The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum
Chittenden, a Yale physiologist who specialized in food and nutrition, was the best known. Chittenden had early on been cautious about food additives, but more recently his views, especially regarding preservatives, had stood in contrast to Wiley’s. The chief chemist attributed that to industry influence; Chittenden, who had publicly endorsed the use of borax, received funding from the borax-mining industry. He also consulted with corn syrup producers. Bedford, the manufacturer of Karo, had cited him to both the president and Wilson as believing that “a strong solution of sugar made from a starch is entitled to be called a syrup.”
Wiley was dismayed by the roles of Remsen and Chittenden but had no criticisms of the other board members. Young was a chemist specializing in pharmacology at Northwestern University. Herter, a Columbia University pathologist, was known for his work in diseases of the digestive tract. Taylor, a physiological chemist at the University of Pennsylvania, studied the role of grains in the human diet.
But overall Wiley’s relationships with many of his more traditional scientific colleagues were beginning to deteriorate. The Society of Chemical Engineers—an industry-allied group—passed a public resolution criticizing his position on compounds such as sulfur dioxide. The leaders of the New York section of the American Chemical Society suggested that he was now more an advocate than a chemist. He refused to admit discouragement over such actions. “The men who led in such a ridiculous fight can only injure themselves,” Wiley told a worried friend in a New York laboratory. “These little fellows do not bother me in the least. You can rest assured of that.”
The Remsen Board, though, bothered him, and deeply. It seemed intended specifically to undercut and countermand the findings of the Bureau of Chemistry. He was dismayed that Remsen himself, the “alleged discoverer” of saccharin, as Wiley put it, was given authority to rule on the sweetener’s safety. He was dismayed that Chittenden, so obviously pro-industry, was on the board at all. He saw both the creation of the board and its business-friendly composition, he told friends, as a betrayal not just of him but of the American consumer.
Wiley took the uncompromising position that “the creation of the Remsen Board of Consulting Scientific Experts was the cause of nearly all the woes that subsequently befell the Pure Food Law.” Other voices agreed. “The Remsen Board,” said a New York Times editorial, “was created on February 20, 1908 for the specific purpose of overruling the findings of Dr. Harvey Wiley of the Bureau of Chemistry with respect to the purity of food and drugs.” The Times, along with Wiley’s pure-food allies and a considerable swath of those Americans who followed the news from Washington, had come to realize that despite the successful passage of the 1906 law, there were forces within the Roosevelt administration, within the federal government at large, that were more than willing to adjust the law’s requirements for the benefit of industry, and not necessarily with the public good in mind.
Eleven
EXCUSES FOR EVERYTHING
1908–1909
Is covered with germs, each armed with a hook
To grapple with liver and spleen.
In April 1908, as his Poison Squad study of sodium benzoate and benzoic acid was being readied for publication, Wiley gave a somewhat defiant speech to a meeting of the venerable American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, an organization that Benjamin Franklin had founded in 1743. He provided information about his preliminary results on sodium benzoate, pressed his case for strict enforcement of the pure-food law, and advocated for tighter limits on what processors could put into commercial foodstuffs.
“The use of chemical preservatives and artificial colors is of quite recent date,” he told his audience. “I think I may say with safety that if one could go back thirty, or at most forty, years he would find a food supply practically free” of such additives. Rapid advances in chemistry had brought about the change, he continued, making it possible to “offer manufacturers chemical preservatives of high potency . . . at prices which make it entirely possible to use them freely in food products.”
He emphasized that it was this ability to make a cheaper product—not safety, not quality—that drove the industry’s embrace of industrial food chemistry. And it wasn’t that much more expensive to do it right, he argued. A “conscientious manufacturer” of ketchup (clearly Heinz) had shown that it cost only an additional fifteen to twenty cents per case to make a preservative-free version of the product.
Previewing the impending official report, Wiley called sodium benzoate “highly objectionable.” It “produced a very serious disturbance of the metabolic functions, attended with injury to digestion and health.” This was a study, as he’d earlier told Congress, in which only three of the twelve volunteers had lasted until the end of the experiment. Wiley finished this speech by once again stressing that any compound proven dangerous or that was used only to support the “convenience, carelessness or indifference of the manufacturer” should be removed from the American food supply “entirely.”
The sodium benzoate trials had deeply dismayed the chief chemist. He’d predicted minor or no ill effects in his Poison Squad volunteers and seen the opposite. As he’d told legislators, “The most pronounced symptoms were burning sensations in the throat and esophagus, pains in the stomach, some dizziness, bad taste, and when the limit of endurance was reached, the subject suddenly became nauseated and ill.” Eleven of the twelve volunteers lost a measurable amount of weight during the trial and—except in two of the men—recovery was proving painfully slow. Following the other findings, this study cemented his conviction that industrially made preservatives posed a more serious health risk than he’d previously realized. “I was converted by my own investigation,” he wrote.
