The Poison Squad

by Deborah Blum

  Most food producers dismissed this recommendation, but there were exceptions. Indiana’s Columbia Conserve Company proudly made a tomato ketchup that neither required nor contained any dyes or preservatives. It did so by adapting “housewife methods” to large-scale production, its president said. And Wiley’s idea had caught the attention of one of the country’s biggest food manufacturers, Henry J. Heinz, founder and president of the H.J. Heinz Company of Pittsburgh.

  Heinz was the same age as Wiley—born in the same year and month—and he had advocated in favor of clean and honest foodstuffs for even longer than the chief chemist had. Heinz had also built a remarkably successful company, one that processed and marketed scores of products. Although he had personally chosen a slogan to advertise “57 Varieties,” by the early twentieth century, his canning and bottling plants produced nearly twice that number of foods and condiments. Unlike many of his peers in the food business, Heinz had lobbied in favor of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Company executive Sebastian Mueller had accompanied such activists as Robert Allen and Alice Lakey when they visited the White House to press the Roosevelt administration, and after its passage, Henry Heinz supported the law’s enforcement. Some of his peers called him a traitor. More irked than worried by such remarks, he ordered his company’s publicity department to disparage his critics in press releases.

  Heinz, like other processors, had frequently used preservatives, following the industry standard. His original recipe for catsup (the spelling on the bottle) was based on his mother’s, including a little finely ground willow bark, which added salicylic acid to the mix. The company had later shifted over to sodium benzoate. But Heinz had found himself impressed by the warnings raised in Wiley’s Poison Squad studies and had decided to invest in developing an alternative approach. Mueller, in charge of food safety at the company, had at first balked, worrying that the move could prove too expensive. The H.J. Heinz Company had always offered a money-back guarantee, and Mueller feared a preservative-free ketchup would lead to costly returns due to spoilage.

  But at his boss’s insistence, Mueller ordered the creation of test batches made from recipes like those of homemade versions that were known to have longer shelf lives. His cooks searched for a correct acid balance in the formula, measuring out the right vinegar content to augment the acids that occur naturally in tomatoes. Discovering that he needed both high-quality tomatoes and high pulp content, Mueller developed a sauce that was thicker than the company’s previous product, thicker than any on the market.

  By 1906 Heinz was selling its new—and, yes, more expensive—ketchup (now spelled that way on the label). The company then launched an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at convincing consumers that it was worth spending a few cents more on a better and healthier condiment. The campaign, like so many run by Heinz, was so successful that in time Americans began to think of all good ketchup as thick and rich—eventually changing production standards industry-wide.

  When the food and drug law went into effect, Heinz also proclaimed in newspaper and magazine advertisements that its preservative-free products were “recognized as the standard by Government pure food authorities.” Heinz ketchup, as the ads also proclaimed, was not only free of sodium benzoate but was also the preferred choice of the famed Dr. Wiley himself.

  Predictably, food processors still using sodium benzoate complained to both Wilson and Roosevelt that the chief chemist had become a shill for H.J. Heinz. Wiley planned to vindicate himself with the publication of his Poison Squad report on sodium benzoate, laying out the evidence that the preservative was clearly suspect in health problems. As 1908 approached, polishing up that report became a top priority, along with other potentially controversial investigations such as a study of the popular artificial sweetener saccharin.

  Due to its low cost, saccharin was increasingly used as a sugar substitute in processed foods ranging from canned corn to ketchup itself—although that inclusion rarely appeared on labels. Leaders in the food-processing industry—aside from Heinz and a few others—braced for more bad publicity. The Poison Squad studies had yet to say anything good about food additives. Makers decided to try intervening before the sodium benzoate report was published, hoping to reach an agreement that would prevent its publication.

  The National Food Manufacturers Association contacted Roosevelt, Wilson, and every legislator thought to be sympathetic, raising concerns about both the upcoming reports and Harvey Wiley. The chief chemist, the organization complained, was stuck in the old-fashioned past of preindustrial food production and biased against twentieth-century innovation. The association urged the president and the agriculture secretary to create a scientific review board, one that might be more balanced and more favorable toward modern food-production methods.

