by Bee Wilson
Within a few days, those on the borax diet started to lose weight. George Rothwell Brown reported the misery of those in the boarding house as their borax diet started to bite, getting particular relish out of the poison squad’s gloomy Christmas celebrations. On 25 December 1902, Wiley had left Washington to celebrate the holiday in Indiana, leaving his boarders in a maudlin state. “You can’t have borax and Christmas at the same time,” one of them told Rothwell Brown. Another described their “festive” meal, which went as follows:
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 Borax112
There was obviously an element of exaggeration here; still, life in the boarding house does not sound much fun. Chef Perry, the temperamental civil service cook, seems to have been constantly grumbling about the conditions, bothering Wiley for a pay increase because he used to be chef to the queen of Bavaria and was not happy that “he puts borax in the skillet now instead of salt.”113 The inmates themselves, meanwhile, grew tired of the monotony of their existence. There were several cases of boarders stealing extra rations of food at night—a boiled egg here, a slice of bread there—something that Wiley took a very dim view of.114
Wiley’s critics complained that it was not even clear what the point of this elaborate exercise was. “How does Professor Wiley propose to prove anything?” asked the Washington Post, complaining that by putting his poison squad on a special regime to build them up before the experiment began, Wiley was skewing the results; the real question was how borax affected “the average person.” rather than these strapping youths.115 An editorial in the New York Evening Post complained:
Apparently it has not occurred to Dr. Wiley that experiments on such healthy robust young men will not be of much service. Nobody claims that borax is a violent and immediate poison, like arsenic or strychnine. It is merely believed or suspected that it interferes with digestion, and thus in the long run impairs the health of those whose stomachs are not vigorous. Young men in the student age do not usually know they have stomachs; they are apt to boast they could eat boiled brickbats on toast. Borax is not likely to affect them visibly; but children and adult dyspeptics—most American adults are dyspeptics—must be injured by a chemical which arrests fermentation, disguises the badness of tainted meat and fish, and retards digestion.116
Soon after these criticisms were levelled against Wiley, a “high official” at the Agricultural Department made the creepy suggestion of expanding the programme to include tests on invalids and infants, the “weak and sickly,” so that the effects of borax on these more vulnerable groups could be gauged.117 “Baby Class in Borax.” squealed the Washington Post. Wiley himself disclaimed the idea, insisting that it had come from his boss, James Wilson, the secretary of agriculture, with whom he had difficult relations. Wiley did agree hypothetically, though, that using babies and the sick “would make the test more complete of course” and pondered, with somewhat sinister logic, that “as for obtaining the subjects, that wouldn’t be hard. We could get the babies from infant asylums and foundling hospitals and there are plenty of invalids.”118
An infant poison squad never materialized. Yet the mere fact that the idea of feeding preservatives to infants could be suggested by officials exposed something callous in the enterprise, a certain chilly disregard for the human guinea pigs. While some criticized the poison squad as ineffectual, other criticized it as irresponsible, putting the lives of these young men at risk. In 1903, Len Dockstader’s minstrel show performed a song about the poison squad called “They’ll Never Look the Same”:
If you ever visit the Smithsonian Institute
Look out that Professor Wiley doesn’t make you a recruit.
He’s got a lot of fellows there that tell him how they feel,—
They take a bowl of poison every time they take a meal.
For breakfast they get cyanide of liver, coffin shaped,
For dinner they get undertaker’s pie all trimmed with crepe;
For supper, arsenic fritter, fried an appetizing shade,
And late at night they get a prussic acid lemonade!
O they may get over it but they’ll never look the same.
That kind of bill of fare would drive most men insane.119
Though Wiley denied that he ever allowed his experiments to be carried on “to the point of danger to health,”120 this was disingenuous. By his own admission, he didn’t know just how dangerous these preservatives were before the trials began; otherwise, why would he need to do the experiment? What’s more, he confided to George Rothwell Brown in 1903 that at times, “the dose has been as large as the men could stand.”121 During his subsequent benzoate trials of 1904, only three members of the squad continued to the end; the others became so ill, with inflamed oesophagi, extreme stomach pains, dizziness, and weight loss, that they had to withdraw.122
What Wiley ought to have said was that, for him, the end justified the means. At the end of a series of his poison squad trials, Wiley could pronounce what he called a “clear and unmistakable lesson”: that “preservatives used in food are harmful to health.”123 If he had to give a few “young robust men” some stomachaches and sore throats in the process, so be it. The public soap opera of the “chemical café” had paid off.
