Five
ONLY THE BRAVE
1901–1903
Oh, maybe this bread contains alum or chalk
Or sawdust chopped up very fine
Or gypsum in powder about which they talk,
Terra alba just out of the mine
By 1901 the Bureau of Chemistry had identified 152 “new” patent preservatives on the U.S. market. Although the term “new,” the government scientists found, was often merely an advertising ploy rather than a sign of innovation. Many of these products were simply remixes of old standbys like formaldehyde or copper sulfate. The main difference was that the formulas contained these compounds in greater quantities than their predecessors—and, as a result, promised astonishing shelf life. As one advertising circular put it, a good preservative was “guaranteed to keep meat, fish, poultry, etc. for any length of time without ice.” The idea of indestructible food products fascinated many in an era when kitchens were equipped with, at best, an icebox to delay spoilage.
The American chemical industry was quick to recognize a lucrative market in such food- and drinking-enhancing products. In addition to preservatives, companies developed synthetic compounds to make food production cheaper. The sweetener saccharin, discovered in 1879 at Johns Hopkins University, cost far less than sugar and quickly replaced it as a cost-saving alternative. Flavoring agents such as laboratory-brewed citric acid or peppermint extracts could now be used in drinks and other products instead of fresh lemon juice or mint—again saving costs, and again crowding the farmer out of the supply chain.
The pioneering industrial chemist Charles Pfizer, who had founded his New York pharmaceutical company in 1849, now also produced borax, boric acid, cream of tartar, and citric acid for use in food and drink. Chicago’s Joseph Baur, whose Liquid Carbonic Company produced the pressurized gas used in the fizzing drinks of soda fountains, had become so interested in artificial sweeteners that in 1901 he had invested in a new business in St. Louis, the Monsanto Chemical Company, to produce saccharin in large quantities. Saccharin production had also launched the Heyden Chemical Works of New York City in 1900, although that company also branched into the preservative market, producing salicylic acid, formaldehyde, and sodium benzoate for use in food and drinks. The food and drink market also attracted Herbert Henry Dow, founder at age thirty-one of the Dow Chemical Company in Midlands, Michigan. Dow had been a chemistry student at the Case Institute of Technology (eventually merged into Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1897 with financial backing from both friends and former professors, he’d launched his own company, Dow Chemical. The company’s first venture was based on a new process Dow had invented for extracting the element bromine from brine for antiseptic use. But within a few years, Dow also made magnesium for incendiary flares, phenol for explosives, and agricultural pesticides—and was becoming a major producer of food preservatives such as sodium benzoate.
The bureau’s scientists learned much of what they knew about food additives from state-employed chemists in independent-minded, agriculture-rich places like Kentucky, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, where farmers were all too aware that industry was undercutting the fresh-food market with increasing use of artificial ingredients. Prominent examples included Indiana’s outspoken John Hurty and the even more combative Edwin Ladd, analytical chemist at the North Dakota Agricultural College in Fargo. Ladd’s analysis of food and drink sold in the state had led him to believe that big corporations basically regarded North Dakota as “a dumping ground for chemically-enhanced waste food products.” In 1901 he launched a statewide campaign for a pure-food law, bombarding North Dakota legislators and citizens with a catalog of dismaying data.
“More than 90 percent of local meat markets in the state were using chemical preservatives and in nearly every butcher shop could be found a bottle of Freezine, Preservaline, or Iceine,” he reported. “In the dried beef, in the smoked meats, in the canned bacon, in the canned chipped beef, boracic acid or borates (products of the borax industry) are a common ingredient.” In almost every food product Ladd analyzed he found unlabeled industrial compounds that had never been tested for safety, although some were known toxins. “Ninety per cent of the so-called French peas we have taken up in North Dakota were found to contain copper salts.” Baked goods were often loaded with “alum,” a salt of aluminum and potassium, used as a preservative, in baking powders, and to whiten bread.
