The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum
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Upton Sinclair refused to give up on his novel. He kept shopping The Jungle to established publishing firms.
He suffered more rejections from publishers wary of potential lawsuits but got a meeting with Isaac Marcosson, who worked for the publishing house Doubleday, Page & Company. As a newspaper writer in Louisville, Kentucky, Marcosson had written a positive review of Sinclair’s 1903 novel, The Journal of Arthur Stirling. He welcomed the author into his office and listened to Sinclair’s promise that the hefty bundle of pages he carried was “something sensational.” Marcosson lugged the manuscript home and became engrossed, staying up all night reading it. In the morning he presented it enthusiastically to his boss, Walter Hines Page.
Both Page and his partner, Frank Nelson Doubleday, needed persuading. Page shared much of Marcosson’s enthusiasm but agreed with more dubious Doubleday that the story’s revolting details might be too much for readers to stomach. Page cautioned their young employee that if they did contract for Sinclair’s book, it would be with the understanding that Marcosson would be responsible for “launching and exploiting” The Jungle. The publishers also insisted on sending a copy of the manuscript to the Chicago Tribune for an opinion on whether the book’s grisly descriptions had any basis in reality. Tribune editors responded with a two-dozen-page rebuttal of the packinghouse descriptions. Alarmed, Page and Doubleday called Sinclair to their offices. But Sinclair promptly began picking apart the Tribune’s critique.
For instance, the paper had denied that the tuberculosis bacterium could survive on walls or floors of the packing rooms. Sinclair pointed out that the germ could indeed survive on those surfaces and could transfer to anything that touched them. He’d brought medical studies to prove it, as well as other evidence to back up his story. He further noted that the paper’s owners were obviously friendly with the meatpackers and sided with them. In fact, it would turn out that the newspaper’s management had not assigned a reporter to study Sinclair’s claims but instead passed the task on to a publicist who worked for the meatpackers.
The Tribune’s fervent denial of the story made Page, also a former reporter, suspicious. As well as a book publisher, he was editor of the business magazine World’s Work. His journalist’s instincts told him something wasn’t right about the Tribune report. It smelled like a whitewash. He decided on an independent investigation. The publishing company sent Marcosson and the company’s lawyer on an expedition to Chicago. Both men returned disgusted and horrified by what they’d seen. They’d also secured multiple sources willing to provide public statements about the odious conditions in the yards. Page became convinced and he persuaded his partner Doubleday to agree. Page also decided that when The Jungle went on sale, he would buttress it by publishing factual reporting on the horrors of the yards in World’s Work. Sinclair signed his book contract with the publishing firm on January 6, 1906.
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Robert Allen recovered, for the most part, from the scandal regarding his cozy deal with bourbon distillers during the purefood exhibition in St. Louis. Allies in the movement forgave him, perhaps in recognition that he had accepted the whiskey men’s $3,000 not for personal gain but to finance the exhibit. Again supported by the well-connected bourbon barons, he secured a meeting with President Roosevelt in the summer of 1905, and several prominent food reform advocates agreed to attend. Wiley wasn’t among them. The chief chemist asked for and received from Wilson an assurance that the Agriculture Department officially supported the meeting. But he believed that there was more power in a delegation of private citizens, especially when the president already knew Wiley’s position all too well. The delegation included Alice Lakey, food commissioners from Ohio and Connecticut, a representative of the retail grocers’ association, and a representative from the H.J. Heinz Company of Pittsburgh, which was now very successfully marketing a preservative-free ketchup made from actual tomatoes. They presented their case to Roosevelt but, as Allen related with some disappointment afterward, the president remained noncommittal.
Then later that year, in November, Roosevelt invited the delegation back to the White House, revealing that he had taken the trouble to talk over their issue with a range of experts, from Wiley to Ira Remsen of Johns Hopkins University, codiscoverer of the sweetener saccharin. The president had even discussed the matter with his personal physician. The result was, the president said, that he had decided at last to support the beleaguered food and drug law in his end-of-the-year message to Congress. He told the group that he had little expectation that his advocacy would change anything—opposition to food and regulation remained both stubborn and powerful—but on December 5 Roosevelt formally announced that he was backing the legislation: “I recommend that a law be enacted to regulate interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks and drugs. Such a law would protect the legitimate manufacturer and commerce and would tend to secure the health and welfare of the consuming public.” The speech made it clear that the president had been following Wiley’s research and its conclusions: “Traffic in foodstuffs which have been debased or adulterated so as to injure health and deceive the public should be forbidden.”
Senator Heyburn promptly brought the bill back to the manufacturing committee, hoping to move it quickly to a vote by the full chamber. But the president had accurately assessed the hostility gathered against the legislation. It appeared, in fact, that Roosevelt’s intervention had stirred up even stronger resistance. The Republican leader of the Senate, Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, had made his fortune as a wholesale grocer with strong ties to the food manufacturing industry. He now took to the floor to attack the bill as an affront to individual liberty: “Are we to take up the question as to what a man shall eat and what a man shall drink and put him under severe penalties if he is eating or drinking something different from what the chemists of the Agricultural Department think desirable?” Angrily, McCumber replied: “On the contrary, it is the purpose of the bill that a man may determine for himself what he will eat and what he will not eat. It is the purpose of the bill that he may go into the market and when he pays for what he asks for that he shall get it and not get some poisonous substance in lieu of that.”
