The Poison Squad

by Deborah Blum

  Upton Sinclair telegraphed the House committee members, asking permission to testify. They turned him down. In short order, the members voted to reject the Beveridge amendment. Wadsworth offered in its place an amendment that reduced inspections and penalties for the packing businesses and changed the funding plan for the inspection program. Beveridge’s amendment had required the packers to pay into a fund that would support inspections. Wadsworth removed that burden on industry and returned it to the taxpayers. In doing so, he deliberately created a much smaller budget for inspections. Whatever Sinclair’s suspicions about him, Roosevelt did recognize that the industry needed to be reformed. The message he sent to Wadsworth read, “I am sorry to have to say that this strikes me as an amendment which, no matter how intentionally, is framed so as to minimize the chance of rooting out the evil in the packing business.”

  Wadsworth replied that he considered the changes to be correct and appropriate. “I regret that you, the President of the United States, should feel justified, by innuendo, at least, in impugning the sincerity and the competency of a committee of the House of Representatives.” He added that he had no intention of making further changes to the amendment. They conducted these exchanges in private. Publicly the legislation simply appeared stalled as usual. But by now Sinclair had had enough of political discretion. He’d become friendly with Neill and Reynolds and he knew their report was both solid and a confirmation of his own work.

  In late May, Sinclair decided to leak what he knew about the Neill-Reynolds report to the New York Times. He stuffed a briefcase with notes, affidavits, letters, and everything he had on paper and marched off to a meeting at the newspaper. The Times editors recognized journalistic gold and ran the story on the front page on Monday, May 28, loaded with quotes from the government inspectors and from the novelist. “In Armour’s own establishment I saw with my own eyes the doctoring of hams that were so putrefied that I could not force myself to remain near them,” read a quote from Sinclair. The story quoted Neill recounting that “the pillars of the buildings were caked with flesh” and that “in these packing houses, the meat is dragged about on the floor, spat upon and walked upon.” The Times even hunted down General Nelson Miles, who had brought the embalmed-beef complaint after the Spanish-American War. Miles’s anger over the military food supply had not abated. “The disclosures about packinghouse products now being exploited is no news to me,” Miles declared. “I knew it seven years ago. Had the matter been taken up then, thousands of lives would have been saved.”

  In early June, exasperated with newspapers and with Upton Sinclair, but mostly with the members of Congress who had put him in this impossible position, Roosevelt released an eight-page summary of the Neill-Reynolds report. Newspapers printed the summary verbatim. Consumers were appalled—as were the meatpackers. The president, Armour declared, was no friend to businessmen and seemed to hold a particular dislike of those based in the heartland. “Roosevelt has a strong, personal animus against the packers of Chicago and is doing everything in his power to discredit them.” Roosevelt responded by letting the packers and their friends in Congress know that he was out of patience. He wanted meat-inspection legislation on his desk in short order. If not, he would release the full report.

  Within a week after Roosevelt released the Neill-Reynolds summary, even the Chicago Tribune was signaling the packers’ defeat. On June 10 the paper ran a special report from a London correspondent headlined EUROPE THINKS U.S. LACKING IN HONOR. The sentiment on the Continent, the writer said, was in favor of sending the Chicago meatpackers to jail. By the end of the month, the British had stopped importing canned meat from the United States and both Germany and France were refusing American meat products in any form. American politicians recognized that they had to move to prevent further damage to the country’s reputation and economy.

  The battle-weary food and drug bill’s advocates now realized the advantage of the moment. Finally circumstances were aligned in their favor. Once Roosevelt made up his mind, he honored his commitments. Heyburn, McCumber, and Beveridge in the Senate pressed the president again on broader food and drug legislation, as did Hepburn and his allies in the House. A new explosion of letters came flying from the women’s clubs. The AMA’s telegram campaign took off. Wiley hurried to meet with legislators and offer new findings from the Poison Squad studies, along with other research findings providing evidence of the need for change.

