained a huge lead in delegates chosen by the party machinery from states that did not hold primaries, which forced Roose­velt to bolt the party after the Chicago convention.

In many ways, Roosevelt’s Progressive candidacy was ahead of its time. It promulgated innovative ideas like social security and a federal minimum wage that were later adopted by Roosevelt’s fifth cousin Franklin in the New Deal.

Yet the primary system wouldn’t be reformed until after 1968, when Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic nominee at his party’s disastrous convention, also in Chicago, despite not having won a single primary. Chaos in Grant Park was the result, forcing both parties to change their rules and become more democratic.

...Cowan paints an admirably nuanced picture of Roosevelt, exposing the hypocrisy of his call to “let the people rule.”

Though the Progressive Party endorsed woman suffrage and welcomed black delegates from the North, Roosevelt, in a bid to woo conservative white Southerners, refused to seat African-Americans from the South at his convention. “I believe that the great majority of the Negroes in the South are wholly unfit for suffrage,” Roose­velt said, echoing the Southern white supremacist sentiments of his day.

His gambit failed in the general election, when the Democrat Woodrow Wilson carried every Southern state, winning 435 electoral votes and 42 percent of the popular vote. Roosevelt won 88 electoral votes and 27 percent of the vote. Taft garnered only eight electoral votes and 23 percent of the vote. But the Progressive Party collapsed soon after. “The dog has returned to its vomit,” Roosevelt said of the Republicans in 1914.

Primaries have not become the democratic remedy Roosevelt was hoping for. Yes, voters have much more say now than they did in 1912, but primary contests have often pushed the parties toward their respective extremes, particularly the Republican Party, while the cost and length of campaigns skyrocketed. “Let the people rule” remains more an aspiration than a reality in American politics today.

For the political history junkies, since I mentioned that Taft only won Vermont and Utah, the 6 states that Roosevelt won were California (by just 200 votes), Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Washington. People interested in where Debs did best-- and 1912 was his best run of his 5 presidential campaigns-- may be surprised to see that all the double digit states were out west:

• Nevada- 16.47%
• Oklahoma- 16.42%
• Montana- 13.64%
• Washington- 12.43%
• Arizona- 13.33%
• California- 11.68%
• Idaho- 11.31%

In an unrelated post in The Atlantic Sunday, David Greenberg pointed out that Teddy Roosevelt "ushered in an age in which presidents would be perpetually engaged in the work of publicity and opinion management-- the work of spin" and he illustrates it with Roosevelt's "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." This is exactly the kind of thing that earned him the undying enmity of the Big Money Republican Party establishment and why they stuck with the unpopular Taft rather than embrace Teddy Roosevelt in 2012.

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.

 ...When his book appeared, Sinclair undertook a promotional campaign. That effort included writing a slew of pieces about the sordid state of Chicago meatpacking for a variety of magazines. It also entailed mailing out copies of The Jungle to important people. One recipient was Theodore Roosevelt, who, fortuitously, was just then considering how to marshal public support for regulation of the so-called Beef Trust.

 Never one to mince words, the president deemed Sinclair a “crackpot.” But he shared the novelist’s dim view of the meat moguls. He wrote Sinclair a three-page letter that mocked the young man’s “pathetic belief” in socialism and offered a critique of The Jungle-- but one that concluded with: “The specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have the power, be eradicated.” Roosevelt extended an invitation to the White House.

By this point, Roosevelt was at work on his own plan. He had previously asked the Agriculture Department to investigate conditions in Chicago. The president thought that if he could confirm even a portion of Sinclair’s report, he could galvanize public opinion and force the balky Congress-- which was warring with TR over his reform agenda-- to move on meat-inspection legislation. When Roosevelt shared the news of this preliminary step with Sinclair, the novelist demurred, fearing, as he told the president, that having the Agriculture Department examine the issue “was like asking a burglar to determine his own guilt.” Instead, Sinclair urged Roosevelt to open “a secret and confidential investigation” by a disinterested party.

...Public support for reform was building. With Roosevelt’s backing, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana introduced an amendment to the agriculture appropriations bill that imposed stringent rules on meat inspection, including dating canned meat, with meatpackers forced to pay the costs. Spurred by this flurry of activity, the Pure Food and Drug bill-- which prohibited the adulteration and mislabeling of foods, beverages, medicines, and other drugs-- also now started to advance, separately, toward passage.

On the defensive, the meatpacking and livestock industries joined forces. They warned that any legitimation of Sinclair’s charges would dry up foreign markets for U.S. meat; federal regulation, moreover, would shift control of the industry from the businessmen with the relevant know-how to “theorists, chemists [and] sociologists,” as one spokesman said. When it became clear that some version of the bill was likely to pass, the industrialists switched to trying to strip out the most severe provisions. The beef companies even placed newspaper ads inviting readers to visit the packinghouses and judge for themselves.

The beef industry had been routed in the court of public opinion. As the packinghouses literally whitewashed their facilities as part of a desperate cleanup job, the press grew withering. The New York Evening Post offered doggerel: “Mary had a little lamb/And when she saw it sicken/She shipped it off to Packingtown/And now it’s labeled chicken.” Before a House committee, Neill and Reynolds rehearsed with fanfare their gory findings, including an account of a pig carcass that fell into a urinal before getting hung, unwashed, in a cooling room.

House conservatives made a defiant stand, and Roosevelt and Beveridge ultimately made some concessions. But the Indiana senator proclaimed the final bill “the most pronounced extension of federal power in every direction ever enacted.” Its achievements far outweighed its deficiencies, and it established important standards and precedents. On June 30, 1906, Roosevelt, with a stroke of the pen, made meat inspection the law of the land—and with another stroke signed into law the Pure Food and Drug bill. “In the session that has just closed,” he said to the press, “The Congress has done more substantive work for good than any Congress has done at any session since I became familiar with public affairs.”

The meat-inspection episode showed the president’s skill not only at discerning public opinion aroused by the press but also at using statements, leaks, and the cultivation of journalists to pass his progressive agenda. In an article hailing “The Reign of Public Opinion,” the great muckraker Lincoln Steffens called it “the real power behind Theodore Roosevelt.” Congressmen submitted to the presidential will, Steffens said, because he was “the leader of public opinion” and they feared popular retribution if they defied him. Even Sinclair, who had wanted a stronger bill than the final compromise, praised TR: “He took the matter up with vigor and determination, and he has given it his immediate and personal attention from the very beginning.”

Roosevelt is remembered as the first president of the modern age not simply because he used presidential power on behalf of sweeping reform-- a feat in itself-- but because he redefined the president’s job by governing with an acute consciousness of his power to reach the public.