The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum
In a mid-December speech at the annual dinner of Chicago’s Atlas Club, Wiley assured diners that the wide-reaching new law would change both food and country for the better. He added that the warnings he’d begun to lay out in his toxicity studies would help set enforcement standards that would continue to help protect the country’s citizens: “This poison squad, gentlemen, is destined to play an important role in the future history of food regulation.”
In 1907 the Bureau of Chemistry published the third of the hygienic table trial studies, this one focusing on the use of sulfurous acid in food processing. In a letter to Wilson, Wiley again credited his loyal staff members for doing the excellent work: F. C. Weber for overseeing the study, Willard Bigelow for doing the food and fecal analysis, B. J. Howard for the “microscopical examination of the blood and urine.”
The letter also emphasized Wiley’s intensifying belief that the bureau researchers—and the scientific community in general—were just beginning to understand the risks imposed by piling one preservative after another into the American food supply. “The relations of sulfurous acid to health are perhaps of greater importance than those of the preservatives already studied—namely boron compounds and the salicylic acids and its salts,” he noted. He attributed this importance—and the need for well-thought-out regulation—to the fact that the compound was so widely used. Manufacturers were devoted to it, insisting that its use “approaches a necessity.”
Sulfurous acid is related to the similarly named, better-known, and highly corrosive sulfuric acid. Chemically they differ by only a few oxygen atoms, but unlike sulfuric acid, sulfurous acid is relatively easy to handle. Manufacturers especially liked the fact that it could be converted into a solid form, such as sulfite of lime, by saturating lime (another name for calcium oxide) with sulfurous acid. This could be heated and its vapors used as a fumigant. In this form it was used to preserve a bright color in dried fruit while simultaneously preventing fermentation and fending off insects. Sulfurous acid was also used to treat syrup, molasses, smoked meats, and wine, as well as to disinfect wine-making equipment. Barrels used to age a vintage were typically given a good dose of acid fumes to sterilize the wood. Sulfur dioxide could also be directly bubbled into the fermenting liquid as a preservative and anti-oxidizer. Not surprisingly, the end result could be high levels of sulfites in wine. The Poison Squad study had thus focused on those compounds and on the chemists’ suspicion that exposure could carry significant risks. To test that idea, the bureau used one of the better-known salts derived from sulfurous acid, sodium sulfite. This was, as in the earlier studies, placed into capsules of varying doses and dished up along with the daily meals.
To the surprise and dismay of the Agriculture Department scientists, only nine of the twelve squad members endured to the end of the sulfite study. At the highest dose (about four grams), two of the volunteers became so ill that the researchers halted the trial before anyone else was badly sickened. They were less sure about a third ailing squad member who was at the time suffering from a bad cold. But every single man had sickened to some degree after being dosed with sulfites, reporting loss of appetite, stomach pains, headaches, dizziness, and a shaky feeling of weakness.
Much more research was needed, but Wiley told the secretary that the government should move toward what he termed a “complete and somewhat speedy suppression” of manufacturing processes that put sulfites into food and drink. “It is evident that the prohibition of its use would necessitate a radical change in methods of manufacture,” he wrote. But “assuming that in the manufacturing processes certain added bodies are used which are found on investigation to be injurious to health, the rational conclusions of such an investigation would be, not to excuse or overlook the presence of such bodies, but to institute investigations looking to their suppression.” The compounds could never be wholly eliminated. Sulfites formed naturally in wine during the process of fermentation. But why add to those levels?
“The use of sulfurous acid and sulfites never adds anything to the flavor or quality of a food but renders it both less palatable and less healthful,” Wiley wrote. “Every fact which has been brought out therefore in the investigation tends to accentuate the justness of the conclusion, namely, that the use of sulfurous acid in foods should be suppressed.” A strong stand against these preservatives would, he predicted, encourage research into other, less toxic ways of preserving food and drink.
