The Poison Squad Read online

  European governments—especially those of Germany and Great Britain—had been far quicker than the U.S. government to recognize and to address problems of food adulteration. In 1820 a pioneering book by chemist Fredrick Accum, titled A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons, had aroused widespread public outrage when it was published in London. Accum minced no words: “Our pickles are made green by copper; our vinegar rendered sharp by sulphuric acid; our cream composed of rice powder or arrowroot in bad milk; our comfits mixed of sugar, starch and clay, and coloured with preparations of copper and lead; our catsup often formed of the dregs of distilled vinegar with a decoction of the outer green husk of walnuts, and seasoned with all-spice,” he wrote.

  As Accum noted, the poisonous practices of his time dated back many years. Long before the nineteenth century’s new industrial dyes, merchants and processors used various colorful substances to make their wares look more enticing. Confectioners often turned to poisonous metallic elements and compounds. Green came from arsenic or copper, yellow from lead chromate, cheerful rose and pink tones from red lead. In 1830 an editorial in The Lancet, the British medical journal, complained that “millions of children are thus daily dosed” with lethal substances. But the practices continued, largely due to business pressures on would-be government regulators.

  By midcentury, though, casualties were starting to mount in Britain. In 1847 three English children fell seriously ill after eating birthday cake decorated with arsenic-tinted green leaves. Five years later, two London brothers died after eating a cake whose frosting contained both arsenic and copper. In an 1854 report, London physician Arthur Hassall tracked forty cases of child poisoning caused by penny candies.

  Three years later, twenty-one people in Bradford, Yorkshire, died after consuming candy accidentally laced with deadly arsenic trioxide—“accidentally” because the confectioner meant to mix in plaster of paris instead. Although he had noticed his workers falling ill while mixing up the stuff, the business owner had put the candy on sale anyway. He was arrested and jailed, as was the pharmacist who’d mistakenly sold him the poison in place of plaster. But they could not be convicted of any crime. Britain had no law against making unsafe—or even lethal—food products.

  Fury over the Bradford incident spurred the passage in 1860 of Britain’s Act for Preventing Adulteration in Food and Drink. Business interests managed to limit the fine for poisoning food to a mere £5, but at least it was a precedent.

  Although not yet nearly loud enough to prod Congress, there were voices of outrage in America too, where journalists like John Mullaly railed against “milk-poison” and George Thorndike Angell, a Massachusetts lawyer and philanthropist better known for his work against cruelty to animals, loudly derided dishonest food producers. In an 1879 speech to the American Social Science Public Health Association, Angell recited a disgusting list of commercially sold foods that included diseased and parasite-ridden meat and processed animal fat passed off as butter and cheese.

  “They poison and cheat the consumer; affect, and in many cases destroy, the health not only of the rich but of the poor,” Angell charged, blasting dishonest food producers as little better than “the pirates who plunder our ships on the ocean or the highway men who rob and murder on the land.” For good measure, he mailed the text of his speech to newspapers nationwide—and to the dismay of food processors, it received prominent display. The American Grocer, a trade publication, dismissed him as sensationalist and “doing a disservice to consumers.” But the Grocer acknowledged that some problems were real, especially the too-often poisonous nature of milk and colored candy, and the reputation harm done by fraudsters. That year, in response to Angell’s concerns, Virginia congressman Richard Lee T. Beale introduced legislation that would have banned interstate commerce in chemically altered foods. A report to the Committee on Manufactures warned: “Not only are substances of less value commingled with those of greater, but such as are injurious to health, and we have no doubt often destructive of life, are freely used in manufacturing and preparing for consuming the necessaries and luxuries of life.” The bill was referred out of committee, where it promptly died through lack of further action. But an uneasy awareness of a troubled food supply was starting to grow.

