The Poison Squad

by Deborah Blum

  That same month, the city of Omaha reported an “embalmed milk” crisis that had led directly to the deaths of an alarming number of children. The Nebraska health department warned “all families, as far as possible, to cease the use of milk and cream furnished by local dairies.” The problem again was Preservaline. The dairy industry had also discovered that formaldehyde was a useful food additive. Not only did it slow the souring of milk, but its oddly sweet taste could also mask the somewhat acrid tang of milk that had already gone bad. “It is noticeable,” announced the city’s public health officer, “that more infants have died in Omaha this spring than ever before.” And spring, he continued, was usually “a time when the general health conditions should have been good.” Following the uptick in child deaths, the department had surveyed physicians and found that almost all the recent infant deaths were related to preservatives in milk.

  Hardly had the Omaha milk scandal died down when another flared in Indiana. Dairies near Indianapolis apparently weren’t bothering with commercially prepared formulas like Preservaline. They were simply pouring straight formaldehyde into rotting milk. Then they sold it on the cheap to poor families and to budget-strapped facilities like orphanages. The practice had been linked to the deaths of more than two dozen children in Indianapolis orphanages.

  The Indiana state health officer, Dr. John Hurty, a former professor of pharmacy at Purdue University and an old friend of Harvey Wiley, had also earned a reputation as a tireless crusader. His work for causes ranging from smallpox vaccination to pasteurization of milk would eventually lead to his election as president of the American Public Health Association. In the aftermath of the orphanage deaths, Hurty explained to journalists that the toxic compounds had proven an economic boon to dairymen, who used to have to throw out milk when it went bad. “Two drops of a forty percent solution of formaldehyde will preserve a pint of milk for several days,” Hurty said. There were no safety tests available, but businessmen had gambled that the amount put into food and drink was too low to cause harm. It turned out some dairymen were adding extra drops of formaldehyde solution on the principle that it would even better preserve their product.

  Hurty’s department advised that even an “infinitesimal amount” of formaldehyde could be dangerous, especially to infants. “Such being the fact, it should not be used for preserving foods,” he insisted. When a newspaper reporter sympathetic to the dairy industry asked him why he was making such a big deal about it, Hurty snapped back: “Well, it’s embalming fluid that you are adding to the milk. I guess it’s all right if you want to embalm the baby.” After his press conference, the Indianapolis News published a cartoon showing a large glass bottle labeled “Milk” with a monster coiling from the bottle’s open mouth. The creature was an evil-eyed scaly thing with jagged teeth and sharp claws. A baby in a diaper stood looking up at the monster, holding only a rattle to defend itself. “It looks like a tough battle for the little fellow” read the caption.

  Hurty had been trying for years to get the Indiana legislature to pass a food safety law, arguing that it was essential due to the lack of federal action. With more victims every day—the embalmed milk epidemic would eventually kill an estimated four hundred children in the state—and a corresponding rise in public outrage, the state passed its Pure Food Law in 1898. Hurty promptly banned all use of formaldehyde in milk. He also launched a campaign to clean up dairy practices in general. Many dairies were still notoriously unsanitary, and milk routinely contained dangerous colonies of disease-causing bacteria, among other impurities. Commercially sold milk that Hurty’s department had recently analyzed contained horsehair worms, flakes of moss, and traces of manure. Further, the chief health officer could “state confidently that this milk has been adulterated with stagnant water.”

  He strongly recommended adoption of the flash-heat process for killing microorganisms and preventing spoilage in beverages, a method developed in the 1860s by French scientist Louis Pasteur. Pasteurization had proven a success in the wine and beer industries in Europe and had more recently begun being used by European dairies to kill bacteria in their product. It was time, Hurty said, for the United States to catch up.

  Four

  WHAT’S IN IT?

  1899–1901

  And yet while we eat

  We cannot help asking, “What’s in it?”