Aldrich stood unmoved. He flatly refused to bring the bill forward for a full Senate vote. Roosevelt tried to suggest, in a private meeting, that Aldrich should let the bill go forward. It would look better publicly and, after all, Aldrich didn’t have to vote for it. The senator would not budge.
But in early February 1906, the Rhode Island senator was forced into an unhappy meeting with a powerful backer of the bill, the director of the American Medical Association’s legislative council. The AMA was less interested in food safety than in the problem of snake-oil medicines, but the two issues were bonded together in the law. The organization wanted those patent cures regulated and was prepared, Aldrich was informed, to rally all 135,000 physicians in the country, including all of those located in the senator’s home state, to get the bill passed. The doctors would, if need be, contact every patient, county by county. The AMA had a reputation for avoiding partisan politics, but its board had decided to take this legislation on as a personal cause. And according to Charles Reed, the AMA legislative council director, the senator from Rhode Island could take this as a personal warning. Shortly after that meeting, Aldrich called a more junior senator into his office—Albert Beveridge of Indiana—and told him to carry a message to Heyburn: It was now good timing for Heyburn to bring his bill up for a vote again.
Beveridge later told journalist Mark Sullivan that he had suspected that his errand was just for show. He thought that any Senate vote in favor of the bill would prove futile. The legislation was clearly destined to die in the House, where leadership was just as firmly opposed. But the Indianan obediently went to Heyburn’s office. As he also recounted to Sullivan, “Heyburn said he could not believe it and said he was tired of
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Back at the Bureau of Chemistry—which Wiley had taken to calling “America’s test kitchen”—the toxicity testing of preservatives continued to tell an alarming story. Bigelow remained lead chemist for the trials and Wiley himself had assumed a more hands-on role. He no longer had the help of physicians from the Marine Hospital Service, who had found the twice-weekly examinations of Poison Squad volunteers too time-consuming. So Wiley was conducting the physicals himself. As with borax in the previous trial, in the second round of tests on salicylic acid, doses were administered either in capsules or tablets. Wiley publicly acknowledged that industry-backed scientists had criticized this in the borax study, arguing that it failed to represent normal intake of the preservative, which was usually premixed into food. Yet he dismissed the criticism. “It is hardly necessary to call attention to the futility of such an objection,” he added. “A preservative administered in this way at the time of the meals, as was always the case, is rapidly mixed with the contents of the stomach during the process of digestion, and could not in any way exert any injurious effect by reason of the form of its administration.”
Another repeated criticism was that Wiley and his staff did not constantly monitor the men’s activities and could not be sure they didn’t cheat on their prescribed diets. These were working government employees who came to the test kitchen only for meals and checkups. This was a real limitation. “The attempt has been made to control, as far as possible, all conditions of the experimental work,” he said, but “the difficulties attending the task are so enormous that it is not possible that complete success should be secured.” Still, he thought, the chemistry crew had done enough checks, interviews, questionnaires, and follow-ups to be sure that their volunteers were not ill, taking medications, or experiencing other unusual exposures.
Again they tested the suspect preservative at varying dosages, ranging from about two hundred milligrams to a full two grams daily. Wiley again believed that although the higher dose, not unexpectedly, produced more severe effects, the real issue was the subtler risk of daily chronic exposure at low doses and an apparent cumulative effect. “Like other ordinary preservatives, it is not one that can be classified as a poison in the usual sense of the word.” Salicylic acid’s long history in folk medicine, as well as its use as a prescribed pharmaceutical, tended to reassure consumers that it was benign. Wiley agreed that salicylic acid was “often beneficial when prescribed by a competent physician.” It was also a base for synthesizing the milder acetylsalicylic acid, an active ingredient in aspirin, with which it was sometimes confused. But, just as Wiley’s lab had reported in its 1887 study of alcoholic beverages, its use as a preservative raised the risk of a cumulative overdose. When salicylic acid was mixed into either drink or food and consumed day after day, meal after meal, it became far more of a hazard than a health aid. During the months of the salicylic acid tests, the scientists had recorded chronic stomach pain, nausea, appetite loss, and weight loss in their squad members. Bigelow’s written conclusion was that taken chronically, even in small quantities, salicylic acid “exerts a depressing and harmful influence upon the digestion and health and general metabolic activities of the body.” The chemists again pointed out that the use of such compounds could be reduced if manufacturers would merely process foods in clean conditions.
Wiley sent Wilson an early copy of the report. It reinforced the secretary’s concern that his bureau chief had become more crusader than objective chemist. The end of the salicylic acid report, in fact, came awfully close to sounding like a Paul Pierce diatribe: “The addition of salicylic acids and salicylates to foods is therefore a process which is reprehensible in every respect and leads to injury to the consumer, which though in many cases not easily measured, must finally be productive of great harm.” This was not the same prudent, methodical Harvey Wiley who had spoken so judiciously about the preservative issue during the embalmed-beef hearings. Wilson had long supported Wiley’s activities, but his growing stridency was starting to alienate the chief chemist from his politically cautious boss.