Ladd was particularly critical of what bottlers were passing off as “catsup” or “ketchup.” (The spellings were already interchangeable.) It was often unrelated to the well-known tomato product. The cheapest of these sauces were frequently made from unwanted pumpkin skins and rinds, stewed, dyed red, and spiced up with vinegar and a little cayenne or paprika. Or ketchup was a soup of “waste products from canners—pulp, skins, ripe tomatoes, green tomatoes, starch paste, coal-tar colors, and chemical preservatives, usually benzoate of soda or salicylic acid.” The North Dakota food chemistry analysis, which Ladd would issue in full the following year, revealed that 100 percent of ketchups were rich in coal-tar dyes, preservatives, and waste products. He also found similar problems in a range of other products, reporting “one hundred percent adulteration” of jams and jellies, 88 percent adulteration of canned corn, and 50 percent of canned peas. And the list went on.
Ladd sent newspapers around the state details of every adulteration finding that he’d uncovered. In response, the National Biscuit Company (later renamed Nabisco) had its legal department engage in an expensive long-distance phone call, suggesting that he tone it down. Ladd, as the local papers gleefully reported, responded by losing his temper. His secretary reported hearing his shouting: “By God, no Eastern lawyer is going to tell me what we can eat out here in North Dakota!”
Ladd’s friend and colleague South Dakota food chemist James Shepard, meanwhile, had launched a similar campaign for a food safety law. To showcase the problem for state residents, Shepard created and publicized a daily meal plan to illustrate the seep of industrial chemistry into the average dinner. His menu, Shepard announced, was such that “any family in the United States might possibly use”:
BREAKFAST
Sausage: coal-tar dye and borax
Bread: alum
Butter: coal-tar dye
Canned cherries: coal-tar dye and salicylic acid
Pancakes: alum
Syrup: sodium sulphite [then the spelling of sulfite]
THIS GIVES EIGHT DOSES OF CHEMICALS AND DYES FOR BREAKFAST.
DINNER
Tomato soup: coal-tar dye and benzoic acid
Cabbage and corned beef: saltpeter
Canned scallops: sulfuric acid and formaldehyde
Canned peas: salicylic acid
Catsup: coal-tar dye and benzoic acid
Vinegar: coal-tar dye
Bread and butter: alum and coal-tar dye
Mince pie: boracic acid
Pickles: coppers, sodium sulphite, and salicylic acid
Lemon ice cream: methyl alcohol
THIS GIVES SIXTEEN DOSES FOR DINNER.
SUPPER
Bread and butter: alum and coal-tar dye
Canned beef: borax
Canned peaches: sodium sulfite, coal-tar dye, and salicylic acid
Pickles: copper, sodium sulfite, and formaldehyde
Catsup: coal-tar dye and benzoic acid
Lemon cake: alum
Baked pork and beans: formaldehyde
Vinegar: coal-tar dye
Currant jelly: coal-tar dye and salicylic acid
Cheese: coal-tar dye
THIS GIVES SIXTEEN DOSES FOR SUPPER.
“According to this menu,” Shepard announced to his state’s newspapers, “the unconscious and unwilling patient gets forty doses of chemicals and colors per day.”
But the additives were so little studied that even concerned scientists like Shepard and Ladd could only guess at what risk they might pose. There were some animal studies on these new food additives, but they were limited at best. One standard approach involved making a solution of residues from food and drink products and injecting that solution into rabbits. If the rabbits didn’t die within minutes, food manufacturers would declare the material to be nonpoisonous and safe for human beings.
Wiley had long worried about this lack of guidance, lack of dosage limits, lack of basic information. If Americans consumed multiple doses of untested compounds in every meal with no assurance of their safety, he thought, then government officials like himself were failing them. The only way to fix that, he’d decided, was to devise some real public health experiments. And the most direct way to get the information would be by using human volunteers. So that same year, 1901, he asked Congress to fund a study that he described as “hygienic table trials.” His plan was to sit people down at “hygienic” tables—by which he meant a clean and carefully controlled setting—and feed them precisely measured meals. Half of the diners would eat fresh, additive-free dishes. The others would receive specific doses of a chemical preservative with each meal. The diners were not to know who was consuming what. Wiley and staff would monitor the health effects, if any, from these diets.
