by Deborah Blum
The committee also called Frederick Dunlap, who admitted that he’d drafted the accusatory memo, the main subject of the hearings, in secret and delivered it to Wilson on a day when he knew that Wiley would be out of town. He also acknowledged that when he and Wiley disagreed on a matter of food safety, he routinely deferred to McCabe in making the final decision on any regulatory issue. “And Mr. McCabe is not a chemist, is he?” asked one committee member pointedly. “Not that I ever heard of,” Dunlap replied. Legislators from both sides of the aisle, the newspapers reported, were unanimous in finding that the Agriculture Department was a personal and political mess.
Taft, who had joined his wife for the summer in Massachusetts, followed the daily newspaper reports as well as consulted with his staff as he tried to decide how best to handle the situation. In mid-September 1911, just before returning to Washington, he announced his decision on the charges related to the Rusby affair. Considering the tenor of the Moss hearings, his findings surprised no one. WILEY UPHELD BY PRESIDENT IN RUSBY CASE read the New York Times headline.
In a letter to Wilson that he made available to the public, the president declared that he’d found no evidence of conspiracy to defraud the government in the payment arrangements to Henry Rusby. In fact, Taft wrote, the payment of the Remsen Board was among many precedents that showed that Rusby’s contract was justified by ordinary government procedure.
By presidential order, Rusby and Wiley both were cleared of all charges. In a diplomatic concession to Wilson, Taft recommended that Kebler and Bigelow be reprimanded for overzealousness in recruiting the New York expert, although he also praised their effort to pay an expert witness fairly. The president stopped short of ordering a reorganization of the department or punishing McCabe or Dunlap. But he signaled his dissatisfaction. “The broader issues raised by the investigation, which have a much weightier relation than this one on the efficiency of the department, may require much more radical action than the question I have considered and decided,” Taft wrote.
In response, Wiley issued a statement to the Associated Press, thanking the president for his sense of justice, the American press for “the practically unanimous support which it has given me during this ordeal,” and especially the many people who had written to encourage him. Neither James Wilson nor George McCabe responded to requests for comment, which the newspapers made a point of emphasizing in their coverage of Taft’s decision.
“My heartiest congratulations,” wrote the muckraking journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams, whose exposé of patent medicine, “The Great American Fraud,” had been central to some of the regulations written into the food and drug law. “I didn’t think Taft had the nerve to come out flat-footed. The slap against Kebler (and the same for Bigelow) was unfair, I thought, and rather cowardly. But everyone who knows Taft will read between the lines and know it for what it is worth. A slight sop to the forces of the enemy.”
In the public view, Wiley had triumphed against his oppressors. Certainly he’d kept his job. But privately he was keenly aware that he hadn’t really shifted the balance of power regarding food regulation. The “adulteration snake,” he told one reporter, still coiled through the department. Again he wondered how long he could persevere. Along with the letters of encouragement and congratulation, he began receiving job offers—most of them from businesses in the food and drink industry. The R.B. Davis Company (makers of phosphate food products, baking powder, and starch) of Hoboken, New Jersey, for example, proposed to create a position for him and match his $5,000-a-year government salary, if he wanted to “leave the pressures of federal service.” He firmly declined them all, replying to R.B. Davis that “I am still in my present job and I intend to hold onto it until I am forcibly ejected.” But at home, talking to Anna, he was thinking very seriously about whether he had outlasted his usefulness.
In January 1912 the Moss committee issued its report, reinforcing the president’s decision and approving Taft’s dismissal of the Rusby charges. The committee dismissed any suggestion that the bureau chemists had conspired to defraud the government. It emphasized the importance of Rusby’s testimony in the Coca-Cola case, praising the bureau’s strategy to accommodate him as part of an essential effort to build a strong regulatory system for food and drink: “One cannot withhold one’s sympathy with an earnest effort on the part of Dr. Wiley to pay proper compensation and secure expert assistance in the enforcement of so important a statute, certainly in the beginning, when questions arising under it are of capital importance to the public.”
