The Poison Squad

by Deborah Blum

  Wilson showed himself willing to at least consider the bleached flour issue. He followed the bureau report by convening a formal hearing on the subject in the fall of 1908. During that session, Ladd, Shepard, and Wiley formed a consensus on three main points: that daily consumption of nitrates could pose a health risk, that this question deserved further study, and that until such consumption was declared safe, the chemical bleaching of flour, which produced those compounds, should be disallowed.

  Not surprisingly, the industry disagreed, as did a cadre of scientists whom milling firms hired to respond to the proposed ban. Seventy-five industry members attended the hearing and they had combined resources to employ a phalanx of experts, including well-known Chicago toxicologist Walter S. Haines, who had earlier defended the use of borax in foods. Haines testified that the nitrate amounts in bleached flour clearly were too small to do any real harm. That December, though, Wilson startled the millers by apparently agreeing with Wiley. He announced that the Agriculture Department would indeed declare bleached flour an adulterated product under the new law. That would mean, among other things, that it could no longer be transported across state lines. Ladd and Shepard hoped the decision was a sign of a healed rift between the secretary and his department’s chief chemist. “Bleached flour is a dead duck,” Wiley wrote happily in response to a query from the Indiana food commissioner, celebrating what appeared to be a rare instance in which he and the secretary of agriculture had worked in harmony.

  The details of the decision revealed, however, that Wilson and Wiley had different motives for supporting a ban. Wiley opposed chemical bleaching of flour because of the health risk, but Wilson blocked publication of the Chemistry Bureau’s toxicological findings on the subject. Wilson had ruled against bleached flour because he considered the practice a tool for deceptive marketing. With powerful bleaching techniques, millers could disguise cheap grades of flour and sell them for a much higher price. Newspaper coverage of the decision emphasized the political differences involved: “Secretary Wilson and Dr. Wiley have disagreed again,” reported the New York–based Journal of Commerce, and the chemist “has once again been turned down by his chief.”

  Wilson also remained responsive to flour-industry concerns. He allowed for a six-month grace period to review his decision and respond before initiating any prosecutions or product seizures. The secretary appeared so hesitant about enforcement, in fact, that millers decided to test his resolve by continuing to produce bleached flour and ship it as they chose.

  Rumors began to circulate that Wiley had finally pushed his boss too hard and was in imminent danger of losing his job. Alarmed members of the National Association of State Food and Dairy Departments wrote directly to Roosevelt to defend their friend. In October, Ladd joined with two other state food commissioners, John G. Emery of Wisconsin and Arthur C. Bird of Michigan, in a letter that noted, “There is a persistent rumor that the Secretary of Agriculture will dismiss Dr. Wiley or ask him to resign,” because of Wilson’s assumption that the chief chemist was responsible for the confrontation in Mackinac. “His assumption is without foundation,” the letter continued. Ladd took full credit, or blame, for organizing the protest. He and his cosigners hoped that Roosevelt would work to prevent any such unfair and harmful actions. But if things got worse, Bird wrote to Wiley, they were prepared to visit the White House in person.

  Roosevelt, they acknowledged, would be in office only a few months longer. He had earlier announced that he would not seek another term (a decision he came to regret) and the upcoming November election pitted Roosevelt’s chosen successor, William Howard Taft, against returning Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. If need be, the food chemists declared, they would take up defense of the food law—and of Wiley—with the next president as well. Even after Taft won the presidential election in November, new rumors flourished, suggesting that Roosevelt would dismiss Wiley before leaving office. Newspaper coverage made it clear that the nation’s editors—and by proxy their readers—saw that idea as an industry-backed threat to American food safety.

  The New York World, December 20, 1908: “Dr. Wiley says ‘I have not been asked to resign but I have been fought at every turn of the road by adulterators of food and I am ready to go if the Government wants to take their recommendation. Otherwise, I will remain to defend the food law, no matter how thick the bullets fly.’”

