The Poison Squad

by Deborah Blum

  Late that month, she called it off. “I am only full of reproaches for myself and for my weakness and lack of womanliness in not knowing my own mind and for letting you even this week harbor any hope of my sharing your future life,” she wrote. “But oh please believe it is that same honesty in me that before you admired which now makes me tell you this before it is too late.” She said she lacked that “sacred, sweet, overpowering feeling” that should accompany real love. “And so goodbye,” she concluded. “Goodbye with respect and the sincerest regards, I am always yours, Anna.”

  Wiley couldn’t bring himself to accept that as a final answer. A brief separation was pending—he’d been appointed to represent the Agriculture Department that summer in Paris, at the Exposition Universelle de 1900, and to organize an exhibit there showcasing the excellence of American wines and beers. With some difficulty, he persuaded her to wait until he returned from France, suggesting she take some time to think things over before definitively telling him no. They held on to that fragile truce until he sailed in mid-July. But he was still shipboard in the middle of the Atlantic when Anna Kelton requested and received a transfer from the Agriculture Department to the Library of Congress. “When I left for Paris I had a perfect understanding with her but I had not been here long before I received a very sensible letter from her saying that she had concluded that our agreement had better be terminated,” he wrote to a friend. “At the same time I gathered from what she wrote that she had been influenced in this by her family.” They thought, he knew, that it was wrong for a man of his age to court a woman in her twenties. But “I have yet to learn that loving a pretty girl in a proper way and being loved by her in return has anything blameworthy in it.”

  To Anna he wrote a tender good-bye letter. “You say, ‘Why don’t you make me love you?’ Love, dear heart, does not come by making nor does it go by unmaking. . . . I want you to know, dear heart, how much zest you have brought into my life.” She did not reply. But still he could not bring himself to remove her photo from the inside cover of his pocket watch.

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  Secretary Wilson wrote to Wiley in Paris to celebrate the good reception that he and his exhibit on alcoholic beverages had received, “which pleases me very much.” Wilson also added a note of reassurance regarding job stability. The next presidential election was coming up in November. “The campaign has not yet opened up but the indications are quite good regarding Mr. McKinley’s re-election.”

  McKinley had been forced to select a new running mate, as his popular vice president, Garret Hobart, had died in November of 1898. After much political wrangling, the party had chosen the progressive New York governor Theodore Roosevelt to take his place. McKinley’s closest advisers were unenthusiastic: Roosevelt had not backed McKinley’s nomination in 1894 and Roosevelt had an un-McKinley-like reputation as a reformer. But that turned out to be a major campaign advantage.

  The Democrats had once again named William Jennings Bryan, who had lost to McKinley four years earlier, as their candidate. As the campaign began, Bryan fiercely attacked McKinley as a corporate insider, a president beholden to banks and railroads. As he was close to those industries, McKinley decided to keep a low profile. The president gave only one speech during the campaign. The energetic Roosevelt, by contrast, gave more than 673 speeches, in 567 cities and towns, in 24 states. On November 3, Election Day, McKinley and Roosevelt won by a wide margin. Wilson’s job was secure for another four years and—as the secretary had predicted—so were both his chief chemist’s job and his food safety crusade.

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  In 1901, shortly after McKinley’s inauguration, Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis and Pabst Brewing Company of Milwaukee wrote to Wiley asking for analyses of their new “temperance beverages.” These bottled malt brews, with little alcohol content, were a relatively new take on the concept of “small beer,” which had been around in one form or another at least since medieval times, when it was often served to children. The big American brewers, producers of higher-alcohol beers and ales, began making temperance beverages to sell to nondrinkers and former drinkers and to curry favor from increasingly prominent anti-alcohol activists.

