The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum
Food commissioners from Pennsylvania and Michigan, both sodium benzoate critics, protested Wilson’s heavy-handed approach by angrily walking out of the meeting. The walkout backfired, as the final tally—absent those votes and the influence of the two protesting officials—went narrowly in support of both the Remsen Board and its finding that sodium benzoate was a fully safe additive. An editorial in the Los Angeles Herald decried Wilson’s tactic and its result: “As the inside facts concerning the Denver convention become more generally known it is revealed as one where the artifices of the politicians were considerably more in evidence than the sober thought of the expert charged with protecting the public health.”
But Wilson was wholly satisfied. He wrote to President Taft that “we fully smashed the program, turned things end for end, fully endorsed the Referee Board and its findings.” Wiley, Wilson added, was a troublesome “low class fellow” but he believed that the Denver vote had sent the chief chemist a warning to Wiley that his policy of defiance would not be tolerated much longer.
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Between his fight to maintain some level of toxicity research and his battles for enforcement and public awareness, Wiley’s staff worried that their chief was beginning to sound exhausted. They were also angry over Wilson’s dismissal of their own work and increasingly willing to push back. One of the most determined to do so was Lyman Kebler, still steaming over the suppression of his investigation of medicated soft drinks.
Kebler had left a lucrative job at Smith, Kline, French & Co. in Philadelphia for the Department of Agriculture, because he believed that it was critical to establish honest practices for pharmaceutical products. Now forty-three, he led the Chemistry Bureau’s oversight of the drug industry and had earned a reputation as meticulous and, on occasion, ruthless. The Bulletin of Pharmacy, while not entirely an enthusiast, had described Kebler, with some respect, as the country’s most eminent “foe to fakers.”
Kebler, with Wiley’s backing, decided to counter Wilson’s suppression of his report with an even more in-depth investigation. To do so, he reviewed more than one hundred brands of medicated soft drinks and bottled waters on the market. The manufacturers ranged from small companies such as New Hampshire’s Londonderry Lithia, which made a drink rich in the element lithium, to large ones, such as the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Company, which had famously made its fortune through a nineteenth-century formula that had included the potent stimulant cocaine. By withholding his report, Kebler told Wiley, the department was hiding both knowledge and risk from American consumers. He knew Wiley was under constant attack; he knew that Wilson had very little patience with the bureau. He also knew that his planned publication had a very provocative title: “Habit-Forming Agents: Their Indiscriminate Sale and Use a Menace to Public Welfare.” But, he added, that title realistically summed up a national problem.
The indiscriminate use of narcotics remained an enormous risk to public health, Kebler pointed out. Many “soothing syrups” for children were laced with morphine, heroin, and chloral hydrate, among other sedatives; cough syrups and asthma medications for adults could contain a mixture of several of these narcotics. Further, Kebler considered the problem of medicated soft drinks particularly troubling because consumers often had no idea that the sodas contained stimulants and/or intoxicating agents. Doctors reported cases of soft-drink addiction, and insurance companies, he said, were trying to develop a plan to deal with “soft drink habituees [sic].” Wiley agreed to make the case to Wilson yet again. But, he told Kebler ruefully, he could make no promises that his argument would work.
The yet-to-be published “Habit-Forming Agents” offered a damning review of the unrestricted use of narcotics in over-the-counter remedies. It was equally unsparing on the subject of counter drinks: “During the last 20 years, a large number of soft drinks containing caffeine and smaller or greater amounts of coca leaf and kola nut products have been placed on the market. Preparations of this class, on account of insufficient information, were formerly looked upon as harmless, but they are now known to be an impending evil.” Kebler had drawn up a list of the worst offenders, many of which were named to hint at their stimulant content: Mello-Nip, Dobe, Kola-Kok, Pillsbury’s Koke, Kola-Ade, Kos Kola, Café-Coca, and Koke. As a further example, the department had ordered the seizure of two products from the American Beverage Corporation: Great American Coca Cream and Great American Pepsette. An analysis found that Coca Cream contained saccharin, benzoic acid, cocaine, and caffeine; and Pepsette, which advertised itself as a pepsin-based, fruit-flavored soft drink, contained no pepsin at all but plenty of cocaine.
It was one thing for the department to find fault with any of those companies—most of them serving limited regional markets—and even to take enforcement action against one or a few. It was quite another to take on Atlanta-based Coca-Cola. The National Druggist estimated that the company sold more than ten million gallons of Coca-Cola to American soda fountains alone, “representing 300,000,000 glasses” consumed annually. This combination of money and influence played a role in the careful approach of James Wilson toward the company; he was especially wary of provoking the company’s influential and combative president, Asa Candler.
The Georgia tycoon had publicly supported the 1906 food and drug law, emphasizing the “pure and wholesome” nature of Coca-Cola. And after the law passed, Candler’s company also stopped secretly sweetening the beverage with cheap saccharin and returned to the old sugar formula. To Candler’s unhappy surprise—expressed loudly to Wilson and others—those measures had not led to a perfectly harmonious relationship with government regulators.
