Eleven
EXCUSES FOR EVERYTHING
1908–1909
Is covered with germs, each armed with a hook
To grapple with liver and spleen.
In April 1908, as his Poison Squad study of sodium benzoate and benzoic acid was being readied for publication, Wiley gave a somewhat defiant speech to a meeting of the venerable American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, an organization that Benjamin Franklin had founded in 1743. He provided information about his preliminary results on sodium benzoate, pressed his case for strict enforcement of the pure-food law, and advocated for tighter limits on what processors could put into commercial foodstuffs.
“The use of chemical preservatives and artificial colors is of quite recent date,” he told his audience. “I think I may say with safety that if one could go back thirty, or at most forty, years he would find a food supply practically free” of such additives. Rapid advances in chemistry had brought about the change, he continued, making it possible to “offer manufacturers chemical preservatives of high potency . . . at prices which make it entirely possible to use them freely in food products.”
He emphasized that it was this ability to make a cheaper product—not safety, not quality—that drove the industry’s embrace of industrial food chemistry. And it wasn’t that much more expensive to do it right, he argued. A “conscientious manufacturer” of ketchup (clearly Heinz) had shown that it cost only an additional fifteen to twenty cents per case to make a preservative-free version of the product.
Previewing the impending official report, Wiley called sodium benzoate “highly objectionable.” It “produced a very serious disturbance of the metabolic functions, attended with injury to digestion and health.” This was a study, as he’d earlier told Congress, in which only three of the twelve volunteers had lasted until the end of the experiment. Wiley finished this speech by once again stressing that any compound proven dangerous or that was used only to support the “convenience, carelessness or indifference of the manufacturer” should be removed from the American food supply “entirely.”
The sodium benzoate trials had deeply dismayed the chief chemist. He’d predicted minor or no ill effects in his Poison Squad volunteers and seen the opposite. As he’d told legislators, “The most pronounced symptoms were burning sensations in the throat and esophagus, pains in the stomach, some dizziness, bad taste, and when the limit of endurance was reached, the subject suddenly became nauseated and ill.” Eleven of the twelve volunteers lost a measurable amount of weight during the trial and—except in two of the men—recovery was proving painfully slow. Following the other findings, this study cemented his conviction that industrially made preservatives posed a more serious health risk than he’d previously realized. “I was converted by my own investigation,” he wrote.
But even as Wiley grew more alarmed about processed foods, and more anxious to police them, his boss was moving in the other direction. Secretary Wilson had grown tired of what he considered alarmist investigations. He’d also started blocking publication of what he considered industry-unfriendly findings. Over the course of 1907, he had forbidden the printing of a report on “Corn Sirup as a Synonym for Glucose” and a Bigelow-authored paper on “Investigations of a Substitute (Weak Brine) for Sulfur Dioxide in Drying Fruits.” Already, in 1908, he had prevented the release of a rather damning survey of “Sanitary Conditions of Canneries” at the urging of Congressman Sherman and his peers in that branch of the industry. Wilson had also squelched two other Poison Squad reports, one on the controversial issue of copper sulfate and the other on the old-time preservative potassium nitrate (saltpeter). Wiley had just returned from Philadelphia when Wilson sent for him to tell him that the sodium benzoate report, too, would not be published as scheduled. The secretary wanted it shelved, at least until after the Remsen Board had concluded its own study.
Colleagues around the department noticed and commented upon Wiley’s obvious frustration. He didn’t deny it. But his exasperation, he would insist, had not pushed him to secretly countermand Wilson’s order halting publication of the sodium benzoate report. He swore that he hadn’t done anything of the kind. When the Poison Squad report was unexpectedly published on July 20, 1908, Wiley protested that he was as shocked as anyone. He argued that it must have been the result of a misunderstanding at the Government Printing Office. And the people in the printing office backed him in that assertion; its administrators formally apologized for the inadvertent release of information. Wilson wasn’t buying it. He knew that Wiley had good friends throughout not only the Agriculture Department but many government agencies, including the printing office. The secretary, already annoyed by the chief chemist’s unbending nature, now saw signs of something worse: an instance of possible treachery by a willful and duplicitous subordinate.
In August 1908 the National Association of State Dairy and Food Departments held its annual conference at the elegant Grand Hotel on Michigan’s Mackinac Island. The setting might have been beautiful and harmonious, the luxurious 1887 hostelry might serenely overlook a shining stretch of water, but the attendees—as journalists could plainly see—were spoiling for a fight.
“The convention will probably manifest the signs that are now being seen in various parts of the country,” warned the New York Times on July 30. “Contrary to what was expected, the let down in food legislation has not been popular. . . . Consumer’s leagues, clubs of different sorts and others are taking the subject up and making their ideas known to the authorities here.” Among the discontents, the newspaper said, were officials of the Bureau of Chemistry and delegates from some of the western states, “where the pure food agitation is strong.”
