by Deborah Blum
Campbell’s FDA had mounted an investigation of the event and now put it to political use. He’d been pushing the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt on this issue for years, with limited success. Now, with everyone from pediatricians to parents expressing deep anger at government inaction, the cough syrup tragedy spiraled into a national scandal, one that soon sparked passage of that better law, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. The legislation replaced and greatly expanded on the 1906 legislation, correcting many of its deficiencies and enlarging the authority of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And although he did not live to see it, the new law, signed by President Roosevelt on June 25, 1938, marked the moment that Harvey Wiley’s once-tiny, six-man Division of Chemistry achieved one of his long-held dreams. The newly empowered FDA would become an independent agency with the real authority to protect American citizens against risky drugs and tainted food.
Wiley might have seen, at last, in the new agency that “more perfect” regulatory structure he’d hoped would arise from the 1906 law. He would have also undoubtedly continued to harangue the FDA to pursue even more perfect protection of his fellow citizens. “I believe,” he said while lobbying year after year for the first food and drug law, “in the chemistry of inward and spiritual grace. And I believe in its application to the welfare of humanity,” and nothing less would do.
EPILOGUE
The story of consumer protection in the United States is often the story of a country playing defense, an account of government regulators waking up, time and time again, to yet another public health crisis.
The 1906 food and drug law, which established federal food regulation, was propelled into being largely by a series of scandals over food processing, including the gruesomely spectacular case of the Chicago meatpackers. The 1938 law, which created the modern U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was passed following the deaths of dozens of children who were poisoned by a cough syrup legally sweetened with the antifreeze ingredient diethylene glycol. A 1956 decision by the FDA to ban some of the old coal-tar dyes arose from the sickening of children by Halloween candy that contained unsafe levels of orange and red coloring agents. A 1976 law authorizing the agency to regulate medical devices was passed after some 200,000 women reported injuries from an intrauterine birth control device called the Dalkon Shield.
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More recently, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), a sweeping update to the FDA’s protective authority, was signed into law after one of the most severe food-poisoning outbreaks in American history, one that continued for months—from late 2008 to early 2009—and derived from one of the country’s most trusted and ordinary food staples.
The cause was a line of peanut butters made by the Virginia-based Peanut Corporation of America. The company used factories that were deliberately unregistered to avoid government attention. Many of the jars and containers of peanut butter, produced in notably unsanitary conditions, contained the pathogenic bacteria salmonella. People in forty-six states were sickened; the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked the products to an estimated nine deaths and up to 22,000 illnesses. To the dismay of consumers and legislators alike, the source of the contamination was identified not by the federal government but by state laboratories in Minnesota, Georgia, and Connecticut, harking back to nineteenth-century failures in enforcing nationwide consumer protection.
Two years later, in 2011, President Barack Obama signed the FSMA into law. The act once again enhanced the FDA’s ability to prevent food safety problems. It included new requirements that food growers, food importers, and food processors adhere to specific, agency-determined safety practices and keep records of compliance. The first stricter rules for crop management began to go into effect in the summer of 2017, prompting some farmers—in language eerily reminiscent of early-twentieth-century complaints—to protest that the government now expected their fields to be as sterile as hospitals. Agricultural business groups have asked that the federal government tone down the regulations and expressed optimism that the current administration, under President Donald J. Trump, will do so.
During his successful 2016 campaign for the White House, Trump promised to have his cabinet “submit a list of every wasteful and unnecessary regulation which kills jobs, and which does not improve public safety, and eliminate them.” His FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, followed that promise by saying that while he recognizes the importance of food safety legislation he wants to “strike the right balance” in its implementation. Consumer groups now anticipate delayed and reduced protections from agencies facing deep budget cuts. The Earthjustice Institute has warned of the “Trump administration’s willingness to accommodate even unfounded and partial industry opposition to the detriment of the health and welfare of people and families across the country.”
Such a warning, with its mix of theatrical anger and genuine dismay, could have been written, almost word for word, by Harvey Washington Wiley more than a century ago. This sense of déjà vu, echoing down the years, should remind us of the ways that food safety practices have dramatically changed in this country—and of the ways they have changed hardly at all.
Thanks to the work of people like Wiley and his colleagues at the turn of the twentieth century, thanks to generations of consumer advocates, scientists, attorneys, journalists, and, yes, dedicated public servants, we’ve come a long way from the unregulated and unsafe food and drink that imperiled American citizens in the past. Today we are buffered by rules and institutions created over the past century to protect American citizens from deceit and danger in the food supply.
