The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum
The U.S. entry into the Great War had helped speed its end, although not before more than fifty thousand U.S. troops had died in combat. American losses were a mere fraction of the total, however; military deaths from the more than two dozen countries involved in the war topped eleven million, and civilian deaths exceeded those. The war concluded, on notes of both relief and grief, with the Treaty of Versailles in November 1918. The following January, Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep during a stay in his Oyster Bay, New York, home at the age of sixty. Many attributed his decline into illness to the death of a favored son during the war. NATION SHOCKED, PAYS TRIBUTE TO FORMER PRESIDENT read the New York Times headline. “Our flag on all seas and in all lands at half-mast.”
But Harvey Wiley spared no mourning for Roosevelt, who remained central to his grievances over the fate of the food and drug law. “Even if . . . the President favored the food bill, it is perfectly clear that he took the most active part in preventing the Bureau of Chemistry from enforcing it,” he would write bitterly some years after Roosevelt’s death. He had been further disillusioned by Woodrow Wilson’s complete indifference to issues of food safety—although being ignored by the president had tended to reduce interference and work in the Chemistry Bureau’s favor. Still, when Wilson had run for reelection in 1916, Wiley had campaigned for Republican challenger Charles Evans Hughes.
Wiley, by contrast, came to appreciate Wilson’s presidency, at least regarding her leading cause. In 1918, after a series of meetings with suffrage leaders, the president changed course and backed a constitutional amendment favoring women’s right to vote, publicly urging Congress to draft language that would enable that action. On June 4, 1919, after much argument and presidential pressure, both houses passed an amendment granting women’s right to vote, and it was sent out for ratification as the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In just over a year, the required thirty-six states ratified it—the last being Tennessee, by a single vote from a young legislator whose mother ordered him to cast it or be forever barred from the house—and it became national law on August 18, 1920.
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The case against saccharin had been halted during the war, due in part to its use as a substitute sugar in military supplies, a use that Alsberg publicly criticized. He remained committed to regulating the controversial sweetener. In December 1919, his case against saccharin as a food additive at last went to court in St. Louis, home of Monsanto. Government attorneys began the trial by demonstrating how widespread the unlabeled use of saccharin was in the food supply: in sodas and ice cream, candies, cakes, pies, breads, canned fruits and vegetables, sweet wines. American consumers, often without their knowledge, now consumed the artificial sweetener with almost every meal. “Unrestricted consumption” of saccharin had been shown to be dangerous, the Agriculture Department insisted, and it had plenty of evidence in that regard.
The government’s leading expert during this round was Anton Carlson, professor of physiology at the University of Chicago. Born in Sweden and with a PhD from Stanford University, Carlson was known for his evidence-based approach to toxicology. He liked to sarcastically describe scientists who theorized without studies to support their ideas as “chicks who chirp but don’t scratch.”
Carlson pointed out that the saccharin (an easily identifiable compound that meshed the well-known elements sodium, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen) “gets into every place in the body and appears in every secretion in the body; it appears in the saliva; it may appear in the tears; it appears in the bile; just the same as it appears in the urine.” If fed to goats, it appeared in their milk. In every place, in every cell, he said, it had a physiological effect. His own studies on the digestive tract found saccharin caused an increase in stomach acids and a decrease in protein absorption. He absolutely would not describe it as “positively harmless,” the phrase used by the chemical industry. Monsanto’s lawyers didn’t attempt to rebut his studies but instead used a defense strategy inspired by the Supreme Court’s bleached-flour decision. Yes, saccharin might pose some risks, they argued, but the government had failed to positively show that putting it in the U.S. food supply caused active harm. Therefore, the Agriculture Department could not restrict it.
The jury failed to reach a verdict, splitting with seven in favor of the government’s case to five against. Against Monsanto’s urging, the judge agreed to a new trial, and Alsberg again directed his staff to begin building a case.
For many involved in the pure-food cause, these battles had become seemingly unending, largely because of the inadequacy of the 1906 food law itself. For example, the “Wiley law,” as everyone still called it, required ingredient labels but did nothing to address the problems of deceptive containers, designed to mislead consumers as to the amount of product they contained. Nor did it require manufacturers to reveal the number of ounces within those containers. Echoing the battles over the 1906 law, a “slack-fill” bill, introduced in 1919 and meant to improve regulation of such chicanery, was firmly opposed by the food industry and had failed in both houses of Congress that year. It then failed again the following year for the same reason.
In 1921, just before Republican Warren G. Harding took office as president, Carl Alsberg, himself battle weary, resigned as chief chemist. He took a position at Stanford as founding director of its new Food Research Institute. His replacement as chief of the Bureau of Chemistry was Walter G. Campbell, the Kentucky attorney whom Wiley had selected to direct the food-inspection programs created by the 1906 law. Wiley was pleased, although the two would not always agree on how to address the limitations of the old food and drug law. Campbell, for instance, would come to believe that an updated law was needed to address the deficiencies. Wiley fiercely defended his signature legislation, insisting that it simply needed better enforcement.