Edwin F. Ladd, the activist food chemist from North Dakota, was both president of the association and lead organizer of the protest movement. He opened the conference on August 4 with a tirade against secretary of agriculture James Wilson, noting the man’s suppression of valuable food safety reports, his resistance to tough regulation, and his apparently cozy relationship with the food industry. Roosevelt, Ladd stated, was not much better, and the appointment of the Remsen Board—clearly an end run around the law—was evidence of both men’s cold indifference to consumer protection. The actions by the federal government, he continued, were an insult to all who believed in allowing good science to help make good decisions.
The Mackinac conference included carefully selected representatives from the food-manufacturing industry, there to testify in favor of Wiley’s views on food safety enforcement. A manager from the Columbia Conserve Company in Indianapolis noted that he’d been at first hostile to the new regulations. Columbia had been profitably selling a cheap “strawberry jelly” made of glucose, apple waste, and red food coloring and had strongly resisted calling it “imitation” for fear of losing customers. But the company had since discovered that it could make even more money by selling well-labeled, high-quality goods. Representatives of the Heinz company also appeared in starring roles. Following its success in removing preservatives from ketchup, the firm had developed a whole line of preservative-free products ranging from mustard to sweet pickles. Heinz’s marketing director reported that a year of experience with these products, exposed to “the heat and cold of changing seasons, or wide distribution at home and abroad,” had been one of “pronounced and unqualified success. Spoilage is less than one-fourth of one percent.” Sebastian Mueller, now a vice president at Heinz, blasted competing manufacturers who insisted on preservative use. He stated firmly that sodium benzoate was being promoted by food manufacturers who found it profitable to use rot-prone waste and scraps in their “bulk” ketchups, sometimes at four times the proposed government standard of 0.10 percent.
Wiley added that food quality and safety represented not only good science but also moral decision-making. The wealthy, he pointed out, could easily afford fresh food and well-made condiments. The trade in cheap, chemically enhanced imitations catered to the poor. If the country could work to standardize good food, then it also would be promoting good health for all. “Whenever a food is debased in order to make it cheap, the laboring man pays more for any given nourishment than the rich man does who buys the pure food,” he pointed out.
The attendees voted to adopt a series of resolutions, including a condemnation of the practice of bleaching flour—increasingly criticized for the resulting chemical by-products—and support for a contentious proposal that the weight of the contents should be listed on every food container, allowing consumers to know the actual quantity being purchased. Manufacturers and grocers stood fiercely opposed to such a “weight on the package” law, which suggested to the delegates that they were onto something. By a 42–15 vote, the food and dairy association also put itself clearly in the Wiley camp on the issue of preservatives and other food additives: “Resolved: That this association is convinced that all chemical preservatives are harmful in foods and that all kinds of food products are and may be prepared and distributed without them, and pledges its best efforts to use all moral and legal means at its disposal to exclude chemical preservatives from food products.” As another indication of their dissatisfaction with the federal government, the convention attendees agreed to work on a uniform food-purity law that they proposed to pass at the state level across the nation. Ladd appointed a committee to work on drafting such a law, including himself, Robert Allen of Kentucky, and Willard Bigelow of the Bureau of Chemistry.
Of all the actions taken at the conference, the most controversial and potentially dangerous, especially for Harvey Wiley, was an organizational censure of Wilson, sparked by Ladd’s opening tirade against the secretary of agriculture. Wiley had warned his friend Ladd in advance that a public attack might not be a good idea, that further alienating Wilson might backfire and hurt their shared cause. But Ladd, who clearly felt a deep sense of betrayal over the change of direction by the federal department, refused to keep his peace. Wiley and other bureau colleagues in attendance prudently abstained from voting on any of the resolutions, let alone the one condemning their department head. And when one particularly irate conventioneer proposed charging Wilson with criminal negligence, they joined other Agriculture Department employees in walking out of the room.
Wiley did not, however, publicly stand up to defend Wilson against the attacks, and some in attendance felt the chief chemist neglected an obvious duty to do so. “Those who watched events at Mackinac were astonished at the course pursued by Dr. Wiley and the rest of the Washington contingent, in absenting themselves from the meeting that ‘roasted’ Secretary Wilson,” said one dismayed attendee, who felt that the chief chemist might have defused the bitterness that accompanied the confrontation. Wilson agreed completely with that assessment. With some heat, he afterward told Wiley that he would never again send anyone to a convention who refused to defend the secretary and the department against unwarranted attacks. Yet as both Ladd and Wiley later noted, there were strong voices speaking up for the secretary, and they came from the food-processing industry. American Food Journal, a leading trade magazine, blamed Wiley for embarrassing the secretary and predicted that the chemistry chief would be fired over this “brazen attack.” Corporations including Dow Chemical also jumped on the moment, urging that Wiley be replaced.
Shortly after the Mackinac meeting, an Agriculture Department inspector visited Dow’s plant in Midlands, Michigan, and met with founder Herbert Dow, who complained of a drop in sales of sodium benzoate following both the passage of the food law and Wiley’s pernicious attacks on the compound. Dow was “not sparing in his criticism of Dr. Wiley,” whom he characterized as playing to the uneducated and temperamentally fearful public. The chemical industry, Dow asserted, was planning its own public education campaign to counter misinformation being spread by Wiley and his friends.
