Three
THE BEEF COURT
1896–1899
A film of the butter so yellow and sweet,
Well suited to make every minute
A dream of delight.
Wiley, as he confided in his diary, was depressed. Some of that was purely personal. His mother, Lucinda, died shortly after Morton took office in 1893. “I was plunged at once out of my long boyhood,” Wiley wrote gloomily. Two years later his father, Preston, died as well, leaving him feeling further adrift and alone—an aging bachelor, renting a room in another family’s house. His job now was the central focus of his life. And that too seemed to be foundering.
The election of William McKinley in 1896 brightened his outlook. McKinley was not a reformer but he was at least not a Democrat. With a Republican back in the White House wanting his own team, the chief chemist felt confident that Morton would be replaced. And when Wiley received his first-ever invitation to an inaugural ball, he allowed himself to hope it was a signal of resurgence, not just for him but also for the status of the Chemistry Division.
The early signs for that were good. McKinley appointed a former congressman, James Wilson, as the USDA’s next secretary. A sixty-two-year-old professor of agriculture from Iowa State University, Wilson still farmed, growing feed corn in Iowa’s Tama County, which had earned him the nickname “Tama Jim.” The new secretary told Wiley immediately that his job was secure and within six months had restored full funding to the Division of Chemistry, encouraging him to begin planning new food-adulteration studies.
Perhaps it was under the influence of such a wave of renewed optimism that the chief chemist, at the age of fifty-three, took an unexpected and uncharacteristic step. He fell in love at first sight with a twenty-one-year-old USDA librarian. “I saw a young woman with a book in her hand, apparently looking for the proper place to deposit it. I was immediately struck by her appearance,” he confided to a friend. She was slight, fine featured, with light brown hair and dark blue eyes. He noticed with admiration her direct, intelligent gaze. As he liked to tell the story, Wiley grabbed the arm of Edward Cutter, the library manager, and demanded to know the woman’s name. The manager identified her as Anna Kelton.
“Cutter,” Wiley said, “I’m going to marry that girl.”
“Perhaps it would be well for you to meet the young lady before proposing matrimony,” Cutter replied. Wiley greeted Anna Kelton politely, as befitted a senior official in the department, but he resolutely began plotting a courtship.
Anna “Nan” Kelton, a graduate of George Washington University, was more intent on a career. Her protective mother, Josephine, recently widowed, was even more intent in that desire. Born in Oakland, California, Anna had come with her family to Washington in 1893, when her father, Colonel John C. Kelton, was appointed governor of the Soldiers Home, a military retirement facility in the northwest quadrant of the capital. He had died of an infection just a year after taking the post, leaving his widow determined to see that her children thrived in their own right.
Wiley knew the odds were against him, but he began by politely asking Cutter if he could borrow Miss Kelton for some stenography work. From there, she gradually came to take over many of the chemistry chief’s secretarial needs. Also gradually, she allowed him to escort her to the occasional play or concert. But when he called at her home, Josephine deliberately made him feel unwelcome, and he found himself again balanced between hope and discouragement.
As McKinley’s presidential term began, Congress once again reluctantly considered the quality of the nation’s food and beverages. The legislative attention was focused, though, on a particular beverage—and, as newspapers cheerfully pointed out, one that enjoyed legislative favor. That would be whiskey, and the rule under consideration was one setting “bonded” standards for the spirit.
The term dated to an 1868 law, which had granted distillers a delay between the time when they produced their product and when they had to pay a federal tax on it. This “bonded period” had originally been set at a year but over time was increased. It provided a financial incentive for letting spirits sit in barrels before being bottled for sale, and it resulted in aged whiskey—amber colored and more complex and mellow in taste. A distiller could charge considerably more for a well-aged bottle of spirits than for liquor straight from the still. High-end makers began to campaign for federal regulation that would do more than give them a tax-free grace period but that would also protect their profitable reputations for making the good stuff. Edmund Haynes Taylor Jr.—who bore the Kentucky honorific “colonel” and was the namesake of Old Taylor brand bourbon—was among the distillers who sought rules to distinguish products like his from, as he put it, “carelessly made whiskeys whose aim is quantity and whose objective is mere chaffering for cheapness.”
