The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum
Wiley had put his volunteers through five rounds of differing dose tests. In all cases the squad members spent time eating borax-laced meals alternating with time dining preservative free. Every squad member, he said, had been tested at the start of every toxicity phase and retested after the recovery period. Whenever they were eating a “clean” diet, all men had been in solid good health. During the dosage period, all had not been so well. Only half of the test subjects had endured to the end of the fifth series of borax testing. The other half dropped out due to illness.
“The experience of the previous series having shown that the administration of increasing doses of borax produced feelings of distress in both the stomach and head,” the scientists attempted to alleviate the problems by decreasing the dose in the final test series. Throughout, the high dose was three grams and the low dose was a “minute” half gram. But by the fifth round, Wiley suspected the illnesses were due to a cumulative effect: “If continued for a long time in quantities not exceeding a half gram per day, they [borax-laced capsules] cause occasional periods of loss of appetite, bad feeling, fullness in the head and distress in the stomach. If given in larger and increasing doses, these symptoms are more rapidly developed and accentuated with a slight clouding of the mental processes. When increased to three grams a day the doses sometimes cause nausea and vomiting.”
Most people would never—knowingly, at least—consume three grams of borax a day, but because the product was in such a range of food products, it was possible that an enthusiastic eater might risk such a level. But the chemists had concluded that a higher, more acutely toxic dose wasn’t the real issue. The issue—as Wiley himself had long worried—was chronic daily exposure with cumulative effects: “On the whole, the results show that ½ gram per day is too much for the normal man to receive regularly.”
Wiley and his chemists had tested a range of foods preserved with these compounds, notably butter and meat. They calculated that a person who ate buttered bread with each meal could consume a half gram of borax and/or boric acid each day, just from the butter. More if they ate meat. Not only that, but the average consumer also would be taking in “salicylic acid, saccharin, sulfurous acid and sulfites, together with the whole list of the remaining preservatives.”
Wiley speculated that the borax, and probably those others, adversely affected the kidneys, if not other organs, thus leading to “disturbances of appetite, of digestions and of health.” His first Poison Squad experiment admittedly was too small and too short to yield the definitive evidence he’d have liked to find. “On the other hand, the logical conclusion which seems to follow from the data at our disposal is that the use of boric acid and equivalent amounts of borax should be restricted,” especially since in many cases the food could be preserved by safer means.
He repeated his argument that consumers had a right to know what manufacturers were mixing into their food. “As a matter of public information, and especially for protection of the young, the debilitated, and the sick . . . each article of food should be plainly labeled and branded in regard to the character and quantity of the preservative employed.”
By the time the report was released, the next group of volunteers was consuming salicylic acid instead of borax, and they were exhibiting worse symptoms, already showing signs of nausea and dizziness.
As songs were performed, cookbook authors worried, and the studies continued, public awareness grew and pressure built. Congress once again weighed the idea of basic protective rules, not only for food and drink but also for the unrestricted, anything-goes patent remedies and other so-called medications in the United States. Two legislators from agricultural states—Congressman William P. Hepburn of Iowa and Senator Porter J. McCumber of North Dakota—spearheaded the efforts in their respective houses. Both scheduled committee hearings on the issue and both, not surprisingly, invited Wiley as the government’s leading expert on chemical additives to food and drink to testify. Wiley, keenly aware of the power of the food-processing industry to stymie legislation, proceeded with caution. He stressed the need for accurate labeling first. “The real evil of food adulteration is deception of the consumer,” he said.
The American Medical Association also sent representatives to support the proposed Hepburn-McCumber legislation. So did the National Association of State Dairy and Food Departments. Wisconsin, Indiana, Texas, Louisiana, California, New Jersey, Tennessee, Vermont, Kansas, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky had all crafted food legislation to try to protect their citizens. But these were a patchwork of different rules and standards. The health officers in all those states were united in thinking that this wasn’t enough; there ought to be nationally consistent rules for food safety.
Kentucky’s chief food chemist, Robert M. Allen, assured the Senate Committee on Manufactures, which McCumber chaired, that a national law was widely desired. Even manufacturers thought uniform federal rules would work to their benefit, he insisted. But although Allen’s public persona was one of cheerful optimism, in private he was far less sure of the outcome. He wrote to Wiley that the meatpacking industry was aggressively fighting the legislation; Allen had also heard that the railroads, which held a big stake in the packing industry, were quietly working against the legislation.
