Seven
THE YELLOW CHEMIST
1904–1906
The pepper perhaps contains cocoanut shells,
And the mustard is cottonseed meal;
And the coffee, in sooth, of baked chicory smells
In early November 1904, just as Theodore Roosevelt won election to the presidency in his own right, the writer Upton Sinclair traveled by train from the East Coast to Chicago, where he moved into a bare-bones settlement house, intent on researching his next novel.
The previous July, butchers had gone on a wage strike at packinghouses in nine cities, from Omaha to New York. The two-month strike failed because meatpacking firms, using a strategy developed by Chicago’s famously ruthless Armour family, hired unskilled, nonunion replacements who could be paid less than the union butchers.
Sinclair, a twenty-eight-year-old son of a New York shoe salesman, was instantly sympathetic. He had barely paid for his own education at City College by writing jokes, dime novels, and magazine articles. Upon graduation in 1897, the aspiring novelist and freelance journalist had joined the worker-friendly socialist cause, partly inspired by his own struggles to make a living. He had written up a passionately pro-strike article and sent it, unsolicited, to the Kansas-based socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason. In the same package Sinclair included a copy of his recent Civil War novel, Manassas, which had been a critical, if not commercial, success. The combination prompted the paper’s editor, Julius Wayland, to make him an offer. He would print Sinclair’s essay on the butchers’ strike, and he would pay the writer $500 for a serialized novel telling the story of the valiant workers of Chicago’s stockyards. Sinclair quickly accepted. He then persuaded his editor at Macmillan Publishing to give him another $500 contract to turn the serialized novel into a print book.
Flush with a grubstake of $1,000 (about $30,000 today), Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago’s yards, living in a settlement house operated by a friend of Jane Addams’s, often dressing in the grubby clothing of a worker to blend in. He observed and interviewed, gathering notes and sketches before returning to the East Coast, where with his wife and son he moved into a New Jersey farmhouse and settled down to write the most influential book of his prolific career.
The novel’s main character was a Lithuanian immigrant, carrying that familiar dream of building a good life in America. “I will take care of us,” he tells his wife. “I will work harder.” In the end, the hardworking laborer is nearly destroyed by working conditions at the fictional “Anderson” meat-processing company. He eventually loses his health, family, and friends in the meatpacking industry but in Sinclair’s conclusion finds some hope, at least, by embracing the brotherhood of socialism.
In February 1905 Appeal to Reason began serializing Sinclair’s novel. By pure coincidence, the publication occurred just as other tales of troubled food production were unfolding in Congress, where advocates of pure-food legislation again sought to advance their cause. Both McCumber and Hepburn were still determined supporters of the proposed food and drug law, although Hepburn, as chair of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, was now mostly working with Roosevelt on railroad legislation. And a new senator from Idaho, Weldon Heyburn, had replaced McCumber as chairman of the Committee on Manufactures.
Heyburn, fifty-one, was a Republican but not in the least a Roosevelt progressive. He was an attorney who had made a living representing bankers and timber barons in his home state. During his time in the Senate, he would oppose the president on issues ranging from creation of new national forests to child labor laws. But like McCumber, he represented a frontier state—Idaho had become the forty-third state in 1890—where consumers believed, as did their counterparts in North Dakota, that their grocery stores were being treated as dumping grounds for cheap, adulterated food ginned up in the East. He also represented one of only four states in the country that had so far granted women the vote (the others were Wyoming, Utah, and Washington). Before the 1902 election, which saw Heyburn come into office, Idaho club women had met with every one of the state’s political candidates to say that they would vote in a bloc against any who failed to support pure-food legislation.
Heyburn rose to the challenge. He found himself genuinely appalled by false claims made for mislabeled, largely useless products—especially those sold by the patent medicine industry. “I am in favor of stopping the advertisements of these nostrums in every paper in the country,” he said. When industry representatives chastised him for supporting the proposed legislation, he replied, “The object of this bill is not to protect the dealer. It is to protect the persons who consume the articles.”