  In 1881 the Indiana State Board of Health asked Wiley to examine the purity of commercially sold sweet substances, particularly honey and maple syrup. At Purdue, Wiley had been studying potential new crops and methods for making sweeteners. Inspired by his father’s venture into sorghum, he had even worked out an improved process for getting syrup from its woody stalks. After his studies in Germany, Wiley possessed the right training and tools to conduct the study, and through presentations at the American Association for the Advancement of Science he’d gained a reputation as one of the country’s leading sugar chemists. The investigation requested by the state—and the political fallout—would serve to plunge him further into his life’s work. It was, as he later remembered, “my first participation in the fray.”

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  A report from the National Academy of Sciences had already warned that jars labeled “honey” were often tinted corn syrup, with a scrap of honeycomb tossed in to complete the deception. Corn syrup—not the much later “high-fructose” version—was a nineteenth-century innovation. Russian chemist Gottlieb Kirchhoff had in 1812 devised an inexpensive process for turning cornstarch into the sugar glucose. He combined the starch with diluted hydrochloric acid and heated the mixture under pressure. The process proved hugely profitable in the corn-rich United States. By 1881 almost two dozen factories were operating in the Midwest, turning 25,000 bushels of corn a day into sugary products. “The manufacture of sirup and sugar from corn-starch is an industry which in this country is scarcely a dozen years old and yet is one of no inconsiderable magnitude,” Wiley wrote in his report.

  In much of the English-speaking world, “corn” could mean any kind of grain crop—barley or wheat, for example. But in English-speaking North America it had long meant maize, a staple of indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere for thousands of years. When Europeans arrived, they called it Indian corn and began growing it for themselves. By the mid-1800s corn had become a primary crop of farmlands from Pennsylvania to Nebraska, from Minnesota to Missouri and beyond—and engendered a whole new array of manufactured food products.

  “Corn, the new American king,” Wiley wrote, “now supplies us with bread, meat, and sugar, which we need, as well as with the whiskey we could do without.” He estimated that corn-derived glucose had about two-thirds the sweetening power of cane sugar; it was also far cheaper, produced for less than half the cost.

  Those who made and sold the sweetener often labeled it either “corn sugar” or “corn syrup.” This was after European practice. Germany had “potato sugar,” for example, and France produced a “grape sugar.” But Wiley, always a stickler for accuracy (a trait that would over the years irritate more plainspoken colleagues, including President Roosevelt), thought the corn-based product should be called glucose or glucose syrup. This, he emphasized, both was the technically accurate term and also clearly differentiated it from traditional sugars made from cane or beet. (In the twenty-first century, amid a diabetes epidemic, many think of “glucose” in terms of human blood sugar levels. But the sugar product derived from cornstarch—or from wheat, potatoes, and other starches—does bear the same molecular signature.)

  In Wiley’s day such scientific precision could seem essential to maintaining a sense of order in research. Chemists of the midnineteenth century had only begun to tease out the nature of molecular bonds. In the late 1850s the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé put forth the first theory of how atoms come together to form a molecule. Chemistry superstar Von Hofmann, then at the University of Berlin, made the first stick-and-ball models of molecules in the 1860s. In Germany, Wiley had learned to respect such precision, a point illustrated by the i
nstruments he’d brought home with him. One of his favorites was called a polariscope (or polarimeter). At Purdue he used it to tell the difference between types of sugars by passing polarized light through sweetened substances and measuring the angle at which the light rotated. “Glucose presents several anomalies when examined with polarized light,” Wiley explained, compared with the true sugars.

  He was not shocked when his tests showed that a full 90 percent of his syrup samples were fakes. Shop owners had told him that these new syrups were so sweet and inexpensive that they had almost “driven all others out of the market.” Testing of honey samples also turned up rampant fakery. He somewhat mockingly referred to the counterfeit product as “entirely free of bee mediation,” noting that even the bit of honeycomb that producers stuck in the jar was phony, made from paraffin. In his report, Wiley found no fault with corn syrup per se—it was, after all, a natural sweetener—but he thought that a food or ingredient ought to be called what it was. To fill a bottle with “glucose” and label it as more-expensive maple syrup was to deceive the consumer. In addition to finding corn syrup masquerading as other sugars, the study turned up impurities left by the manufacturing process. There was copper from mixing tubs and some chemical remnants of charred animal bones (used as a charcoal filter), and in some samples he detected sulfuric acid.

