Other researchers disagreed. French chemists successfully raised safety concerns earlier, in 1881 persuading their government to ban its use as a preservative in wine. Germany also banned salicylic acid in both wine and beer made for domestic use. The Germans, however, did permit breweries to use the chemical in beers made for export to the United States. After all, American authorities had shown no interest in regulating its use. “In this country but little attention seems to have been given to the use of salicylic acid as a preservative,” the Chemistry Division’s report noted, somewhat sadly, in its conclusion.
The Division of Chemistry staff worried that the compound’s use in alcoholic beverages could add up to a harmful dose, especially for a person who consumed several drinks a day. Authored by C. A. Crampton, one of Wiley’s staffers, the fermented beverages report noted that American wines contained, on average, almost 2 grams of salicylic acid per bottle. Beers averaged 1.2 grams. But some measured higher. One case of wine contained a full therapeutic dose—3.9 grams—in every bottle tested. Not every vintner used it, but the Chemistry Division had tested seventy American wines—from Riesling to zinfandel, from New York to California—and found that more than one-fourth contained salicylic acid. The same was true for the beers and ales tested. And as a report by New York’s Department of Public Health pointed out, the preservative was increasingly found not just in alcoholic beverages but in a wide range of other grocery products, upping the odds of consumers getting a stiff dose every day.
Cyrus Edson, author of the New York report, wrote to Wiley’s division, requesting that the federal government take a protective stand against salicylic acid. Edson cited evidence that in addition to causing gastrointestinal bleeding, the compound could damage other organs, including the kidneys, possibly permanently. “This report closes with the recommendation that the addition of salicylic acid, even in small amounts, be absolutely prohibited by law,” he wrote. “I would respectfully recommend that some action be taken by this department toward this injurious substance.”
He found a receptive audience in Wiley, who was starting to worry that continual exposure to low doses of industrial chemicals—yet to be tested for safety—might indeed be a health issue. Although the chief chemist believed that “a healthy stomach can, from time to time, receive with impunity food containing small qualities of preservatives,” he grew increasingly uneasy about the effects of repeating such a dose over and over. In people suffering from ill health, the elderly, the very young, and invalids with “weak or diseased stomachs,” he warned that the effects of such constant dosage might be much worse. At least, he argued, there should be a requirement of accurate information on labels, which should, at a minimum, “give the name of the preservative and the quantity employed.”
But Wiley also wondered what good it would do to list the ingredients in a food product if no one knew whether those ingredients were safe and in what doses. He began thinking about how he could test to see how much of such additives a person could consume safely. Would it be possible to conduct trials, not just of salicylic acid but other preservatives too, on human subjects?
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In 1888 Grover Cleveland lost his bid for reelection. Before he left office, he signed a bill elevating the Agriculture Department to cabinet status. Norman Coleman became the country’s first secretary of agriculture, but only for his last month in office, before making way for President Benjamin Harrison’s pick, Governor Jeremiah Rusk of Wisconsin.
Like Wiley, Rusk had grown up on a midwestern farm. And like Wiley, the new secretary saw the rise in manufactured, adulterated foods as an evil that needed to be addressed. Rusk, a genial man nicknamed “Uncle Jerry” by the agency staffers, was determined to build up the department as a support system for farmers. Over his few years in the office, the USDA grew rapidly, adding staff to the Chemistry Division and field stations for research around the country. And Rusk tripled the budget for the continuing Bulletin 13 reports, from $5,000 to $15,000 yearly.
After Crampton’s report on fermented beverages had rounded out the 1887 edition, Wiley published a study of lard and lard adulterants and, with the additional money from the new Republican administration, scheduled investigations into baking powders; sugar, molasses, honey, and syrup; tea, coffee, and cocoa; and canned vegetables.
The lard study again highlighted the routine nature of adulteration—and the routine false advertising that came with it. Packages of lard—labeled as the best pure hog fat—often contained cheaper fats, mostly waste products from beef manufacturing or cottonseed oil, or both. As he had earlier with oleomargarine, Wiley noted that these particular adulterations were poorly understood in terms of health effects. There was no scientific data to show that pig fat was healthier than cottonseed oil or the other way around. But packages marked “pure lard” that contained no lard lacked such ambiguity. They could be considered only another example of deceptive labeling. He also noted that the Division of Chemistry was finding unlabeled cottonseed oil in a slew of other products, especially in “olive” oils. Almost 200 million pounds of cottonseed oil were now produced in the United States and manufacturers of purportedly higher-end oil and fat products had seized upon this cheaper but “innocuous” raw material. “To do this is a fraud upon the consumer,” Wiley wrote in his summary, once again recommending that the ingredients actually be listed on the packaging.
Increasingly frustrated that only a tiny readership—fellow scientists, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and legislative staffers—ever saw his technical reports, Wiley decided to try for a broader audience. In 1890 he hired Alex Wedderburn, a journalist and pure-food advocate, to write easy-to-read copy for the public—in effect, press releases or consumer brochures. And although he thought Wedderburn’s first such report contained a little too much advocacy—it blasted the “utter recklessness and hard-heartedness” of food adulterers and condemned their “unlawful and dishonest methods”—he supported its publication, merely advising the writer to tone it down next time.