But even as Wiley grew more alarmed about processed foods, and more anxious to police them, his boss was moving in the other direction. Secretary Wilson had grown tired of what he considered alarmist investigations. He’d also started blocking publication of what he considered industry-unfriendly findings. Over the course of 1907, he had forbidden the printing of a report on “Corn Sirup as a Synonym for Glucose” and a Bigelow-authored paper on “Investigations of a Substitute (Weak Brine) for Sulfur Dioxide in Drying Fruits.” Already, in 1908, he had prevented the release of a rather damning survey of “Sanitary Conditions of Canneries” at the urging of Congressman Sherman and his peers in that branch of the industry. Wilson had also squelched two other Poison Squad reports, one on the controversial issue of copper sulfate and the other on the old-time preservative potassium nitrate (saltpeter). Wiley had just returned from Philadelphia when Wilson sent for him to tell him that the sodium benzoate report, too, would not be published as scheduled. The secretary wanted it shelved, at least until after the Remsen Board had concluded its own study.
Colleagues around the department noticed and commented upon Wiley’s obvious frustration. He didn’t deny it. But his exasperation, he would insist, had not pushed him to secretly countermand Wilson’s order halting publication of the sodium benzoate report. He swore that he hadn’t done anything of the kind. When the Poison Squad report was unexpectedly published on July 20, 1908, Wiley protested that he was as shocked as anyone. He argued that it must have been the result of a misunderstanding at the Government Printing Office. And the people in the printing office backed him in that assertion; its administrators formally apologized for the inadvertent release of information. Wilson wasn’t buying it. He knew that Wiley had good friends throughout not only the Agriculture Department but many government agencies, including the printing office. The secretary, already annoyed by the chief chemist’s unbending nature, now saw signs of something worse: an instance of possible treachery by a willful and duplicitous subordinate.
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In August 1908 the National Association of State Dairy and Food Departments held its annual conference at the elegant Grand Hotel on Michigan’s Mackinac Island. The setting might have been beau
“The convention will probably manifest the signs that are now being seen in various parts of the country,” warned the New York Times on July 30. “Contrary to what was expected, the let down in food legislation has not been popular. . . . Consumer’s leagues, clubs of different sorts and others are taking the subject up and making their ideas known to the authorities here.” Among the discontents, the newspaper said, were officials of the Bureau of Chemistry and delegates from some of the western states, “where the pure food agitation is strong.”
Edwin F. Ladd, the activist food chemist from North Dakota, was both president of the association and lead organizer of the protest movement. He opened the conference on August 4 with a tirade against secretary of agriculture James Wilson, noting the man’s suppression of valuable food safety reports, his resistance to tough regulation, and his apparently cozy relationship with the food industry. Roosevelt, Ladd stated, was not much better, and the appointment of the Remsen Board—clearly an end run around the law—was evidence of both men’s cold indifference to consumer protection. The actions by the federal government, he continued, were an insult to all who believed in allowing good science to help make good decisions.
The Mackinac conference included carefully selected representatives from the food-manufacturing industry, there to testify in favor of Wiley’s views on food safety enforcement. A manager from the Columbia Conserve Company in Indianapolis noted that he’d been at first hostile to the new regulations. Columbia had been profitably selling a cheap “strawberry jelly” made of glucose, apple waste, and red food coloring and had strongly resisted calling it “imitation” for fear of losing customers. But the company had since discovered that it could make even more money by selling well-labeled, high-quality goods. Representatives of the Heinz company also appeared in starring roles. Following its success in removing preservatives from ketchup, the firm had developed a whole line of preservative-free products ranging from mustard to sweet pickles. Heinz’s marketing director reported that a year of experience with these products, exposed to “the heat and cold of changing seasons, or wide distribution at home and abroad,” had been one of “pronounced and unqualified success. Spoilage is less than one-fourth of one percent.” Sebastian Mueller, now a vice president at Heinz, blasted competing manufacturers who insisted on preservative use. He stated firmly that sodium benzoate was being promoted by food manufacturers who found it profitable to use rot-prone waste and scraps in their “bulk” ketchups, sometimes at four times the proposed government standard of 0.10 percent.
Wiley added that food quality and safety represented not only good science but also moral decision-making. The wealthy, he pointed out, could easily afford fresh food and well-made condiments. The trade in cheap, chemically enhanced imitations catered to the poor. If the country could work to standardize good food, then it also would be promoting good health for all. “Whenever a food is debased in order to make it cheap, the laboring man pays more for any given nourishment than the rich man does who buys the pure food,” he pointed out.