The committee reprimanded McCabe and Dunlap for their heavy-handed tactics. It joined the president in criticizing Wilson for the secretive support lent to industry by the Remsen Board and for his direction of that body, which, said the report, often paralyzed reasonable enforcement of the law. It characterized the department as poorly managed, which was yet another embarrassing blow to Wilson, but it did not find that the USDA was, as Wiley suggested, entirely in thrall to industry. Wilson, McCabe, and Dunlap might not believe in Wiley’s consumer-before-all approach, but they had prosecuted businesses, worked to build a regulatory structure, proved willing to fight questionable practices such as the bleaching of flour all the way to the Supreme Court. A willingness to work with manufacturers, the committee noted, was not always the evidence of corruption that Wiley and his allies believed. Sometimes it was merely evidence of practicality.
Publicly Wiley declared the double whammy of Taft’s decision and the committee report a “sweeping victory” for his side. To his friends he was a little more cautious, writing to one of them that “while the verdict was not as sweeping as I had hoped it is nevertheless a good one.”
Following the Moss report, Wilson made visible efforts to repair the damage. He removed McCabe from the Food and Drug Inspection Board and appointed an ally of Wiley’s, Roscoe Doolittle, director of the department’s New York–based food laboratory, as its chairman. But he kept Dunlap on the board in order to maintain some of that practicality. And Wilson, who had served under three presidents, remained as agriculture secretary. (He’d privately asked to finish out the current term, his fourth, and Taft had consented.) He calmly assured the president and Congress that the situation in the department was much improved. But the calm was deceptive; he was furious about having his reputation so tarnished. Within a few weeks following Taft’s decision, Wiley was increasingly aware of that, noting that Wilson had become “alertly antagonistic.”
“I found that my recommendations to the secretary were being returned unapproved,” he said. It was obvious that “I would have continually to fight my own associates on the Board of Food and Drug Inspection in carrying out my orders and policies.” The scandal, the Moss hearings, the fact that little had changed at the Agriculture Department—all had made it clear to both Wiley’s allies and his enemies that though he had survived the attack, though he had undaunted public support, he lacked vital internal support for his strict approach to food regulation.
“Be sure of your ground for the conspirators will not cease to lay pitfalls for you,” warned J. G. Emery, Wisconsin food and dairy commissioner. The food industry was now neatly sidestepping Wiley on a regular basis, taking complaints directly to Wilson. The chief chemist had just recently tried to regulate mold and dirt in grain shipped across state lines, and Wilson, responding to pressure from the industry, had directly overruled him again.
Wiley had declared that he would stay as long as the department would have him, but he had begun to see the futility of remaining in such a hostile environment. He wasn’t interested in going to work for a baking soda company, but he thought there might be somewhere else that he could make a difference. If he could find a place that would allow him to fight as he chose, he wondered if he should now explore such opportunities. And there were also welcome family reasons for considering a job that might pay better. To their surprise and delight, he and Nan were expecting their first child in the spring.
The women’s magazine Good Housekeeping, known for its crusading tendencies, had offered him $10,000 a year—double his current salary—to become director of a new department of “food, health and sanitation.” It would include his own state-of-the-art laboratory, based in Washington, DC, that would test products on the market, offer advice to readers on their safety and merits, and perhaps even award them a Good Housekeeping “seal of approval” where deserved. He could also write a column in the magazine on both food safety and nutrition.
The Redpath Lyceum Bureau, an agency that booked lecturers and performers into halls across the country, also contacted Wiley to offer him a lucrative speaking contract. The agency, founded as the Boston Lyceum Bureau in 1868, had represented such luminaries as Mark Twain, Julia Ward Howe, Susan B. Anthony, and Frederick Douglass. Wiley was honored by the opportunity to join that list. It was a pleasant reminder that, due to both his public successes and his public failures, he had become an influential celebrity.