He proposed that his human guinea pigs be tough male specimens, “young, robust fellows, with maximum resistance to deleterious effects of adulterated foods.” If such individuals were sickened, he reasoned, then this would be much more of a warning flag than if the test subjects were already considered fragile. “If they should show signs of injury after they were fed such substances for a period of time, the deduction would naturally follow that children and older persons, more susceptible than they, would be greater sufferers from similar causes.” The hygienic table trials, he explained in his proposal to Congress, would address “whether such preservatives should ever be used or not, and if so, what preservatives and in what quantities?” He added that the experiments could also address questions about other additives, such as food dyes. He had no idea what these experiments might find, he emphasized. But he could make a good case for giving them a try. And after all, the lawmakers were eating and drinking these unknown compounds too.
In March, Congress authorized a grant of $5,000 (about $150,000 in today’s dollars) to, as the legislation put it, “enable the Secretary of Agriculture to investigate the character of food preservatives, coloring matters and other substances added to foods, to determine their relation to digestion and health, and to establish the principles which should guide their use.”
The sum was only a third of what Wiley had requested, but it was a start. Now he just had to figure out how to launch the country’s first food-toxicity trials involving human subjects. He had no equipment. No supplies, food or otherwise. Nor did he have any test subjects nor any assurance that anyone would sign up to be poisoned.
He needed a kitchen, a dining room, and a cook. For economy’s sake, and with Wilson’s permission, he decided to build his experimental restaurant in the basement at the Department of Agriculture. The resulting dining room was sparely furnished with two round tables of dark stained oak covered with white tablecloths. Six stiff ladder-back chairs gathered around each table. The china was plain white, the walls painted white and unadorned. Shelving, neatly divided into small cubbies, lined one wall and contained everything from pepper grinders to measuring tools, including a sturdy brass scale for weighing out the food.
The adjoining kitchen was furnished with cooking necessities and no more. But the area was scrupulously clean and reasonably pleasant. “Cheerful surroundings, good company, and in general an agreeable environment, tend to promote the favorable progress of digestion,” he wrote. “A reversal of the conditions of the environment have exactly the opposite effect.”
He wanted the meals to be wholesome, tasty, and dished out on a precise schedule: breakfast at 8:00 a.m., luncheon at noon, dinner at 5:30 p.m., “these being the customary meal-times” for civil service employees. He wanted strictly fresh ingredients with no trace of preservatives. He’d budgeted for roast beef, beefsteak, veal, pork, chicken, turkey, fish, oysters, and an array of fruits and vegetables. Cream and milk were allowed, but these had to be pasteurized to avoid both bacterial infections and unmonitored chemical preservatives. Some canned soups, fruits, and vegetables were also allowed, but only in specially ordered, preservative-free batches from selected manufacturers. “The greatest pains were taken to secure absolute freedom from antiseptics in the whole of the food consumed.”
The Bureau of Chemistry recruited volunteers by posting an advertisement, circulated to government employees, promising three free meals daily in exchange for participation in the study. As the Washington Post put it, the U.S. government was about to “open, for the first time in history, a scientific boarding house under the direction of Prof. Wiley.” To the professor’s relief, volunteers applied in abundance. Young men, earning perhaps a few hundred a year, struggling to make ends meet in the nation’s capital, saw a chance to stretch their budgets. Wiley, who had lived poor himself, understood that: “They are clerks, working for small salaries, and the item of free board will be a big one to them,” he said.
The Chemistry Bureau also received a deluge of applications from fascinated citizens around the country: “Dear Sir,” wrote one applicant. “I read in the paper of your experiments on diet. I have a stomach that can stand anything. I have a stomach that will surprise you. . . . What do you think of it? My stomach can hold anything.”