  In January 1908 Roosevelt invited some of the most outspoken among the group’s processors and grocers to visit the White House. They included representatives from Curtice Brothers of Rochester, New York, and Williams Brothers of Detroit, both in competition with H.J. Heinz. Also in attendance was Republican congressman James S. Sherman of New York, who was himself president of a New England canning company. Sherman’s firm routinely, and surreptitiously, used saccharin instead of more expensive cane sugar to sweeten its canned corn. The Heinz company was not on the invitation list. Intrigued by the conversation, Roosevelt asked his guests to stay over and requested that Wilson, Wiley, McCabe, and Dunlap join them the next morning for a follow-up discussion.

  They met in the Cabinet Room of Roosevelt’s new office building on the west side of the White House, a precursor to the later West Wing. The meeting required the large chamber because the businessmen had brought along their attorneys. Roosevelt asked the previous day’s visitors to repeat their concern that removing sodium benzoate from ketchup would destroy the entire industry. As Wiley would describe it: “There was no way in which this disaster could be diverted except to overrule the conclusions of the Bureau.” Wiley was vilified from the outset of the meeting as “a radical, impervious to reason and determined to destroy legitimate business.” These businessmen asserted that the Heinz company was an anomaly and its method of ketchup production unlikely to survive.

  Roosevelt then turned to Wilson and asked him, “What is your opinion about the propriety and desirability of enforcing your Chief of Bureau?”

  Wilson stood by his department’s findings. He said to Roosevelt, “Dr. Wiley made extensive investigations in feeding benzoated goods to healthy young men and in every instance he found that their health was undermined.” The president then asked McCabe, Dunlap, and Wiley for their individual opinions. Along with Wilson, McCabe and Dunlap had studied the Poison Squad results. In a rare moment of unity, they agreed that the table trial had raised legitimate concerns. The young volunteers in the study had exhibited, as the draft report noted, “unfavorable symptoms and disturbances of metabolism” including irritation, nausea, headache, vomiting, and weight loss. The chemists who had run the experiment were now urging that, “in the interests of health both benzoic acid and benzoate of soda should be excluded from food products.”

  “On hearing this opinion,” Wiley wrote, “the President turned to the protestants, struck the table in front of him a stunning blow with his fist, and showing his teeth in the true Rooseveltian fashion said: ‘Gentlemen, if this drug is injurious, you shall not put it into food.’” The battle, Wiley thought, was almost won. But Sherman, the New York congressman and canner, spoke out again. He also wanted to discuss the use of saccharin in canned goods. He strongly objected to Wiley’s likely recommendation to restrict its use. “My firm saved $4,000 by sweetening canned corn with saccharin instead of sugar,” he said, addressing Roosevelt directly. “We want a decision from you on this question.” For decades after the meeting, Wiley would replay this moment and wish he had sat silently and waited for Roosevelt to respond.

  By the early twentieth century, saccharin was well known
to the public as a diet aid; although most didn’t realize that canners like Sherman secretly used it as a cheap alternative to sugar in creating so-called sweet corn. Wiley considered the substitution a deceptive practice and took a position against such use, at least until the sweetener could be proved benign. It was in his judgment an illegal adulterant under the law. Nor did he care for a move by chemical companies to avoid the problem by simply rechristening saccharin as a sugar. He was at that moment pursuing a court case against the Heyden Chemical Company’s saccharin product, which was sold under the name Heyden Sugar. In his cautious approach to the health effects, he differed with Dunlap and McCabe. While the two men agreed that the sweetener ought to be listed on product labels, and even that it should be properly described, they thought that until health risks were clearly shown, the saccharin use should not be restricted.