If we pay attention, we see signs of those protections every day, in large ways and small. Food labels, for instance, contain a wealth of information about ingredients and nutrition—not as much as some of us might want, but more than many of us will ever take the time to read. New products are safety-tested. Food-poisoning outbreaks are monitored and traced; tainted products are subject to recall; food and drug manufacturers who cause harm can be criminally prosecuted. In 2015 the chief executive of the Peanut Corporation of America was sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison for fraud, conspiracy, and the introduction of adulterated food into interstate commerce.
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And these same principles, also built on lessons learned from crises, have been applied to other protective measures—environmental regulations being an outstanding example of that. About a half century after Wiley’s crusade for food and drug protections, Americans became increasingly alarmed over evidence of industrial and agricultural pollution. In her influential 1962 book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson drew a vivid portrait of the destructive nature of untested pesticides. In 1969 Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, and the following year President Richard Nixon established the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has, over the years, been a central force in cleaning up our land, air, and water, but again new fears have risen about the agency’s increasingly corporate-friendly policies. Agency administrators, appointed by President Trump, have shifted the EPA’s direction toward protection of the oil and gas industry, including removing all reference to scientifically proven links between fossil fuels and climate change from the agency websites. In addition, the EPA has shut down a program that helped document that connection by collecting information on gas emissions from industrial sites. “The number of environmental rollbacks in this time frame is staggering,” said Harvard University environmental law professor Richard Lazarus after Pruitt had been in office for just six months.
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We have succeeded in creating a protective system that at its best protects all of us impartially. But it’s our responsibility to value and maintain that system. We still need those who will fight on the public’s behalf; we still need our own twenty-first-century version of Harvey Washington Wiley—or rather a cadre of th
em—to fight for those protections if we are to remain safe.
And that, in part, is why stories like his remain so important today. If we are to continue moving in a direction that preserves what’s best in this country, we need not romanticize the past but we must learn from what it tells us about our earlier mistakes. The people who fought to correct those long-ago errors still have lessons to share. The story of Harvey Washington Wiley, at his fierce and fearless best, should remind us that such crusaders are necessary in the fight. That the fight for consumer protection may never end. But if it does, if that long-awaited final victory is achieved, it will be because we, like Wiley, refused to give up.
Harvey Washington Wiley, age nineteen, when he was a freshman at Indiana’s Hanover College in 1863.
Wiley (third from right) with his crew of chemists at the Department of Agriculture in 1883.
Look Before You Eat,” from the cover of Britain’s satiric Puck magazine, mocking the state of the food supply, in 1884.
Notes about poisonous candy from an investigator working for Wiley in 1890.
A state-of-the-art laboratory at the Bureau of Chemistry in the early twentieth century.
Jeremiah Rusk, secretary of agriculture from 1889 to 1893, affectionately nicknamed “Uncle Jerry” by his staff.
Julius Sterling Morton, secretary of agriculture from 1893 to 1897, was a ruthless cost-cutter.
James Wilson, secretary of agriculture from 1897 to 1913, started as a Wiley supporter and ended up as an enemy.
Ira Remsen, codiscoverer of saccharin, was tapped to head an industry-friendly board of scientists for the USDA.
William McKinley, twenty-fifth president of the United States, was assassinated in 1901, near the start of his second term.
Grenville Dodge, a former Union Army general, was named by McKinley to lead an investigation of shoddy meat given to soldiers in the Spanish-American War.
Theodore Roosevelt became the twenty-sixth president of the United States following McKinley’s assassination.
President Roosevelt, shown here with his cabinet, signed the country’s first food safety legislation in 1906.
Volunteers of the Poison Squad experiments in Wiley’s dining room testing the safety of food additives.
Wiley and one of his chemists in a publicity shot taken during the Poison Squad experiments.
Cover of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, which exposed the horrors of U.S. meat production.
Novelist Upton Sinclair in 1906.
British postcards satirizing meat produced by the Chicago meatpackers circulated after The Jungle’s publication.
The muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker, famed for his investigation of the railroad industry, advised Sinclair on his book.
Walter Hines Page, of the publishing firm Doubleday, Page & Company, authorized and supported publication of The Jungle.
