The Poison Squad Read online

  Miles cited a letter from one army doctor, which claimed that much of the canned beef shipped from the United States was “apparently preserved by injected chemicals to aid deficient refrigeration.” The canned meat smelled like formaldehyde when opened, the doctor said, and when cooked tasted of chemical preservatives. Another officer described the canned meat as having an “unnatural, mawkish, sickening” odor. It was a national disgrace, Miles said, to serve chemically tainted meat with “no life or nourishment in it” to men who had put their lives at risk for their country.

  Miles’s angry remarks prompted an even angrier response from Brigadier General Charles P. Eagan, commissary general of subsistence, when he testified before the commission the following month. “He lies in his throat, he lies in his heart, he lies in every hair on his head and every pore in his body,” said Eagan about Miles. “I wish to force the lie back in his throat, covered with the contents of a camp latrine.”

  In February 1899, the Dodge Commission issued a voluminous document titled “Report of the Commission Appointed by the President to Investigate the Conduct of the War Department During the War with Spain.” It reflected none of the anger expressed by Eagan and Miles. Rather it contained cautious recommendations regarding army medical practices, supplies, troop movements, and more. And it did not reach a conclusion about the bad-smelling beef. The only officer punished in the wake of the hearings was Eagan, not for procuring distasteful meat or shipping it to the troops but for the grave offense of insulting his senior officer in public. Found guilty, Eagan, already in his late fifties, was relieved of duty until he reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-four.

  The Dodge hearings satisfied neither Miles nor the public, who remained furious that America’s fighting men had been fed bad rations. Newspapers tracking the story accused the army of covering up its own substandard practices; private citizens telegraphed the White House in outrage. Under pressure, an increasingly irate President McKinley ordered the War Department to hold another inquiry on the specific question of the quality of the beef that had been supplied to U.S. troops. The Chicago Tribune immediately christened this second tribunal the “Beef Court.” It convened in March 1899.

  In anticipation, the president had summoned Secretary Wilson to the White House to ask for help with chemical analysis from Harvey Wiley’s crew. “I called on Secretary Alger to request that he send me samples of the canned beef that were furnished to the soldiers last summer,” Wilson wrote to Wiley, “for the purpose of determining whether any deleterious substances have been added to them in the course of preparation to more perfectly preserve them.”

  Wiley and his chemists had already begun to draw a precise and unappetizing portrait of all American canned beef—not just military rations. Every can they opened contained a soupy mix of meat scraps and fat. The fat was standard in canned meat production because manufacturers used it to fill spaces between the scraps. Before a can was sealed, hot fat or a boiled-bone gelatin was poured in to “fill all the interstices not occupied by pieces of meat.” Finding a thick paste of gelatinous fat embedded with shreds and chunks of meat wasn’t unexpected and, in fact, the chemists noted, the solid mass probably prevented some bacterial spoilage.

  Wiley drew test samples from military supplies and from cans available in stores from three of the nation’s biggest packinghouses, Libby, McNeil & Libby, Armour, and Cudahy, all residents of Chicago’s Union Stockyards. All three had grown bigger since the oleomargarine study in the 1880s. The yards now processed close to twenty million animals a year. “Packingtown,” as the locals called it, had become even more notorious for its pervasive dirt, gore, and offal.

  This was a community of immigrant labor—Irish, German, Polish, Russian, anyone in desperate need of a job. The workers manned “the killing floors” for ten-hour shifts, earning perhaps ten cents an hour. Women could be hired for half that; they were employed mostly to pack the meat into boxes or cans. Children were cheaper yet; a six-year-old boy could be paid to run messages around a factory for a mere penny an hour. As the industry emphasized, Americans liked their meat inexpensive. Fresh beef could be found in the grocery store for twelve cents a pound. The average housewife could pick up three cans of corned beef for a quarter. When the War Department’s Commissary Division had wanted an even better deal, the packers had found it easy to comply. Libby, McNeill & Libby alone had unloaded seven million pounds of canned meat into the military supply depots, as the army’s investigating panel would note.