The confrontational Heyburn tended to make enemies, among them Washington journalists. His press coverage was so often critical that he had fired back by describing reporters allowed into government buildings as mere guests of the state who “had no right to make disparaging remarks about senators.” He had also antagonized many of his fellow lawmakers, who often, even publicly, described him as arrogant and humorless. Still, many Capitol colleagues succumbed to the force of his determination.
By January 1905 Heyburn had a food and drug bill called up before the full Senate. Two weary veterans of the fight, McCumber and Wiley attempted to temper his expectations, suggesting strategic concessions, such as to the whiskey rectifiers. Heyburn, as was typical, refused to compromise.
Food-processing industries had hardened their opposition to reform. The National Food Manufacturers Association lobbied for Heyburn to sponsor a different Senate bill, one that permitted the use of preservatives, excluded reports from the Bureau of Chemistry, and transferred regulatory authority over food and drink from the Agriculture Department to the business-friendly Department of Commerce and Labor.
Meanwhile, the blended-whiskey interests had been outraged to learn that the straight-whiskey men had secretly given financial support to the pure-food exhibit in St. Louis. Colonel Taylor himself had delivered a $3,000 check to the Kentucky food commissioner, Robert Allen, along with several cases of good bourbon to be displayed as examples of the “right” kind of whiskey. Allen had not shared that information with the other exhibit organizers, which in turn created outrage among his allies as well as the rectifiers. Paul Pierce wrote for What to Eat several angry pieces on the corrupting influence of Taylor and his like, but rectifiers weren’t mollified.
In a story headlined LABELING RUINOUS TO LIQUOR TRADE, published in the New York Journal of Commerce, a major liquor distributor declared that if rectified whiskey was fully labeled as to dyes, additives, and synthetic alcohol, it would do untold damage to businessmen and government income derived from its sale. Taxes, the distributor predicted, would “suffer to an extent never dreamed of heretofore.” The rectifiers’ chief lobbyist, the obstreperous Hough, notified every member of Congress that his members flatly insisted on removing any whiskey-labeling requirements from the legislation. Hough further sent out a circular urging all blenders, rectifiers, and distributors to stand together against such “hostile measures” before Congress. From the baking powder producers to the patent medicine industry to the meatpackers, manufacturers joined to fight any sign of food, drink, or drug regulation.
William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Evening Journal, wrote: “There is a bill in the Senate of the United States called the Pure Food Bill. Its purpose is to prevent food adulteration, the swindling and poisoning of the public. Nobody in the Senate says a word against this bill; nobody dares go on record, of course, in behalf of adulteration. Yet it is certain that the bill will not be passed.” The business of Congress was to take care of businessmen, Hearst wrote, and even some of the country’s most “respectable” businessmen reaped huge profits by producing, misrepresenting, and selling adulterated, diluted, and downright faked food and drink. “Who is that shabby looking, patched-up individual trying to get on the floor of the House?” mused the editors of Life magazine. “O, that’s old Pure Food Bill. When he first came around here he looked pretty good, but now he has been knocked around and changed so much that his friends don’t know him at all. In a minute you’ll see him thrown out bodily again.”
As predicted, the proposed legislation collapsed in both houses within just a couple of months. “What now?” wrote the chairman of the Federation of Women’s Clubs pure-food committee to Wiley. “Does this mean the [final] defeat of the Pure Food Bill or shall we keep on with our petitions and letters?” Wiley could almost imagine himself as the living incarnation of that shabby, patched-up bill described by Life. His advocacy for the legislation had increasingly made him a public target. An editorial in the California Fruit Grower, titled “Chemistry on the Rampage,” had demanded, “Let somebody muzzle the yellow chemist who would destroy our appetite with Borgian tales,” and the trade journal Grocery World, which represented the wholesalers, had chimed in: “The greater part of Dr. Wiley’s time seems to be taken up in the delivering of sensational lectures on food frauds and the writing of articles on such subjects” as poisoned foods. “Dr. Wiley seems to thirst deeply for notoriety. He is happiest when looking complacently into the horror-stricken eyes of women he has just scared half to death.” The journal’s editors had even recommended that Wilson officially reprimand Wiley. The secretary had not done so, but he had once again called his chief chemist into his office to recommend discretion.