  Now Wiley jumped directly into the conversation: “Everyone who ate that sweet corn was deceived. He thought he was eating sugar, when in point of fact he was eating a coal tar product totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health.” The interjection was political bad form. With Roosevelt, it would have been all right in many cases to venture an opinion without having first been asked for one. The president was known to tolerate interruptions if he thought the point that the speaker made was worth being made. In this case, however, Roosevelt thought the opposite. As he quickly made clear, the president disagreed strongly with what Wiley had said.

  Roosevelt was a regular consumer of saccharin. His personal physician, Rear Admiral Presley Marion Rixey, had recommended the sweetener as a healthy alternative to sugar. Roosevelt put a great deal of faith in what Rixey said as the navy physician was also a friend. The two of them, both accomplished equestrians, frequently rode together. Despite regular exercise, the president showed a tendency toward corpulence, and Rixey—having observed the link between weight gain and long-term diseases like diabetes—had advised Roosevelt to replace sugar with saccharin as a diet aid. “You tell me that saccharin is injurious to health?” Roosevelt said to Wiley. “Yes, Mr. President, I do tell you that,” Wiley said firmly. No one had clearly proved injury yet; the research was still going on. But Wiley believed it and he said so.

  “Dr. Rixey gives it to me every day,” the president said in rising anger. By this time Wiley had recognized his error and attempted to recover the moment: “Mr. President, he probably thinks you may be threatened with diabetes.” Roosevelt would have none of it. “Anyone who says saccharin is injurious to health is an idiot,” he snapped. Shortly later, he called the meeting to a close.

  The following day, Roosevelt announced the appointment of a scientific review board—in fact, the very board that had been requested by the food-processing industry. It would reassess Wiley’s research, starting with sodium benzoate and saccharin. Further, Roosevelt had decided on its alternative chief chemist. Ira Remsen of Johns Hopkins, the chemist who had in 1879 co-discovered saccharin along with Constantin Fahlberg, would lead the investigations.

  Wiley protested to no avail. Remsen, he thought, had a clear conflict of interest. “According to the ordinary conception of a juror, Dr. Remsen would not have been entitled to sit on the subject of saccharin. Such little matters as those, however, were not dominating with the President of the United States.” But although he was angry with Roosevelt, Wiley was angrier with himself for further alienating the president. Ever since the 1902 incident in which he had exasperated Roosevelt over the proposed import of Cuban sugar, he had tried to steer clear of disagreements with the chief executive—until this misstep. He knew that by giving Roosevelt a new reason to be annoyed with him, he had just made things more difficult for himself and his cause. And “I fear that I deserved it.”

  Not that he’d made an outright enemy. Roosevelt was quick to take offense, but his rational side often overruled his ire. The president would continue to back some of the chief chemist’s positions, notably the regulation of whiskey. Wiley’s chemists continued to demonstrate fraud in that industry. They had recently revealed that University Club Whiskey contained no whiskey at all, merely industrial ethanol dyed brown, and that Sherwood Rye Whiskey contained not a trace of a rye product. Despite continued industry pressure to accept such products as simply the modern way, Roosevelt still stood by his attorney general’s decision regarding whiskey, and he supported Wiley’s determined insistence on accuracy in labeling.

  Yet the president also found himself annoyed by other instances of Wiley’s staunch unwillingness to compromise. The chief chemist continued to reject the term “corn syrup.” Since his earliest food-analysis study, for the state of Indiana in 1881, Wiley had insisted that the word “glucose” was the only accurate way to describe this sugary liquid derived from corn. Within the corn industry, however, that name had long been disliked. It sounded unappetizing, manufacturers feared, and was likely to alienate consumers. A new firm called the Corn Products Refining Company, created by a merger in 1906, had recently petitioned the government to be allowed to call its new corn-derived sweetener a syrup. This appeal carried behind it the clout of company founder Edward Thomas Bedford, a longtime executive and current director of the Standard Oil Company.

  E. T. Bedford, as he was known, sought to bottle and market a thick liquid product under the name “Karo Corn Syrup.” He knew full well that “Karo Glucose” was never going to succeed in the market. He’d done his best to convince Wiley that the name was aptly descriptive and overall more accurate than the unappetizing word “glucose,” which sounded too much like “glue.”