  In 1899 U.S. senator William Mason of Illinois asked for and received permission from Secretary Wilson for Wiley to serve as scientific adviser for a new series of hearings on the country’s tainted food and drink supply. Mason, a Republican from Chicago described by newspapers as “a champion of liberty,” had a reputation as a progressive legislator and a reform-minded opponent of machine politics.

  The Mason hearings began that very spring, with meetings scheduled not only for Washington but also for New York and Chicago. They would continue for nearly a year, encompassing fifty different sessions and almost two hundred witnesses. The Chemistry Division would be nearly overwhelmed by the need to analyze hundreds of additional samples of food and drink. State public health officials lined up to testify, from Indiana’s Hurty, caught up in his state’s milk scandal, to the chief chemist from Connecticut, whose laboratory had discovered that spice processors in that state were burning old rope and using the ash as filler in ground spices such as ginger. Businessmen also testified, the honest ones decrying unfair competition from fraudsters. Representatives from the cream of tartar industry warned that baking powders were tainted with aluminum. Representatives from the dairy industry testified that makers of oleomargarine (by which they meant meatpackers) were still consistently mislabeling their product as butter.

  Without federal help, dairy states had little recourse; the state of New Hampshire had tried requiring that all margarine be dyed pink, but the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down that legislation in 1890, declaring it an illegal tax. Dairymen complained at the Mason hearings that margarine makers were nothing but cheats and liars. The meatpackers, in turn, accused the dairy industry of being stuck in the primitive past. Anyone, they insisted, could tell the difference between old-fashioned, often rancid butter and ever-fresh oleomargarine, which was “a product of the advanced age.”

  At Mason’s request, the Chemistry Division’s Willard Bigelow had looked again at dishonesty in the wine industry, finding the usual preservatives, such as salicylic acid, swirling through many bottles. He’d also found many bottles that were labeled as wine but were merely factory-produced ethanol colored with coal-tar dyes and flavored with fruit peels. One wine dealer, when visited by Bigelow posing as a shop owner, had asked “what distinguished label” his visitor desired. He’d taken Bigelow’s list and then, while the chemist watched, filled everything from the same cask, simply pasting labels on the different bottles to identify them as claret, Burgundy, or Bordeaux.

  For almost every food product, the Chemistry Division could point to a trick involved in its manufacture. Doctors continued to worry over continued reports of “grocer’s itch,” a side effect of the deceptive practice of grinding up insects and passing the result off as brown sugar. Sometimes live lice survived the process. Beer, which most consumers imagined to be derived from malted barley and hops, was often made from a cheaper ferment of rice or even corn grits. So-called aged whiskey often was still routinely rectified alcohol, diluted and colored brown. As Wiley had found twenty years earlier at Purdue, corn syrup was widely used as the basis for fake versions of honey and maple syrup.

  Many manufacturers argued that they had to fake products to stay competitive. Detroit canner Walter Williams, of Williams Brothers, described the making of his Highland Strawberry Preserves. The jam was, he said, 45 percent sugar, 35 percent corn syrup, 15 percent apple juice made from discarded apple skins, some scraps of apple skin and cores, and usually one or two pieces of strawberry. The strawberries cost him, he added. Many comparably priced preserves were just glucose, apple juice, red dye, and timo
thy seed added to simulate strawberry seeds. “If we could sell pure goods, I would be pleased,” Williams insisted. “I believe they should be labeled, showing their ingredients and showing the quality of the goods.” But as there was no law setting such standards and as he had to compete with less scrupulous canners, there was no way for him to stay in business unless he cut costs to match.

  Wiley testified that about 5 percent of all foods were routinely adulterated, with the number being much higher—up to 90 percent—in categories such as coffee, spices, and “food products made for selling to the poor.” This proved to be a little too sedate a summary for some of the tabloid journals; reporters exaggerated his testimony, stating that Wiley believed 90 percent of all food and beverage products to be adulterated. The careless reporting dismayed Wiley, his boss Wilson, and even the president—especially after alarmed American trade representatives wrote from Europe that grocers there were talking about boycotting U.S. food entirely. Wilson had to send clarifications and copies of Wiley’s actual testimony to the State Department in order to reassure importers of American food and drink.