Wiley—somewhat to the secretary’s frustration—instead returned to the lecture trail with renewed vigor. “I believe in chemistry and its application to the welfare of humanity,” he told students at Cornell University. “But at the same time I can’t help noticing how it is abused.” He put the whole force of his personality behind the arguments, observed the muckraking progressive journalist Mark Sullivan: “On the platform the forcefulness and originality of his utterances gained from the impressiveness of his appearance: his large head capping the pedestal of broad shoulders, his salient nose shaped like the bow of an ice-breaker, and his piercing eyes compelled attention.” It was a “great battle,” Wiley would later write, and any battle, he thought, needed a general, someone who could coordinate the different factions into an effective army. At this moment he seemed to be the natural, perhaps the only, choice for that role. He urged the federated women’s clubs to renew their activities, to protest the stalled legislation to every senator, every congressman, and every newspaper. His friends in the WCTU needed little urging to do the same. The National Association of State Dairy and Food Departments returned to the issue with increased urgency. Pushing past Allen’s ties to the whiskey-distilling industry, the association joined Wiley in this new offensive push. It created a traveling exhibit, smaller but more graphic than the one at the St. Louis fair, a “chamber of horrors” that could be used to provide tangible illustration of adulterated food and drink at lectures. The state commissioners were nearing desperation. If the legislation failed yet again, their cause might die. They feared that they’d reached the critical moment, that if they didn’t succeed now there might not be another chance for food and drug reform, or perhaps for any kind of consumer protection law, in their lifetimes.
The serialized version of Sinclair’s novel, which he titled The Jungle, had a limited socialist readership, but he was counting on his editor at Macmillan to grow that audience. He mailed the installments to the publishing firm and, chapter by chapter, his editor became more dismayed. The book described diseased cattle arriving by railroad in Chicago to be butchered and sold to American housewives. “It was a nasty job killing these,” Sinclair wrote, “for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foul smelly stuff into your face.” Sinclair also evoked the embarrassing food scandals of the Spanish-American War: “It was stuff such as this that made the ‘embalmed beef’ that killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was old stuff that had been lying around for years in cellars.”
Pickled beef had to be bathed in acid; the men working that line had their fingers eaten away by repeated exposure. Tuberculosis germs thrived in the moist, stinking air of the processing plants and spread from animal to animal, worker to worker. In the rendering rooms, there were open vats of acid set into the floor, to help break down the carcasses. Workers occasionally fell in, and “when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting.” Sometimes, Sinclair wrote, an exhausted worker, staying after hours to earn a little more, would slip into a vat and “be overlooked for days till all but the bones of them had gone out into the world as Anderson’s [his thin disguise for Armour’s] Pure Leaf Lard.”
His editor sent chapters out for review by well-connected friends and advisers. Equally dismayed, they wrote back to insist that the descriptions couldn’t be true. In late summer a new chapter recounted the ways that meat in a state of decay, even when fuzzed over with mold, could be cleaned, “dosed with borax and glycerin and dumped into hoppers and made over again for home consumption.” It related that the packers routinely put out poisoned bread to keep the rat population down, and “then the rats, bread and meat would go into the hoppers together.”
It was too much. His editor declared that the book was “gloom and horror unrelieved.” Macmillan asked Sinclair to remove objectionable passages. Sinclair took the recommendations to some of his fellow writers, among them reformist journalists Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker. Both those journalists had made names for themselves writing for the muckraking magazine McClure’s with articles centered on government and corporation corruption. Both encouraged Sinclair to reject the cuts that Macmillan wanted and to keep his novel rich in the blood-spattered details of the Chicago stockyards. Steffens did warn him, though, that he should expect continued resistance and revulsion. Sometimes, the veteran journalist noted gloomily, “it is useless to tell things that are incredible, even though they may be true.” Baker, whose exposés of the railroad industry had led to Roosevelt’s obsession with reforming it, thought Sinclair should have written a nonfiction book instead of a novel, but he counseled his friend not to back down.
Sinclair determined that “I had to tell the truth and let people make of it what they would.” In September 1905 Macmillan canceled his contract, generously offering that he keep the $500 advance. Disappointed, Sinclair shopped The Jungle around to other publishers but found no takers. He arranged to publish a “sustainers edition,” essentially self-publishing. Issued under the Jungle Publishing Company imprint, it was offered to subscribers of the Appeal, and sold surprisingly well—netting him almost $4,000—but, to his disappointment, failed to gain any real national attention.