  “The momentum of the Meat Inspection amendment carried with it the Pure Food Bill, which its enemies thought had been safely chloroformed in committee,” wrote the investigative journalist Mark Sullivan. “In the end, the exposures of the packers by Roosevelt’s commission, of the wholesale liquor dealers by themselves, of the patent medicines by The Ladies’ Home Journal and Collier’s, of food adulteration and food dyeing by Doctor Wiley and State and city food officials—the aggregate of all that worked into the strengthening of Roosevelt’s hand, and was invincible.”

  There were still those who thought that Roosevelt and his legislative allies compromised too much, among them the proud muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips. He’d already noted in his “Treason of the Senate” series that the New York congressman James Wadsworth had not entirely backed down from his defense of the meat industry. He’d successfully deleted the requirement that meat companies fund the inspection program. Further, Wadsworth had limited federal financing to $3 million a year when the “lowest estimate of the cost of adequate inspection” was twice that. The packers had also persuaded Wadsworth to remove a requirement that the inspections be marked with a date. The idea of that date was “so that the beef trust could not relabel three-and-four-and-five-year-old cans and furbish and ‘freshen’ decaying meat and work it off as good, new meat.” Phillips deplored the fact that that requirement too had been deleted and warned that the planned legislation was far more corporate than consumer friendly. But in the rush to success, he doubted that he was being heard.

  On June 30, 1906, Roosevelt triumphantly signed both the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drug Act. He presented Beveridge with the pen he’d used to sign the meat act. He did not acknowledge Sinclair’s contribution, having decided, he told his friends, that the man was a crackpot. The president did not acknowledge Wiley either, not in the ceremony and not by any other gesture. Stung by the deafening silence, Wiley, after a modest interval, asked Beveridge if he would mind inquiring with the White House about whether he might also receive some token of the victory. Roosevelt’s secretary replied: “Senator Beveridge spoke to me about presenting the Doctor with the pen with which the president signed the pure food bill, but on looking up the matter I found it had already been promised to Senator Heyburn, as author of the bill.” Otherwise, the secretary politely continued, “it would have been a pleasure to have sent it to Dr. Wiley, to whom too much credit cannot be given for his long fight for pure food and against shams.”

  Roosevelt had a different view. As he would put it some years later: “The Pure Food and Drug bill became a law purely because of the active stand I took in trying to get it through Congress.” Wiley and his allies had tried for years and failed, he said, because “some of them, although honest men, were so fantastically impractical that they played right into the hands of their foes.” Newspapers might frequently reference the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act as “Dr. Wiley’s Law,” but Roosevelt would never do so. And he worried that the doctor’s uncompromising approach would only hamper, rather than help, the cause of safe food in the United States.

  Part II

  Nine

  THE POISON TRUST

  1906–1907

  And you could not be certain, except for their shape,

  That the eggs by a chicken were laid.

  “How does a general feel who wins a great battle and brings a final end to hostility?” Wiley would wonder, looking back on the passage of the food and drug law. “I presume I felt that way on the last day of June
1906.” Bottles of champagne and Kentucky bourbon whiskey, fresh fruit and unadulterated candy, real honey and fine cheese had arrived in baskets and boxes at the Bureau of Chemistry, along with blizzards of celebratory telegrams and congratulatory letters, bearing wishes such as this one: “I have long contemplated writing you to express my admiration and encouragement in your contest for pure food, which I now express.”

  But Wiley, awash in that triumphant fizz of success, would later allow that he’d been too optimistic in believing that winning the legislative battle would end the hostilities. He’d gotten his hopes up, despite notes of caution mixed among the initial bravos. “I suppose you are pleased and I cannot refrain from writing my entire satisfaction in regard to the matter,” wrote Wiley’s old friend James Shepard, the South Dakota chemist who had publicized the preservative problem with his cautionary “daily meal plan.” However, Shepard continued, “Perhaps it is not ‘time to holler’ yet for we may not be out of the woods.” Shepard’s assessment was accurate. The law had barely passed, Wiley later wrote, before manufacturers united to undo its proposed regulations “and then the real fight began.”

