Chapter 26
Before Congress stepped into the food-and-drug-regulation business in 1906 with the Pure Food and Drug Act, what consumers were putting in their mouths or on their bodies was anyone’s guess. Something could be delicious, or it could be poison—or it could be both—and the onus was on buyers, not sellers, to know the difference. Aimed at consumer protection, the legislation was a sweeping reform, but rather than eliciting grateful praise, it was met with a hearty “harrumph” from the populace who were paying for it all in the form of new taxes.
Food was as dangerous as a shotgun then. Beginning in 1902, a dirty dozen of young men known as the “Poison Squad” regularly gathered in the basement of the Agriculture Department in Washington, D.C., to eat toxins. Served, for example, chicken, potatoes, and asparagus by a cook who had worked as “head chef for the Queen of Bavaria,” the squad members were in reality testing the effects of the preservatives that fare was typically—and generously—spiked with: benzoate, and borax. The team, heralded by their motto “Only the Brave Dare Eat The Fare,” inspired similar local and industry daredevil efforts for dried fruit, ice cream, and coffee.
By the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, expos began replacing the more-is-more displays of food products with ones implanting the certainty that food was as pure as a Madonna’s kiss. Demonstrations by meat-packing plants of the value of refrigeration in their work took place there, perhaps a concession to current events, with Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” soon to appear, and the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act shortly to become law in 1906.
So, to cheerlead the importance of honesty in handling, labeling, and advertising for consumables, the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition in Virginia centered an entire 60,000-square-foot building of exhibits around the Pure Food Movement, filling it with wholesome goodness like Quaker Oats oatmeal, Shredded Wheat cereal, and Jell-O gelatin. (The most popular food item at the expo, however, was Snowdrift Hogless Lard.) Only exhibitors who swore adherence to the Pure Food and Drug Act were allowed to exhibit in the space, and responsibility was thrust squarely upon them to shift the population’s mentality about why they deserved facial creams without brain-damaging toxins, products that actually contained the items listed on the label, and food that hadn’t been colored and scented to disguise spoilage, mixed with floor sweepings, or slept in by rats.
Some exhibitors, such as the American Cereal Co., brought in entire production lines for Puffed Rice and Quaker Oats on a miniature scale to show the purity and precision of its processes in food handling. Other displays went for showy appeal with palm trees on the roof or oversized cups of brightly colored Jell-O spread around, but none could compete with the exhibit conceived by beverage manufacturer Martin Gillet & Co. Inc.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Situated in the center of the building’s show floor, a teapot of mammoth proportions broadcast the company’s signature product—He-No Tea made from the finest Chinese leaves available and packaged in newfangled single-serving bags. The teapot’s cupola and acorn finial towered above the room to beckon every corner of the building, and officials bragged that the pot could hold one million cups of the company’s pure-tea goodness.
Fairgoers were invited into the booth, which was strung with Chinese lanterns and outfitted with a traditional tea lounge, to sample and purchase goods, while publications reporting on the fair raved that the booth was nothing short of the crown jewel of the Pure Foods displays. They also praised the purity of the product, which touted on its packaging that it was “pure and free from all adulteration.” It was an important distinction, Martin Gillet said, because most bulk teas of the era contained artificial colorants, spurious plant material, spent tea, and who knew what else.
With the help of the Jamestown Exposition and other Pure Foods shows that cropped up in its wake around the country, people began to warm to the idea that maybe the new legislation and its accompanying tax weren’t so bad. Exhibitors from the Pure Foods building in Jamestown were considered the poster children for the cause and became the darlings of the Pure Food Movement.
Imitators grasping the coattails of those well-regarded manufacturers cropped up too, including one that called itself Hi-Hi Tea and created suspiciously familiar-looking packaging in what seemed an obvious attempt to divert some of He-No Tea’s loyal clientele. Martin Gillet fought for and won an injunction against the imposter, which was run by a C.D. Kenny, along with damages for lost revenues for its trademarked He-No Tea.
But Kenny appealed, accusing the company of falsely acquiring a trademark for a “Chinese” tea that no Chinese person had ever heard of. Martin Gillet officials acquiesced that He-No was not a specific tea leaf, but rather a proprietary blend of several Chinese tea varieties. That was enough to prompt the court of appeals to side with Kenny and overturn the infringement verdict under the laws of the day.
Kenny was free to go on confusing consumers into purchasing his tea packets instead of He-No Tea, but karma wasn’t Kenny’s bosom buddy in the end. It turned out that Kenny was right about Martin Gillet’s misleading product, but not in a way that was going to help him at all.
An inspection conducted under the auspices of the new Pure Foods Act discovered that there was a wolf in sheep’s clothes among the Pure Foods Building’s exhibitors, and it was He-No Tea. Despite images of Chinese sailing ships on its labels and the promise of the finest Chinese teas in its products, Martin Gillet turned out to be selling something that was not only not Chinese tea, but not tea at all. Rather, a closer scrutiny of the product revealed that it was Kentucky bluegrass that made up the bulk of the “tea” the company was selling, baled out of fields instead of shipped across the ocean in Chinese junks with billowing sails.
In the greatest tea scandal since Boston Harbor, the government seized the product and charged He-No Tea with misbranding. In a clever, if not confused effort to survive the disrepute, the company hired a Chinese lawyer who vigorously defended the product in court. He challenged the charge of mislabeling, but he didn’t say it was because there was, in fact, Chinese tea in the product. Rather, he argued that the name was entirely accurate because it was “hay” and had “no tea.” With shame heaped upon the company, Martin Gillet lost its court case, though it went on under various monikers to become one of the world’s leading tea manufacturers, eventually acquired by what is now ConAgra Foods Inc. C.D. Kenny and Hi-Hi Tea were never heard from again.