Wiley must have realized what a regulatory reach this was. To call for a ban of a widely used preservative, to anticipate industries quickly adapting newer, safer methods—these were beyond optimistic. But if he had momentarily forgotten the scale and intensity of the opposition to such ideas, he was soon to be reminded.
In January 1907, before Wiley and his colleagues had managed to put even basic enforcement guidelines into place, James A. Tawney, a congressman from Minnesota, moved to eliminate one of Wiley’s favored aspects of the food and drug bill. The fifty-two-year-old Tawney—tall and stylish, sporting an imposing mustache—belonged to a faction of the Republican Party popularly known as the Stand-Patters. In contrast to reformers in general and the Roosevelt-led progressive Republicans, they resisted any move that reeked of change from what they saw as the more noble nineteenth-century approach to government. Tawney’s move was to attach an amendment to the agricultural appropriations bill that blocked the use of any federal funds to support food safety work by scientists and officials working at the state level. It was potentially devastating. The Department of Agriculture depended heavily on cooperation with state officials; scientists like Edwin Ladd of North Dakota had shown how much of a difference collaboration could make. Opponents of the food and drug law had already capped its first-year enforcement funding at a mere $700,000, not even enough to cover a national food-inspection program. If the USDA lost its support from state regulators and researchers, there seemed little prospect of making the law work.
Once again Wiley contacted his allies in the pure-food movement; once again he asked them to help him fight back. Alice Lakey of the National Consumers League replied immediately, angrily describing Tawney’s amendment as specifically designed to “impair the efficiency of the administration of the food and drugs act. . . . Our committee are doing all we can and please let us know if you have any instructions for us.” Club News, the newsletter of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, echoed her outrage. In a nationally circulated editorial, it pointed out that opponents of regulation had first campaigned against the law as a federal violation of states’ rights, a claim that had helped array Southern Democrats against the food and drug bill. “The plot failed,” the editorial continued. “It would now appear that the same thing is being attempted in a different way—that is, by practically prohibiting all plans for co-operation between the National and State Authorities.”
Opposition to Tawney’s amendment also came from a new source: the People’s Lobby, an organization launched to fight government corruption. Its founders included two well-known muckraking journalists, Henry Beech Needham and Lincoln Steffens, along with crusading Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White; Kentucky food chemist Robert Allen, now secretary of the Interstate Pure Food Committee; James B. Reynolds, who had been part of the investigative team that Roosevelt sent to inspect the Chicago stockyards; and the widely admired and politically liberal novelist Mark Twain. “If anyone is naughty in Congress, he will have to reckon with a new force,” Twain wrote in the New York Times. The People’s Lobby, he said, should be considered an ally to good government, as it would “see, in a methodical manner, that Congress hides no secrets, no secret alliances.” Like Steffens, Henry Needham had long been a supporter of Roosevelt’s progressive policies, and he was optimistic that the president would favor the new organization. He and Roosevelt had a mostly friendly relationship, based on a shared interest in athletics. Needham was one of the nation’s foremost baseball writers and an eloquent critic of excessive violenc
Like Hough’s presumptuous arrogance, the Tawney amendment irked Secretary Wilson into abandoning his usual cautious approach to political issues. He too came out publicly against the measure. The combined opposition’s strength, to the relief of many, caused Tawney’s amendment to fail in committee. Wilson’s public stance gave the impression that he was willing to back Wiley as strongly as ever, but those around them saw signs of strain between the two. Robert Allen wrote to Needham that the secretary was shutting his chief chemist out of key decisions regarding food regulation: “Secretary Wilson absolutely ignores Dr. Wiley.”