Those chafferers, as Taylor called them, sometimes sold their lesser products with phony labels proclaiming them to be Taylor’s brand or Jasper “Jack” Daniel’s famed Old No. 7. The fakes were often made using rectified alcohol, also called neutral spirits. These were a concentrated form of ethyl alcohol, usually produced on an industrial scale by repeatedly distilling the liquid to purify it and increase its strength. To simulate whiskey, the product was diluted with water and tinted brown—often with tobacco extracts, tincture of iodine, burned sugar, or prune juice.
In 1897, after decades of complaints over the widespread adulteration and fakery of alcoholic spirits, Congress passed the Bottled-in-Bond Act, which attempted to encourage basic quality standards. The act stated that each bottle of spirits could be marked with a green “bonded” seal from the government if it was aged for at least four years in a supervised federal warehouse. Bonded whiskey was also labeled for proof (a measurement set in the United States as twice the percentage of alcohol) and the location of the specific distillery.
Makers of blended whiskeys, meanwhile, were also trying to fend off counterfeiters and set quality standards. Blended whiskeys are, as the name indicates, made from a mixture of distilled spirits. They usually contain a high-quality aged product, derived from a single distillation, to establish flavor, together with other, lesser whiskeys added for economy. Sometimes, in lower-quality blends, there are also neutral spirits added to the mix, along with dyes to enhance color.
Although they could not qualify for the bonded designation at their best, blends could be high-quality products sold at premium prices—prime targets for the counterfeit-label scam. In the nineteenth century, Canada’s Hiram Walker Company, producer of Canadian Club blended whiskey, reacted to fakery in the U.S. market by hiring detectives to hunt cheats. The company took out newspaper advertisements listing the perpetrators or had the names listed on billboard posters proclaiming “A Swindle, These People Sell Bogus Liquors.” Yet inexpensive blended whiskeys were too often no better than the counterfeits. For that reason, producers of blended whiskeys were sometimes lumped together under the somewhat derogatory label “rectifiers.” Wiley—who of an evening often enjoyed a glass of fine, aged bourbon—had little regard for anything called a blend and tended to dismiss any alternatives to straight whiskey as belonging to a catalog of fakes, admittedly of varying quality.
After the Bottled-in-Bond Act, Colonel Taylor and his friends began publishing advertisements touting bonded whiskey as the only “real” whiskey. Producers of blends—both good and bad—protested, to little effect at the time. But their sense of a real injustice did not end, and neither did their determination to fight for a change. The rectifiers, and their quest for equality, would lead to years of wrangling over what could rightly be called whiskey, plaguing Wiley, Wilson, and a series of presidents in the years ahead.
McKinley himself showed no interest in the topic—or in food or drink quality in general. He had other far more pressing issues, including a politically charged decision to go to war with Spain over Cuban independence in 1898. Although the conflict was brief—lasting only from April to August of that year—the aftershocks were profound. The United States became something of an imperial power, gaining former Spanish colonial possessions, including Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. And although the war was brief, it showcased so many examples of outdated and inept management of the U.S. military that McKinley was forced to replace the secretary of war, John Hay.
To the president’s dismay, among the most stubborn scandals regarding mismanagement was one involving the quality of food fed to the troops. The story—which made newspaper headlines coast to coast—involved the shoddy state of the beef fed to American soldiers during the conflict. Testimony at the resulting hearings before the War Department would range from Wiley as an expert witness on food safety to then–New York governor Theodore Roosevelt as an aggrieved former soldier.
The “embalmed beef” scandal arose soon after the war’s end in August. Major General Nelson Miles, commanding general of the army, called for an investigation of food that had been supplied to soldiers in Cuba. He’d asked all the commanders stationed in the Caribbean to write evaluations of the canned beef delivered to their regiments. Miles, citing reports of a chemical smell wafting from the product, called it “embalmed beef,” a term that caught on in the nation’s newspapers. The press reported that Miles had received descriptions of cans swarming with maggots and cans supposedly containing a mix of meat and charred rope. The Chicago Tribune—a paper particularly interested in the business of the meatpacking industry—quoted soldiers who said that often when the cans were opened they “had to retire to a distance to prevent being overcome” by the stench.