Anna Wiley was also becoming a well-known reform advocate. She was president of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Suffrage Club in Washington, DC, lobbying not just for women’s right to vote but also for bank reform. In December 1911 she’d also been elected to the Congressional Committee of the American Women’s Suffrage Association. “As I read the papers and I diagnose the signs, I find you are slowly but surely becoming known as the husband of Anna Wiley,” wrote Nathaniel Fowler to his friend Wiley. Fowler, a Boston-based journalist and author, joked that Wiley would soon find himself featured in a new Ladies’ Home Journal series titled “Unknown Husbands of Great Women.”
By March 1912, rumors had begun circulating again that Wiley might finally leave the department. Wilson, who might have welcomed such news, was slow to believe it. He told his friends that Wiley himself had planted such rumors, probably to angle for further concessions. When a reporter for the New York Times asked the secretary about the possibility of the chief chemist resigning, Wilson snapped, “That story isn’t ripe yet.” But on the morning of March 15, Wiley sent a notice to his favorite newspaper reporters, telling them that he had an important message to share. He also prepared a simple resignation letter for Wilson, extending not even a day’s notice to his employer: “I hereby tender my resignation as chief of the bureau of chemistry at a salary of $5,000 per annum in the Department of Agriculture, to take effect at the termination of the 15th day of March 1912.”
He asked for a meeting with Wilson to deliver the letter. The two men talked for almost an hour. Wiley said, as he had before, that he would gladly stay if Wilson would clear the department of opponents of honest regulation, particularly Dunlap—whom he described as a sneak and a liar—and the equally devious George McCabe. Wilson replied, as he had before, that he would not consider it, that he did “not see his way clear” to dismissing the people in question. At the end of the discussion, the secretary scrawled, “Your resignation is accepted,” on Wiley’s note and handed it back to him.
Later that day—mostly for the benefit of the press—Wiley released a “supplementary statement” of resignation, emphasizing his long dedication to the civil service and adding, “It is also a matter of extreme gratification to me that in the twenty-nine years which I have been chief of this bureau, there has not been a cent, to my knowledge, wrongfully expended.” He reminded reporters that he was quitting the government, but not the cause. “I propose to devote the remainder of my life with such ability as I may have at my command and with such opportunities as may arise, to the promotion of the principles of civic righteousness and industrial integrity, which underlie the Food and Drugs Act.”
Wiley also made a point of thanking Wilson for “the personal kindness and regard which he has shown me during his long connection with the department.” He was grateful that one of his most trusted lieutenants, Willard Bigelow, had been appointed acting chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in his absence. But, he added, the situation in the department had become intolerable for him, and he saw no other “self-respecting” course but to leave.
To members of the press who gathered for an afternoon news conference at the department, Wilson praised Wiley’s long and valuable service but said that he had chosen to respect his chief chemist’s decision. He had told Wiley, he said, “that I should not for a moment stand in his way” if he felt that he could better himself by resigning. “I could only acquiesce and wish him Godspeed.” The listening reporters maintained their skepticism; a number of the resulting stories described the secretary as looking relieved. The Druggist Circular described Wilson’s response to the resignation with that ironic American saying “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?”
Like Wilson, President Taft was moderate in his public statement. He praised the outgoing chief chemist, commenting, “I would be very glad if he could continue in the service of the government. I feel that I shall have difficulty finding a man to fill his place.” But he then added that he was already moving to consult with university presidents in search of an appropriate replacement.
* * *
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But elsewhere in the Department of Agriculture, the news brought an almost universal outpouring of grief. As McCabe and Dunlap had often noticed with irritation, Wiley had many more loyal friends on staff than they, or Secretary Wilson, could ever hope for, especially among the many women who served in clerical positions, the clerks whom he’d always made a point of treating with kindness and respect. Employees from throughout the building rushed to Wiley’s office to wish him well.