Two of Wiley’s chemist friends in Ohio wrote in jest to apply for positions. He wrote an amused reply, but one that probably gave them more insight into his perspective than he was willing to allow in public: “You will begin with a diet of borax garnished with salicylic acid—with a dash of alum on the side. You will then have a course in chromatics—beginning with the beautiful yellow of oleomargarine and including the green of the French canned peas. . . . Please report for duty about September 10th. Blanks for wills and coroner’s certificates must be furnished by the guests.” But in actual practice, he and his staff, including the ever-reliable Bigelow, decided to limit applicants to the presumably upright people who had passed the civil service exam, “so they came to us with a good character.”
For the first round of experimental meals, he lined up twelve young clerks, mostly from the Agriculture Department. He’d wanted to use more but could not afford it. Still, as far as he knew, this was the largest group ever yet used in a human health experiment of this kind. The trial design was straightforward. Each compound would be studied during a six-week period, and the test subjects would be divided during that time into two different seating arrangements. For the first two weeks, those sitting at table 1 would receive untainted food and those at table 2 would be dosed with a given preservative. The scientists would track the health differences, if any, between the two groups.
They would then switch so that table 1 received the preservative and table 2 was allowed two weeks of recovery. Then back again for a final round of comparison. Critics would later point out, with justification, that two weeks wasn’t sufficient time to measure an effect; that it would have been better to have maintained his control group and test group throughout. Wiley conceded that point. The hygienic table trials weren’t perfect, he admitted, but they had potential to increase understanding of health effects from these mostly untested compounds. Another reason he’d kept the test periods short was to minimize any harm to his young volunteers, who’d been required to sign a liability waiver. “Did you explain that this was a dangerous process?” a congressman would ask later, during a hearing following publication of the first findings. Wiley replied that the volunteers were told about the planned procedure (although he wouldn’t guarantee they understood all the implications).
The department would not have done the work, he emphasized, if he’d believed at the start that chemical compounds deliberately mixed into American food posed an immediate deadly risk. He’d gone in hoping the materials were safe, and his worst-case guess before the trials started was “that there might be some disturbance to their systems.” (“So,” the congressman would say, “you thought that there was nothing; but you took a release because there was danger of losing life, in a sense.” That, Wiley agreed, was correct.) Test subjects could consume only what was dished out in Wiley’s test kitchen. They had to refuse any other snacks or drinks: “Each individual subject pledged himself to abstain entirely from food and drink not prepared by the scientists in charge of the dining room.”
As the details of the project became known, newspaper reporters covered the deprivations with a mixture of amusement and horror: “Should they become hungry between meals, they must wait until the official dinner bell rings. If they grow thirsty during working hours, they may watch the water cooler with longing eyes but nothing more. . . . They cannot even drink a friendly glass of beer.”
The volunteers had to record everything they ate and drank, noting the precise amounts of every portion. They had to record their weight, temperature, and pulse rate before every meal. Twice a week they had to be examined by doctors from the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service. They had to behave in an upright way, to “pursue their ordinary vocations without any excesses and to take their ordinary hours of sleep.” They also had to agree to collect their urine and feces—“every particle of their excreta,” in Wiley’s words—and bring it to the chemistry laboratory for analysis. In retrospect, it seems astonishing that anyone volunteered and that none of the test subjects backed out before the experiment even began.
Wiley chose the preservative borax as the first additive to test. It was one of the most widely used food preservatives. Further, the few studies conducted thus far on borax suggested that it was relatively, but not completely, benign. Here was a chance to explore the questions raised about its consumption without, he thought, putting his volunteers at too much risk.
A study published the previous year in which mice were fed varying amounts of borax and boric acid had concluded that in small doses the compounds “have no influence upon the general health of the animals.” Another test with baby pigs had reached a similar conclusion. If the dose was ratcheted up, though, the compound appeared to pose some problems. There was some evidence of a disruption in metabolism; there was the occasional animal that suffered digestive upsets, nausea, and vomiting. There were also some warning signals arising from a few human studies, but those tests were idiosyncratic at best.