J. Ogden Armour, president of Armour & Company in Chicago, tried to stop European publication of The Jungle.
Journalist David Graham Phillips infuriated President Roosevelt with his searing expose of corruption in the U.S. Senate.
The Heinz Company ran numerous ads promoting the purity of its products in the early twentieth century.
The American meat industry became a favorite target of Puck magazine as scandals emerged.
The American magazine Collier’s took aim at congressional resistance to food safety legislation.
The Beef Trust,” which became the nickname for the Chicago meatpackers, satirized in a 1906 Puck cover.
During a lengthy battle to legally define “real” whiskey, distillers made a point of emphasizing the purity of their product.
The 1906 Food and Drug law made “pure food” labels such as this one extremely popular.
Cartoon paying homage to Wiley’s leadership in the fight for food safety legislation, despite bitter opposition.
One of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s newly authorized food inspection teams, Indiana, 1909.
William Howard Taft (left), twenty-seventh president of the United States, meeting with Elihu Root, secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt.
A 1909 cartoon in the Des Moines Register commenting on President Taft’s turn from Roosevelt progressives to congressional leaders who were closely allied with industry.
The Washington Star’s famed political cartoonist, Clifford Berryman, delighted Wiley with this drawing, mourning his retirement suggesting that his shoes would be impossible to fill.
Photo taken during a U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection of an early twentieth-century candy factory, emphasizing the need for regulation.
Anna Kelton Wiley, in 1920, with sons Harvey (right) and John (left).
The masthead for Wiley’s regular 1920s column about food and nutrition.
A 1956 U.S. postage stamp honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the Pure Food and Drug Act and featuring a portrait of Harvey Washington Wiley.
Portrait of Harvey Washington Wiley in World’s Work just before he left his government job.
Gratitudes
When I finish a book, one of my first thoughts—after those of cartwheeling around the room—is to thank everyone I know for putting up with me. A book of this nature is an obsessive and often antisocial project. So as I return from this sojourn into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I’d like to thank all for their patience with the time traveler.
At the top of that long list is my editor, Ann Godoff, not only for her patience but also for her deep interest and often brilliant counsel during the book-writing process; my terrific agent, Suzanne Gluck, who is ever both encouraging and wise; my husband, Peter Haugen, for his generosity and invaluable help in pulling a very messy story into a coherent one; my sons, Marcus and Lucas Haugen, for their savvy twenty-something perspective on fake food and for their help in prioritizing my enormous stack of early-twentieth-century publications with a special thanks to Lucas for his smart analysis of What to Eat; my former graduate student Kate Prengaman for her tireless investigations of the history of food safety, including a visit to the Library of Congress that involved days of sorting through a daunting stack of boxes from the Wiley papers; and the truly wonderful librarians in the Science Reading Room and the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, who collect and watch over some of our country’s most important history. As always, thanks to my friends Kim Fowler, Denise Allen, and Pam Ruegg for their interest and encouragement throughout this book and others.
And a special thanks to my mother, Ann Blum, who never failed to listen to my food horror stories with grace and humor and who frequently kept me on track with the question about the book’s progress, beginning, “My friends are wondering when . . .”
Finally, that there is a “when” at all owes more than I can say to the many dedicated professionals at Penguin Press. Special thanks to Casey Denis, Will Heyward, Hilary Roberts, Eric Wechter, Sarah Hutson, and Matt Boyd. They are the often unsung heroes of every book you pick up and it is a pleasure to thank them here.
Notes
Harvey Washington Wiley was married to an outspoken and widely admired Washington, DC, suffragette—Anna Kelton Wiley—who had also worked for years at the Library of Congress. Not surprisingly, she donated his carefully kept and voluminous (70,000 items spanning almost 250 file containers) papers to the library. They are kept in the manuscript division there, and the online finder’s guide can be found at http://findingaids.loc.gov.
In the course of researching this book, I made several visits to study these papers; many of the details in this book are drawn from letters, memos, telegrams, invitations, program
s, diaries, newspaper and magazine articles, and other resources in the archive. For those interested in food, history, and public health, I also spent time at the remarkable Cookery, Nutrition and Food Technology collection at the Library of Congress, where I found everything from magazines like What to Eat to a collection of cookbooks that are in themselves a history of the United States: www.loc.gov/acq/devpol/cookery.pdf.
All other resources—books, papers, documents, and other publications—are described below with, on occasion, some additional context and explanation.