  The Boston Evening Record, December 29, 1908: “Pure Food Doc Wiley . . . has made hundreds of enemies but he has made them for the sake of the public. If the food tinkerers ever do actually get him removed, the consumer will pay the freight.”

  The New York Evening Mail, December 31, 1908: “It is earnestly hoped that Mr. Wiley will fight his enemies, open and secret, and that he will continue to denounce the modern system of mixing poison with food to increase the profit.”

  The chorus of public dismay became so loud that Roosevelt’s executive secretary, William Loeb Jr., issued a statement declaring that he “knew of no friction” between the president and the popular chief chemist and had heard of no plans to replace Wiley. Roosevelt agreed that he had no plans to remove the chief chemist but he qualified that expression of support shortly later. He told a reporter that he had personally reviewed Wiley’s opinions on the issues of corn syrup, accurate labeling of imported French vinegar, and the safety of saccharin, and he had disagreed with him every time. “Those instances gave me a great distrust of Wiley’s good judgment.” On the other hand, the president continued, “I have such confidence in his integrity and zeal that I am anxious to back him up to the limit of my power wherever I can be sure that doing so won’t do damage instead of good.”

  If regulations became too rigid or petty, Roosevelt emphasized, then a backlash could lead to “upsetting of the whole pure food law.” He hoped that reasonable men could agree that such a result would serve no one well.

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  That same December, the Bureau of Chemistry issued a summary report on formaldehyde as a food preservative. It was a straightforward condemnation of the practice: Formaldehyde, still heavily used in milk, especially in summer, was a poisonous additive with an “insidious effect on the cells.” The compound had sickened every single one of the Poison Squad members who had taken it with meals; they’d suffered sleeplessness, headaches, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, and vomiting. They’d lost weight. An analysis of their blood and urine had found that in every case calcium oxalate crystals were forming in the urine and white blood cell counts were dropping, suggesting immune system harm. The bureau concluded with a flat statement: The use of formaldehyde in food “is never justified.” Despite the forceful language, this was one of Wiley’s least controversial findings.

  A review of findings in the New York State Journal of Medicine cited a litany of evidence that formaldehyde was a “violent poison.” Examples ranged from the death of a teenager (who drank a 4 percent solution of formaldehyde and died twenty-nine hours later) to a study in which five kittens were given milk containing 1/50,000 formaldehyde. Three of the five died within hours. Despite their many differences, Wilson, McCabe, and Dunlap all concurred with Wiley that the federal government should bar formaldehyde as a food additive.

  Wiley also could take comfort in the fact that he’d successfully argued against borax as a food additive and that his position had been upheld within the department. At Wilson’s direction, the agency began seizing borax-laced products to get them off the market. After a seizure of a train carload of its cheese, the MacLaren Imperial Cheese Company (a Canadian manufacturer later purchased by the J.L. Kraft & Brothers Company) asked Wilson to refer the borax question to the Remsen Board. Wilson refused to do so.

  The secretary also had endorsed a November decision to seize fifty-two industrial-sized cans of eggs preserved in a 2 percent solution of boracic acid. The Hipolite Egg Company of St. Louis sold these huge cans—forty-two pounds each—to the baking indus
try at a price much lower than that of fresh eggs. Hipolite specialized in salvaging dirty, cracked, and even rotting eggs for use in breads and cakes. The company was particularly known for using “spots” (decomposing eggs); mixing their contents into a thick, homogenous mass; using boracic acid, a by-product of borax, to halt further decomposition; and then selling the eggy soup by the can. Wilson not only approved the seizure but also initiated a legal action against the company to halt its use of the preservative. As with the move to ban formaldehyde, this was a politically astute decision. Borax had fallen out of favor precipitously since Wiley’s first Poison Squad report—and since the unscrupulous propaganda tactics of the Pacific Coast Borax Company had come to light.