One of them involved a scientist mixing boric acid into his own milk for a couple weeks; he’d felt fine, he said. Another experiment, done in London, had involved dosing three young children with borax and boric acid for several months. Those results were both reassuring and a little puzzling.
Unlike Wiley, who had carefully explained his choice of sturdy test subjects, the British researchers were vague about the selection process. They had chosen a two-year-old boy, a five-year-old boy, and a four-year-old girl who “was delicate, being convalescent from pneumonia,” leading to some suspicion that they’d merely selected a few children whose parents were agreeable. They had found that borax could cause some temporary nausea and diarrhea but concluded that, in the big picture, “neither boric acid nor borax in any way affected the health and well-being” of the test subjects. That is to say, the three children appeared to be okay at the end of the experiment.
Meanwhile, John Marshall, a professor of chemistry and toxicology at the University of Pennsylvania, had also dosed himself with borax, and he’d reported some severe diarrhea (“the food escapes without assimilation”) and nausea. But Marshall was interested in acute toxicity and had given himself a hefty dose after being called as a witness in the trial of a butcher accused of using the preservative to restore slightly rotten meat. So, while his self-experiment suggested that a stiff dose of borax produced unpleasant symptoms, it did not predict that most Americans, receiving a daily low-level exposure while consuming products ranging from meat to milk, would become so ill.
Wiley knew his study plan was by no means perfect either. But he also believed that its design was better than anything else out there. He had a larger study group of subjects, all of comparable age and health. He would be dividing them into two groups for purposes of comparison, a far cry from one man sipping milk or the use of three random children. His tests would continue for longer and look at a greater range of doses. He still thought that he wouldn’t find anything much. But if borax did pose a risk, he also thought he’d have a better chance of finding that out than any work done so far.
He struggled with the best way to deliver the borax. In the British studies, the vehicle had been milk. As the authors of the experiment with children had pointed out, this made sense because “milk forms such a large proportion of their diet.” Wiley decided to try butter instead; buttered bread and rolls were a staple of the American meal and he hoped they’d be consumed with enthusiasm. He wasn’t worried about the taste putting off his diners. “It is pointed out that an important point of distinction between modern preservatives and the long-established ones—salt, sugar, vinegar, and wood-smoke—is that in the small amounts used they are almost without taste and odor, and their presence in a food product would not be noticed by the consumer unless specifically proclaimed.”
In November 1902, just over six months after Wiley received his grant, the dining room opened its doors for the first round of tests. In its honor, a squad member propped up a sign at the entrance to the little dining room. Like the room itself, there was nothing fancy about it, just seven black-stenciled words on a white-painted board. They read: ONLY THE BRAVE DARE EAT THE FARE.
The first snag in Wiley’s tidy plan came early. His volunteers soon realized—possibly through the study’s garrulous chef, S. S. Perry—that the borax had been secreted in the butter. They quit putting butter on their bread. Wiley then quietly resorted to the British approach, serving borax-dosed glasses of milk. The diners figured that out too. “Those who thought the preservative was concealed in the butter were disposed to find the butter unpalatable and the same was true with those who thought it might be in the milk or the coffee.” After a few more attempts to sneak the preservative onto the table, he decided on a straightforward approach. The table settings for the first group now included a dish of borax capsules, and either he or Bigelow or one of the other chemists stood by, monitoring to make sure that the squad members took the requisite amount. He did not take the borax capsules himself. But that didn’t stop him from being referred to in the Washington Post as “Old Borax.”