  In other testimony, Wiley concentrated on preservatives and dyes. For example, he cited the practice of improving the color of canned peas by spiking them with copper sulfate and zinc salts. In small doses, these metals might pose little risk, he said, but no one really knew what those safe doses were. As he had earlier, he also warned of a possible cumulative dose: Who could ensure that a steady diet of the stuff, over months or even years, wouldn’t lead to heavy metal poisoning? Another witness, chemical physiologist Russell Chittenden of Yale University, echoed that point even more strongly, warning that most people eating canned vegetables would eventually be harmed by repeated exposure to metals. He urged that copper, in particular, be banned as an additive from American food products as soon as possible.

  Wiley again emphasized that the biggest worry was for vulnerable populations: young children, people with chronic health problems, and the elderly. Those with a healthy stomach, as he put it, were unlikely to be harmed by an occasional exposure to copper or zinc. The problem was that no one was sure who would be harmed: “Many people they do hurt and the least possible amount upsets the digestion.”

  Unlike Chittenden, Wiley did not urge an immediate ban. Rather, Wiley told the assembled senators that such regulations needed to be grounded in good science. He urged that the government invest in studying the health effects of such additives. If risks were clearly and methodically identified, then those compounds should be removed from all food and drink. And, somewhat wearily, he once again recommended that manufacturers be required to tell consumers, on labels, what was being mixed into their products. “Were it as harmless as distilled water,” he said, “there would be no excuse of its addition to food without notification to the consumer.”

  State food chemists also expressed dismay over the new additives. A. S. Mitchell, food chemist for the state of Wisconsin, brought to the hearings samples of three of the most popular new preservatives: Rosaline Berliner, Freezine, and Preservaline, the formaldehyde-rich culprit in the Indiana milk poisonings. He pointed out that none of them had been safety-tested; that all of them had been found in samples of commercially sold ice cream, cottage cheese, beef, chicken, pork, and shellfish; and, finally, that none of those foodstuffs bore a label listing ingredients.

  With the Rosaline Berliner, Mitchell highlighted what he saw as the alarming increase in the use of its active ingredient—sodium borate, or borax. A naturally occurring mineral salt, it had been used in various forms of manufacturing for centuries. The name came from the old Arabic word būraq ( ), which meant white. First discovered in the dry lake beds of Tibet, the powder, which easily dissolved in water and could be used to enhance enamel glazing, had been traded along the Silk Road as early as the eighth century CE. But its modern use had been driven by discovery of vast deposits of borax in California and by the aggressive marketing of the Pacific Coast Borax Company. A Wisconsin-born miner named Francis Marion Smith, with a natural flair for marketing his product, had founded the company. Smith, known to consumers as the “Borax King,” had purchased the rights to a rich vein of borax in the Mojave region, known as the “Twenty Mule Team Mine” for the long wagon trains used to haul out the mineral deposits. On the advice of his manager, he developed a cleaning formula promoted as “Twenty Mule Team Borax” for its powerful action and then went on to market his product for that and many other uses, including as a handy preservative.