  On July 24 Wilson formally assigned his chief chemist to work with the three other departments—Treasury, Commerce, and Labor—to draft “for approval of the respective secretaries the rules and regulations necessary for the enforcement of the pure food act.” They had some six months to do so; the law would not take effect until January 1907. The new law, as the government officials recognized, was big on ideas, minimal on specifics. The legislation, Wiley acknowledged in a letter to his friends at the American Medical Association, “is not as good as we would like it.” It would take real work to render it effective. The best thing was that it had passed at all and that it had not—“when we consider the determined and able efforts which have been continually made by the opponents of this legislation”—been rendered completely toothless. Wiley’s hope at this point, he continued, was to help strengthen it into a “more perfect structure in the future.”

  It did at least contain a definition of what constituted adulterated food, packed into one long sentence, one that became increasingly grim as it wound its way to the period. First, food would be considered adulterated if “anything” was mixed into it that reduced its quality or strength. Second, if one ingredient was surreptitiously substituted for another, as when manufacturers labeled cottonseed oil as high quality olive oil. Third, “if any valuable ingredient has been wholly or partially removed,” as when vanilla extract contained no actual vanilla. Fourth, if the food was “mixed, colored, coated or stained” so as to conceal damage or fakery. The last items on the list were pure Harvey Wiley, the fifth declaring food adulterated if it contained “any poisonous or injurious ingredient” that might put health at risk, and the sixth barring acceptance of food that contained diseased animals, or consisted “in whole or part, of filthy, decomposed or putrid animals or vegetable substance.”

  But Wiley had wanted specific numbers, scientifically valid measurements to be part of the definition. As the bill was being drafted and revised, he had tried but failed to get such specific standards written into it. He knew enforcement would be hampered by vagueness. For instance, how was one to precisely measure what a reduction “in quality or strength” meant? As it now stood, the law lacked standards by which a material could be judged “injurious to health.” It offered no definition of what constituted a poison; it qualified in no way why any part of an animal should be considered “unfit for food.” It did not specify how ill or weak a steer or hog could become before it was officially judged “diseased.”

  Further, the new Agricultural Appropriation Act, which had also passed on June 30, hadn’t authorized the Agriculture Department to set such standards. The original bill had done so, early drafts explicitly ordering the department to “establish standards of purity for food products and to determine what are regarded as adulterations therein.” But the industry-backed National Food Manufacturers Association had successfully lobbied for removal of that language. Wiley had tried to have the authorization restored, but whiskey lobbyist Warwick Hough had successfully outflanked him.

  When the bill was being drafted and revised, Wiley had warned legislators that a failure to set standards would make it easy for manufacturers to fight regulatory efforts by attacking them as arbitrary or political. “No set of authorities can equitably execute a food law without a set of standards of purity for their guide,” he wrote to Congressman James R. Mann of Illinois. At the same time, Mann, a Republican, and other members of the House of Representatives were fielding intense pressure from business interests hostile to such standards. Journalist Phillips was right when he warned that the industry could weaken even the best-intentioned legislation. “For seventeen years the people had been trying to get a law that would check the operations of what is commonly known as ‘the poison trust,’” Phillips wrote, using his favorite nickname for the American food manufacturing industry. He continued, “For seventeen years, the Senate had refused to permit the ‘industry’ to be molested.” Phillips credited the passage of even minimal regulation mostly to the toxicity studies by Wiley’s Chemistry Bureau and to the efforts of his energetic network of allies. He allowed some brief admiration for the pure-food exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair, along with published articles, speeches, letters, telegraphs, and other determined advocacy. He judged that these combined had an even larger influence than Sinclair’s famous book. “A campaign was coming on and the people were in an ugly mood.” He credited Roosevelt for his political savvy in forcing consumer-protection measures and noted that Congress had been pushed into a corner where it had no alternative. The food and drug legislation, as proposed by Heyburn, had seemed a relatively honest attempt at regulation, Phillips added, modeled on successful laws already in place in Europe. But by the time Roosevelt had signed the bill, Phillips wrote, it had become perverted into what he now saw as a gift to the food processors and the chemical manufacturers.