  Wiley’s report, published both in the state record and in Popular Science in the summer of 1881, gratified those in the real maple syrup business, but it annoyed corn growers, corn-syrup manufacturers, and the bottlers of the mislabeled products—which, put together, made a far larger and more influential interest group than that consisting of maple tree tappers. Wiley, as he would for the rest of his career, had begun making powerful enemies.

  Surprisingly, the group that seemed most bothered by his report was beekeepers. Instead of thanking him for exposing what the chemist called “the injury done to the honey industry” by the corn-based fakes, that industry’s trade journals denounced him and the study, referring to it as “Wiley’s Lie.” The honey producers worried about damage to their reputations. But it became obvious as well that there were “beekeepers” who had not, of late, been bothering to keep bees.

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  Wiley, characteristically, doubled down. He wrote a more in-depth report for the Indiana Board of Health, stressing the importance of truthful labeling. The second report included instructions for how to detect adulterations, and it strongly recommended that Indiana set purity standards for sugar products produced and sold in the state. “The dangers of adulteration are underrated,” he wrote, “when it is for a moment supposed that any counterfeit food can be tolerated without depraving the public taste, and impairing the public safeguards of human life.”

  Despite the political pushback, he closed with a firm call for action. It was high time, he wrote, that “the demand for honest food should be heard in terms making no denial.” He wasn’t afraid, as he would say throughout his career, to stand up for what he thought right. After all, he’d been raised that way.

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  Like Harvey Wiley, Peter Collier, chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture, was fascinated by the science of sugars and the plants from which they could be produced. Even more enthusiastic about sorghum cane than Wiley was, the Yale-educated Collier saw it as a crop of the future. He envisioned glowing copper-and-green sorghum fields across the country, a potential source of sugar as bountiful as corn or even sugarcane.

  His boss, the pragmatic George Loring, did not share Collier’s vision. Commissioner Loring (titled “commissioner” because the USDA was not yet a cabinet-level department) was a former Massachusetts physician with a special interest in treating the often-crippling diseases of farm animals. The sorghum disagreement between Collier and Loring might have stayed a matter of internal discussion except for one problem. Whenever Collier felt aggrieved, he had a habit of complaining about the commissioner to the Washington press. Exasperated by newspaper stories in which his chief chemist suggested that he was an idiot, Loring in 1882 sought and received permission from President Chester A. Arthur to replace Collier with a more amiable scientist. Later that year, at a December meeting of Mississippi sugarcane growers, Loring heard a speech by Harvey Wiley, who had been invited to present an overview of sugar-producing crops. It was, thought Loring, a balanced presentation. It was objective. Unlike Collier, who had become increasingly fanatic about the dreamy future of sorghum, Wiley gave each crop its due. The Purdue scientist impressed the commissioner as the reasonable man he was looking for.

  Two months later, Loring offered Wiley the chief chemist job. The timing was perfect. Wiley had been feeling increasingly stifled and unappreciated at Purdue. Conservative members of the university’s board of trustees hadn’t cared for the negative attention his state honey and syrup study had drawn, especially from the influential corn industry. One trustee had declared publicly that scientific progress was “the devil’s tool.” The board even publicly disapproved of Wiley’s personal life, including his regular baseball games with the college students and the high-wheel bicycle that he rode to campus daily, dressed in knee breeches. Trustees had called him into a meeting to upbraid him for making a spectacle of himself, even comparing him to a circus monkey. Wiley, as he wrote in his diary, would have taken insult if he hadn’t found the scolding so amusing. Yet he admitted frustration. He had just that year been considered, but passed over, for the post of university president. For the thirty-nine-year-old bachelor, Loring’s offer seemed a lifeline out of a job that increasingly felt like a trap.

