Upton Sinclair went undercover into the square mile of Chicago slaughterhouses in 1904 to write a novel that would expose wage slavery and advance socialism. What the public took from The Jungle was panic about what was in their sausage. This episode follows the relentless miseries of Lithuanian immigrants Jurgis and Ona Rudkus, from a predatory housing contract and factory deaths to Ona’s coercion by her boss and Jurgis’s descent into drink, crime, and strike-breaking before his conversion at a socialist meeting.

We look at the five publishers who rejected the manuscript, the Macmillan memo calling it gloom and horror unrelieved, Sinclair’s plan to self-publish a sustainers’ edition, and Doubleday’s publicity blitz that made the book a sensation selling 25,000 copies in six weeks. Then we trace Theodore Roosevelt’s private contempt for Sinclair, the investigators who confirmed the filth but found no workers ground into lard, the 1906 Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act, and Sinclair’s bitter view that the new laws subsidized the big packers while doing nothing for workers.

• The undercover research behind a novel built as an argument against capitalism
• Jack London’s comparison to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the deliberate architecture of misery
• How a Kickstarter-style subscription plan pressured a major publisher to sign the book
• Roosevelt’s crackpot letter, the Neill-Reynolds inspection, and the panic cleaning of the stockyards
• Regulatory capture, the Helicon Home Colony, and the line about aiming for the heart and hitting the stomach