Meanwhile, other writers continued to drive interest in the subject of the country’s appalling food supply. The illustrated monthly Everybody’s Magazine published an investigation into the National Packing Company, a trust established by Armour, Swift, and Morris. Its author, investigative journalist Charles Edward Russell, then published a book, in that fall of 1905, called The Greatest Trust in the World, devoted to the further evils of the meatpacking industry. Its angry dissection of price-fixing, inhumane working conditions, and corrupt practices at the Chicago stockyards would help Upton Sinclair sharpen many of the demoralizing descriptions in subsequent editions of The Jungle. Crusading women’s magazines also took aim at the toxic nature of processed food. In the spring of 1905, the Woman’s Home Companion, a monthly magazine founded in 1873 and with a circulation approaching two million, published a three-part series titled “The Truth About Food Adulteration,” written by Henry Irving Dodge. The journalist had worked in collaboration with none other than Willard Bigelow, chief of the Division of Foods at the Bureau of Chemistry. “The series is therefore a thoroughly authoritative account of this most dangerous and growing practice,” read the magazine’s promotional copy.
Bigelow described for Dodge some of the clever ways that American businessmen legally deceived consumers. He cited a popular product, Old Reliable Coffee, which was described on its elaborately scrolled label as “a compound of delicious drinking coffee, guaranteed to please those who like a full-bodied cup of coffee.” There was not, Bigelow said, one grain of coffee inside the can. But the use of the word “compound” allowed the manufacturer to make coffee claims under both state and federal law. Bigelow encouraged Dodge to examine food samples through a microscope, revealing to the journalist the ground pumice stone in baking powder, the pulverized olive pits in spices, demonstrating the difference between a rectilinear crystal of lard and a bush-shaped crystal of beef fat. None of these fakes, Dodge wrote admiringly, escaped the department’s chemistry analyst, whom he further described as a “man of blue blazes and sulfurous smokes.”
Part 2 of the series was titled “How the Baby Pays the Tax: The Food Poisoner Reaches the Height of His Crime When He Attacks the Baby, upon Whose Well-Being the Fate of the Nation Depends.” The story was illustrated by a drawing of a child dining at one end of a well-stocked table and a skeleton watching him from the other. The words “Glucose, Sulphate of Copper, Boracic Acid, Aniline Dyes, Benzoic Acid, Formaldehyde” were embroidered along the edge of the tablecloth. “The man who poisons food for gain builds a palace of bones upon a graveyard” was the opening sentence of Dodge’s next salvo.
The focus was milk, still widely adulterated and either filthy with bacteria or poisoned with formaldehyde. Dodge cited a plethora of anecdotes to support this conclusion, from Brooklyn to Chicago, where authorities had been recently forced to condemn almost five hundred vats of milk in a single week. A doctor in New Jersey had recently blamed an uptick in child deaths on continued used of formaldehyde in milk, and another in New York had noted that unpasteurized supplies had contributed to yet another outbreak of typhoid. In the year 1904, Dodge noted, more than twenty thousand children under the age of two had died in New York City and that milk was considered a major contributor to those fatalities. “The cry ‘Poisoned Milk’” rings through the land, he wrote, as it had over decades of government inaction and corruption.
Dodge had learned from a friend in the U.S. Senate that manufacturers were prepared to spend more than $250,000 to defeat any regulations and had already made major contributions to the campaigns of senators considered friendly to the cause. No wonder the proposed food legislation was going nowhere, he wrote: “The Senate does not indulge in bawling opposition to the bill. Oh no, its weapons are much more effective and more deadly. It lets the bill die.” The American government, he concluded, would rather protect wealthy business interests than protect the American people.