  But he had not anticipated that the ever-combative Collier would turn his attention from Loring to him. Furious at the loss of his job and status, Collier promptly engineered a series of attacks on his designated successor. His well-placed allies wrote to farm trade journals, denigrating the Indiana sugar studies and suggesting that their author was an inferior scientist. Collier also persuaded the senators from his home state of Vermont to visit President Arthur, demanding that Wiley be denied the position. The aggressive campaign only irritated the president and it did not win Collier his job back. But it was successful in embarrassing Wiley.

  “These were the first public attacks on me and they cut to the quick,” Wiley later wrote. “I felt hurt to be the victim of such insinuations and misstatements.” He wrote to the same publications, attempting to defend and justify his work. Collier’s faction, in turn, accused him of bragging. The best way to respond to such attacks, he would gradually come to believe, “is to go about one’s business and let enemies do their worst.” He began packing up for the move to Washington, DC.

  In 1883, the Agriculture Department’s sprawling campus was situated between the Smithsonian Institution’s redbrick castle and the almost-completed Washington Monument. The grounds boasted experimental gardens, greenhouses, conservatories, and a grand, modern main building, built in the 1870s, with a stylish mansard roof. The tiny Division of Chemistry, however, was tucked into what Wiley called a “damp, illy-ventilated, and wholly unsuitable” basement. One of the first acts of the new chief chemist was to ban smoking. Not only was the laboratory air stale already but a stray spark, he feared, would have turned the place into a bonfire.

  For his living quarters, Wiley rented a bedroom from a Washington family, with whom he would happily stay for the next twenty years. Treated as a well-liked family member he frequently spent evenings helping the children with their homework. Social by nature, he accepted an invitation to join the prestigious Cosmos Club, a men-only, intellectually inclined organization whose members included Alexander Graham Bell and Mark Twain. He also joined the more casual Six O’Clock Club, which by contrast did admit women and boasted American Red Cross founder Clara Barton on its executive committee.

  New to the charged political climate of Washington, Wiley scored an early coup in 1885, when Grover Cleveland became president. A dedicated
Republican, Wiley knew that his job security could well depend on Democrat Cleveland’s choice to replace Loring as commissioner of agriculture. The chemist started a letter-writing campaign to influential friends, urging the appointment of Norman J. Coleman, a Missouri Democrat and a longtime publisher of farm trade journals, who approved of Wiley’s research. The campaign worked, and Wiley was blessed with a grateful and supportive new boss.

  Coleman, who would help create a national network of agricultural experiment stations, also believed that it was a public servant’s duty to champion the public interest. In fact, he wanted the chief chemist to be more aggressive in tackling food safety issues—something Wiley too had been advocating. Coleman even had a suggestion for some timely official investigations. He recommended that the Chemistry Division report on the quality and healthfulness of commercially sold milk. The scientists, he proposed, also should investigate dairy products such as butter and evaluate the new and highly suspect industry of butter substitutes.

  The problems of the dairy industry had continued to fester basically unchecked. Mullaly had written in 1853 about the practice wherein distillers housed dairy cows in stinking urban warehouses where each animal was tethered immobile and fed on the spent mash, or “swill,” from the fermentation process used in making whiskey, an arrangement that enriched the owners but was linked to a host of public health problems.

  In the 1850s Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper had exposed these fly-ridden, maggot-infested milk factories, where the animals stood in their own waste, subsisting on the warm swill, which still contained residual sugar and alcohol but little nutrition. Over the cow’s short, miserable life, its teeth tended to rot out before the animal stopped giving milk and was sent to slaughter—or dropped dead in the stall. Pediatricians linked swill milk to a list of childhood symptoms of ill health. “I have every year grown more suspicious of distillery milk,” one doctor wrote, “whenever I have seen a child presenting a sickly appearance, loose flabby flesh, weak joints, capricious appetite, frequent retchings and occasional vomitage, irregular bowels with tendency to diarrhea and fetid breath.”