  For some years, magazines and newspapers across the country had been printing the anti-Wiley, pro-preservative opinions of H. H. Langdon, who identified himself as a public health advocate with a scientific background. Langdon’s ideas usually appeared in letters to the editor but also in the occasional magazine essay. After Wiley had published in 1907 a book compiling the bureau’s analyses under the title Foods and Their Adulteration, the apparently science-savvy Langdon had written a fiercely critical review of the work. But “Langdon” was a fictional creation of H. L. Harris, the chief publicist for the Pacific Coast Borax Company. Harris planted his Langdon letters in large publications and small. In a missive to a newspaper in eastern Ohio, the Alliance Review, he wrote, “A recent case of ptomaine poisoning in Alliance has caused the thought that it is certainly appalling to learn how rapidly ptomaine poisoning cases have increased since the passage of the pure food law.”

  To the New York Times the fictional Langdon described Wiley as an untrustworthy scientist of “radical views.” In Scientific American he insisted that the health of the Poison Squad volunteers was improved by eating borax-laced food. His work even appeared in Paul Pierce’s What to Eat, where he wrote that the Poison Squad experiments could not be trusted because the bureau’s dining room was so shabby and dirty as to depress anyone’s appetite. These entirely fictional statements were reprinted with enough effect that scientists hostile to Wiley—such as the German industrial chemist Oscar Liebreich, who had helped bring borax into favor—sometimes included them in their own testimony.

  It was the adoption of the Harris/Langdon statements by high-profile pharmaceutical chemists like Liebreich that led the American Medical Association to investigate. AMA physicians reviewed the cases of ptomaine poisoning reported in the fake letters and discovered that many had never occurred; most of the illnesses ranged from indigestion to a few suicidal “self-administrations of arsenic.” In other words, there had been no sudden increase in bacterial food poisoning due to the reduction in use of borax and other preservatives. In an article titled “Press Agents and Preservatives,” the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) faulted other periodicals for the tendency of the lazy editor to “calmly appropriate Harris’s ‘dope’ as fact and print it as his own.” They advised the group’s physician members to report any Langdon letters to newspaper editors. In some cases, newspapers had started adding editors’ notes to the Langdon opinions, a positive step that the AMA noted, “must cause chagrin and disgust at the headquarters of the Pacific Coast Borax Company.”

  But despite such evidence of skullduggery by the food industry, and despite his support for prohibiting additives such as borax and formaldehyde, Wilson remained deeply wary of Wiley and his activist tendencies. He again refused to consider restrictions on the use of sulfur compounds in food. He again said that he was waiting for the Remsen Board’s recommendation on sodium benzoate before he would make any decision. It surprised neither Wiley nor his allies when the board’s report, issued on January 26, 1909, found no problem worth mentioning with sodium benzoate. “You will find it rich reading,” Wiley wrote to a friend after reading the published report and noting that he had not been shown an advance copy. “Excuses for everything.”

  Three of the board members—Long, Herter, and Chittenden—had independently conducted their studies, loosely following Wiley’s design, and failed to replicate the signs of serious illness seen in the Poison Squad study. They had tested the preservative on a group of young men, but they had added several additional months to the testing and they had experimented with a wider range of doses. All three of the Remsen Board researchers saw some signs of ill health in their subjects but dismissed them as “slight modifications in certain physiological processes, the exact significance of which modifications is not known.” To a man, they suggested that the causes were anything from lack of sleep to the weather. Chittenden, for instance, blamed the nausea and diarrhea that he observed on a “hot, dry New England summer.” The Remsen Board announced that it could reassure the government and the public that sodium benzoate—at an industry-standard dose of 0.01 percent—was perfectly safe.

  Preservative makers declared the Remsen report a victory over an “arrogant official scientist.” Once again, the food-manufacturing association called for Wiley’s removal from office and predicted that the food additives he had criticized—from copper sulfate to saccharin—would be found innocuous. But such public celebration, as the New York Times reported, almost immediately backfired. Pure-food advocates immediately charged that the Remsen report was biased, beginning a new round in what the paper called “a first class fight.”