Wiley’s plan had been to conduct a quietly managed study and then report the results in discreet scientific fashion. It was with some dismay that he realized his experiment had attracted the amused attention of an ambitious young reporter for the Washington Post, George Rothwell Brown. The son of a Washington physician, Brown, twenty-three, had started a neighborhood newspaper in the basement of his family’s Capitol Hill home when he was still in high school. He’d already put in a few years reporting for the Washington Times when, in 1902, the Post hired him away. While reporting on Congress, Brown came across a dry description of Wiley’s proposal while looking over the federal budget. The journalist scented a good story and hurried over to talk to Wiley and his staff.
Brown found them less helpful than he had hoped. Although he often sought to engage the public in his campaign for pure foods, Wiley feared in this case that too much showy attention might bias the study and rob it of scientific dignity. He also worried that things would go wrong and that he wouldn’t be able to manage the resulting bad news.
So Wiley warned his employees against granting interviews. “I can’t say anything about anything,” one chemist told Brown about the experiment. Wiley also warned that volunteers would be dropped from the program if they were caught talking with journalists. Brown countered by hanging around outside the Chemistry Bureau building and following volunteers down the street. Wiley caught him several times chatting cordially with Chef Perry through a basement window.
Brown’s first story was headlined DR. WILEY AND HIS BOARDERS. The Post published it in early November. “The kitchen at the bureau of chemistry has been painted and put in excellent condition, and the chef is ready for business.” Wiley apparently didn’t approve of the breezy, cheerful tone, as Brown made evident in his next story: “The authorities are apprehensive that unless the public can be brought to look upon the experiments as an enterprise undertaken by scientific men and carried out in sober earnest, with a view to deciding a question of vast import to the country at large, the results of their self-sacrificing labors and patient investigation will be partially if not entirely lost. Any suspicion or belief in the public mind that there is a humorous or insincere element or phase connected with the experiments deserving of scoffing or ridicule would be deplorable in its effect.”
But Brown and his editors shared a concern that the Post’s readers were never going to warm up to a story about “hygienic table trials.” They needed more human interest and a catchier description. He spent long hours hunting down the identities of the first group of volunteers, who were “braving the perils of a course on food preservatives.” The standout among them was B. J. Teasdale, whom Brown described as “a famous Yale sprinter and a former captain in a high school cadet regiment.” Teasdale had set a record in the one-hundred-yard dash. The others, none as distinguished, were “the fat boarder,” “the thin boarder,” the Irishman whom Brown called “the only one of the Emerald Isle’s sons among the twelve subjects,” and volunteers whom he identified geographically as being from Mississippi, New York, and Pennsylvania. But collectively they were a band of brothers. And, to give them credit, Brown believed that it took some courage to venture into the chemical unknown. With that in mind, he found a better name for the study. He would simply call it the “Poison Squad.”
That didn’t stop him from seeing that the idea of borax in food offered limitless opportunities for entertainment. As the study continued into December, he imagined, for readers of the newspaper, what that year’s Christmas dinner menu might look like:
Apple Sauce.
Borax.
Soup.
Borax. Turkey. Borax.
Borax.
Canned String Beans.
Sweet Potatoes. White Potatoes.
Turnips.
Borax.
Chipped Beef. Cream Gravy.
Cranberry Sauce. Celery. Pickles.
Rice Pudding.
Milk. Bread and Butter. Tea. Coffee.
A Little Borax.
Wiley was known in the department for having a lively sense of humor; Secretary Wilson himself publicly admired it. So he could live with being called Old Borax in his city’s newspaper. He could even laugh about it. He could also see the humor in the supposed holiday menu. He’d drafted a joke menu himself, although that he managed to keep a secret.