Also in 1905, Pierce’s magazine, What to Eat, published a four-part series titled “The Slaughter of Americans.” In his opening editor’s note, Pierce wrote: “In view of the widespread adulteration of foods in America, that is adding so greatly to the death roll and causing more sickness and misery than all the other sources combined, What to Eat has decided to publish a series of carefully compiled articles revealing to Americans the actual condition of the food we eat today.” The series provided a detailed list of the reasons that Pierce and his food-reform allies were so frustrated and angry. In one article Pierce assured his readers that butter now contained enough coal-tar dye to kill a cat. Another article in the series said that more than 400,000 infants were killed by unwholesome food and formaldehyde-tainted milk every year in the United States. A restless urgency crackled through Pierce’s series and through the writings, speeches, and letters, both private and public, of all of Wiley’s growing army of food-reform allies. They were fed up with foot-dragging federal lawmakers.
Upton Sinclair refused to give up on his novel. He kept shopping The Jungle to established publishing firms.
He suffered more rejections from publishers wary of potential lawsuits but got a meeting with Isaac Marcosson, who worked for the publishing house Doubleday, Page & Company. As a newspaper writer in Louisville, Kentucky, Marcosson had written a positive review of Sinclair’s 1903 novel, The Journal of Arthur Stirling. He welcomed the author into his office and listened to Sinclair’s promise that the hefty bundle of pages he carried was “something sensational.” Marcosson lugged the manuscript home and became engrossed, staying up all night reading it. In the morning he presented it enthusiastically to his boss, Walter Hines Page.
Both Page and his partner, Frank Nelson Doubleday, needed persuading. Page shared much of Marcosson’s enthusiasm but agreed with more dubious Doubleday that the story’s revolting details might be too much for readers to stomach. Page cautioned their young employee that if they did contract for Sinclair’s book, it would be with the understanding that Marcosson would be responsible for “launching and exploiting” The Jungle. The publishers also insisted on sending a copy of the manuscript to the Chicago Tribune for an opinion on whether the book’s grisly descriptions had any basis in reality. Tribune editors responded with a two-dozen-page rebuttal of the packinghouse descriptions. Alarmed, Page and Doubleday called Sinclair to their offices. But Sinclair promptly began picking apart the Tribune’s critique.
For instance, the paper had denied that the tuberculosis bacterium could survive on walls or floors of the packing rooms. Sinclair pointed out that the germ could indeed survive on those surfaces and could transfer to anything that touched them. He’d brought medical studies to prove it, as well as other evidence to back up his story. He further noted that the paper’s owners were obviously friendly with the meatpackers and sided with them. In fact, it would turn out that the newspaper’s management had not assigned a reporter to study Sinclair’s claims but instead passed the task on to a publicist who worked for the meatpackers.
The Tribune’s fervent denial of the story made Page, also a former reporter, suspicious. As well as a book publisher, he was editor of the business magazine World’s Work. His journalist’s instincts told him something wasn’t right about the Tribune report. It smelled like a whitewash. He decided on an independent investigation. The publishing company sent Marcosson and the company’s lawyer on an expedition to Chicago. Both men returned disgusted and horrified by what they’d seen. They’d also secured multiple sources willing to provide public statements about the odious conditions in the yards. Page became convinced and he persuaded his partner Doubleday to agree. Page also decided that when The Jungle went on sale, he would buttress it by publishing factual reporting on the horrors of the yards in World’s Work. Sinclair signed his book contract with the publishing firm on January 6, 1906.
Robert Allen recovered, for the most part, from the scandal regarding his cozy deal with bourbon distillers during the purefood exhibition in St. Louis. Allies in the movement forgave him, perhaps in recognition that he had accepted the whiskey men’s $3,000 not for personal gain but to finance the exhibit. Again supported by the well-connected bourbon barons, he secured a meeting with President Roosevelt in the summer of 1905, and several prominent food reform advocates agreed to attend. Wiley wasn’t among them. The chief chemist asked for and received from Wilson an assurance that the Agriculture Department officially supported the meeting. But he believed that there was more power in a delegation of private citizens, especially when the president already knew Wiley’s position all too well. The delegation included Alice Lakey, food commissioners from Ohio and Connecticut, a representative of the retail grocers’ association, and a representative from the H.J. Heinz Company of Pittsburgh, which was now very successfully marketing a preservative-free ketchup made from actual tomatoes. They presented their case to Roosevelt but, as Allen related with some disappointment afterward, the president remained noncommittal.
