by Deborah Blum
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In November 1902, just over six months after Wiley received his grant, the dining room opened its doors for the first round of tests. In its honor, a squad member propped up a sign at the entrance to the little dining room. Like the room itself, there was nothing fancy about it, just seven black-stenciled words on a white-painted board. They read: ONLY THE BRAVE DARE EAT THE FARE.
The first snag in Wiley’s tidy plan came early. His volunteers soon realized—possibly through the study’s garrulous chef, S. S. Perry—that the borax had been secreted in the butter. They quit putting butter on their bread. Wiley then quietly resorted to the British approach, serving borax-dosed glasses of milk. The diners figured that out too. “Those who thought the preservative was concealed in the butter were disposed to find the butter unpalatable and the same was true with those who thought it might be in the milk or the coffee.” After a few more attempts to sneak the preservative onto the table, he decided on a straightforward approach. The table settings for the first group now included a dish of borax capsules, and either he or Bigelow or one of the other chemists stood by, monitoring to make sure that the squad members took the requisite amount. He did not take the borax capsules himself. But that didn’t stop him from being referred to in the Washington Post as “Old Borax.”
Wiley’s plan had been to conduct a quietly managed study and then report the results in discreet scientific fashion. It was with some dismay that he realized his experiment had attracted the amused attention of an ambitious young reporter for the Washington Post, George Rothwell Brown. The son of a Washington physician, Brown, twenty-three, had started a neighborhood newspaper in the basement of his family’s Capitol Hill home when he was still in high school. He’d already put in a few years reporting for the Washington Times when, in 1902, the Post hired him away. While reporting on Congress, Brown came across a dry description of Wiley’s proposal while looking over the federal budget. The journalist scented a good story and hurried over to talk to Wiley and his staff.
Brown found them less helpful than he had hoped. Although he often sought to engage the public in his campaign for pure foods, Wiley feared in this case that too much showy attention might bias the study and rob it of scientific dignity. He also worried that things would go wrong and that he wouldn’t be able to manage the resulting bad news.
So Wiley warned his employees against granting interviews. “I can’t say anything about anything,” one chemist told Brown about the experiment. Wiley also warned that volunteers would be dropped from the program if they were caught talking with journalists. Brown countered by hanging around outside the Chemistry Bureau building and following volunteers down the street. Wiley caught him several times chatting cordially with Chef Perry through a basement window.
Brown’s first story was headlined DR. WILEY AND HIS BOARDERS. The Post published it in early November. “The kitchen at the bureau of chemistry has been painted and put in excellent condition, and the chef is ready for business.” Wiley apparently didn’t approve of the breezy, cheerful tone, as Brown made evident in his next story: “The authorities are apprehensive that unless the public can be brought to look upon the experiments as an enterprise undertaken by scientific men and carried out in sober earnest, with a view to deciding a question of vast import to the country at large, the results of their self-sacrificing labors and patient investigation will be partially if not entirely lost. Any suspicion or belief in the public mind that there is a humorous or insincere element or phase connected with the experiments deserving of scoffing or ridicule would be deplorable in its effect.”
But Brown and his editors shared a concern that the Post’s readers were never going to warm up to a story about “hygienic table trials.” They needed more human interest and a catchier description. He spent long hours hunting down the identities of the first group of volunteers, who were “braving the perils of a course on food preservatives.” The standout among them was B. J. Teasdale, whom Brown described as “a famous Yale sprinter and a former captain in a high school cadet regiment.” Teasdale had set a record in the one-hundred-yard dash. The others, none as distinguished, were “the fat boarder,” “the thin boarder,” the Irishman whom Brown called “the only one of the Emerald Isle’s sons among the twelve subjects,” and volunteers whom he identified geographically as being from Mississippi, New York, and Pennsylvania. But collectively they were a band of brothers. And, to give them credit, Brown believed that it took some courage to venture into the chemical unknown. With that in mind, he found a better name for the study. He would simply call it the “Poison Squad.”
That didn’t stop him from seeing that the idea of borax in food offered limitless opportunities for entertainment. As the study continued into December, he imagined, for readers of the newspaper, what that year’s Christmas dinner menu might look like:
Apple Sauce.
Borax.
Soup.
Borax. Turkey. Borax.
Borax.
Canned String Beans.
Sweet Potatoes. White Potatoes.
Turnips.
Borax.
Chipped Beef. Cream Gravy.
Cranberry Sauce. Celery. Pickles.
Rice Pudding.
Milk. Bread and Butter. Tea. Coffee.
A Little Borax.
Wiley was known in the department for having a lively sense of humor; Secretary Wilson himself publicly admired it. So he could live with being called Old Borax in his city’s newspaper. He could even laugh about it. He could also see the humor in the supposed holiday menu. He’d drafted a joke menu himself, although that he managed to keep a secret.
