Swindled

by Bee Wilson

  Are we right to be so tolerant? What if the mere existence of margarine were itself a kind of fraud, perpetrated both against consumers and against butter? In Quebec, the only kind of margarine you can buy is uncoloured, so that if the substance melting on your toast is white, you can be sure it isn’t butter. In 2000, the food giant Unilever tried and failed to have this Quebecois restriction overturned.52 The same was true until quite recently in various parts of the United States. Until 1967, the state of Wisconsin, the Dairy State, influenced by the powerful butter lobby, banned the sale of yellow margarine, on the grounds that such margarine was ipso facto a swindle. (By Wisconsin standards, this law was comparatively moderate; a state law in place from 1925 to 1927 had banned the manufacture, sale, and even possession of margarine in any form whatsoever.)53 In the 1950s, the only margarine you could buy in Wisconsin was pure white, so that no one could conceivably mistake it for a natural dairy product. When the housewife bought her white block of margarine, she would also be given a small sachet of yellow food colouring, which she could mix in when she got home, if she wanted to give the margarine a more buttery look, without being deceived about what she was doing. But for some this wasn’t enough—as Wisconsin lawyer Barry Levenson discovered, “longtime Wisconsin residents remember the 1950s and early 1960s for bootleg runs to Illinois for yellow margarine.”54 Think about it: crossing the state line to get a genuinely fake version of a fake product so as not to be reduced to the indignity of having to fake it for yourself.

  The twentieth-century Wisconsin ban on yellow margarine was a hangover from 1886, the year when margarine was the subject of fierce debates in the U.S. Congress concerning both its novelty and its inauthenticity—a “greasy counterfeit,” as some called it. One congressman went so far as to name margarine “the monumental fraud of the nineteenth century.” Another expressed bewilderment at the way that cunning trickery could compound a substance “to counterfeit an article of food—it is made to look like something it is not; to taste and smell like something it is not; to sell like something it is not; and so [to] deceive.”55

  Much of the initial American hostility to margarine stemmed from the circumstances under which it had been invented. Margarine was suspicious because it was French and associated with poverty. In 1886, Senator Palmer complained that margarine dated from the siege of Paris of 1870, a desperate time when “house pets were sold in the market for food.”56 Margarine had actually been patented the year before, in 1869. In the 1860s, there had been a shortage of edible fats in Europe. Napoleon III sought a cheaper version of butter. A French chemist, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, found the answer—a new method for emulsifying beef suet. First he turned the suet into oil by “digesting” it with chopped up cattle stomachs; then he emulsified this oil with the chopped up udders of cows, plus some bicarb of soda. Mège-Mouriès found the resulting cow-fat spread so precious—so opalescent—that he named it oleomargarine, after the Greek for pearl (margaron).

  To the dairy farmers of America, however, the oily new substance was considerably less attractive than its name would suggest. The first U.S. patent for making margarine was granted on 30 December 1873. In the 1870s, U.S. agriculture was suffering a depression. and the influx of cheap butter substitutes added insult to the dairymen’s sense of economic injury. Many of the oleomargarines made using the Mège patent were blatantly pretending to be butter. They were dyed a deep daffodil yellow and packed in the same tubs that butter traditionally came in. Whether they were made from hog fat or beef fat or a mixture, they rejoiced in the delightful name of “butterine.” In 1877, New York and Pennsylvania passed laws requiring honest labelling, but this did little to stem the inexorable rise of margarine. In 1880, the United States exported nearly 40 million pounds of butter and only 20 million pounds of margarine; by 1885, the figures had reversed, with only 21.5 million pounds of butter exported and 38 million pounds of margarine. The total production of “oleo” was somewhere in the region of 50 million pounds by 1885.57

  Mark Twain gives a glimpse of how gung-ho and unscrupulous some of the margarine sellers were. On a Mississippi riverboat headed for Cincinnati, he overheard a salesman who specialized in selling “butter” that was really margarine, talking to another salesman over a late breakfast. Twain saw the first seller take out a slab of “ostensible butter” and exclaim:

  You can’t tell it from butter; by George, an expert can’t! It’s from our house. We supply most of the boats in the West; there’s hardly a pound of butter on one of them. . . . You are going to see the day pretty soon, when you can’t find an ounce of butter to bless yourself with, in any hotel in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, outside of the big cities. . . . And we can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has got to take it. . . . Butter’s had its day—and from this out, butter goes to the wall.58

  It is hardly surprising that dairy farmers should have seen margarine as the enemy.

  When “oleomargarine” was debated in the House of Representatives and Senate in the spring and summer of 1886, Representative Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin called it “a villainous device for making money lawlessly, and subtilely eating the heart out of an industry which is to the Government what blood is to the body.”59 Margarine was an attack on agriculture, which meant it was an attack on America itself. Other congressmen from dairy-producing states concurred. The New York representative complained that the dairy industry was “in danger of extinction” unless the national legislature could protect it; state laws had been no use.