The attendees voted to adopt a series of resolutions, including a condemnation of the practice of bleaching flour—increasingly criticized for the resulting chemical by-products—and support for a contentious proposal that the weight of the contents should be listed on every food container, allowing consumers to know the actual quantity being purchased. Manufacturers and grocers stood fiercely opposed to such a “weight on the package” law, which suggested to the delegates that they were onto something. By a 42–15 vote, the food and dairy association also put itself clearly in the Wiley camp on the issue of preservatives and other food additives: “Resolved: That this association is convinced that all chemical preservatives are harmful in foods and that all kinds of food products are and may be prepared and distributed without them, and pledges its best efforts to use all moral and legal means at its disposal to exclude chemical preservatives from food products.” As another indication of their dissatisfaction with the federal government, the convention attendees agreed to work on a uniform food-purity law that they proposed to pass at the state level across the nation. Ladd appointed a committee to work on drafting such a law, including himself, Robert Allen of Kentucky, and Willard Bigelow of the Bureau of Chemistry.
Of all the actions taken at the conference, the most controversial and potentially dangerous, especially for Harvey Wiley, was an organizational censure of Wilson, sparked by Ladd’s opening tirade against the secretary of agriculture. Wiley had warned his friend Ladd in advance that a public attack might not be a good idea, that further alienating Wilson might backfire and hurt their shared cause. But Ladd, who clearly felt a deep sense of betrayal over the change of direction by the federal department, refused to keep his peace. Wiley and other bureau colleagues in attendance prudently abstained from voting on any of the resolutions, let alone the one condemning their department head. And when one particularly irate conventioneer proposed charging Wilson with criminal negligence, they joined other Agriculture Department employees in walking out of the room.
Wiley did not, however, publicly stand up to defend Wilson against the attacks, and some in attendance felt the chief chemist neglected an obvious duty to do so. “Those who watched events at Mackinac were astonished at the course pursued by Dr. Wiley and the rest of the Washington contingent, in absenting themselves from the meeting that ‘roasted’ Secretary Wilson,” said one dismayed attendee, who felt that the chief chemist might have defused the bitterness that accompanied the confrontation. Wilson agreed completely with that assessment. With some heat, he afterward told Wiley that he would never again send anyone to a convention who refused to defend the secretary and the department against unwarranted attacks. Yet as both Ladd and Wiley later noted, there were strong voices speaking up for the secretary, and they came from the food-processing industry. American Food Journal, a leading trade magazine, blamed Wiley for embarrassing the secretary and predicted that the chemistry chief would be fired over this “brazen attack.” Corporations including Dow Chemical also jumped on the moment, urging that Wiley be replaced.
Shortly after the Mackinac meeting, an Agriculture Department inspector visited Dow’s plant in Midlands, Michigan, and met with founder Herbert Dow, who complained of a drop in sales of sodium benzoate following both the passage of the food law and Wiley’s pernicious attacks on the compound. Dow was “not sparing in his criticism of Dr. Wiley,” whom he characterized as playing to the uneducated and temperamentally fearful public. The chemical industry, Dow asserted, was planning its own public education campaign to counter misinformation being spread by Wiley and his friends.
By now the rift between the agriculture secretary and the head of the Chemistry Bureau was public knowledge; their every action was suddenly scrutinized for political nuance. As newspapers including the New York Times pointed out with interest, even when Wilson backed Wiley on a point of food safety enforcement, his reasons often differed from those put forward by the chief chemist. A recent and clear example of that could be seen in departmental decisions regarding the controversial practice of bleaching wheat flour.
Snowy-white baked goods had become a measure of household status in the late nineteenth century. The traditional method of whitening flour was simply to expose it to direct sunlight or allow it to age in a well-ventilated room. But these methods took time—hours or even days. By the turn of the twentieth century, millers had turned to far more rapid techniques, mostly involving chemical oxidation of the flour with nitrogen peroxide or ozone. A review of industry practices after passage of the food and drug law found that chemical bleaching of flour had become nearly standard. The exception was usually small companies that could not afford to set up the oxidation process; they typically advertised in magazines with ads promoting the advantages of
Edwin Ladd, the North Dakota food commissioner, had the previous year begun investigating bleaching techniques at the request of the state’s smaller millers; his friend and ally James Shepard, food commissioner of South Dakota, did the same. Ladd’s investigation found that bleached flours, at least those processed with nitrogen oxides, were heavily tainted with nitrates, which are derivative nitrogen-oxygen based salts. These compounds, Ladd felt, should be considered a possible health risk and further studied in that regard. Pending the publication of his report, in 1907 Ladd issued a North Dakota state ruling prohibiting the sale of any bleached flour that contained nitrates.
Wiley’s Bureau of Chemistry proceeded more cautiously, advocating at first only that flours be labeled clearly as bleached or not so that consumers could make a choice. But Wiley also authorized an investigation of bleached flour and any chemical fallout, such as nitrates, that might result from the process. The scientists in his laboratory proceeded to show a direct connection between bleaching and nitrates: The more nitrogen peroxide was used, the higher the nitrate residues in flour. Further, they discovered that most of these chemical residues survived even through the baking of bread. They found no evidence that levels of nitrates in either raw flour or baked products diminished over time. Further, according to a report from the department’s Food and Drug Inspection Laboratory: “A summary of our results will tend to show that the bleaching of flour by nitrogen peroxide never improves the flour from the consumer’s standpoint.”