That December he’d been asked by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to help organize holiday social events for the organization’s friends and for respected scientists and politicians and—as the note to Wiley read—to stand as a “representative of the best people in Washington.” He’d responded with invitations to a “poison dinner” of his own, inscribed with skulls and crossbones, undertaker advertisements, and pictures of skeletons labeled “after.” The invitations featured a menu of preservatives, additives, and adulterations woven into a tongue-in-cheek play on fine French dining:
MENU DU SOUPER EMPOISONNE
Le 13 Decembre 1902
Huitres queu de coq—sauce Formaldehyde (Xeres adroitment falsifie)
Hors d’ouevres varies a l’aude benzoique (Sauternes a l’aide sulfereuz)
Howards a la Nouvelle Dills aux ptomaines
Callies (perdeux) a pain brulee sauce borate de soude
Salade coucobre a l’huile de coton
Fromage aux falsifications diverses
Café artificial
Liqueurs de tête mort
Tabac—a former
Matin—Bromo-selzer a volante
Invitation du Monsieur le Docteur Wiley d’assister a un coupfer a la Roland B. Molineux
Molineux was one of the country’s more notorious cyanide murderers. A member of an aristocratic New York family—and the grandson of a decorated Civil War general—he’d been convicted in 1900 of killing two people he disliked by mailing them gifts spiked with poison.
Wiley was indeed grateful that Brown hadn’t gotten his hands on a copy of that menu. But as the dismayed scientists at the Chemistry Bureau came to realize, if Brown couldn’t find an element of interest in that week’s work, the lively-minded journalist just made it up. For example, there was the story accusing the Chemistry Bureau of nearly starving the squad members: “F.B. Linton, who weighs out the food when Dr. Wiley is otherwise engaged, will bite a bean in half” rather than give the diners too much food. Another Post article reported that after only a few weeks on the borax diet, half the boarders were losing weight and the cook was so depressed that in his distraction he’d burned a turkey dinner. Another said
that one of the volunteers was putting on weight and another was losing it, baffling the scientists: “Dr. Wiley is in despair.” Brown reported that the volunteers also were messing with the study, relating the tale of a test subject who “in the spirit of mischief” dropped quinine into another boarder’s coffee. The victim of the joke, wrote Brown, went home “prepared to die in the interests of science.”
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Brown’s most fanciful masterpiece appeared more than six months into the Poison Squad work, in the summer of 1903. Headlined BOARDERS TURN PINK, it claimed that the steady diet of borax had wrought a marked and permanent change in the skin color of all members of the Poison Squad: “The change in the complexion of the chemical scholars has not been of an alarming character. On the contrary, each of the young men undergoing the course of treatment has blossomed out with a bright-pink complexion that would make a society bride sick with envy.” The excited agricultural chemists, he added, were in the process of drafting a pamphlet about their revolutionary discovery. To Wiley’s annoyance, Brown’s widely distributed story—promising skin as rosy as “the inside of a strawberry”—resulted in a small deluge of letters to the Agriculture Department from women seeking the new secret to youthful skin.
By that time, the once sedate hygienic table trials had found their place in popular culture. Entertainer Lew Dockstader was performing “Song of the Poison Squad,” written by S. W. Gillilan, in his minstrel shows.
O we’re the merriest herd of hulks
That ever the world has seen;
We don’t shy off from your
Rough on Rats or even from Paris green
We’re on the hunt for a toxic dope
That’s certain to kill, sans fail
But ’tis a tricky, elusive thing and
Knows we are on its trail;
For all the things that could kill
We’ve downed in many a gruesome wad,
And still we’re gaining a pound a day,
For we are the Pizen Squad.
Rough on Rats was an arsenic-based rodent poison. Paris green, formed from copper, acetate, and arsenic, was used in pest control and as a coloring agent. Neither Wiley nor Secretary Wilson was pleased—neither by the notion that they were deliberately poisoning their volunteers nor that the Chemistry Bureau’s research was now featured in musical satire.
The secretary and the chief chemist both complained repeatedly to the Post over the months that Brown’s articles were making the department a laughingstock. They got little satisfaction. But after the BOARDERS TURN PINK story, the paper’s editors had to acknowledge that their reporter had invented the whole thing. What the editors didn’t catch—not then, anyway—was that Brown had missed the most important, if not the most entertaining, aspect of the Poison Squad story. By the summer of 1903, Wiley was looking at results that suggested steady ingestion of borax was not nearly as benign as had been assumed.
Six
LESSONS IN FOOD POISONING
1903–1904
And our faith in the butter is apt to be weak,
For we haven’t a good place to pin it
Annato’s so yellow and beef fat so sleek
Oh, I wish I could know what is in it.
In 1903 Fannie Farmer was the most famous cookbook author in the United States. She had become a household name after publishing The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book seven years earlier. In it she had included more than recipes, written about more than preparation, presentation, and flavor. She’d also discussed food chemistry and principles of nutrition as she understood them.