  As well as being a threat to agriculture, margarine was depicted as a menace to public health. Dairymen insisted it was a “poison.”60 The Illinois representative, John R. Thomas, argued that not just farmers but consumers should be saved from margarine by the federal law, since they would not save themselves: “ ‘It would seem that Americans delight in being defrauded and that they go yawping around with their mouths open, seeking to be taken in.”61 Various representatives insisted that margarine was rancid, or made from “filthy” fats taken from diseased animals or those fed on the swill from distilleries (they had learned how effective this charge could be in triggering public unease). The Washington Post referred to margarine makers as “manipulators of condemned suet and spoiled soap grease.”62 A congressman from Virginia depicted margarine as “the stomachs of pigs, sheep and calves reduced by acids, and then bromo-chloralum used to destroy the smell and prevent detection of the putrid mass. . . . Yes, ‘cheap food’ in the form of an apothecary’s shop in the poor man’s stomach.”63

  Some of its detractors thought that margarine had the power to attack not just the body but the soul as well. There were suggestions that margarine was ungodly, since it baffled “the four senses which God has given us.” Being such a “promiscuous” mixture, perhaps it would lead to moral promiscuity in those who ate it. Margarine represented a lower way of life than butter. Congressman William Grout of Vermont argued that to resort to eating margarine would be a sign that the course of American civilization was reversed, with its citizens having moved backwards from being butter-eaters to eating the “raw tallow and lard which were the delight of our Saxon ancestors in the forests of Germany.”64

  Margarine, however, had its friends in Washington too, and they fought the increasingly hysterical tone of the butter lobbyists in a measured and reasonable tone. Butter’s allies had called margarine a “midnight assassin,” but “where was there a single tombstone engraved dead from oleomargarine?” asked Thomas Browne in Congress. As for claims that bad or “filthy” fat was used, a scientist pointed out that unless the fat used for margarine was fresh, it was “utterly worthless.” Anyway, butter itself was not as bucolic and healthy as the farmers made out; it had become an industrial food in its own right, with all the risks that implied. A Pennsylvania congressman observed that butter was often adulterated with carrots, beets, and potatoes. There were also cases of rancid butter being “recovered” or deodorized before being sold on to unwitting consumers.
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br />   The crux of the debate was not whether oleo was poisonous but whether it was deceitful. The dairymen laboured the point that this “bogus butter” was often passed off as the real thing, a basic swindle since the cost of producing it was so much less than the cost of producing butter.65 In 1879 it was said that consumers almost “invariably buy it for butter,” rather than for what it really was.66 Farmers testified that suspicious new “creameries” had opened up, which took in only small amounts of milk each day, and yet somehow managed to churn out vast quantities of “butter.”67 The reason? It was really “oleo butter,” which was making “exorbitant profits” for its swindling manufacturers. A good deal of “oleo butter” seems to have found its way into boarding houses and restaurants, where customers asked for “butter” with their meals and paid the high price of butter but were given oleo. “He Got Oleomargarine Though He Asked for Butter at a Railroad Restaurant” was one pedantic headline in the New York Times in December 1886.68

  It was easy to agree that this fraudulent sale of oleomargarine was wrong. But did it follow that no oleo should be sold? The Washington Post, fed up with the “incessant and wearisome wail” of the butter men, argued that it was fine to sell oleo, so long as it was “plainly labelled” as such with the name of the manufacturer and a government stamp on the package.69 Consumers would know that butter was butter and oleo was oleo. It would be obvious that the latter was not butter because of its low price. Equally, butter’s expense would be a test of its authenticity.

  The butter men—all too predictably—disagreed. They insisted that so long as margarine was allowed to be coloured butter-yellow, it would continue to be passed off as butter, or mistaken for it. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Agriculture in 1886, Senator Palmer, for the butter lobby, argued that the “rich, buttercup hue” of butter was sanctioned by the Bible, and that it was therefore wrong to dye margarine yellow with annatto.70 Senator Henry Blair of New Hampshire made much the same point: “You may take all the other colours of the rainbow, but let butter have its pre-empted colour.” Margarine’s friends pointed out, however, that it was hard to say exactly what butter’s “pre-empted colour” really was. Depending on the time of year and what the cows ate, butter itself varied widely in hue, sometimes turning a deep yellow, other times tending to a pale off-white. If it was fraudulent to add yellow colouring, then it was a fraud that the butter manufacturers were themselves guilty of, since much butter was itself now dyed yellow to meet consumer expectations. A Mr. Hinshaw, one of the new breed of Chicago margarine exporters, told the Senate that the margarine-makers actually had a prior claim on the yellow colouring, since the butter-makers had probably got the idea of using yellow dye from them; and that it would be only just for the margarine-makers to demand that the dairymen use a different colour from yellow. Let them have the other colours of the rainbow instead!