  The Journal of the American Medical Association wrote that the Remsen Board seemed determined to find no health implications. “[T]his decision of the board leaves the question of the physiologic action of sodium benzoate on the community practically where it was before; that is, that while the substance is known to be a bacterial poison, its deleterious action on the human organs is, in the words of the Scotch verdict, ‘not proven.’” A Scottish “not proven” verdict meant, in this context, that although the charge had not been established as true, the defendant had not been absolved of guilt, either. “It is to be hoped that Dr. Wiley will be in no way discouraged and will remain at his post and continue to hew to the line,” the piece continued. “He is a government official of a type that happily is becoming more common—one of those men who appreciate that they represent the public and that they are expected to look after the interests of the public and not the interests of any class. . . . No wonder he is so cordially hated by those who heretofore fattened at the expense of public health and well-being.”

  Women’s clubs, consumer leagues, newspaper editorial writers, even the Canners Association and the National Wholesale Grocers Association all came angrily to Wiley’s defense. On the day that the Remsen report was published, Paul Pierce announced the formation of a new advocacy group, the American Association for the Promotion of Purity in Food Products, which included representatives from industry including the Shredded Wheat Company, the Franco-American Food Company, the Beechnut Packing Company, and the H.J. Heinz Company. Heinz paid for the association’s press agent, who kept journalists supplied with pamphlets detailing both the risks of preservatives and the corporate corruption of the Agriculture Department. “If you could see the letters, telegrams and newspaper clippings pouring in upon me,” Wiley wrote to Edwin Ladd, “you would think the Referee [Remsen] Board had not a single supporter in the country.”

  Wilson was unmoved by such political drama. He accepted the Remsen report without criticism, simply recommending that the preservative be allowed at a low enough level to be considered safe until proven otherwise by objective science. In March 1909, just before leaving office, President Roosevelt approved a regulation permitting the use of sodium benzoate in food at a level set at 0.01 percent. If he’d been less on the defensive, Wiley could have celebrated the fact that he’d at least gotten a limit put in place. But he, his allies, and the press took the decision as a resounding defeat for the chief chemist and his cause. The assessment was that the army of pure-food advocates had flexed their political muscle to an impressive extent, but they had lost.

 
Wiley thought again about quitting but rejected that idea. He’d come too far and he felt he owed his loyalty and allegiance to his many like-minded comrades in battle. As he wrote to a friend, it would be cowardly for “a general to resign his command because one part of his army was engulfed.” He had flaws, he acknowledged, but he could say proudly that cowardice was not one of them.

  Twelve

  OF WHISKEY AND SODA

  1909

  The banquet how fine, don’t begin it

  William Howard Taft won the presidency largely thanks to the support of Theodore Roosevelt, and he shared his patron’s wariness of the Agriculture Department’s crusading chief chemist: “I expect to give Dr. Wiley the reasonable and just support he is entitled to have,” Taft wrote, shortly after taking office, to one of Wiley’s anxious supporters. “But when I feel he has done an injustice I expect to differ with him even at the expense of having my motives questioned.”

  He expected, on the other hand, that his relationship with Roosevelt would stay cordial. But the sitting president and the former one grew apart over the next four years. A simple and widely cited explanation for the split is that the office brought out Taft’s conservative tendencies even while Roosevelt, restless and unhappy at being out of power, grew more progressive. Their differences came to a head when a very public disagreement over wilderness protection prompted Taft in 1910 to fire the popular Gifford Pinchot from his position as U.S. Forest Service chief. The move alienated not just Roosevelt, who had appointed Pinchot to the position, but other progressive Republicans as well, creating a serious rift within the party.

  Yet the alienation between the Taft and Roosevelt factions was rooted in more than one big dispute. From his earliest days in office, Taft showed a willingness to reconsider Roosevelt’s rulings, including some controversial new positions on enforcement of the food law.