The U.S. Army in 1907 dropped Coca-Cola from its list of approved beverages, responding to rumors that the drink contained a possibly intoxicating level of alcohol. Arguing its innocence, the company requested an analysis by the Bureau of Chemistry to prove such suspicions wrong. The results convinced the army to take Coca-Cola back: Wiley’s chemists found only a trace amount of alcohol residue from the oils and extracts used in the soda, nothing even close to a level that could cause intoxication. The bureau analysis also confirmed that the soft drink was cocaine free. The only notable stimulant in Coca-Cola was caffeine. A glass of the soft drink, served at a soda fountain, contained slightly more than half the amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee and close to twice that in an average cup of tea. Candler assumed these findings were as reassuring to the Agriculture Department as to the Department of War. But as would gradually become clear, the tests raised other issues to trouble Wiley and Kebler.
Wiley, who, as his colleagues often complained, was given to literal-mindedness about labels, thought the word “coca” implied to consumers the existence of that ingredient; some of the labels even depicted the fruit of a coca plant. Kebler was more bothered by the caffeine levels. This was a drink marketed directly to children, without any disclosure of the stimulant involved, and he took that worry to the chief chemist and again asked his aid in raising the issue with the secretary of agriculture. “I am not a believer in the promiscuous use of caffeine,” wrote Wiley to Wilson in a memo detailing his concerns about “so-called soft drinks.” As always, the chief chemist had a list of other concerns, such as the artificial flavoring (industrial citric acid instead of real lemon juice, pepper dust instead of ginger), coal-tar dyes, and cheap saccharin as an unlabeled sugar substitute. These methods were “highly objectionable both on ethical grounds and because of their possible injury to health.” But he’d come to agree with Kebler that the unlabeled caffeine issue should be addressed first.
They got support from an unexpected quarter. George McCabe thought Coca-Cola might offer a test case on the unlimited use of stimulants in products sold to children and urged Wilson to at least consider the idea. Meanwhile, Wiley continued to urge the secretary to act: “Coca-Cola is one of the most widely sold beverages in the country. Its use is to a certain extent habit-forming and great injury may come to h
In a spring 1909 speech at the Holy Cross Academy in Washington, DC, Wiley warned the students: “If you only knew what I know about these soft drinks you would abstain from them,” he said. “It would surprise you that most of them have more caffeine in them than coffee—and a drug even more deadly.” After newspaper accounts of the talk provoked angry complaints from the American Bottlers Association, he clarified that, emphasizing that caffeine was his major concern. “What I did say to the young girls at that academy is that parents often forbid their children to drink coffee or tea and yet they could get caffeine, the most injurious part of those drinks, at the soda fountain.”
What he didn’t mention was that, following the Coca-Cola analysis, he’d sent Lyman Kebler down south to take a closer look at both the company and the culture surrounding soft-drink consumption. Kebler had combined a visit to the company headquarters and production facilities with some time spent lurking at Atlanta soda fountains. He was dismayed to observe children as young as four years old drinking glasses of stimulant-rich Coca-Cola. It was this report, in part, that had led Wiley to urge a legal test case, arguing that caffeine was an unlabeled additive that posed a genuine health risk to children.
Wilson, still annoyed, sent Wiley a memo ordering him to drop the subject—and again refused to publish Kebler’s report. Wiley had no evidence that the Coca-Cola Company had helped influence the decision, but he thought it highly likely. “I was, of course, surprised and grieved at this action on the part of Mr. Wilson, but as usual I could see behind it the manipulation of powerful hands.” He suspected that an action against Coca-Cola was never going to happen. And then a visit from a muckraking Atlanta journalist changed that prediction.
In October 1909 Wiley sat down for an unexpectedly hostile interview with Fred L. Seely, editor of the reform-minded newspaper the Atlanta Georgian. Seely was a longtime critic of the Coca-Cola Company’s indifference to others and he saw the federal government as complicit in the company’s bad behavior. He demanded to know why the Agriculture Department had never gone after Coca-Cola for the health issues linked to consumption of its product. Wiley responded defensively that he had in fact recommended that the company be prosecuted. His chemists had even done research suggesting that the soft drink might be both “habit-forming and nerve-racking.” He then showed the journalist a handful of the memos he’d written to Wilson on the subject—all of which had been rebuffed.
There was, for instance, the memo telling the secretary that “this product contains an added ingredient [caffeine] which may render the product injurious to health.” There was also one regarding false labeling, noting that “the name Coca-Cola would indicate that it contained the substances and active principals of the coca leaf and the kola nut, when as a matter of fact it contains only an extract derived from exhausted coca leaves, which is a refuse product obtained in the manufacture of cocaine.” There was another memo urging that “an effort should be made to stop the traffic in a dangerous beverage.”