In the summer of 1923, President Harding suddenly died—doctors thought probably from a cerebral hemorrhage—during a visit to San Francisco. His vice president, Calvin Coolidge, succeeded him and won 1924’s election to continue in the office. Coolidge, a small-government conservative and former Massachusetts governor, had earned a well-deserved reputation as a friend to business and staunch opponent of regulation.
That same year the government’s prosecution of Monsanto and saccharin again ended in a mistrial, again on a 7–5 split in the government’s favor. Despite the president’s reputation for siding with industry, Coolidge’s secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace, wrote to Monsanto’s Queeny, saying that the department was not giving up. This was echoed by a statement from the Bureau of Chemistry that “it would be a serious mistake to accept any form of compromise which would in any way, even partially, sanction the use of saccharin in food.” But the judge in St. Louis told the government attorneys that he was done with the case. He was prepared to strike it from the docket rather than revisit the issue. Further, if the government pursued it, he warned, then he was prepared to simply declare for the defendant. Angry Agriculture Department officials suspected that Monsanto, a major employer in the judge’s hometown, had finally applied enough pressure to end the case in the company’s favor. But they were stymied as to how to go forward.
The following year the government dropped its effort to regulate the artificial sweetener but issued a formal statement reiterating its lack of enthusiasm for the product: “The Government has much scientific evidence to show that saccharin is harmful to health and believes that it should not be used except as a drug under direction of a physician. It is sometimes prescribed for patients suffering with diabetes who demand some sweetening agent but who are prohibited the use of sugar. As a drug, saccharin has its uses. In our opinion, it has no legitimate use as food and is harmful to health.” The department used its authority to formally require that saccharin be listed as an ingredient on product labels, a measure that proved surprisingly effective in limiting its use. Many food companies, rather than reveal that they
Wiley fumed over the decision to drop the case. He was increasingly disenchanted with everything about the federal approach to consumer protection. Upon Coolidge’s election, he’d written him an open letter, published in Good Housekeeping, urging newly aggressive enforcement and a reversal of decisions that allowed nitrates, sulfites, preservatives like sodium benzoate, and additives like saccharin and caffeine in the food supply. The letter closed: “It is the crowning ambition of my career before I die to see these illegal restrictions, which now make a prisoner of the Food Law, removed and the Law restored to the functional activity which Congress prescribed for its enforcement at the time of its enactment.”
Coolidge did not reply. Instead Wiley received a letter from assistant secretary of agriculture Renick W. Dunlap (no relation to Frederick Dunlap). In diplomatic language, it emphasized the department’s essential support on protection issues and agreed that the compounds listed by Wiley were “for the most part undesirable from the broad general standpoint of human health and nutrition” and that to eliminate them was “an object greatly to be desired.” But Dunlap also emphasized a growing consensus that the 1906 law was inadequate. Its primary enforcement mechanism—seizure of goods followed by prosecution—had turned out to be a cumbersome tool. More important was its failure to define key terms, such as “injurious,” or to provide a mechanism for doing so. Due to that failure, the court decisions, notably the bleached-flour ruling, had ended up hobbling enforcement. “To bring cases and fail,” Dunlap pointed out, “invited an increased employment of these [harmful] substances.”
Wiley had known since before the food and drug law passed that it was flawed. He’d argued in 1906 that it should include exactly the kinds of specifics that Renick Dunlap now cited as lacking, but away from the bureau, he had grown increasingly protective of “his” law. It was a position that would alienate him from some of his longtime friends at the agency, but not one that he could bring himself to change.
Still, in 1926, at age eighty-one, he joined former colleagues in a campaign to protect the law against a new push from an old enemy. The Corn Products Company, the corporation that had persuaded Roosevelt to allow the term “corn syrup” instead of “glucose,” had now persuaded a friendly Iowa senator to introduce an amendment to the food law that would have stripped away any power to regulate corn sweeteners in the food supply. The new language had been slipped in as part of an agricultural relief bill, and it specifically exempted dextrose—another name for sugar made from cornstarch, especially in its dry form—from being indicated on any label. Under the proposed amendment, dextrose would just be called sugar.
The proposal had gone through the Senate’s committee process without a single dissenting vote when Wiley, Campbell, and the alarmed regulators at the Agriculture Department learned of it. They also learned that Monsanto was providing lobbying money in support of the amendment; the company hoped that this exemption would pave the way for others to follow. Walter Campbell immediately organized an Agriculture Department pushback against the amendment, warning publicly that this move was designed to mislead consumers into believing they were purchasing a cane sugar– or beet sugar–sweetened product.
