by Bee Wilson
Like margarine, glucose—made in the United States from Indian corn—was a relatively recent creation, and many people were equally willing to denounce it as a sinister novelty. George Angell railed against glucose as a terrifying “giant” that had “grown in a few years to colossal proportions.”81 The question of size was undeniable; by the late 1870s, glucose was a two-million-dollar industry.82 But Angell also insisted that glucose was bad for health, and this point was much less clear-cut. Wiley himself had mixed feelings about glucose. Essentially, he welcomed it as a wholesome, home-grown food, writing in the Popular Science Monthly in 1881 that “Corn, the new American king, now supplies us with bread, meat and sugar, as well as the whisky which we could do without.”83 On the other hand, his studies of various sugars showed him just how widely glucose was used not in its own right but as an adulterant. In the same article in 1881, he gave the example of honey. Much liquid “honey” at this time was really cleverly disguised glucose, with just a hint of the real stuff left in to give the right smell. Wiley knew that honey forgers went to great lengths to hide their deception. Sometimes, they went so far as to “put the remnants of bees, wings, legs etc. to carry out the fraud” so that the unnatural cleanness of glucose would not give its true nature away.84 Shameless swindlers would take an artificial comb, fill it up with glucose, and cap the cells with paraffin.85 According to the same article, “some inventive Yankee,” so Wiley wrote, had gone so far as to patent this devious process.
When beekeepers read this, however, they did not see the funny side, and Wiley’s remarks were interpreted as a slur on the integrity of honey. Honey journals referred to the notion of an artificial glucose comb as “the Wiley lie.” The fear was that the whole honey industry would be damaged by the charge, and Wiley recalled that “I was made the object of bitter attack by beekeepers all over the US for years.” Wiley did his best, though, to assure the beekeepers that he was on their side; that his intention was not to encourage adulteration but to prevent it. He wrote a report to the Indiana State Board of Health examining the sugars and syrups on sale, including honey, and the extent to which they had been adulterated. Once the beekeepers saw Wiley’s evidence of “the vast injury done to the honey industry” by its adulteration with glucose, they came round to his side and, as he happily recorded in his autobiography, some of them “became my most enthusiastic supporters.”86
Beekeepers were not the only ones to have taken note of Wiley’s sugar analyses. While attending a conference of sorghum growers in St. Louis, Wiley met Dr. George Loring, the U.S. Commissioner of Agriculture, and made a good impression on him. In April 1883, the call came from Washington for Wiley to become the chief chemist in the Department of Agriculture. Wiley happily accepted, leaving the provincial scholars of Purdue for the intense political activity of the capital. At first, he continued his work on sugar, pressing for the establishment of a domestic sugar beet industry, against opposition from various interest groups. Later, he would claim for himself the title of “father of the beet-sugar industry.”87 Increasingly, though, he devoted himself to studying adulteration wherever he could find it, using his lab for the systematic analysis of various foods, bringing out reports on dairy products (1887); spices and condiments (1887); fermented alcoholic beverages (1887); lard (1889); baking powders (1889); sugars (1892); tea, coffee, and cocoa (1892); and canned vegetables (1893). He also spoke out against the “wretched and disgraceful evil” of adulteration in medicine, attacking patent medicines and the “various nostrums, salves, appliances, poisons, magic and sheer fraud this group of ghouls foisted upon . . . suffering humanity.”88 He was equally incensed by false advertisements for food, which claimed that special foods could “feed the brain, or feed the nerves, or feed the skin.”89 In 1892, he was elected president of the American Chemical Association. He was well on the way to establishing himself as the dominant figure in the fight against adulteration in the States.