  In the end, though, the butter lobby was too powerful. The federal Margarine Act of 1886 imposed a tax of two cents per pound on margarine—less than the original bill, which called for a crippling ten cents a pound, but still punitive given that margarine needed to sell more cheaply than butter (which then cost about fourteen cents a pound).71 The Margarine Act also called for manufacturers and wholesalers of margarine to buy expensive licences. This law was still not enough for the dairymen, though, who went back to the states to secure even more protection. New Hampshire, whose senator had wanted butter to keep its God-given colour, passed a law requiring all margarine to be coloured a bright pink. Minnesota, another dairy state, followed suit.72 These bizarre “Pink Laws” were overturned in 1898 by the Supreme Court on the grounds that they were so extreme they were effectively a ban on margarine, and therefore “unconstitutional.”73 The legality of margarine had become a question of high constitutional politics, which is what both sides wanted. Yet neither side was satisfied with the outcome.

  An American advertisement for margarine, referring to the fact that it cannot be bought coloured yellow.

  Harvey Washington Wiley

  The temporary triumph of butter over margarine in 1886 was not a triumph for pure food over fake, but a victory for sectional interests and scaremongering over rational debate. The role of government in the whole affair, as a soapbox for the different sides rather than an instrument for bringing them together, did not inspire much confidence for the future. By the final decade of the nineteenth century, food politics in the United States still seemed hopelessly divided between the fanatics and the partisan interests, with national government caught fatally in the middle. But as so often in this story, it took one person to make the difference. He was a man of a distinctive type: extrovert but also somewhat priggish, a zealot for reform but not a fanatic for change, someone who understood the worlds of both science and big business without being in hock to either. He was, like Accum and Hassall, a man with a healthy sense of his own importance, as comes through in the autobiography he wrote at the end of his life to make clear just how important he had been in changing the face not just of food but of politics in the United States. Like Accum, he was a bit of a showman, but he had a great deal of Hassall’s remorseless determination as well. He believed himself to be a man of destiny, and though, as with so many such men, the selfimportance sometimes grates, it was crucial to what he was able to achieve. What the cause of pure food needed at the end of the nineteenth century was a new, independent-minded champion, neither crank nor commercialist, but possessing a streak of both. Harvey Washington Wiley was this person.

  A U.S. postage stamp depicting Harvey Washington Wiley (1844–1930), who did so much to secure the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906.

  An intelligent, tall, well-built man, “muscled like a ditch digger,” Wiley was born in a log cabin in rural Indiana in 1844.74 His father was a farmer and a lay preacher, who was known as the “original abolitionist of Jefferson County.” The whole family was educated to be bitterly antislavery. Wiley Jr. was brought up on the story of how, in 1840, his father had turned up at a polling station to vote for Martin van Buren, the “Free Soil” antislavery candidate, the only vote cast for him in the entire township. In those days, voting was oral, so there was no way of hiding which way you inclined. As Wiley Sr. marched up to the polls, he was assaulted with jeers of “Nigger! Nigger!” from a boorish and threatening crowd. This only strengthened his determination to do what he felt was right, and he never let young Harvey forget that this was the Wiley way.75

  The son lost his father’s religion, but he kept his ability to hold fast to unpopular views, even in the face of ridicule; indeed, unlike his father, he seemed actively to relish making himself ridiculous. After serving briefly on the Union side in the American Civil War, Wiley studied medicine, first at Indianapolis, then at Harvard. In 1874, he became one of the first faculty members at the newly founded Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. He would spend the next nine years on and off teaching there, but he made himself deeply unpopular with the board of trustees by flouting convention. Wiley liked to ride a bicycle around town—a high-wheel velocipede with one tiny wheel at the front and a giant wheel at the back, said to be the first bicycle ever seen in Tippecanoe County—wearing a pair of outrageous knickerbockers, frightening not just the horses but the local dignitaries as well. One of them compared him to “a monkey on a cart wheel.”76 It was not how a member of faculty ought to behave. The trustees also disliked the fact that he played baseball with the students and neglected to attend morning prayer. “In short, I was irreligious, frivolous and undignified,” Wiley would later tell an interviewer, with a characteristic air of self-satisfaction.77

  Despite the clowning, it was during his time at Purdue that Wiley began to take a serious interest in the battle against food adulteration. In 1878, he travelled to Germany, where he attended the lectures of the distinguished chemist August Willhem von Hofmann (1818–1892) on chemistry and Wittmack on adulteration.78 He was elected to the German Chemical Society and began to work analysing sugar chemistry.
Wiley had always been interested in sweetness, having learned how to make maple syrup as a boy from the 125 trees in his family’s maple grove. Then, in the late 1850s, sorghum was introduced into southern Indiana, a grasslike plant whose canes yielded a sweet juice. The Wileys began to grow this too from seed, turning it into dark sorghum syrup after it was harvested.79 After the Civil War, when the supply of New Orleans sugar and molasses was cut off, this home-grown sorghum supplied the Wiley family with all the sugar they needed. Wiley drew on these early memories in the 1870s when he started to analyse various different sugars using a “polariscope” that he had obtained in Germany—an instrument that used rays of light passed through a prism to test the chemical makeup of different sugar solutions. In testing sugars, he was motivated in part by the dream that America itself might become self-sufficient in sugar, just as his own family had been, rather than spending a hundred million dollars each year on imported cane sugar.80 Wiley started by analysing maple and sorghum syrups, the sweeteners of his childhood, before moving on to a new and controversial source of sugar: glucose.