WOMEN WEEP AS WATCH DOG OF THE KITCHEN QUITS AFTER TWENTY-NINE YEARS, read the headline in the Buffalo Courier: “With tears streaming down their cheeks, hundreds of women clerks, many of them employed in other sections of the Department of Agriculture, filed in to say goodbye. So crowded were the elevators leading to Dr. Wiley’s office that numerous women walked up four long flights of stairs.” It was, the New York Times wrote, a remarkably affecting scene: “Some of the employees had worked with him for more than a quarter-century and they left crying like children.”
Wiley’s allies and supporters were both surprised and deeply disappointed by his decision. Paul Pierce wrote in National Food Magazine that he feared his friend had been secretly threatened or pressured out of the job. “Dr. Wiley is known to be a man of indefatigable will and courage; it is not reasonable to believe that he would thus quit under fire. . . . It is hard, therefore, to account for his strange action unless there be a cause back of it all which has not yet come to light.” Alice Lakey interpreted the resignation as a triumph for Wiley’s enemies, blaming the agriculture department for putting Wiley in an impossible situation: “his hands have been tied so far as possible to hinder the strict enforcement of the pure food law.” Secretary Wilson and his alliance of corporate friends had worked toward this end, she said, so that the Agriculture Department, instead of enforcing the law, could “make everything easy for the food adulterer.”
The Journal of Commerce pointedly headlined its story THE SACRIFICE OF DR. WILEY. The editor of a consumer-advocacy publication called the Oil, Paint and Drug Reporter began his lament by quoting from Macbeth: “So clear in his great office that his virtue will plead like angels, trumpet tongued, against the deep damnation of his taking off.” Ralph Moss, the congressman who had chaired the investigative hearings into the Rusby case, sounded a similar note. “I regard the passing of Dr. Wiley from public service as the greatest loss that the American people have sustained in a generation,” wrote Moss, who was also from Indiana. Like Lakey, though, he acknowledged that it might have been an unavoidable choice. “I have known that the conditions of administration in the Department were such that he could not remain in his place. . . . He has done more, in my judgment, than any other man in the country for mankind in general.”
Wiley saved the testimonials and newspaper clippings for years, but his favorite of all the tributes was a cartoon in the Washington Star. It
pictured his office, containing tables cluttered with test tubes and beakers. A pair of battered shoes was sitting on the floor. Next to the desk stood Uncle Sam, looking sadly down at those shoes. They were labeled as belonging to Harvey Wiley. The shoes were unmistakably oversized, unmistakably far too large for anyone else to fill.
Fifteen
THE HISTORY OF A CRIME
1912–1938
. . . I wonder, what’s in it.
Theodore Roosevelt’s unhappiness with Taft as president, combined with his absolute belief that he himself would do a far better job, had drawn him back into national politics. During the same spring, of 1912, he campaigned to be the Republican nominee for the fall election. His odds looked promising; he’d started sweeping presidential primaries, including in Taft’s home state of Ohio.
The embattled Taft realized that just one more controversy would end his chance of staying in office. With outrage over Wiley’s resignation still simmering, he put off naming a replacement to the position of chief chemist. Quietly he and Wilson replaced Bigelow as temporary acting chief, but with another ally of Wiley’s—Roscoe Doolittle, who had recently taken McCabe’s place on the Food Inspection Board.
In a report to Wilson that May, Doolittle reported that fakery and adulteration continued apace. Products most frequently at fault, he wrote, included “cordials containing artificial color without declaration . . . figs unfit for consumption because of worms and excreta . . . flour bleached to conceal inferiority, eggs decomposed and unfit for food, arsenic in baking powders [also in gelatin and the shellac used to give chocolate a shine], so-called egg noodles containing artificial color but little or no eggs . . . black pepper containing added pepper shells, maple products adulterated with cane products, confectionary products containing talc and unpermitted colors, misbranded mixtures of olive oil and cotton seed oil,” and more.