  Borax was already known at that point as both a cheap and versatile preservative. It slowed fungal growth and it appeared to inhibit bacteria as well. Long before Smith’s industrious marketing, food manufacturers had been gradually taking up its use. Meat producers had started using it in the mid-1870s, after British importers had complained that American bacon and ham tasted too salty. The dairy industry had followed by using borax as a butter preservative, again avoiding a salty taste. During the Mason hearings, one dairy spokesman suggested that the British had, in fact, come to prefer the slightly metallic taste of borax in butter. The meatpackers used borax to preserve everything from canned meat to oleomargarine. In a rare moment of agreement, they joined with dairy representatives in attacking complaints like Mitchell’s, pointing out that refrigeration options were extremely limited when sending products overseas. One could do only so much by packing with ice; it served no one to sell slimy meat and rancid butter abroad. The meatpackers also moved to quell the suggestion that borax might not be a healthy additive. They hired toxicologist Walter Haines, from the University of Chicago, to assure the Senate that borax was safe. Haines didn’t exactly stick to script. He said that he’d seen no convincing evidence that borax was harming people but refused unambiguous endorsement. For the moment, Haines explained, illnesses caused by decaying foods, the dreaded “ptomaines,” seemed to him to be a far worse option.

  Such scientific caution failed to satisfy preservative makers, whose position was made clear by Albert Heller of Chicago, manufacturer of the formaldehyde-infused Freezine. Yes, Heller said, Freezine was now used in everything from cream puffs to canned corned beef. But American consumers were lucky to find it there. By preventing decay, it reduced the number of illnesses caused by the ptomaines. For all he knew, it reduced other terrible diseases like cholera as well. The American public should embrace chemical preservatives, he argued, and smart consumers already did. “I wish to say that every one of us eats embalmed meat and we know it and we like it,” Heller said.

  * * *

  —

  In the early spring of 1900, after reviewing the hearing testimony, Senator Mason delivered a fiery speech on the Senate floor. “This is the only civilized country in the world that does not protect the consumer of food products against the adulterations of manufacturers,” he charged. The country’s food was full of aluminum, “sulfuric acid, copper salts, zinc and other poisonous substances.” And if it wasn’t contaminated with toxic substances, it was faked, disguised, or otherwise adulterated. He’d had enough and he hoped the American people and his fellow legislators felt the same, Mason said. He was proud to introduce legislation that would require safety testing of additives and substitutes and prohibit those found dangerous. Further, his pure-food bill would require accurate labeling of all ingredients. If it passed, companies that failed to comply, he added, would be fined or even taken to court. He was proud to announce that comparable legislation was being introduced in the House.

  The whole parade of food and drink manufacturers—dairy, meat, eggs, flour, baking soda, beer, wine, whiskey—not to mention the chemical companies, immediately lined up against the legislation. Despite his strong language in support of the Senate bill, Mason warned Wiley privately to expect its failure. The sponsor of the House version of the bill, Congressman Marriott Brosius from Pennsylvania, was equally pessimistic. His assessment, as he also told Wiley, was that the most positive result was likely to be s
imply keeping the issue “before the public eye.”

  Within weeks, both bills were shut down in committee by legislators friendly to the different manufacturing interests. It was frustrating, Wiley wrote to Mason, because he did think public support was turning their way. He’d collected dozens of newspaper clippings about the Mason hearings and every single one of them had applauded the action of the committee.

  Many people also had written directly to Wiley requesting copies of committee testimony, issues of Bulletin 13, and even a tongue-in-cheek piece of doggerel that Wiley had written for a Pure Food Congress and impulsively decided to read aloud as part of his testimony. The verses, also published in New York’s Pharmaceutical Era Weekly, concluded pointedly:

  The banquet how fine, don’t begin it

  Till you think of the past and the future and sigh,

  “How I wonder, I wonder, what’s in it.”

  That same spring of 1900, in late May, Wiley proposed marriage to Anna Kelton. Her written answer—though not an immediate refusal—was less welcoming than he’d hoped it would be. “What worries me most of all is that I am not happier,” she wrote to him. “I had always pictured to myself that love would be consuming and overwhelming in its joy and I am on the verge of tears. What is the matter with me do you think?” She was painfully aware of the great age difference, of her mother’s staunch disapproval, and most of all of her own ambition to be independent and self-sustaining. “Browning’s line about ‘the best is yet to be’ comes into my mind but still this hobgoblin thought keeps popping up and it is that I am sacrificing my ideals, however childish they may be.”