Roosevelt signs two landmark food and drug bills into law on the same afternoon

By the summer of 1906, Americans had been reading Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" for months — and the Chicago meatpacking industry had become a national scandal. President Theodore Roosevelt, skeptical of Sinclair's socialist politics but unable to ignore the public outcry, had commissioned a surprise inspection of the plants; investigators Charles P. Neill and James Bronson Reynolds came back revolted. On June 30, 1906, Roosevelt signed both the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act into law, establishing mandatory federal inspection of slaughterhouses and requiring drug labels to name their ingredients — including opium, morphine, and cannabis…