  Like Wiley, Phillips pointed out that the new law failed to set standards for “deleterious” ingredients, and, he complained, it didn’t name a single toxic compound to be regulated. In his assessment, the final version also had been crafted to deliberately protect unscrupulous grocers and other food purveyors, notably including a clause declaring “No dealer shall be prosecuted” for selling adulterated products if the businessman could produce a written guarantee from a manufacturer, wholesaler, “or any other party residing in the United States” that the goods were pure. In other words, Phillips noted sarcastically, a note from the grocer’s mother would serve to excuse him from selling fake or chemically risky products.

  Further, he pointed out, the law was written so as to make the enforcement process nearly impossibly cumbersome. If a Bureau of Chemistry analysis found adulteration or misbranding, the secretary of agriculture was required to first notify the business in question. The business owner could then demand a hearing to defend the product. If the secretary sided with the manufacturer, the matter would be dropped. If the secretary sided with the bureau’s findings, he was to “certify” the evidence as correct but still couldn’t take direct enforcement action. Instead, he had to recommend legal prosecution to the appropriate district attorney, who could agree or not to take on the case.

  Enforcement, if any was planned, would thus require a strong collaborative and cordial relationship between the Agriculture Department and the court system. And it would require an equally collaborative relationship between Wiley, as head of the Chemistry Bureau, and Wilson as head of the department. The two men had worked together with a fair degree of harmony in the past, but the need to function in a law-enforcement capacity would necessarily force them into a different and far more politically oriented partnership. “The new, the boasted pure food law adds nothing,” Phillips wrote. “The pure food men did the shouting but the poison trust got the victory.”

  Despite that, Wiley found hims
elf dealing almost daily with a corporate backlash that followed passage of the law. “Naturally when the battle array was formed, the first point of attack was on me,” he wrote. Hough—who was by this time drawing a salary of $40,000 a year (almost $1 million today) as a liquor lobbyist—was among the first to attack. He had pelted Wilson with complaints about Wiley’s interest in the whiskey question. “The word FOOD does not include drinks and beverage,” Hough wrote to the secretary in late November. Therefore, the Agriculture Department had no standing to order—as Wiley had done—that liquor ingredients be put on labels. “The kind of actions taken by the Bureau of Chemistry,” Hough continued, “would cause a renewal of trade disturbances, thanks to the kind of unwarranted statements of the Chief of the Bureau of Chemistry.” In early December 1906, as implementation of the law loomed, Hough wrote again demanding the secretary’s reassurance that his department would not permit Wiley to “discriminate against one class or grade of whiskey against another.”

  Wilson had been in office since shortly after McKinley’s inauguration in 1897 and owed his continued employment in part to a diplomatic ability to distance himself from such quarrels. But Hough’s hectoring tone pushed him to exasperation. He told the lobbyist that he had discussed the issue of labeling whiskey ingredients with the president, and that Roosevelt had promised that the White House would review the situation. In the meantime, Wilson advised that Hough stop criticizing the Bureau of Chemistry.

  “Since you have objected to my writing about Dr. Wiley’s efforts which only benefit the whiskey trust,” Hough snapped back, he would temporarily halt his letter-writing campaign. In return, he expected the White House to support him, and he would send a message to the blenders and rectifiers, advising them that “no general onslaught is to be made by your department upon their business” when the law goes into effect in January. He had no doubt, he continued, that the secretary would comply with that very reasonable request. Wilson, still irritated, assured Wiley that he would continue to stand up to Hough, giving the chief chemist hope that he had the support to enforce the Food and Drug Act vigorously.