Not that he and his chemistry staff weren’t busy supplying Wedderburn with additional ammunition. The division’s 1892 investigation into coffee, teas, and cocoa, for instance, stood out for the level of inventive fraud it uncovered. Tea, as Battershall had already noted, was routinely adulterated, so much so that some manufacturers didn’t bother to disguise it. The federal chemists made a point of analyzing a product proudly labeled as “Lie Tea”: “This substance, as its name implied, was an imitation of tea, usually containing fragments or dust of the genuine leaves, foreign leaves, and mineral matters, held together by means of a starch solution.” As for cocoa, “there is probably no more misleading or abused term in the English language.” Cocoa powders contained everything from clay to sand to iron oxides (the latter used as a coloring agent). “Finely powdered tin is sometimes added to give the chocolate a metallic luster,” the report added.
Coffee, long America’s hot beverage of choice, had frequently been cut with all manner of adulterants ranging from tree bark, sawdust, and ground beets and acorns to relatively flavorful substitutions such as chicory root and the bitter seeds of the blue lupine flower. During the Civil War, Union troops had enjoyed the advantage of coffee that was made—at least in large part—from actual coffee beans while their Confederate counterparts made do with brews of charred wheat, corn, peas, and beans. But that was the ground product. A consumer with access to whole coffee beans and a grinder had, it was assumed, the assurance that the resulting brew was genuine.
By 1892 Wiley’s staff had determined that about 87 percent of all ground coffee samples tested were adulterated. “One sample contained no coffee at all.” But they’d also found that processors had devised a way to make coffee-free “beans” by pressing a mixture of flour, molasses, and occasionally dirt and sawdust into molds. The chemists discovered that the average scoop of coffee beans in Washington, DC, contained “as high as 25 percent of thes
e artificial bodies.” “Dear Sir,” began one letter from a distributor to a grocer. “I send you by mail this sample of ‘imitation coffee.’ This is a manufactured bean and composed of flour; you can easily mix 15 percent of this substitute in with genuine coffee.” A flyer from another supplier offered “coffee pellets” consisting of three-fourths filler, 15 percent coffee, and 10 percent chicory. “This makes a very desirable cup of coffee.” The flyer further assured grocers it could be sold at full price and was undetectable to consumers.
Producers had also taken to coloring light-colored, inexpensive coffee beans and passing them off as costlier Java beans, recognizable by their glossy, dark appearance. The Division of Chemistry found coffee-coloring agents included charcoal, drop black (a powder made with charred bone), and finely powdered iron. They also turned up traces of more dangerous dyes, such as Scheele’s green (arsenic), Prussian blue (cyanide), and chrome yellow (lead). The fake beans were usually polished to an enticing shine using glycerin, palm oil, or even Vaseline (a petroleum-based jelly patented by the British-born chemist Robert Chesebrough in 1872). “Consumers, and especially the poor, are being grossly deceived,” the bulletin report concluded. “Very little pure ground coffee is sold, and even the whole coffee does not escape sophistication.”
And in case any reader missed the point: “Stringent laws are certainly needed to suppress these frauds.”
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Lawmakers had taken only small notice of any of the Chemistry Division’s food and drink bulletins. Back in 1888, Virginia congressman William H. F. “Rooney” Lee, the son of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, had introduced a bill requiring detailed labeling of products. That legislation failed, but a more powerful advocate had introduced another bill in the upper house in 1891. “The devil has got hold of the food supply in this country,” declared sponsor Algernon Paddock of Nebraska, chairman of the Agriculture and Forestry Committee. Industry lobbyists and other opponents of regulation saw signs that Senator Paddock’s bill was gaining support. In response, they gathered thousands of signatures on petitions aimed at blocking it. Grocers and factory owners, the National Farmers’ Alliance, and the National Colored Farmers’ Alliance were among the petitioners. The strongest opposition came from the southern states and their legislators, who, even decades after the Civil War, remained suspicious of any action that might further consolidate federal power. Senators from Tennessee and Georgia railed against the anticipated intrusion, suggesting that the USDA wanted to send spies and informers into the countryside to conduct unwarranted searches of homes and businesses.
Paddock responded by citing the food fraud studies from the Agriculture Department reports. He insisted that Wiley’s Chemistry Division was “as nearly nonpartisan in its work as such an institution can be under our system.” This was not about states’ rights but about responsibility. If the federal government didn’t accept its responsibility to keep the food supply honest, American citizens eventually would hold it accountable. The United States was the only Western country that lacked a national law regulating food safety, he pointed out. “Take heed when people demand bread that you continue not to give them a stone,” he said, referring to flour that Wiley and his team had discovered to be cut with gypsum and rock dust. Paddock managed to wear down his opponents in the Senate, which did, rather grudgingly, pass his bill. But industry lobbyists blocked a parallel proposal from even getting a hearing on the floor of the House, effectively halting the legislation.