There were others in Washington besides Wiley who interested themselves in pure food at this time. In 1889, Senator A. S. Paddock of Nebraska had brought a pure food bill before Congress, hoping to capitalize on some of Wiley’s work (and on the margarine wars of a couple of years previously). But it failed; the bill was ridiculed, and then thwarted, as were subsequent, similar bills during the following decade. But Wiley was not downhearted. He understood the importance of choosing the right battles, and he had a peculiar knack for garnering the most effective kind of publicity for his cause; he also had an unusual hunger for the fight. In his youth, he had considered a career as a prizefighter, and he never lost his fighting instincts. There was an inevitable degree of self-aggrandizement in his struggle, and recent historians have shown that he was as concerned as any other Washington insider with increasing the power and prestige of his own federal bureau in relation to other government agencies.90 But Wiley retained a clear sense of who his real enemies were—those who used chemicals to preserve food; dishonest labellers; manufacturers of adulterants; and sellers of patent medicines—and a pugnacious desire to defeat them. He knew that these interest groups would smugly label anyone who attacked them as “cranks” or “reformers without much business sense.”91 And he was determined not to let them get away with it.
It also helped that ridicule was something the thick-skinned Wiley knew how to deal with. To a certain degree, he guarded himself against it, fighting his cause in as reasonable and uncrankish a way as possible. Compared to other pure food campaigners, his language was not messianic, but humorous and commonsensical. He made a point of avoiding exaggeration, observing that the extent of adulteration was often overstated, and that it affected perhaps 5 percent of the food supply. On many questions he was neither a purist nor a prohibitionist. “It is not for me to tell my neighbour what he should eat, what he shall drink, what his religion shall be, or what his politics. These are matters which I think every man should be left to settle for himself. . . . Anything under heaven that I may be pleased to do I want the privilege of doing, even if it is eating limburger cheese” (a famously smelly cheese).92
But when he found something he did want to attack, he went after it with every sinew in his vast frame, daring the mockers to scoff. Fake honey and bleached flour; ineffectual headache powders and ludicrous panaceas; concealed caffeine and “rectified” or artificial whisky; these were Wiley’s great bugbears. His most famous battle, though, was against manufacturers who claimed to be able to stave off the march of time itself: the makers of the new breed of preservatives.
Preservatives and the Poison Squad
“There is but one proper way to preserve foods,” Wiley told a lecture audience in Washington, DC, in 1897, “and that is through sterilization and afterward hermetically sealing the vessels in which they are kept.”93 Most manufacturers took a different approach. With the twentieth century looming, an array of new wonder products was now at their disposal to arrest the inevitable tendency of food to decays. Manufacturers could now buy Freezine or Freezem, Rosaline or Preservaline to delay the decomposition of milk, cream, ice cream, sausages, hamburger steak, fish, and bulk oysters, or “almost every conceivable food that will spoil.”94 Wiley talked in his lecture about the growing use of salicylic acid, which “paralyses organic action” but also has a “deleterious effect upon the digestion.”95 The canning industry, which was growing by the day, made considerable use of additives: saccharine to make corn sweeter, copper to make peas greener, and all sorts of preservatives to stop meat from going off. Wiley had an instinctive dislike of these additives, which he felt could only deceive the consumer.
When presented with the argument that these new preservatives were no different from older ones, such as sugar, salt, and spice, Wiley would vehemently disagree. Spice advertised its presence with its distinctive taste, whereas these new chemicals were mostly devoid of taste or smell, so people who ate them had no idea they were there. Old-fashioned preservatives were, in Wiley’s word, ‘condimental’, adding a great deal more to the
food than the mere fact that they helped it to keep, whereas these new additives were merely ‘chemical.” To prove his point, he asked why little salt cellars of borax (otherwise known as sodium borate, a widely available industrial preservative described by Wiley as a “germicide” for “paralyzing fermentative action”) should not be placed on the table along with the salt and pepper, so that people could add it or not as they chose.96
In 1898–99, the whole nation woke up to the potential problem of preservatives when the “embalmed meat” scandal broke.97 During the Spanish-American War of 1898, American troops in Puerto Rico and Cuba sent frequent complaints home about the quality of the beef they were fed, both canned and so-called fresh—“putrid,” “pungent,” “stringy,” and “gristly” were some of the terms used. During previous wars, such as the Civil War, animals were taken with the armies and slaughtered as needed. By the 1890s, however, America had a far more efficient meat-packing and processing industry, and it was decided that the army should be supplied with refrigerated beef, along with canned beef. Both kinds of meat drew complaints from soldiers, and these coincided with a growing incidence of disease in army camps.