Meanwhile, the processed-food industry had formed a new organization, the National Food Manufacturers Association, which was seeking a “proper” law, one that would sidestep both Wiley and his recommendations. The association offered high fees to scientists willing to testify at the hearings that preservatives were chemically harmless and that because the compounds prevented decay, they also prevented countless Americans from contracting ptomaine poisoning. The association included some three hundred members, ranging from importers of tea and coffee to fish packers and mustard purveyors to the meatpackers. And it was joined in opposing the Heyburn-McCumber legislation by the dairy industry, with its growing dependence on formaldehyde to salvage sour milk; the baking industry, which worried about limits on aluminum in products such as baking powder; the bleached flour industry; and the industrial chemical industry, with its growing investment in preservatives and aniline dyes. Whiskey blenders and rectifiers also stood in opposition to label requirements, which would have forced them to list synthetic ethanol as a key ingredient.
As Warwick Hough, the chief lobbyist for the National Wholesale Liquor Distributors Association, once again wrote to remind Wiley, barrel-aged whiskey also contained toxic compounds. It was unfair to keep “natural poisons” off the label while forcing manufacturers who might use dyes or other materials to list them on the label. Hough urged that whiskey be removed from the legislation entirely—surely those issues could be dealt with separately. And the rectifiers were both wealthy and powerful enough that many of the bill’s supporters warned Wiley that including whiskey in the regulations could doom the legislation.
Wiley feared that if whiskey was exempted, producers of other substances might lobby for exemptions too. He also worried that without the inclusion of alcoholic beverages, the bill might lose the support of the also-powerful temperance movement. Despite those fears, Wiley did eventually opt for pragmatism and recommended that the requirement for labeling the chemical constituents of whiskeys be removed from the bill. But Hepburn and McCumber overruled him on that point; they also were wary of exemptions that might weaken the bill. Exasperated, the liquor wholesalers’ group urged its members to work against the legislation. Hough, ignoring Wiley’s efforts on his behalf, publicly accused the chief chemist of being in league with the straight-whiskey industry, increasing the bitter relations between the two men. But Hough insisted that his message was cautionary. Wiley’s known and friendly ties to the straight-whiskey industry gave the appearance of bias, Hough said, and “will seriously impair your usefulness as an officer of the government in a position which calls for the exercise of utmost impartiality.”
The Proprietary Association, an alliance representing manufacturers of such popular nostrums and “cures,” struck back by calling the studies an attack on personal freedom. Its officers warned publicly that if their products became subject to regulation, government control of people’s lives would know no limits. “If the Federal Government should regulate the Interstate traffic in drugs on the basis of their therapeutic value, why not regulate traffic in theology by excluding from transportation all theological books which Dr. Wiley and his assistants, upon the examination, should find to be ‘misleading in any particular,’” read a communication from the association.
Both the House and Senate versions of the bill died in committee that spring. Hepburn and McCumber promised Wiley that they would reintroduce their legislation again later that year. Hepburn had written directly to Roosevelt, asking him to include a favorable reference to the proposed food and drug act in a congressional address, but the president had declined. It was an election year and he was picking his battles, Roosevelt explained. “It will take more than my recommendation to get the law passed,” he added. “I understand there is some very stubborn opposition” to even the idea of a purefood and drug act.
Wiley, looking at another round of failed legislation, now accepted that his longtime strategy of working with legislators and scientific experts was not enough. If the regulations he dreamed of were to stand a chance, he needed new allies. He already had friends in the increasingly politics-savvy community of women activists; now he further sought their help. Through the consciousness raising of Fannie Farmer and cookbook authors like her, with their warnings that commercial foods could not be trusted, women were helping to shape the nation’s opinion about the problem of food adulteration. And women-led organizations were recognized as growing agents of change, as in the case of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
That group had in recent years broadened its focus from opposing alcoholic beverages and promoting women’s suffrage to other issues—including the movement for food and drug regulation. The organization’s leaders had come to that cause by way of studies like those from the Chemistry Bureau, showing that alcohol-rich patent “medicines” contributed to the problem of drunkenness. The WCTU had also decided to tackle the problem of intoxicating substances in “tonics” and soft drinks, including the popular and famously stimulating drink Coca-Cola. WCTU had been prominent among women’s groups that had pressured the beverage company to drastically reduce the amount of cocaine in its formula around 1902.
Wiley started supplying the organization’s leaders with copies of Kebler’s reports on patent remedies. He also began courting favor with other women’s groups, volunteering to give talks—as his secretary noted, dressing up for these with respectful formality, including a top hat—and scheduling friendly meetings with their leaders. His persistence, some said his obsession, on the issue of food and drug regulation kept earning him opponents. But he was also forging new partnerships, and the drive and determination of the women’s organizations gave him a fresh source of hope.