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As Doubleday, Page prepared to publish The Jungle in early 1906, Marcosson told Sinclair that the firm wanted major revisions. The serialized version of the novel, the last chapter of which had appeared in Appeal to Reason the previous November, featured too much overwrought, preachy philosophy, including its many references to exploitive employers preying on hapless workers. Doubleday, Page wanted to excise Sinclair’s overt comparisons of worker life to an existence in a wild forest with “the strong devouring the weak”—the source of his title. At such a late date, after his struggles to find a publisher, he gave in. The publisher cut thirty thousand words and ordered an initial print run of twenty thousand copies. Publication was set for February 26, which was, again by pure coincidence, the day the Senate passed Heyburn’s food and drug bill.
Marcosson speculated that the book would either be “a sensational success or a magnificent failure.” To help get the word out, Sinclair sent an early copy to his muckraking journalist friend Baker at McClure’s. Marcosson sent copies to the wire services Associated Press and United Press with a note urging them to quote at will. And he sent extra copies to newspapers and magazines in every major American city. The publishing company also sent a copy to President Roosevelt, autographed by Sinclair, of course.
Eight
THE JUNGLE
1906
And the terrapin tastes like roast veal.
The wine which you drink never heard of a grape,
But of tannin and coal tar is made.
With the legislation seeming permanently stalled in Congress, Harvey Wiley had taken to writing protest letters to newspapers and magazines, complaining about their advertising of fake remedies and fraudulent foods. Their practices weren’t illegal, he acknowledged, but they were dismayingly dishonest.
To the Washington Star he wrote in early 1906: “I have read with regret in your issue of Monday, [January] 29th of the probably fatal illness of Buck Ewing, the celebrated catcher.” Ewing, a former star player and manager for the New York Giants, had been diagnosed with Bright’s disease, an inflammation of blood vessels in the kidneys, dreaded as bringing on a rapid and painful death.
But Wiley noted that the Star was apparently prepared to offer a solution to such a devastating diagnosis, as illustrated by “your issue of Sunday, the 28th instant, of Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root. This remedy, which I always keep near me,” he added sarcastically, “has on the carton in very large letters—Cures Brights Disease—together with every other ill that the flesh is heir to.”
Perhaps, he suggested, the Star didn’t realize that his bureau chemists had found that the Swamp Root formula was mostly drinking alcohol and turpentine, flavored with a sprinkle of herbs and spices such as cinnamon, peppermint, and sassafras. But as the newspaper’s advertisement guaranteed the tonic’s cure-all potency, Wiley promised to send Ewing “a marked copy of the Sunday Star with this absolute guarantee and I shall expect soon to hear of his entire restoration to health.” Ewing died of Bright’s disease in October 1906 at age forty-seven.
To Everybody’s Magazine in New York, Wiley fired off a series of questions: Could the magazine explain how Rubifoam made teeth look “just like pearls”? In what sense was Celes, the oxygen tooth powder, “chemically perfect”? And about that Kneipp Malt Coffee, which was made from roasted barley grains. How exactly did it manage to have “rea
Needling the periodicals and their advertisers provided him with an amusing respite from the seemingly never-ending and increasingly bitter legislative fight. After the encouraging vote on Heyburn’s bill in the Senate, after Wiley’s acceptance of his role as the public face of the campaign, the opposition had escalated the frequency and the vitriol of their attacks on him, which were also becoming more personal in tone. “My attention is called to the fact that considerable agitation is going on here looking to your removal,” wrote the director of Dudley & Co. Canned Goods in New York City to Wiley. Grocery World, a trade paper for wholesale grocers, had published two editorials in the previous two weeks demanding that Wiley be removed from office.
Critics described him as “the nation’s janitor,” busily sweeping up the kitchens and pantries of its citizens; the overzealous “policeman” of the American stomach; a would-be tyrant; a shoddy scientist; a man with mental issues and delusions of grandeur. The publicist for the borax industry sent letters to news editors under a fake name, calling the Poison Squad studies deeply flawed. The whiskey rectifiers and the wholesale grocers printed a pamphlet on Wiley’s work on fake honey from the early 1880s, dating back to his years at Purdue.
Repeating the old charge, it was titled “Wiley’s Honey Lie” and purported to be from still-angry honey producers. The American Honey Producers League denied any knowledge of the pamphlet but the damage was done. The whiskey rectifiers suggested that he was a bourbon-soaked alcoholic receiving packets of hard cash from Taylor and his friends. Wiley started receiving sympathy notes from members of Congress. “The attacks which are being made upon you by certain representatives of the liquor interests are contemptible,” wrote a Wisconsin legislator to Wiley about one circular. In a good-humored reply, Wiley called the rectifiers’ diatribe “[A]bout the best one that has been issued so far. I shall take pleasure in showing it to the Secretary of Agriculture.” Wilson, despite his concerns, was still standing by Wiley and had recently renewed the chemist’s contract.