Wiley and Wilson had, at least, earlier reached an agreement on a plan to expand their roster of food and drink inspectors; twenty-eight new men would be on board by year’s end. Six new branch laboratories were being opened to handle regional demand for product analysis; the department had plans to add at least another ten facilities the following year. And Allen himself had successfully recommended a young lawyer from Kentucky, Walter G. Campbell, to head the Food Inspection Division: Working with public health officials in Louisville, Campbell had helped shut down numerous swill dairies there. Allen wrote to Wiley, “I unqualifiedly recommend him as one of the men that you will make no mistake in appointing and putting close to you.” Campbell proved his worth rapidly, meticulously organizing the agency’s inspection program and working tirelessly to improve the law and its enforcement. He would eventually direct the regulatory agency that, years later, would inherit the enforcement role of the Bureau of Chemistry, an agency that in 1930 would become the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Still, Allen’s misgivings about Wilson grew. As he also wrote to Needham, “in thinking over Secretary Wilson’s attitude toward the pure food work, there is nothing to show that he has ever been in sympathy with it.” He recalled that during the embalmed-beef hearings, Wilson had been “unenthusiastic,” leaving Wiley to be the public face of the issue. The secretary had even, during the hearings, told Allen privately that he found Roosevelt’s dramatic testimony “a pain in the side.” Allen had an uneasy feeling that the People’s Lobby would need to come to Wiley’s aid “more than once in this fight.”
The ever-festering conflict over whiskey was key among matters driving a wedge between Wiley and Wilson. Under the new law, the chief chemist had successfully pushed through one government seizure of rectified whiskey after another. The seizures included two barrels of Choice Old Monongahela Whiskey, which did not “contain enough whiskey to give it character”; fifteen barrels of Clark’s Old Blend Rye Whiskey, which contained no rye; four and a half barrels of Old Kimroe Rye Whiskey Blend, which also lacked rye, and a barrel of Old Harmony Whiskey, which was simply a batch of dyed ethanol. In a single week the department had moved to seize more than fifty barrels of so-called whiskey with an eye toward prosecution.
And barely a month after the law went into effect, in February 1907, Wiley had reinforced Hough’s fears about his Kentucky bourbon bias when the chief chemist gave some undeniably pro–straight whiskey testimony before the House Committee on Agriculture. House Speaker Joseph Cannon, the fiercely pro-business Republican from Illinois, seeking to protect the numerous bottling businesses in his home district, now wanted blended whiskeys exempted from labeling under the law. When asked before the committee to define “blended whiskey,” Wiley gave in to exasperation and replied, “Crooked is the term you mean. If one is straight, the other is crooked. Crooked whisky is not whisky at all but is made of neutral spirits and flavored and colored. It is an imitation.”
Politically his outburst did not serve him well. Hough fired off another angry broadside to Wilson. The secretary agreed that such statements could not be described as unbiased scientific commentary. The confrontation added to a sense by Wilson—and, perhaps more important at this point, by the Agriculture Department’s powerful solicitor, George P. McCabe—that Wiley’s long advocacy for regulation had turned him into more of a crusader than an unbiased researcher.
The argument between Wiley and Cannon had focused on one detail of the new law, a paragraph on misbranding. That section stated that all products that were compounds, imitations, or blends must be accurately labeled. A product could be called a blend only if it was a “mixture of like substances” under the law. This, by Wiley’s reading, meant that blended whiskey must be a mixture of genuine whiskeys. If it was one of the rectified versions—whiskey mixed with neutral spirits, water and dye, or just dyed neutral spirits and water—then it should be labeled “imitation whiskey.”
The rectifiers had developed a line of additives to mimic the taste of straight whiskey and even its tendency to bead or cling to a glass. These special flavorings and enhancers included bourbon extract, rye oil, rye extract, rye essence, Pittsburg rye essence, Monongahela essence, malt essence, Irish and Scotch essence, essence of gin (made from juniper berries), corn flavoring, aging oil, and bead oil. Hough argued that these coloring and flavoring agents were only trace additives and that all blended whiskeys—his organization was trying to do away with the term “rectified”—could be considered simply a mix of different types of alcohol. In a letter to Wilson he suggested that “everything mixed could be called a blend,” rather than using the off-putting word “imitation.” The idea—practical and business friendly—appealed to USDA solicitor McCabe. He wrote a recommendation that all alcohols be considered “like substances” in the future.