As Miles was airing his complaints, the War Department (roughly analogous to today’s Department of the Army) began a general inquiry into the overall conduct of the war. At the direction of President McKinley, secretary of war Russell A. Alger appointed a long-retired Civil War officer, Major General Grenville Dodge, to lead an investigative panel that became known as the Dodge Commission. A wealthy businessman and former congressman, Dodge transported the commission aboard his own private railroad car to interview witnesses around the country. He also held numerous hearings in Washington, DC, where Miles was called to testify that December.
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 business.”
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.”
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 called “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.
That same month, the city of Omaha reported an “embalmed milk” crisis that had led directly to the deaths of an alarming number of children. The Nebraska health department warned “all families, as far as possible, to cease the use of milk and cream furnished by local dairies.” The problem again was Preservaline. The dairy industry had also discovered that formaldehyde was a useful food additive. Not only did it slow the souring of milk, but its oddly sweet taste could also mask the somewhat acrid tang of milk that had already gone bad. “It is noticeable,” announced the city’s public health officer, “that more infants have died in Omaha this spring than ever before.” And spring, he continued, was usually “a time when the general health conditions should have been good.” Following the uptick in child deaths, the department had surveyed physicians and found that almost all the recent infant deaths were related to preservatives in milk.
Hardly had the Omaha milk scandal died down when another flared in Indiana. Dairies near Indianapolis apparently weren’t bothering with commercially prepared formulas like Preservaline. They were simply pouring straight formaldehyde into rotting milk. Then they sold it on the cheap to poor families and to budget-strapped facilities like orphanages. The practice had been linked to the deaths of more than two dozen children in Indianapolis orphanages.
The Indiana state health officer, Dr. John Hurty, a former professor of pharmacy at Purdue University and an old friend of Harvey Wiley, had also earned a reputation as a tireless crusader. His work for causes ranging from smallpox vaccination to pasteurization of milk would eventually lead to his election as president of the American Public Health Association. In the aftermath of the orphanage deaths, Hurty explained to journalists that the toxic compounds had proven an economic boon to dairymen, who used to have to throw out milk when it went bad. “Two drops of a forty percent solution of formaldehyde will preserve a pint of milk for several days,” Hurty said. There were no safety tests available, but businessmen had gambled that the amount put into food and drink was too low to cause harm. It turned out some dairymen were adding extra drops of formaldehyde solution on the principle that it would even better preserve their product.
Hurty’s department advised that even an “infinitesimal amount” of formaldehyde could be dangerous, especially to infants. “Such being the fact, it should not be used for preserving foods,” he insisted. When a newspaper reporter sympathetic to the dairy industry asked him why he was making such a big deal about it, Hurty snapped back: “Well, it’s embalming fluid that you are adding to the milk. I guess it’s all right if you want to embalm the baby.” After his press conference, the Indianapolis News published a cartoon showing a large glass bottle labeled “Milk” with a monster coiling from the bottle’s open mouth. The creature was an evil-eyed scaly thing with jagged teeth and sharp claws. A baby in a diaper stood looking up at the monster, holding only a rattle to defend itself. “It looks like a tough battle for the little fellow” read the caption.
Hurty had been trying for years to get the Indiana legislature to pass a food safety law, arguing that it was essential due to the lack of federal action. With more victims every day—the embalmed milk epidemic would eventually kill an estimated four hundred children in the state—and a corresponding rise in public outrage, the state passed its Pure Food Law in 1898. Hurty promptly banned all use of formaldehyde in milk. He also launched a campaign to clean up dairy practices in general. Many dairies were still notoriously unsanitary, and milk routinely contained dangerous colonies of disease-causing bacteria, among other impurities. Commercially sold milk that Hurty’s department had recently analyzed contained horsehair worms, flakes of moss, and traces of manure. Further, the chief health officer could “state confidently that this milk has been adulterated with stagnant water.”
He strongly recommended adoption of the flash-heat process for killing microorganisms and preventing spoilage in beverages, a method developed in the 1860s by French scientist Louis Pasteur. Pasteurization had proven a success in the wine and beer industries in Europe and had more recently begun being used by European dairies to kill bacteria in their product. It was time, Hurty said, for the United States to catch up.