Wiley, back in warrior mode, canceled plans for a Florida vacation with his family. He sounded the alarm in newspapers, giving a widely printed interview to United Press in which he said: “I had hoped to do my small share in protecting the country from the wicked actions of food adulterers but I am afraid the battle is going against us.” Congress, he warned, was moving to allow food manufacturers to deliberately cheat American consumers, “mak[ing] legal the grossest kind of food adulteration in this case,” opening the door for countless other cheats and basically nullifying the good done by the 1906 law.
He said the same in his Good Housekeeping column, he personally wrote to all senators and congressmen, and he requested a private meeting with Coolidge to urge a veto if the law did pass. He did not gain the president’s help but he attracted the attention and support of Senator Matthew M. Neely of West Virginia, who took up the cause and, when the bill reached the floor of the Senate, conducted a filibuster. Throughout it Neely held a copy of Good Housekeeping in one hand, and he interspersed his speech with paragraphs read aloud from Wiley’s column, including the plea “Why should legislation be used to deceive the public?” The proposed amendment failed shortly later. The following day, Wiley wrote a glowing note to Neely: “The country owes you a vote of thanks for your heroic and successful endeavor yesterday to block the approval of the so-called ‘Corn-Sugar Bill.’”
In a 1927 efficiency move, the Agriculture Department split the old Bureau of Chemistry in two. It created a Food, Drug and Insecticide Administration to handle consumer protection duties, with Campbell as its head. The other division was the Bureau of Chemistry and Soils, with a focus on more basic agricultural research. The former chief hated the change, which he felt dismantled the agency that he had nurtured and shaped. He feared, as he wrote in his column, that the government had split and weakened the unit and would next simply set pure-food issues aside. Despite the positive signs—three years later Campbell’s agency was renamed the Food and Drug Administration, a clear sign of sharpened focus—he saw nothing but his own work being undermined and dismissed. He was now eighty-two years old and he was weary of the war. He stepped down from his full-time job at Good Housekeeping and decided to channel his remaining energy into detailing his grievances.
Wiley poured his anger and disappointment into a self-published book, The History of a Crime Against the Food Law. It appeared in 1929, bearing the unwieldy subtitle The Amazing Story of the National Food and Drugs Law Intended to Protect the Health of the People, Perverted to Protect Adulteration of Food and Drugs. A four-hundred-plus-page tirade, it detailed the many often-vicious attacks on Wiley and derided his attackers. It revisited in detail the early corruption of the law’s enforcement and leapfrogged into the enforcement failures of the 1920s.
The government had gotten it wrong, he wrote, on everything from toxic food dyes to imitation whiskeys, preservatives, labeling, corn syrup and soft drinks, and, most recently, saccharin. He decried “the ignominy and disgrace of great scientific men bending their efforts to defeat the purpose of one of the greatest laws ever enacted for protection of the public welfare.” If successive administrations had not bent to industry pressure, he asserted, the government would have avoided “outraged public opinion,” the American people would have become stronger and healthier, and “this History of a Crime would never have been written.”
The book’s bitter tone dismayed Wiley’s old colleagues, but they could recognize that his weariness and anger came partly from his declining health. Suffering from heart disease, he kept mostly to his home. But he too felt that his angry screed should not be his last word. Wiley began working with freelance writer Orland “O.K.” Armstrong on another book, an autobiography to be published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis.
It may have been the influence of Armstrong, a social activist and reform-minded journalist (and later a member of Congress from Missouri), but the resulting work reflected a personality much closer to that of the younger Wiley—the Indiana-born chemist and occasional versifier with a lively sense of humor. It reflected his old passion to do good and his abiding belief in the power of science to benefit society. “The freedom of science should be kept inviolate,” he urged in its conclusion, and he returned to his old call for moral standards in research—that science should live up to its ultimate calling, which was “to search for truth and thereby to elevate and improve mankind.”
Harvey Washington Wiley: An Autobiography was published in late 1930, but Wiley n
Walter Campbell was at the graveside to pay his respects. Despite Wiley’s late-life doubts about him, Campbell would continue to lead the fight for stronger food and drug regulation. In this he would be joined by activist groups formed in the 1930s, such as the Consumers’ Union, as well as longtime Wiley allies such as the American Medical Association and the still-powerful women’s organizations. New adulteration abuses would also come to light, ones that again highlighted the weaknesses of the old law. In a scathing book on the country’s health policies, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, the founders of the Consumers’ Union stated flatly, “Pure food laws do not protect you” and provided instances of everything from fake antiseptics to mascaras thick with lead to apples tainted by arsenic-rich pesticides. The consumer group directly blamed the pro-business U.S. government for the “squeezing out of Dr. Wiley and his policies,” a program that daily put American citizens at risk.
Consumer advocates renewed those charges to real effect when, horrifically, more than one hundred people—many of them children—died in late 1937, poisoned by cough syrup sweetened with the solvent diethylene glycol (often found in antifreeze). The Tennessee company that made the lethal concoction had, of course, not been required to safety-test it under the 1906 regulation. In fact, the only charge possible under the law was mislabeling; the syrup had been labeled an “elixir” despite the fact that it did not contain alcohol.