In the following years, a number of states passed new and more effective pure-food laws, and finally, the dream of an omnibus federal law to regulate food standards across the country started to look not just realistic, but unavoidable. The House of Representatives twice passed a Pure Food and Drugs Act, though on both occasions the bill died in the Senate. Meanwhile, Wiley helped to keep the issue in the public’s mind. He collaborated with Samuel Hopkins Adams, a journalist who in 1905 published a series of articles in Collier’s Weekly attacking frauds in drugs: expensive fakes such as Liquozone, which marketed itself as a “universal antiseptic” but really consisted of 99 percent water.124 Wiley also worked with the women of the National Consumers’ League, which in 1905 announced the consumer’s fundamental rights: to safe food, to truthful information, to choose, to be heard, and to be protected by government agencies.125
When at last the U.S. Pure Food and Drugs Act was passed, on 30 June 1906, Wiley felt triumphant. In his autobiography, he compared himself to a general who “wins a great battle and brings a final end to hostilities.”126 He complained that President Theodore Roosevelt had been given “undue credit” for this act of 1906. Yes, Roosevelt signed the bill into law, but he had not championed the act during its bitter fight for passage in Congress. He had not fought the good fight as Wiley had. The implication was that Wiley himself deserved sole credit for the new law. No one ever accused Harvey Washington Wiley of false modesty.
He was forgetting, or conveniently ignoring, someone else, though. If Wiley laid much of the groundwork for the 1906 law, the immediate impetus came from a much less probable source—an unheralded novel written by a nervous young socialist named Upton Sinclair. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sinclair’s name is absent from Wiley’s autobiography. Wiley’s part in the story is not yet finished; we will return to him later in this chapter. But the man of the hour in 1906 was Upton Sinclair. It was because of the unprecedented impact of his novel The Jungle that even the most diehard opponents of government intervention in the food business felt cowed into submission. Sinclair brought the public debate about food to such a pitch of anxiety and disgust that federal legislation was the only answer.
Upton Sinclair, Theodore Roosevelt, and The Jungle
The Jungle tells the story of Jurgis, a Lithuanian who comes to America with his family to be a “free man,” and a rich one, but who fi
nds himself instead living in the stockyard area of Chicago, enslaved to horrible and low-paying work as a meat packer. Jurgis’s initial optimism turns to grim misery, as he works sweeping entrails off the gory floor. A century after the novel was published, the Zola-like descriptions of blood-splattered “killing beds” still have the power to shock. Sinclair makes you see both the nastiness of the “Packingtown swindles” and the squalor of forcing human workers to collude in them. The account of what goes into sausages was “an image that haunted the nation”:127
There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.128
What made the image so haunting was that it wasn’t fictitious. Sinclair himself had spent seven weeks observing the huge Chicago meat plants owned by rich “beef barons” and had seen such sausage making with his own eyes. He went to Chicago in 1904 after the failure of a Packingtown strike. Sinclair, then an impoverished and unhappily married writer and passionate socialist, aged just twenty-five, had written an article in favour of the strikers in a socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason. The leaders of the strike read it and invited Sinclair to come to Chicago to witness their lives for himself. Because these plants put so little emphasis on human individuality, it wasn’t hard for Sinclair to fit in. One worker told him that all he had to do was to carry a dinner pail and wear old clothes and everyone would take him for a working man. “You can see anything you want to see.”129
What Sinclair witnessed were the most distressing and grotesque scenes of his life. This was no place for an anxious young man with stomach worries and a tendency to panic. Sinclair, who was the product of an alcoholic father and a puritanical mother, was said to have had “an obsessive fear of alcohol, sex and impurities of any kind.” For days, he bravely persevered in the blood and the stench, “white-faced and thin,” as he later described himself, but determined to expose the horrors he witnessed. He also interviewed those who knew the ways of Packingtown—workers, doctors, nurses, settlement-house workers—before retreating to a rural cabin to write the book. “I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all the pain that life had meant to me.”130 In one of the few things he had in common with Wiley, Sinclair also saw the fight against adulteration as a continuation of the previous generation’s fight against slavery; several prominent readers compared The Jungle to Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its political impact.