  The Beef Court convened in the new State, War, and Navy Building on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. The hearing chamber was crammed with journalists, annoying both War Department officials and the meatpackers, who were angry over being portrayed publicly as poisoners of American soldiers. Roosevelt, then the thirty-nine-year-old governor of New York, appeared as a star witness early in the proceedings. At the beginning of the war, he had famously left his post as assistant secretary of the navy to form the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, popularly known as the Rough Riders. Bearing the rank of colonel, Roosevelt had been hailed as one of the heroes of the brief conflict, and his testimony was front-page news.

  “I first knew there was trouble with the beef while we were lying off the quay in Tampa Bay,” he said. “I noticed a man named Ash—I think he was from Kentucky—preparing to throw away his portion of canned roast beef. I asked him why he was throwing it away. He said, ‘I can’t eat it.’ I told him that he was a baby and that he did not go to war to eat fancy menus and that if he was not satisfied with the rations he had better go home. He ate the meat and vomited.” The governor said he had then examined the rations. “When the cans were opened, the top was nothing more than a layer of slime. It was disagreeable looking and nasty. The beef was stringy and coarse and seemed to be nothing more than a bundle of fibers.”

  Roosevelt stressed that the issue was that good men had been served poorly by their country, sent into war with provisions that were “uneatable, unpalatable, unwholesome . . . utterly unsafe and utterly unfit.” He added that his men, unable to eat what was supplied, were half starved much of the time in Cuba. Roosevelt said he had personally quit eating the army meat rations, subsisting on beans and rice while awaiting food packages sent by his family. “I would rather have eaten my hat,” he said.

  Newspapers reported that Roosevelt was flushed and ill tempered by the time he finished testifying. Stamping out of the hearing room, trailed by a crowd of fascinated journalists, he turned to a friend and snapped, “It was a disgrace to our country.” He was followed on the stand by dozens of equally embittered former soldiers. One after another, they described a slimy product with a chemical tang and, often, visible rot. Army cooks cited the thick greenish deposit they routinely scraped out of roast beef cans. There was also a lengthy discussion of the so-called fresh beef shipped down from the yards. One soldier marveled over a heavily preserved side of beef that, he claimed, hung in the sun for hours in a state of eerie stasis, showing no sign of decomposition. A medical officer testified that much of the beef “had an odor similar to that of a dead human body after being injected with formaldehyde, and it tasted when first cooked like decomposed boric acid.” A funeral home director who had served as a soldier in Cuba also mentioned the familiar aroma of embalming chemicals. More than that, he said, the cans of beef were crowded with crystals that looked eerily like the ones that formed in corpses when he injected preservatives. “It did not look like roast beef,” a corporal testified.

  Eventually, expert witness Harvey Wiley came quietly to the stand. At least a few of the reporters in attendance leaned forward. The chemistry chief was in no way as famous as Governor Roosevelt, but he enjoyed a certain reputation for the trouble he had caused producers of dirty coffee and acid-laced wines. At a recent party, a food trade journal editor had refused to shake Wiley’s hand, explaining that he felt no need to be civil to “the man who is doing all he can to destroy American b
usiness.”

  Wiley testified calmly that his staff had found traces of “all of the preservatives ordinarily employed in meat products” in the army supplies. These included “boric acid, salicylic acid, sulfites and sulfurous acid,” all of them common and all considered relatively safe, although Wiley, if he had been pressed, would have admitted that he lacked data about how safe they might be and in what doses. The cans sold to the War Department had not been adulterated with the latest industrial chemicals, certainly not synthesized formaldehyde, he said. Instead, the packers had relied mostly on far cheaper sodium chloride—plain old table salt—in combination with potassium nitrate, also relatively inexpensive. Widely known as saltpeter, the latter substance was also an ingredient in gunpowder. Salts had been used this way since the Middle Ages and undoubtedly much earlier. Potassium nitrate, usually mined from guano deposits, was used not only to stop decay but also to treat disease. Eighteenth-century physicians had dosed patients with it to treat everything from asthma to arthritis. In the tiny amounts found in the cans, the compound shouldn’t pose any particular risk, Wiley said.