Wiley pushed back. He didn’t buy the idea that synthetic ethanol, dyed with burned sugar and flavored with bourbon extract, was equivalent to aged bourbon. It was cheating the consumer to pretend so. Wilson this time took McCabe’s part, rebuffing Wiley. The chief chemist refused to accept their decision and decided that the point was worth appealing over their heads. Requesting and receiving an appointment with President Roosevelt in late March, he took with him to the White House a miniature still and a briefcase loaded with samples of whiskey extracts and additives. For a “very fruitful hour,” as Wiley described it, he explained and demonstrated to Roosevelt the differences between types of beverages labeled “whiskey.” In a March 30 letter to Robert Allen, he described the president as agreeable to trying the different samples and overall “extremely courteous” and attentive. “At the end, he thanked me most cordially and said I had thrown new light upon the problem. . . . So I think, at least, I did not do any harm.”
But in terms of in-house politics, he had also stirred up some trouble. Roosevelt called Wilson in for further discussion. He found the issue “very puzzling,” he told the agriculture secretary, and he wasn’t satisfied with the department’s stand. Wilson, not pleased to find himself in this position, stood by McCabe and did his best to dismiss Wiley’s arguments. He urged the president to adopt the single word “blended” for all the mixed whiskeys and alcohols, and Roosevelt agreed to consider it.
The president, though, had been impressed by Wiley’s demonstrations and the science behind them. And he was suspicious that, as Henry Needham had recently warned him, the “imitation whisky alliance,” having failed to prevent or further weaken the food and drug law, was now focusing its interests on “bulldozing” the Department of Agriculture. Needham pointed out to Roosevelt that if so early in the enforcement process a concession was made to one industry, it would set a precedent that others would easily pursue.
Judging that the department had grown too political within itself—on both sides of the argument—Roosevelt asked his attorney general, Charles J. Bonaparte, to review the evidence from all sides and to issue a formal ruling. Roosevelt considered the fifty-seven-year-old Bonaparte—a grandson of Jérôme Bonaparte, youngest brother of Napoleon I of France—to be thorough, tough, and unafraid of contentious is
After reviewing stacks of whiskey-related documents, including a voluminous report from the Bureau of Chemistry, Bonaparte found that he agreed with Wiley that not all whiskeys were created equal. Further, American consumers deserved detailed and accurate labels to help guide their purchases of such products. On April 10, 1907, Roosevelt notified Wilson that Bonaparte had so decided and that he, as president, accepted the ruling. He appended to that notice some instructions: “Straight whiskey will be labeled as such.” The definition of a “blended whiskey” would be limited: Only “[a] mixture of two or more straight whiskies will be labeled as blended.” If the blend was whiskey mixed with industrially produced ethyl alcohol, then things got more complicated: “Provided that there is a sufficient amount of straight whiskey to make it genuinely a ‘mixture,’ then the label would call it a ‘compound whiskey.’” If there was no straight whiskey in the bottle, if it was simply colored and flavored neutral spirits, then it was a fake version of straight whiskey and needed to be so identified. In other words, “Imitation whisky will be labeled as such. Sincerely yours, Theodore Roosevelt.”
Many in the pure-food movement saw the whiskey decision as a test of the government’s willingness to address the labeling issue even when powerful business interests opposed it. It was to that end that Wiley had put himself—and his relationship with the secretary—on the line. His friends dared hope that the decision, carrying the clout of Roosevelt’s approval, would restore the chief chemist’s standing with his boss. “I write to congratulate you on your victory,” wrote John Hurty, Indiana’s public health officer, to his old friend about the whiskey ruling. “Your ideas in regard to ‘blends’ are exactly right and thus you see more than the President supporting you.” The director of Kentucky’s agricultural experiment station wrote, “Let me congratulate you for the victory won. Stick to it.”