  The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union had been organized in the early 1870s with the stated goal of “achieving a sober and pure world.” It was far from the first American temperance organization, but along with the Anti-Saloon League, organized in 1893, the WCTU had become one of the most strident and effective forces opposed to alcohol consumption. With its slogan, “Agitate. Educate. Legislate,” the WCTU linked this cause to another growing social movement, that of women’s suffrage. Frances Willard, WCTU leader, saw suffrage as a key to power. She argued that if women had the vote, they could better protect their communities from drunkenness and other vices. By 1901 the organization boasted more than 150,000 members nationwide. Its activism—and growing popularity—was making American brewers and other alcohol producers increasingly nervous.

  So the brewing companies had double hopes for their temperance beverages: new markets plus the alleviation of hostilities. Wisconsin-based Pabst had two years earlier gotten the Chemistry Division to analyze its Malt Mead, seeking a stamp of approval to help market it. The lab had confirmed that the drink contained less than 2 percent alcohol. Now the company wanted Wiley’s support for another new low-alcohol beverage called Nutria. Pabst intended to sell it in Indian Territory (in the eastern half of what is now Oklahoma), where tribes including the Cherokee and Muscogee had been resettled after they were forced from ancestral lands in the Southeast. Pabst’s complaint was that the Department of Indian Affairs, which prohibited the sale of any alcoholic beverages in Indian Territory, had analyzed Nutria and declared it an intoxicating drink. It was shoddy chemistry, the company complained. Could Wiley’s more able crew set things right? The Chemistry Division’s analysis confirmed Pabst’s position and Nutria went on sale in Indian Territory.

  Anheuser-Busch, meanwhile, had created a drink called American Hop Ale, essentially a beer-flavored soft drink, and wanted Wiley and Bigelow to analyze it so that the company could use the official Chemistry Division findings as part of its marketing campaign. The chemists complied, and Wiley wrote to the company to inform it that the division had detected traces of alcohol in the product. This, the brewery responded, was merely a preservative. “This is our secret,” a reply from Anheuser-Busch explained, but surely it didn’t alter the basic nature of the beverage? “Could not a small percentage of alcohol be added to the soft stuff to make it keep?” It could, the Chemistry Division allowed, and shortly later the company launched a new near-beer campaign.

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  In May 1901 the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo opened. This latest world’s fair, with its dazzle of electric lighting powered by nearby Niagara Falls, sprawled across 350 acres and celebrated the new century under the slogan “Commercial well-being and good understanding among the American Republics.” As part of the U.S. government’s contribution, the Agriculture Department presented exhibits featuring innovations ranging from new crops to modern farm machinery. Wiley’s scientific division, now renamed the Bureau of Chemistry, participated with three displays, two of which—one highlighting the sugar beet industry, the other celebrating experimental use of plant products in road building—fit the fair’s theme and a third, organized by Willard Bigelow, on “Pure and Adulterated Foods,” that defiantly did not.

  Bigelow’s exhibit was made eye-catching by some brightly dyed flags, which were labeled as exemplifying the coal-tar agents used to color food and drink. It also featured a display of faked products, ranging from vinegar to whiskey, highlighting a newly developed technique of adding soap to rectified alcohol to simulate the way aged bourbons would bead and cling on glass. But perhaps the most pointed section dealt with the rising tide of new industrial preservatives. On these shelves were not only food s
amples but also glass jars and beakers containing preservatives extracted from everyday foods. The exhibit divided preservatives into “undoubtedly injurious, such as formaldehyde, salicylic acid, and sulfites” and possibly injurious, such as borax and benzoic acid.

  “It is claimed by those interested in their use that the amount of preservatives added to foods is so small as to be unimportant.” But in this time of no food safety regulation, “small” was left entirely to the discretion of the manufacturer. Some foods were basically soaked in the new compounds. Or as Bigelow put it: “The amount added sometimes greatly exceeds that which is believed to be necessary by those who favor the use of chemical preservatives.”