  The canned beef had been garden-variety cheap meat—stringy, gristly, poorly handled, and too quick to decompose. And rather than using preservatives too heavily, the cost-conscious meatpackers hadn’t used enough salts to prevent decomposition when the cans were exposed to the Cuban heat. This lack had accounted for much of the rot and discoloration found in many cans when they were opened. Wiley speculated that eventually, the very appearance of the stuff “might produce a feeling of nausea or distaste in the person eating it.” But he also gave credence to the reports of widespread illnesses blamed on the meat. Many were probably ptomaine poisoning, the general term for bacterial contamination, he said. He testified that the army should have put in place “a supervising agent to check for decay or signs of failed sterilization.”

  A member of his team, food chemist Willard Bigelow, also testified, reinforcing Wiley’s points and adding details. Bigelow—slight, bespectacled and bearded, meticulously tidy, and intense by nature—was known as a tireless and stubborn investigator. For this analysis, he’d visited meatpacking operations not only in Chicago but also in Kansas City and Omaha. He’d run chemical analyses and taste-tested every sample. If the cans had been loaded with industrial preservatives, Bigelow testified, “the taste would be so bitter that it would soon be detected.” He made it clear that he’d not enjoyed tasting meat that he judged to be from “the poorest cattle”—possibly diseased. It was terrible-quality beef, he said, but contrary to widespread rumor, it was indeed beef. He’d found no evidence that the soldiers had been dished up diced horse meat.

  Perhaps the most condemnatory conclusion that the USDA chemists had reached was that the canned meat that had so disgusted soldiers in Cuba was almost exactly what U.S. consumers were finding on grocery shelves. In response, representatives from the meatpacking firms accepted none of this; they firmly defended their products. Libby issued a statement pointing out that it had been in business for twenty-five years and knew a lot more about meat and its quality than the average soldier: “We sold millions of pounds of canned meat to the government for use in the war and no cans have ever been returned to us as bad,” which was true, as the War Department had destroyed the bad meat. The company suggested the real problem was lousy cooks: “All meats require pepper and salt and as the soldiers did not have any seasoning, it is likely the canned meat tasted flat to them. That may have had some effect on them.” A spokesman for Augustus Swift’s company declared that the packinghouse had not used embalming compounds in meat sold to the military—or to anyone else. It would be, he said, bad business.

  The Beef Court concluded by issuing findings that expressed dissatisfaction with almost everyone involved, including General Miles, for raising such a fuss. The judicial panel noted that it was difficult to assess just how substandard the food had been because much of the spoiled or tainted meat was “burned or buried” rather than served to the men. The presiding officers also pointed out that the destruction of food would have left the military kitchens undersupplied if not for the fact that “the entire army was so reduced by sickness and debilitation, due to climatic influences,” that many of the men hadn’t been eating anyway.

  There was nothing in the investigation, the panel continued, to suggest that tainted meat was the major cause of illness. The evil effects of bad water and tropical fevers were found to be the major cause: “The court finds it impossible to conclude that either the canned beef or the refrigerated beef appeared to an appreciable extent as causes of intestinal disease.” Taking a cue from Wiley and Bigelow, the ruling found that supplies sent to Cuba had been no “better or worse than any other,” although they were probably not suitably packaged to withstand tropical heat and perhaps were inadequately spiced or prepared in the field.

  Soldiers who had served in Cuba remained unconvinced. Spanish-American War veterans insisted ever after that the meat had stunk of formaldehyde. One of them was the poet Carl Sandburg, who said years later that he could not forget the stink of the army meat. “It was embalmed,” he said, “every suck of nourishment gone from it though having nevertheless a putridity of odor more pungent than ever reaches the nostrils from a properly embalmed cadaver.”