Then later that year, in November, Roosevelt invited the delegation back to the White House, revealing that he had taken the trouble to talk over their issue with a range of experts, from Wiley to Ira Remsen of Johns Hopkins University, codiscoverer of the sweetener saccharin. The president had even discussed the matter with his personal physician. The result was, the president said, that he had decided at last to support the beleaguered food and drug law in his end-of-the-year message to Congress. He told the group that he had little expectation that his advocacy would change anything—opposition to food and regulation remained both stubborn and powerful—but on December 5 Roosevelt formally announced that he was backing the legislation: “I recommend that a law be enacted to regulate interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks and drugs. Such a law would protect the legitimate manufacturer and commerce and would tend to secure the health and welfare of the consuming public.” The speech made it clear that the president had been following Wiley’s research and its conclusions: “Traffic in foodstuffs which have been debased or adulterated so as to injure health and deceive the public should be forbidden.”
Senator Heyburn promptly brought the bill back to the manufacturing committee, hoping to move it quickly to a vote by the full chamber. But the president had accurately assessed the hostility gathered against the legislation. It appeared, in fact, that Roosevelt’s intervention had stirred up even stronger resistance. The Republican leader of the Senate, Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, had made his fortune as a wholesale grocer with strong ties to the food manufacturing industry. He now took to the floor to attack the bill as an affront to individual liberty: “Are we to take up the question as to what a man shall eat and what a man shall drink and put him under severe penalties if he is eating or drinking something different from what the chemists of the Agricultural Department think desirable?” Angrily, McCumber replied: “On the contrary, it is the purpose of the bill that a man may determine for himself what he will eat and what he will not eat. It is the purpose of the bill that he may go into the market and when he pays for what he asks for that he shall get it and not get some poisonous substance in lieu of that.”
Aldrich stood unmoved. He flatly refused to bring the bill forward for a full Senate vote. Roosevelt tried to suggest, in a private meeting, that Aldrich should let the bill go forward. It would look better publicly and, after all, Aldrich didn’t have to vote for it. The senator would not budge.
But in early February 1906, the Rhode Island senator was forced into an unhappy meeting with a powerful backer of the bill, the director of the American Medical Association’s legislative council. The AMA was less interested in food safety than in the problem of snake-oil medicines, but the two issues were bonded together in the law. The organization wanted those patent cures regulated and was prepared, Aldrich was informed, to rally all 135,000 physicians in the country, including all of those located in the senator’s home state, to get the bill passed. The doctors would, if need be, contact every patient, county by county. The AMA had a reputation for avoiding partisan politics, but its board had decided to take this legislation on as a personal cause. And according to Charles Reed, the AMA legislative council director, the senator from Rhode Island could take this as a personal warning. Shortly after that meeting, Aldrich called a more junior senator into his office—Albert Beveridge of Indiana—and told him to carry a message to Heyburn: It was now good timing for Heyburn to bring his bill up for a vote again.
Beveridge later told journalist Mark Sullivan that he had suspected that his errand was just for show. He thought that any Senate vote in favor of the bill would prove futile. The legislation was clearly destined to die in the House, where leadership was just as firmly opposed. But the Indianan obediently went to Heyburn’s office. As he also recounted to Sullivan, “Heyburn said he could not believe it and said he was tired of being made a fool of by asking useless consideration [for the bill] which he had asked so many times before.” Beveridge ventured the opinion that the game seemed, for the minute, to be going Heyburn’s way and that he might as well take advantage of it. That afternoon Heyburn requested a vote on his bill. On February 26 the food and drug bill passed 63–4, with Aldrich abstaining. The bill then went to the House and, as predicted, Sullivan wrote, “There it slept.”
Back at the Bureau of Chemistry—which Wiley had taken to calling “America’s test kitchen”—the toxicity testing of preservatives continued to tell an alarming story. Bigelow remained lead chemist for the trials and Wiley himself had assumed a more hands-on role. He no longer had the help of physicians from the Marine Hospital Service, who had found the twice-weekly examinations of Poison Squad volunteers too time-consuming. So Wiley was conducting the physicals himself. As with borax in the previous trial, in the second round of tests on salicylic acid, doses were administered either in capsules or tablets. Wiley publicly acknowledged that industry-backed scientists had criticized this in the borax study, arguing that it failed to represent normal intake of the preservative, which was usually premixed into food. Yet he dismissed the criticism. “It is hardly necessary to call attention to the futility of such an objection,” he added. “A preservative administered in this way at the time of the meals, as was always the case, is rapidly mixed with the contents of the stomach during the process of digestion, and could not in any way exert any injurious effect by reason of the form of its administration.”