This was a war with few direct American casualties in the line of battle but many incidental deaths, and in September 1898 President McKinley set up the Dodge Commission to investigate the conduct of the War Department during the war. In December 1898, a Major General Nelson A. Miles testified that 337 tons of “so-called refrigerated beef, which you might call embalmed beef,” had been sent to the troops in Puerto Rico over the summer.98 It was the word “embalmed” that was so shocking, suggesting as it did a human corpse. Another witness, Major W. H. Daly, an army surgeon, testified that he had seen “fresh beef” on an army ship sailing from Puerto Rico that smelt like an embalmed human body and tasted like decomposed boric acid. He also testified that he saw a quarter of beef hanging in the sun for sixty hours that remained completely, suspiciously, untainted. Meanwhile, numerous reports were heard of fighting soldiers having been disgusted by their rations of canned beef. Often it made them feel so ill they would throw it away rather than eat it. To be alarmed by preservatives no longer marked you out as a crank.
Ironically, when asked by the U.S. government to investigate army meat, Wiley, the arch enemy of preservatives, now found that the trouble in this case was not preservatives at all. “Embalmed beef” was largely a fiction. Wiley and his assistant, W. D. Bigelow, analysed samples of army canned beef and found no trace of any chemicals used as preservatives except for good old-fashioned salt—no borax, no boric acid, no sulfites, no salicylic acid, and no benzoic acid.99 By contrast, when his bureau tested ordinary commercial samples of canned meats a few years later, they found chemical preservatives in 6 percent of samples. Wiley concluded that the reason the rations had made the soldiers feel so nauseated was twofold. First, the army diet was badly constructed—day after day of cold slimy canned beef, with no potatoes or rice to balance it. “The human stomach does not tolerate the recurrence of the same article of food daily very well . . . just as a person can not eat a quail every day for thirty days in succession, although for one day, with a bottle of wine, it is a very palatable ration.”100 His second reason was that the meat spoiled quickly in the heat of Cuba and Puerto Rico, which explained the foul stench. What he did not say was that, unlike a fine dinner of quail, the canned army beef was of extremely poor quality, fatty, stringy, and coarse.
Even if the legend of “embalmed beef “ was not true, in Wiley’s view, it was still extremely useful for his crusade. With the scandal fresh in the public’s mind, the time was right to focus on the use of preservatives in the civilian diet. The trouble was how to prove that chemical preservatives were harmful. Wiley himself was convinced they were, to a greater or lesser extent. At the Mason Hearings of 1899–1900, when a Senate committee investigated the extent of the adulteration of food and drink, Wiley as chief chemist testified that “there is no preservative which paralyzes the ferments which create decay, which does not at the same time paralyze to an equal degree the ferments that produce digestion.”101 In other words, such preservatives by their very nature must be bad for the stomach. Yet at the same hearings, a Chicago manufacturer of preservatives named Albert Heller testified that the opposite was true: far from being harmful, preservatives such as formaldehyde were healthy, since they prevented people from getting cholera from milk products. Their very artificiality marked them out as useful weapons in the battle against tainted food. For example, Heller insisted, boric acid was an altogether beneficial ingredient for curing bacon, which might otherwise spoil. “I wish to say that every one of us eats embalmed meat—and we know it and like it and continue to eat it.”102
Evidently, if Wiley were to continue in his view that preservatives were generally harmful, he needed some hard evidence. In 1902, with the cause of pure food gathering ground, he came up with his most provocative idea yet—the series of experiments that would come to be known as the “poison squad,” for which he was given five thousand dollars from Congress. In his autobiography, Wiley boasted of his belief in practical experimentation: “I believe in trying it ‘on the dog.’ ”103 In this case, it was not a dog but twelve robust young men from the Department of Agriculture, who volunteered to live in a “scientific boarding house” and follow a strict preservative-enriched diet prescribed by Wiley. The idea was as brilliant in its simplicity as Supersize Me, the film in which the director Morgan Spurlock subjected his body to a diet of nothing but McDonald’s burgers and fries for a month to prove beyond doubt that such a regimen damages your health.