Although log cabin born and farm raised, he’d grown up with the understanding that women were strong, capable, smart, and worthy of respect. His parents had sent all three of his sisters to college, a rarity in the midnineteenth century. In his Hanover College days, he had once given an address heralding the unfettered woman of the future: “She will claim all the avenues of usefulness be opened to her, that she no longer be compelled to depend upon the bounty of a father or a friend, to marry without love or choice, to keep a crowded school which kills or wash her sister’s dishes which degrades.” As chief chemist, he occasionally startled his colleagues with such views. In a talk to chemists visiting from Europe, he said, “Man’s highest ambition in this country is to strive to be the equal of woman.”
At other times he sounded more dismissive, arguing like a privileged man of his time, echoing the sentiments of his companions. In an essay for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, he wrote: “I know she is not intended by nature, taste, or by education, as a rule to follow the pursuits which are reserved for men.” But he then proceeded to point out that women had intelligence, energy, and the ability to drive public opinion. Nothing was gained, Wiley went on, by excluding women “from a participation, in an organized way, in the great problems which look to the uplifting of man.”
At a meeting of the Cranston, New Jersey, Village Improvement Association, where he’d been invited to speak, Wiley met the event’s organizer, Alice Lakey, who would become one of his staunchest allies. Born in 1856, Lakey had once dreamed of being a concert singer, but she was sidetracked by ill health. Illness also plagued her parents. She helped look after them and, after her mother died in 1896, continued to keep house for her ailing father. Seeking to understand and alleviate both their health problems, she, rather like Fannie Farmer, developed a deep interest in nutrition. At least partly through careful devotion to a healthy diet, Lakey succeeded in becoming much stronger and, as a result, had become a dedicated advocate for nutrition, a balanced diet, and pure, untainted food and drink.
She’d joined the village association as a member of its Domestic Science Division and became association president, the post she held when Wiley came to speak. The two crusaders struck up an instant bond. Under Lakey’s leadership, the Cranston Village Improvement Association petitioned Congress to pass food and drug legislation and she persuaded the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs to do the same. She then began a push for more support at the national level, contacting the National Consumers League and encouraging its more famous leaders to speak out on the issue.
Started in 1899 by influential social reformers Josephine Lowell and Jane Addams, the league primarily focused on helping the working poor. Addams—whose tireless work to help the disadvantaged would be honored in 1931 with a Nobel Peace Prize—had become nationally known for pioneering programs to bring education to America’s low-income communities. She was the cofounder of one of the country’s best-known settlement houses in Chicago, Hull House, which offered a range of classes and recreational activities for immigrant workers and also did detailed studies on the results. Addams recognized that shoddy food especially undermined the health of the poor. It took little urging from Lakey for Addams to begin to speak publicly in favor of pure-food legislation. Even the “most conservative woman,” even the most traditional housewife, Addams emphasized at a national women’s club convention, had a stake in the fight. It was shameful that she could not keep a “clean and wholesome” house, or feed her children safely, or buy “untainted meat” for the family dinner due to the troubled state of the American food supply.
Lakey also joined the pure-food committee of another national organization, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Founded in 1890 by New York journalist Jane Cunningham Croly, a pioneer of American feminism, the federation linked volunteer women’s clubs across the country. Like the WCTU, the federation had become interested in food and drug safety regulations some years earlier: Members had written pamphlets on “The Chemistry of Food
“I think women’s clubs of this country have done great work in whatever they have undertaken to the betterment of the condition of society,” he wrote to one club president. “There is something wonderful in the power which organized effort can develop and the women of this country, through organized effort, in my opinion can secure any good thing which they demand.”
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Lakey urged Wiley to take a further lesson from the cookbook writers. There was a reason that domestic science was so popular among women frustrated by the lack of educational opportunities. The Chemistry Bureau’s publications contained a wealth of scientific information. Why not, she asked, put that to practical use in the country’s kitchens? Not only would it be helpful, but also it would serve to remind women that the simple act of assembling a meal could, far too often, put their families at risk. Her idea was to publish a guide to simple tests that home cooks might use to identify adulterated products.
There had been precedents for that in the private sector. In 1861 the Boston physician Thomas A. Hoskins had published a book called What We Eat: An Account of the Most Common Adulterations of Food and Drink with Simple Tests by Which Many of Them May Be Detected. “For the purpose of adding something to the means of self-protection,” Hoskins explained, “I have endeavored to furnish simple directions, by which many of the more dangerous frauds in foods may be detected.”