A poster for the film version of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
Sinclair was not writing with any particular axe to grind regarding the American diet. It was only later that he became a figurehead of the wilder fringes of the vegetarian movement. Aged twenty-six, he was still eating “white flour and sugar and other denatured foods” and suffered rotting teeth and a fragile digestion on account of it.131 What he lacked in nutritional knowledge he made up for in an acute sensitivity to misery and gore. Five publishers rejected The Jungle on account of its shocking details—much too much “blood and guts,” said a reader for Macmillan; publishers may have also been put off by the fact that the novel had previously been serialised in the socialist Appeal to Reason. Doubleday took a risk and agreed to publish it, and ultimately it was the shocking details that made The Jungle such a success. The prose may be overwrought and the characterization of the Lithuanian workers somewhat wooden, but it is still, as Jack London said, a great book because it is “brutal with life.”132
Sinclair depicts workers falling into vats and no one bothering to fish them out, so that “all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard”; meat inspectors turning a blind eye to diseased meat; old women with “ghastly pallor” “twisting sausage-links and racing with death”; “potted chicken” that is really rotten pork. Sinclair’s message is that these individual scandals are not isolated but part of a giant industrial conspiracy: “The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country; from top to bottom, it was nothing but one gigantic lie.”133 The Jungle is about a system of food production in which adulteration is the only currency. Jurgis and his family are well versed in the spectrum of spoiled-meat swindles that go on in Packingtown.
Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant—a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor—a process known to the workers as “giving them thirty per cent.” Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as “Number Three Grade,” but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade—there was only Number One Grade.134
Hams being doctored in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
But the fact that they are aware of these tricks cannot save the workers from being duped by other food swindles in their turn.
How could they know that the pale blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and doctored with formaldehyde besides? . . . How could they find out that their tea and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned peas had been coloured with copper salts, and their fruit jams with aniline dyes? And even if they had known it, what good would it have done them, Since there was no place within miles of them where any other sort was to be had? . . . If they paid higher prices they might get frills and fanciness, or be cheated; but genuine quality they could not obtain for love or money.135
Because the problem was so systematic, Sinclair believed that the solution must be systematic too: a wholesale transfer from capitalism to socialism. In a rather clunking ending, which reviewers of The Jungle found unconvincing and which even Sinclair himself admitted was poorly written, Jurgis finds a vision of a better future by converting to socialism. “We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us. . . . CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!”136
Except, of course, that it never was; the socialist revolution Sinclair dreamed of failed to materialize, least of all in Chicago, whose gangster days were only just beginning. What his book did provoke, however, was an instant outcry over the disgusting and deceitful way in which Packingtown meat was produced. The revelations in The Jungle were terrifying for a nation where per capita meat consumpt
ion was as high as 179 pounds a year, nearly half a pound of meat per person a day.137 Sinclair himself was disappointed. He had hoped to awaken in his reader a sympathy with the plight of the workers; instead, the main response had been a selfish, if understandable, bourgeois fear of being poisoned by tubercular meat. “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” was his famous quip.138
One of the stomachs hit by The Jungle was the sizeable paunch of President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, who had been sent an advance copy by Sinclair’s publisher, Doubleday.139 Roosevelt had been interested in the meat supply ever since he fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War at the time of the “embalmed beef” crisis. He remembered how his men had started complaining about the quality of the canned meat. Catching one of his soldiers throwing his rations away he accused him, with typical masculine bluntness, of being a baby. “Eat it and be a man,” he barked. But when the soldier tried to obey Roosevelt’s order, he vomited. Roosevelt then tried to eat some of the meat himself, but “found I could not . . . [it] was slimy, stringy and coarse . . . like a bundle of fibres.”140
When the assassination of William McKinley propelled Roosevelt into the White House in 1901, he revisited beef. Roosevelt’s domestic policy rested on the so-called square deal, a promise to curb the power of monopolistic corporations or “trusts” within “reasonable limits.” Roosevelt became known as a “trustbuster,” issuing forty-four lawsuits against overweening corporations in the course of his presidency. Several years before The Jungle appeared, the beef trust was already in Roosevelt’s sights, as one of the most powerful commercial oligarchies—or “oligopolies.” In 1902, there had been wide public protest when the price of meat—which was controlled by the Beef Trust—shot up. Over six months, the price of sirloin steak had risen from eighteen cents a pound to twenty-two cents; of shoulder of lamb, from eight cents to twelve cents; of pork chops, from twelve cents to fifteen cents. These increases were extremely unpopular with retail meat dealers as well as with customers, the increase in the wholesale price of meat forcing some of them out of business. “Poor people cannot stand the increases, but the retailer has to make them,” commented a meat-seller at New York’s Washington Market.141 These price hikes were especially scandalous, because they coincided with a collapse in the prices paid by the big meat packers at cattle markets.