Another repeated criticism was that Wiley and his staff did not constantly monitor the men’s activities and could not be sure they didn’t cheat on their prescribed diets. These were working government employees who came to the test kitchen only for meals and checkups. This was a real limitation. “The attempt has been made to control, as far as possible, all conditions of the experimental work,” he said, but “the difficulties attending the task are so enormous that it is not possible that complete success should be secured.” Still, he thought, the chemistry crew had done enough checks, interviews, questionnaires, and follow-ups to be sure that their volunteers were not ill, taking medications, or experiencing other unusual exposures.
Again they tested the suspect preservative at varying dosages, ranging from about two hundred milligrams to a full two grams daily. Wiley again believed that although the higher dose, not unexpectedly, produced more severe effects, the real issue was the subtler risk of daily chronic exposure at low doses and an apparent cumulative effect. “Like other ordinary preservatives, it is not one that can be classified as a poison in the usual sense of the word.” Salicylic acid’s long history in folk medicine, as well as its use as a prescribed pharmaceutical, tended to reassure consumers that it was benign. Wiley agreed that salicylic acid was “often beneficial when prescribed by a competent physician.” It was also a base for synthesizing the milder acetylsalicylic acid, an active ingredient in aspirin, with which it was sometimes confused. But, just as Wiley’s lab had reported in its 1887 study of alcoholic beverages, its use as a preservative raised the risk of a cumulative overdose. When salicylic acid was mixed into either drink or food and consumed day after day, meal after meal, it became far more of a hazard than a health aid. During the months of the salicylic acid tests, the scientists had recorded chronic stomach pain, nausea, appetite loss, and weight loss in their squad members. Bigelow’s written conclusion was that taken chronically, even in small quantities, salicylic acid “exerts a depressing and harmful influence upon the digestion and health and general metabolic activities of the body.” The chemists again pointed out that the use of such compounds could be reduced if manufacturers would merely process foods in clean conditions.
Wiley sent Wilson an early copy of the report. It reinforced the secretary’s concern that his bureau chief had become more crusader than objective chemist. The end of the salicylic acid report, in fact, came awfully close to sounding like a Paul Pierce diatribe: “The addition of salicylic acids and salicylates to foods is therefore a process which is reprehensible in every respect and leads to injury to the consumer, which though in many cases not easily measured, must finally be productive of great harm.” This was not the same prudent, methodical Harvey Wiley who had spoken so judiciously about the preservative issue during the embalmed-beef hearings. Wilson had long supported Wiley’s activities, but his growing stridency was starting to alienate the chief chemist from his politically cautious boss.
As Doubleday, Page prepared to publish The Jungle in early 1906, Marcosson told Sinclair that the firm wanted major revisions. The serialized version of the novel, the last chapter of which had appeared in Appeal to Reason the previous November, featured too much overwrought, preachy philosophy, including its many references to exploitive employers preying on hapless workers. Doubleday, Page wanted to excise Sinclair’s overt comparisons of worker life to an existence in a wild forest with “the strong devouring the weak”—the source of his title. At such a late date, after his struggles to find a publisher, he gave in. The publisher cut thirty thousand words and ordered an initial print run of twenty thousand copies. Publication was set for February 26, which was, again by pure coincidence, the day the Senate passed Heyburn’s food and drug bill.
Marcosson speculated that the book would either be “a sensational success or a magnificent failure.” To help get the word out, Sinclair sent an early copy to his muckraking journalist friend Baker at McClure’s. Marcosson sent copies to the wire services Associated Press and United Press with a note urging them to quote at will. And he sent extra copies to newspapers and magazines in every major American city. The publishing company also sent a copy to President Roosevelt, autographed by Sinclair, of course.