  The popular exposition ran for seven months and attracted eight million visitors, including President McKinley, who arrived in early September to make a speech against American isolationism. On the afternoon of September 6, he stood at the head of a receiving line in the exposition’s grand Temple of Music, cheerfully shaking hands with enthusiastic citizens. Reporter John D. Wells of the Buffalo Morning News, assigned to cover the event, stood taking notes, carefully describing each encounter. He would later recount that when one smiling young man got up to the president, he raised his right hand, which held a pistol wrapped in a handkerchief. Leon Czolgosz fired the pistol twice. The first bullet grazed McKinley’s chest. The second ripped through his stomach and sent him stumbling backward. The assassin was jumped by both police and attendees and transported to the local jail; the gravely injured president was rushed by ambulance to the local hospital.

  Still, doctors reassured Vice President Roosevelt and cabinet members who had rushed to Buffalo to be by McKinley’s side that the wounds were not fatal. The president was expected to recover. Roosevelt departed for a working vacation in Vermont, where he was scheduled to address the state’s Fish and Game League. But the local Buffalo doctors, refusing to use newfangled X-ray machines, had not successfully removed all the debris left by the fragmenting bullet or fully sterilized the internal injuries. The wounds became infected, gangrene set in, and on September 14, nine days after the shooting, McKinley died.

  Roosevelt rushed back—cobbling together a trip by horse, car, and train—to take the oath of office. He received a less-than-enthusiastic welcome from reform-wary leaders of his party. “I told William McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man at Philadelphia,” said Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio. “Now look, that damned cowboy is president of the United States.”

  Czolgosz, a former steelworker and a self-proclaimed anarchist, was rapidly charged, tried, and convicted. He received the death sentence, at the unanimous recommendation of the jury, and died in the electric chair at Auburn (New York) Prison on October 29, just forty-five days after the shooting.

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  In the weeks after McKinley’s death, Roosevelt sought at first to reassure the country: “In this hour of deep and terrible bereavement, I wish to state that I shall continue unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the peace, prosperity, and the honor of the country.”

  But the new president was biding his time. In February 1902, Roosevelt’s administration filed an antitrust suit against a giant holding company created by a consortium that included such Gilded Age titans as J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the Rockefellers. The Wall Street Journal angrily called it the greatest shock to the stock market since McKinley’s assassination. By contrast, Harvey Wiley was pleased to see the president show his more volatile, reformist side and hoped to see pure food and drink become one of Roosevelt’s causes. Unfortunately Wiley had stumbled already, and stumbled badly, in the opinion of the new chief executive.

  Since his adventure in Cuba, Roosevelt had become a booster of the newly independent island country. With the support of Elihu Root, the secretary of war, the president proposed an agreement that would, among other things, foster economic growth by reducing the American tariff on Cuban-grown sugar. In January 1902 the House Committee on Ways and Means began hearings on the issue. Wiley, long considered an expert on the growing and processing of sugars, was called to testify.

  Wiley feared that if the tariff on Cuban sugar was lowered, powerful American companies would see an opportunity for easy profit, buy up the imports, and resell them to American consumers at higher prices. The losers, he suspected, would be American farmers, undercut by the Cuban competition. He didn’t want to say all of this, however, in a public hearing. He knew it wouldn’t sit well with Roosevelt, but he wasn’t willing to testify contrary to what he believed. So Wiley asked Secretary Wilson to get the congressional summons withdrawn. “‘If I go up there I shall tell what I believe to be the truth and thus get in trouble,’” wrote Wiley, quoting himself in his conversation with the secretary.

  Unfortunately for Wiley and his future relations with Roosevelt, Wilson shared the chemist’s reservations about Cuban sugar and wanted those doubts to be aired in testimony before Congress. Wilson also knew he’d damage his own standing with the president if he delivered the testimony himself. As a member of the cabinet, he said, he dared not say what he thought. Wiley could. The chief chemist agreed, reluctantly, to be a witness and, characteristically, he spoke his mind. “I consider it a very unwise piece of legislation and one which will damage, to a very serious extent, our domestic sugar industry,” Wiley testified. “Do you contemplate remaining in the Agricultural Department?” a legislator asked as other committee members burst out laughing.