Wiley had advised Paddock on the food safety act at the senator’s request. After the measure’s failure, he pondered what he saw as a curious lack of support for reform from the public at large. In a paper titled “The Adulteration of Food,” Wiley invoked the famously cynical showman P. T. Barnum, writing, “To be cheated, fooled, bamboozled, cajoled, deceived, pettifogged, demagogued, hypnotized, manicured and chiropodized are privileges dear to us all.”
He sent the paper to Paddock, who agreed but encouraged him to soldier on anyway. The senator predicted that eventually consumers would come to appreciate that they could not protect themselves against systemic cheating without regulatory help. “Angry waves of popular discontent,” he said, would eventually lead to change.
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“A cold northeast wind and sleet makes nature look as I feel after yesterday’s vote,” Wiley wrote in his diary on the morning after Election Day 1892. Former president Grover Cleveland had won his old job back, meaning the well-liked secretary of agriculture Rusk was on his way out. Tired of the uncertainties of politics, Wiley considered leaving his government post. “I have thought for some time of giving it up to go into private business.” But he still had such a long list of food safety investigations planned; he decided to stay and hope for the best. That hope would not last long.
The new secretary was Julius Sterling Morton of Nebraska. Like President Cleveland, he belonged to the conservative wing of his party, often disparagingly referred to as the “Bourbon” Democrats, a reference both to bourbon whiskey and to the Bourbon dynasty in France. Like the French Bourbons in that country’s bloody revolution, conservative Democrats had been swept from power with the Civil War. But the Bourbon kings returned to power in 1814 and the Bourbon Democrats had regained legislative power after Reconstruction. Morton, who had been governor of the Nebraska Territory before it became a state in 1867, was a wealthy businessman, a former newspaper editor, and a fierce believer in small government. He came to the USDA determined to make it leaner and more efficient, in keeping with the austerity policies of Cleveland’s second term. Under the openhanded benevolence of Harrison appointee Rusk, Morton complained, the Agriculture Department had been “well on the way to becoming a national feed bag.”
Morton was in office for a month before he called Wiley into his office to renew the chief chemist’s contract and to inform him of plans for a stripped-down Division of Chemistry. The secretary wanted department chemists to concentrate only on science that could directly benefit farmers. He favored research into bettering soils, making more effective fertilizers and pesticides, and developing superior species of grains, hay, and other crops. Eliminating what he judged to be unnecessary services, Morton ordered sorghum and sugar research halted, the scientists doing that work dismissed, and USDA research stations sold off to private interests. He cut the budget for food-purity research by two-thirds. “Is there any necessity for . . . inspectors of food or seekers after adulterants in food?” he wrote in a memo to Wiley. “Would the public interest suffer if these gentlemen cease to draw salaries for what they are alleged to be doing at this time?” In 1893 Congress appropriated another $15,000, requested under Rusk, for Wiley’s investigations of food adulteration, but Morton slashed that back to $5,000 and warned the chemist that he had plans to eliminate the studies entirely.
One part of Bulletin 13, an examination of canned vegetables, was still under way, and that, Morton told Wiley, would be the last. The secretary also ordered that Wiley stop sharing his division’s findings with the public and recommended that Wiley get rid of the public science writer position held by Alexander Wedderburn. The Agriculture Department’s mission did not include educating the public, he insisted.
To say that Wiley disagreed would be an understatement. Morton’s demands led to months of exchanges with his chief chemist, during which Wiley fought to keep Wedderburn on the payroll until he could finish one last consumer piece. “It will afford me great gratification if you will show me wherein Mr. Wedderburn, during his connection with the department, has broadened the farmer’s market or increased the demand or price of his products,” Morton wrote to Wiley. The more people were informed about adulteration, the more they would demand untainted food, Wiley replied. “Such a consummation would be of great benefit to agriculture by relieving the farmer who sells pure foods from competition with the adulterated articles.”
Morton then peppered Wiley
with questions about Wedderburn’s fitness to be part of the Chemistry Department. He asked how many analyses Wedderburn had done. What substances did he analyze? What chemistry school did he go to? How much experience as an analytical chemist did he have? “To your first question,” Wiley replied, “None. To your second, none.” The man was a talented writer with a gift for explaining science. In other words, Wedderburn was not a graduate of a chemical school and “has never had any experience as a chemist, never professed to be a chemist, and has no reputation as a chemist.” Morton wrote back, “So tell me what peculiar fitness and adaptation you found in Mr. Wedderburn for the work of investigating food adulterations.”
“I have endeavored in two previous communications to set plainly before you the character of Mr. Wedderburn’s work,” Wiley wrote, before asking if Morton was willing to throw away the paid hours that Wedderburn had already devoted to the document he was working on. The appeal to frugality worked. Morton agreed to pay the writer one final month’s salary so that he could finish the promised document.
But as the secretary had feared, the result was another searing indictment of food manufacturing practices, focused on the increasing use of chemical preservatives and coal tar–derived coloring agents, which Wedderburn described as “poisonous adulterations that have, in many cases, not only impaired the health of the consumer but frequently caused death.” Morton was appalled by what he saw as an attack on American business. Again, in the interest of thrift, he didn’t kill the report. But he ordered a limited printing of fewer than five hundred copies and told his staff not to publicize it in any way.