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  The army also sought the Chemistry Division’s help in investigating the death of nineteen-year-old Private Ross Gibbons of Peoria, Illinois, who had collapsed in convulsions after dining on a can of corned beef at a Tennessee training camp. A day later he died. Chemical analysis showed that the contents of the can had been saturated with the neurotoxic metal lead, which had apparently seeped out of the container itself. Lead was also found in his body.

  Metal poisoning from canned goods didn’t surprise Wiley. His laboratory had flagged the problem years earlier. The coffee investigation had noted that “relatively large” amounts of tin were seeping into canned foods. And in the part of Bulletin 13 investigating canned vegetables, which was printed—and promptly shelved—just before Julius Morton had shut down the food investigations, lead poisoning had been highlighted as a primary concern.

  Lead solder was then the preferred method for sealing the seams of tin cans. But while European countries regulated lead levels in solder, the United States had set no standards, not even for food containers. The Chemistry Division had found that some of the solders used in tin cans were 50 percent lead. Further, the “tin” used to make cans was an unregulated alloy of whatever metals the manufacturer had handy. “In this country there is no restriction whatever in regard to character of the tin employed and as a result of this the tin of some of the cans has been found to contain as high as 12 percent of lead.” The analysis also found other toxic metals including zinc and copper. Even glass containers used for canning could be contaminated. Jars were capped with lead tops and sealed with rubber pads or rings that contained sulfate of lead. Testing of jar-canned goods had found that the food inside sometimes contained higher lead levels than those found in the tin cans. As the study, overseen by the tireless Willard Bigelow, concluded: “The general result of the examination of the canned goods exposed for sale in this country leads to the rather unpleasant conclusion that the consumers thereof are exposed to . . . poisoning from copper, zinc, tin and lead.”

  Those earlier findings had been suppressed, but under Secretary Wilson, Wiley was again free to publicize his laboratory’s food safety findings. And after the beef court, he realized that his cause was finally in the public eye. Editors were eager to feature his writing, which appeared frequently in publications that ranged from somber scientific journals to the liberal, reform-minded Arena to popular Munsey’s magazine, with its circulation of more than 700,000 readers. In a Munsey’s article, Wiley detailed his division’s survey of bread and cake “flour” sold in the United States, which they had found to be liberally laced with ground white clay and powdered white rocks calle
d “barites.” Some flour, labeled as made from wheat, was really cheaper corn flour, whitened with sulfuric acid. Manufacturers made the acid-treated corn product, labeled “flourine,” and the ground clay product, called “mineraline,” specifically for sale to flour companies. In his article, Wiley quoted from a marketing bulletin that read, “Gentlemen: We invite your attention to our mineraline, which is without a doubt the greatest existing discovery. There is no flourmill man who can afford not to use it for several reasons. Your flour will be much whiter and nicer. And you will realize a profit of between $400 to $1600 per carload of shipped flour barrels.”

  Almost as soon as the beef court had concluded, there were new, tragic reports of not just “embalmed beef” but also “embalmed milk” causing sickness and death in places like Ohio, Nebraska, and Indiana. In June 1899 the city of Cincinnati warned citizens of “an epidemic of stomach trouble, due practically entirely to embalmed beef.” More than one thousand people had fallen ill in a single week after eating beef. The Cincinnati health department had first suspected salicylic acid. As Willard Bigelow had noted in the embalmed beef hearings, this compound was increasingly popular with commercial butchers, who had discovered it could freshen the look of graying beef, setting off a chemical reaction that made old meat look newly pink for a good twelve hours. That time frame, Bigelow had said, was just long enough to move the meat out of the store and into the home kitchen.

  Cincinnati’s public health chemist, to his surprise, did not find salicylic acid in the samples tested. Instead he discovered two new brand-name preservatives, both of which confirmed widespread public suspicion and finally justified the use of the term “embalmed beef.” One was Freezine, a sulfur-rich mixture containing a small percentage of formaldehyde. Freezine’s promotional literature boasted: “Meat can be exposed for sale, returned to ice, more of the preparation applied, and still look good to the eye.” The other, Preservaline, contained formaldehyde as its main active ingredient. Cincinnati officials recommended that citizens play it safe and avoid beef altogether.