  Wiley was unmoved. The food and drug law’s protective measures should not be “suspended or abandoned because it is hurtful to any interest or is displeasing to any men,” he insisted. Bedford responded by appealing to Wilson instead, protesting the Agriculture Department’s apparent indifference to what he called the “impossibility of popularizing our product under the name Glucose.” He thought Wiley’s refusal to reconsider was rooted in hostility toward industry in general and, he wrote to the secretary, such a stubborn refusal to listen “very clearly indicates the personal views of Dr. Wiley in a way that tends to cause us a lot of trouble.”

  Representatives of the corn industry had also petitioned Roosevelt. In a meeting attended by Wilson and Dunlap but not Wiley, the president had made it clear that he thought “glucose” was a ridiculous name for a syrupy material derived from corn. “You must make the manufacturers call a spade a spade,” the president had said. “But don’t make them call it a damn shovel.” Wilson discussed the issue privately with McCabe and Dunlap. They had earlier sided with Wiley on the term but, at the secretary’s request, now agreed to withdraw their support for Wiley’s stance on the definition. A majority of the three-man Board of Food Inspection now favored the term that the industry wanted to use, and the department issued a formal endorsement of the term “corn syrup.” Karo Corn Syrup was cleared for the grocery store market.

  Such moves by Roosevelt and Wilson had established a precedent. Industry advocates now saw a way around Wiley and his insistence on strictly limiting chemical additives to food. This came to bear as French canning companies, which used toxic copper salts to make their peas and other vegetables look especially green, looked to bypass the new standards. Fearing that Americans would reject vegetables without the familiar bright green color, a delegation representing canners and importers took the issue not to the Department of Agriculture but to the Department of State. It proved an effective decision. Secretary of State Root pushed for an exemption to satisfy the French manufacturers. In response, Roosevelt suggested that Wilson refer the copper salts question to the newly created consulting panel—already better known as the “Remsen Board” after chairman Ira Remsen. Until the board reviewed the science—whenever that was—the French were free to continue greening up their canned vegetables as they chose.

  Emboldened, makers and importers of other French food products started complaining
directly to Roosevelt about Wiley’s interference with the labeling of their wares. In May 1908 the issue came to a head regarding a so-called wine vinegar, which was, in truth, a synthetic acetic acid dyed to a golden tone. Manufactured by a company called Cessat of Bordeaux, it bore a cheerful label decorated with bunches of grapes and leaves meant to suggest a product fresh from the vineyard. At Wiley’s insistence, Cessat had added the words “Distilled, colored with caramel” to the label. In addition, he wanted the company to remove all the vineyard imagery—grapes, leaves, and vines—which, he thought, erroneously gave the impression of a vineyard product. Cessat executives resisted. They would remove the grape clusters, they said, but leave the decorative vines.

  But Wiley refused to compromise, believing that if he gave up on small details for one product he would be forced to give up on all. When the next shipment of Cessat of Bordeaux vinegar reached a U.S. harbor, he ordered that because it was deceptively labeled it could not be brought ashore. The company, encouraged by recent events, appealed directly to Roosevelt. The president promptly fired off an angry letter to Wilson, ordering that the shipment be released and demanding that the responsible officials (meaning Wiley) explain their “useless, illegal and improper interference with shipments of food from a friendly nation.” In an impetuous, scrawled postscript to that letter, the president stressed that he did not mean to undercut the food and drug law. It was “one of the best laws on the statute book.” He did, however, want it to be administered without “a nagging, vexatious, foolish or corrupt spirit toward honest business.”

  Meanwhile, Roosevelt worked with Wilson in appointing four other scientists, besides chairman Ira Remsen, to the board that was to review Wiley’s work on chemical hazards in food. He wanted scientists with strong reputations. The final list included Russell Chittenden, John H. Young, Christian A. Herter, and Alonzo E. Taylor.