That December he’d been asked by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to help organize holiday social events for the organization’s friends and for respected scientists and politicians and—as the note to Wiley read—to stand as a “representative of the best people in Washington.” He’d responded with invitations to a “poison dinner” of his own, inscribed with skulls and crossbones, undertaker advertisements, and pictures of skeletons labeled “after.” The invitations featured a menu of preservatives, additives, and adulterations woven into a tongue-in-cheek play on fine French dining:
MENU DU SOUPER EMPOISONNE
Le 13 Decembre 1902
Huitres queu de coq—sauce Formaldehyde (Xeres adroitment falsifie)
Hors d’ouevres varies a l’aude benzoique (Sauternes a l’aide sulfereuz)
Howards a la Nouvelle Dills aux ptomaines
Callies (perdeux) a pain brulee sauce borate de soude
Salade coucobre a l’huile de coton
Fromage aux falsifications diverses
Café artificial
Liqueurs de tête mort
Tabac—a former
Matin—Bromo-selzer a volante
Invitation du Monsieur le Docteur Wiley d’assister a un coupfer a la Roland B. Molineux
Molineux was one of the country’s more notorious cyanide murderers. A member of an aristocratic New York family—and the grandson of a decorated Civil War general—he’d been convicted in 1900 of killing two people he disliked by mailing them gifts spiked with poison.
Wiley was indeed grateful that Brown hadn’t gotten his hands on a copy of that menu. But as the dismayed scientists at the Chemistry Bureau came to realize, if Brown couldn’t find an element of interest in that week’s work, the lively-minded journalist just made it up. For example, there was the story accusing the Chemistry Bureau of nearly starving the squad members: “F.B. Linton, who weighs out the food when Dr. Wiley is otherwise engaged, will bite a bean in half” rather than give the diners too much food. Another Post article reported that after only a few weeks on the borax diet, half the boarders were losing weight and the cook was so depressed that in his distraction he’d burned a turkey dinner. Another said that one of the volunteers was putting on weight and another was losing it, baffling the scientists: “Dr. Wiley is in despair.” Brown reported that the volunteers also were messing with the study, relating the tale of a test subject who “in the spirit of mischief” dropped quinine into another boarder’s coffee. The victim of the joke, wrote Brown, went home “prepared to die in the interests of science.”
Brown’s most fanciful masterpiece appeared more than six months into the Poison Squad work, in the summer of 1903. Headlined BOARDERS TURN PINK, it claimed that the steady diet of borax had wrought a marked and permanent change in the skin color of all members of the Poison Squad: “The change in the complexion of the chemical scholars has not been of an alarming character. On the contrary, each of the young men undergoing the course of treatment has blossomed out with a bright-pink complexion that would make a society bride sick with envy.” The excited agricultural chemists, he added, were in the process of drafting a pamphlet about their revolutionary discovery. To Wiley’s annoyance, Brown’s widely distributed story—promising skin as rosy as “the inside of a strawberry”—resulted in a small deluge of letters to the Agriculture Department from women seeking the new secret to youthful skin.
By that time, the once sedate hygienic table trials had found their place in popular culture. Entertainer Lew Dockstader was performing “Song of the Poison Squad,” written by S. W. Gillilan, in his minstrel shows.
O we’re the merriest herd of hulks
That ever the world has seen;
We don’t shy off from your
Rough on Rats or even from Paris green
We’re on the hunt for a toxic dope
That’s certain to kill, sans fail
But ’tis a tricky, elusive thing and
Knows we are on its trail;
For all the things that could kill
We’ve downed in many a gruesome wad,
And still we’re gaining a pound a day,
For we are the Pizen Squad.
Rough on Rats was an arsenic-based rodent poison. Paris green, formed from copper, acetate, and arsenic, was used in pest control and as a coloring agent. Neither Wiley nor Secretary Wilson was pleased—neither by the notion that they were deliberately poisoning their volunteers nor that the Chemistry Bureau’s research was now featured in musical satire.
The secretary and the chief chemist both complained repeatedly to the Post over the months that Brown’s articles were making the department a laughingstock. They got little satisfaction. But after the BOARDERS TURN PINK story, the paper’s editors had to acknowledge that their reporter had invented the whole thing. What the editors didn’t catch—not then, anyway—was that Brown had missed the most important, if not the most entertaining, aspect of the Poison Squad story. By the summer of 1903, Wiley was looking at results that suggested steady ingestion of borax was not nearly as benign as had been assumed.