  The president was not amused. He summoned Wilson to demand that the chemist be fired on the spot. Wilson, realizing the extent of the damage he’d done to his subordinate, told the president that the chemist had been following departmental orders. It would be wrong to fire Wiley for doing what he was told, said the secretary. Grudgingly, Roosevelt agreed. He sent Wilson back with a message for the chief chemist: “I will let you off this time but don’t do it again.” Later that year, Roosevelt successfully negotiated a treaty that included a 20 percent tariff reduction on Cuban sugar. “I ran afoul of his good will in the first months of his administration,” Wiley later wrote ruefully. “I fear that this man with whom I had many contacts after he became president never had a very good opinion of me.”

  Five

  ONLY THE BRAVE

  1901–1903

  Oh, maybe this bread contains alum or chalk

  Or sawdust chopped up very fine

  Or gypsum in powder about which they talk,

  Terra alba just out of the mine

  By 1901 the Bureau of Chemistry had identified 152 “new” patent preservatives on the U.S. market. Although the term “new,” the government scientists found, was often merely an advertising ploy rather than a sign of innovation. Many of these products were simply remixes of old standbys like formaldehyde or copper sulfate. The main difference was that the formulas contained these compounds in greater quantities than their predecessors—and, as a result, promised astonishing shelf life. As one advertising circular put it, a good preservative was “guaranteed to keep meat, fish, poultry, etc. for any length of time without ice.” The idea of indestructible food products fascinated many in an era when kitchens were equipped with, at best, an icebox to delay spoilage.

  The American chemical industry was quick to recognize a lucrative market in such food- and drinking-enhancing products. In addition to preservatives, companies developed synthetic compounds to make food production cheaper. The sweetener saccharin, discovered in 1879 at Johns Hopkins University, cost far less than sugar and quickly replaced it as a cost-saving alternative. Flavoring agents such as laboratory-brewed citric acid or peppermint extracts could now be used in drinks and other products instead of fresh lemon juice or mint—again saving costs, and again crowding the farmer out of the supply chain.

  The pioneering industrial chemist Charles Pfizer, who had founded his New York pharmaceutical company in 1849, now also produced borax, boric acid, cream of tartar, and
citric acid for use in food and drink. Chicago’s Joseph Baur, whose Liquid Carbonic Company produced the pressurized gas used in the fizzing drinks of soda fountains, had become so interested in artificial sweeteners that in 1901 he had invested in a new business in St. Louis, the Monsanto Chemical Company, to produce saccharin in large quantities. Saccharin production had also launched the Heyden Chemical Works of New York City in 1900, although that company also branched into the preservative market, producing salicylic acid, formaldehyde, and sodium benzoate for use in food and drinks. The food and drink market also attracted Herbert Henry Dow, founder at age thirty-one of the Dow Chemical Company in Midlands, Michigan. Dow had been a chemistry student at the Case Institute of Technology (eventually merged into Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1897 with financial backing from both friends and former professors, he’d launched his own company, Dow Chemical. The company’s first venture was based on a new process Dow had invented for extracting the element bromine from brine for antiseptic use. But within a few years, Dow also made magnesium for incendiary flares, phenol for explosives, and agricultural pesticides—and was becoming a major producer of food preservatives such as sodium benzoate.

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  The bureau’s scientists learned much of what they knew about food additives from state-employed chemists in independent-minded, agriculture-rich places like Kentucky, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, where farmers were all too aware that industry was undercutting the fresh-food market with increasing use of artificial ingredients. Prominent examples included Indiana’s outspoken John Hurty and the even more combative Edwin Ladd, analytical chemist at the North Dakota Agricultural College in Fargo. Ladd’s analysis of food and drink sold in the state had led him to believe that big corporations basically regarded North Dakota as “a dumping ground for chemically-enhanced waste food products.” In 1901 he launched a statewide campaign for a pure-food law, bombarding North Dakota legislators and citizens with a catalog of dismaying data.