Harvey Wiley carefully weighing food to be given to his famous “poison squad.”
Wiley’s poison squad was very similar, except that, unlike Spurlock, he did not use his own body but those of his volunteers. Half were to be fed a normal, wholesome, preservative-free diet, with plenty of fruit and vegetables and no alcohol, cooked by a civil service cook. The other half would supplement this diet with a ration of preservatives. Every aspect of their health would be strictly monitored. Each member of the squad was required to record his weight, temperature, and pulse rate before each meal, to note down meticulously what he had eaten, and to carry with him sample jars for his urine and faeces, to be sent off to the government chemists.104 A rigidly exact regime had to be followed. The coffee drinkers among the squad had to stick to two cups a day, no more and no less, lest any variation in caffeine intake should skew the results of the trial; “if at any time he shall feel disinclined to partake of the soothing cup,” said one instruction, “he will have to relegate his feelings to the rear and drink whether or no.”105
The experiment caught the public imagination at once, in part thanks to vivid press reports, which viewed the whole business in essentially comic terms. The term “poison squad” was coined by a young reporter on the Washington Post, George Rothwell Brown. Wiley himself disliked the phrase, since it prejudged the question; the experiment was designed to find out whether borax was or was not poisonous. But he could not complain about the publicity. Brown followed the progress of Wiley’s inmates in absurdist detail, describing how Wiley’s food weigher would go so far as to bite a bean in half to make sure that precise portion control was maintained.106 Poems circulated, one of which, the “Song of the Pizen Squad” by S. W. Gillian, was quoted by Wiley himself:
Harvey Wiley dining in Washington with his “poison squad” of strapping young human guinea pigs.
For we are the Pizen Squad.
On Prussic acid we break our fast;
We lunch on a morphine stew;
We dine with a matchhead consommé,
Drink carbolic acid brew;
. . .
Thus all the “deadlies” we double-dare
To put us beneath the sod;
We’re death-immunes and we’re proud as proud—
Hooray for the Pizen Squad!107
The first chemical to be tested, in November 1902, was borax.108 Wiley chose i
t partly because it was widely used, and partly because it was, according to Wiley, the “least objectionable” preservative and he would therefore be putting his twelve young men in the least danger by starting with it. There was a political reason too: Germany, as part of a long-standing meat war, had banned imports of American foods containing borax as unsafe (a German experiment conducted on four men had concluded in June 1902 that borax was indeed unsafe, leading to weight loss).109 Wiley’s much larger-scale experiment was important for recovering American face; whatever the results might be, at least America could claim to have had the more thorough experiment. Wiley insisted at the outset that he was keeping an “open mind” about borax.
For weeks the experiment stalled, to the amusement of George Rothwell Brown in the Washington Post, because Wiley found it so hard to get his human guinea pigs to the right weight. “One Boarder Grows Too Fat and Another Too Lean” read the headline on 16 December 1902. Wiley was fixated on the idea that his volunteers must be strapping young fellows of “normal” weight, working on the assumption that if the borax did them harm, it would be so much more harmful to children, the elderly, or the vulnerable. But, to his despair, one of his boarders kept gaining weight—“that boy eats like two men,” he complained—while another was so scared by the experience of being in the scientific boarding house that he lost all appetite and began to shrink away.110 Even after the borax dosing finally started, Wiley’s troubles did not end. He had decided to give the borax surreptitiously, so as not to affect the mental health of those eating it. Initially, he hid powdered borax in the butter, but the boys soon cottoned on to it and began to eat less butter. The same happened when he hid it in milk, meat, and coffee, so he was forced to change tack and administer the borax openly, in capsule form, halfway through the meal, or sprinkled throughout.111 At last the borax regime had started.