“Food,” the book began simply, “is anything that nourishes the body.” She proceeded to explain that “thirteen elements enter into the composition of the body: oxygen, 62½ percent; carbon, 21½ percent; hydrogen, 10 percent; nitrogen, 3 percent; calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, chlorine, sodium, magnesium, iron, and fluorine the remaining 3 percent.” While other chemical elements were found in food, she noted, “as their uses are unknown, [they] will not be considered.” Farmer’s editor at Little, Brown and Company of Boston had wondered whether women needed such chemical information. Cookbooks, replied Farmer, were an essential form of education for American women, most of whom were afforded little if any opportunity to attend college.
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Little, Brown eventually agreed to print the book, but only if the author herself paid for the first print run. Within a year, Farmer’s 1896 opus had been reprinted three times; within a decade it had sold close to 400,000 copies (and by the midtwentieth century that number would top two million). Little, Brown’s hesitation worked to Farmer’s advantage. She had agreed to pay for publishing the book only if she retained control of the rights. By her death in 1914, thanks to her cookbook sales, she held stock in businesses that ranged from railroad companies to chocolate factories.
In 1903 she was already financially secure. At forty-six, she could write as she chose. She chose to write a book that she would consider the most important of her career: Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent. The idea had arisen directly out of her own struggles for good health. Born in 1857, the youngest daughter of a Boston printer, she’d suffered a collapse at the age of sixteen. Doctors diagnosed the cause as a “paralytic stroke,” although later experts would wonder if the girl had suffered a polio infection. For several years Fannie was unable to walk. Her mother nursed her; her father carried her from bed to chair. She was in her twenties before she began to hobble around the house; thirty before she was independent enough to enroll as a student at the Boston Cooking School.
There, in addition to cooking techniques, students learned about germ theory—the understanding that microbes cause illness, still a cutting-edge idea in the nineteenth century—and how to apply hygienic principles. They studied the chemistry of food and read the latest research into the principles of nutrition. Within three years she was assisting the principal, and by the time she wrote her famous first cookbook, she had become the head of the cooking school.
Farmer may have been the most influential author so far to warn of impurities in the food supply. Her devoted audience—composed largely of mothers and homemakers—was particularly receptive to the warning. An entire section of Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent was focused on the “unappetizing and unhealthful pollution” of commercially sold milk. This supposedly “pure” food, she wrote, was still filthy, still too often thinned with water, full of chalk, food dyes, and harmful microorganisms. She joined other Americans advocating for pasteurization, the pathogen-killing heat process widely used in Europe. “The pathogenic germs in milk are often causes of typhoid fever, diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and cholera,” she warned. Some American dairies, especially in the larger cities, had begun employing the process, but it made their products more expensive. Most dairymen continued to prefer far cheaper chemical preservations. Farmer wanted to alert her devoted readers of the dangers of “borax, boracic acid, salicylic acid, benzoic acid, potassium chromate, and carbonate of soda.”
Earlier cookbook authors had also warned of the risks of food fakery; nineteenth-century recipes had routinely included asides about fraudulent spices or sham coffees. But Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent gained extra attention because of its famous author and because it was published in 1904, a year in which public awareness of food problems was increasing, partly due to press coverage of Wiley’s experiments. That May the New York Times announced that the first group of Chemistry Bureau volunteers had officially retired from the job of “eating poisons under the direction of the Agricultural Department” and been allowed to resume their normal lives. “The ill effects of eating drugs used in preserving articles of diet are said to be visible on all members of the squad, and one or two of them appear to be on the verge of breaking down,” the Times noted.
Wiley had tu
rned in his borax report, nearly five hundred pages, to Secretary Wilson for review. The department had “declined to give out figures” without Wilson’s approval. But the Times anticipated the conclusion. Its subhead read PROFESSOR WILEY HELD THE MICROSCOPE WHILE THE VOLUNTEERS WRIGGLED. The experiments, the story explained, were designed to help solve the “poison mysteries” related to eating canned and preserved foods. How much “poison”—as the paper repeatedly called borax—did the squad members consume? “It is known that each of the martyrs to science ate several ounces of poison—about the same amount fed to soldiers in Cuba in the unpleasantness with Spain.” (The newspaper gave no source for this dubious comparison.) Did the study prove that preservatives were indeed poisonous? “The result shows that many preservatives are deadly, causing pronounced inflammation of the digestive tract.”
In June the Department of Agriculture released its official report on the borax experiment. Wilson had hesitated to make the results public, but sensationalistic press coverage had rendered such reluctance futile. At best, the report had the potential to temper the tone of what had been written elsewhere about the trials. Titled Influence of Food Preservatives and Artificial Colors on Digestion and Health. I. Boric Acid and Borax, it did not throw around the word “poison.” It did not suggest that volunteers were tottering toward death or had turned pink. It did state that a steady diet of borax was shown to harm the human system.