In that last note, Wiley had written to his boss that Coca-Cola “contains an alkaloidal, habit-forming drug of a character which is forbidden to be used by hundreds of thousands of parents in this country who refuse to allow their children to drink either tea or coffee, which contain caffeine in its natural state and in a much less injurious form than this misbranded and adulterated beverage. Our duty is clearly in this case to protect the people of our country in every possible way.”
Seely studied the memos that Wiley brandished at him. Then, newly outraged, he marched over to Wilson’s office and demanded a meeting on the spot. When it was granted, he told Wilson that he planned to write a story about the department’s refusal to protect consumers from a dangerous product. He would feature the secretary’s order telling Wiley to leave Coca-Cola alone. He planned to make an example of Wilson as government corruption at its worst. The following day, Wilson called Wiley into his office and told him that it was time to make a formal seizure of Coca-Cola products. “It is remarkable,” Wiley noted sarcastically, “what the fear of publicity will do!” The secretary also told Wiley that he would schedule Kebler’s medicated-soft-drink report for the following spring.
On October 21, 1909, two weeks after Seely’s visit, the U.S. government moved to seize a shipment of Coca-Cola syrup bound for the company’s bottling plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The action meant that the government would need to schedule a formal court hearing into the company’s famous and lucrative product. A date had not yet been set for the hearing, but the legal action was already gaining attention based on its title alone: United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola.
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Toward the end of 1909, rumors began circulating that Taft was preparing to announce his whiskey decision. The rumors also predicted which side the president would take. Newspapers began writing mockingly about the new “Taft Whisky,” which would be “neutral spirits made from molasses and beet refuse.”
On December 26 the president announced his decision, officially changing the Roosevelt rules and establishing final definitions. The president ruled that the term “whiskey” could and should be used for any and all liquors made from grain alcohol. The government would require some “subordinate” description—whether the product was blended and a list of ingredients, such as coloring agents or neutral spirits. But there would be no requirement to label a quick-stilled and well-dyed product as imitation and there would be no describing barrel-aged whiskeys as the only real thing. Taft said that he agreed with the wholesale group that all alcohols were basically “like” substances. Or as economics professor Henry Parker Willis put it, “Whiskey appears to be virtually anything that will serve to intoxicate.”
Lloyd Bowers, the solicitor general who had issued the more nuanced decision earlier in the year, called Wiley the next morning. As Wiley described the conversation, Bowers, who was an old friend of the president, said that he was about to depart on a much-needed vacation. But before he left he wondered, “What do you think of Mr. Taft’s decision?” Wiley replied ruefully that he felt as if he’d been spanked. “He laughed and said so do I.”
Not everyone took Taft’s decision with such grace. In January 1910 Arthur Stanley, head of the Louisville-based Glenmore Distillery, wrote to Wiley that he thought the president was mostly a very good friend to Joe Cannon and his Peoria rectifiers: “What I fear is that wine distillers of Illinois will be allowed to brand their output as whisky, it will then be shipped to the rectifiers and mixed with real whisky and then called a ‘Whisky Blend.’” It was a terrible precedent for those who cared about honest labeling, Stanley said bitterly, and had the potential of “virtually nullifying the Pure Food Law.”
Alice Lakey felt the same. Her organization, the National Consumers League, issued a formal resolution to that effect: President Taft’s statement “that neutral spirits, which the most eminent food chemists have declared an unlike substance to whisky, may be added to whisky and the whole product colored with burnt sugar or caramel without stating the latter fact on the label, etc. is destined to open the door for the return of all the evils of adulterated foods, drugs, liquors and medicines that have for a time been held in check by the operation of the pure food law. . . . We the executive board protest against this action and urge state officials to stand up.”
Lakey also wrote to magazines and newspapers: “We believe that Mr. Taft’s decision is the most serious blow to the pure food legislation this country has had. We believe that it is class legislation. We believe it permits special rulings for one product coming under the pure
To Wiley she wrote privately that she doubted the decision could be changed: “It is a very strong illustration of how clever the rectifiers are.” But Wiley, increasingly besieged at the Department of Agriculture, put most of the blame on Wilson, who he suspected had quietly moved to undermine the law. In a letter to Lakey, he wrote, “There is but little we can do as long as the present Secretary of Agriculture is in the saddle.”
Thirteen
THE LOVE MICROBE
1910–1911
Till you think of the past and the future and sigh
Wiley wasn’t prepared to give up. As Wilson knew all too well, his chief chemist never was. With the idea of pressing his beleaguered cause outside the department, by the start of 1910, Wiley had lined up months’ worth of public talks.
In January he had promised to talk to the Men’s Club of Newark, New Jersey, on the “morality of business”; to testify about aluminum levels in baking powder at a state trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; to talk about food additives to the Montgomery County Medical Society and the Medical Society of New York. In February, the Harvard Club in Philadelphia; in March, the New York State Department of Health; in May, the Historical and Art Society; in July, the United States Pharmaceutical Convention in Washington, DC, and the National Dental Association in Denver. He’d also tentatively accepted engagements in Oklahoma City; Des Moines; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Brooklyn, Newburgh, and Buffalo, New York.