By now the rift between the agriculture secretary and the head of the Chemistry Bureau was public knowledge; their every action was suddenly scrutinized for political nuance. As newspapers including the New York Times pointed out with interest, even when Wilson backed Wiley on a point of food safety enforcement, his reasons often differed from those put forward by the chief chemist. A recent and clear example of that could be seen in departmental decisions regarding the controversial practice of bleaching wheat flour.
Snowy-white baked goods had become a measure of household status in the late nineteenth century. The traditional method of whitening flour was simply to expose it to direct sunlight or allow it to age in a well-ventilated room. But these methods took time—hours or even days. By the turn of the twentieth century, millers had turned to far more rapid techniques, mostly involving chemical oxidation of the flour with nitrogen peroxide or ozone. A review of industry practices after passage of the food and drug law found that chemical bleaching of flour had become nearly standard. The exception was usually small companies that could not afford to set up the oxidation process; they typically advertised in magazines with ads promoting the advantages of the old-fashioned ways: “no artificial pallor . . . no fictitious simulation of age.”
Edwin Ladd, the North Dakota food commissioner, had the previous year begun investigating bleaching techniques at the request of the state’s smaller millers; his friend and ally James Shepard, food commissioner of South Dakota, did the same. Ladd’s investigation found that bleached flours, at least those processed with nitrogen oxides, were heavily tainted with nitrates, which are derivative nitrogen-oxygen based salts. These compounds, Ladd felt, should be considered a possible health risk and further studied in that regard. Pending the publication of his report, in 1907 Ladd issued a North Dakota state ruling prohibiting the sale of any bleached flour that contained nitrates.
Wiley’s Bureau of Chemistry proceeded more cautiously, advocating at first only that flours be labeled clearly as bleached or not so that consumers could make a choice. But Wiley also authorized an investigation of bleached flour and any chemical fallout, such as nitrates, that might result from the process. The scientists in his laboratory proceeded to show a direct connection between bleaching and nitrates: The more nitrogen peroxide was used, the higher the nitrate residues in flour. Further, they discovered that most of these chemical residues survived even through the baking of bread. They found no evidence that levels of nitrates in either raw flour or baked products diminished over time. Further, according to a report from the department’s Food and Drug Inspection Laboratory: “A summary of our results will tend to show that the bleaching of flour by nitrogen peroxide never improves the flour from the consumer’s standpoint.”
Wilson showed himself willing to at least consider the bleached flour issue. He followed the bureau report by convening a formal hearing on the subject in the fall of 1908. During that session, Ladd, Shepard, and Wiley formed a consensus on three main points: that daily consumption of nitrates could pose a health risk, that this question deserved further study, and that until such consumption was declared safe, the chemical bleaching of flour, which produced those compounds, should be disallowed.
Not surprisingly, the industry disagreed, as did a cadre of scientists whom milling firms hired to respond to the proposed ban. Seventy-five industry members attended the hearing and they had combined resources to employ a phalanx of experts, including well-known Chicago toxicologist Walter S. Haines, who had earlier defended the use of borax in foods. Haines testified that the nitrate amounts in bleached flour clearly were too small to do any real harm. That December, though, Wilson startled the millers by apparently agreeing with Wiley. He announced that the Agriculture Department would indeed declare bleached flour an adulterated product under the new law. That would mean, among other things, that it could no longer be transported across state lines. Ladd and Shepard hoped the decision was a sign of a healed rift between the secretary and his department’s chief chemist. “Bleached flour is a dead duck,” Wiley wrote happily in response to a query from the Indiana food commissioner, celebrating what appeared to be a rare instance in which he and the secretary of agriculture had worked in harmony.
The details of the decision revealed, however, that Wilson and Wiley had different motives for supporting a ban. Wiley opposed chemical bleaching of flour because of the health risk, but Wilson blocked publication of the Chemistry Bureau’s toxicological findings on the subject. Wilson had ruled against bleached flour because he considered the practice a tool for deceptive marketing. With powerful bleaching techniques, millers could disguise cheap grades of flour and sell them for a much higher price. Newspaper coverage of the decision emphasized the political differences involved: “Secretary Wilson and Dr. Wiley have disagreed again,” reported the New York–based Journal of Commerce, and the chemist “has once again been turned down by his chief.”
Wilson also remained responsive to flour-industry concerns. He allowed for a six-month grace period to review his decision and respond before initiating any prosecutions or product seizures. The secretary appeared so hesitant about enforcement, in fact, that millers decided to test his resolve by continuing to produce bleached flour and ship it as they chose.
Rumors began to circulate that Wiley had finally pushed his boss too hard and was in imminent danger of losing his job. Alarmed members of the National Association of State Food and Dairy Departments wrote directly to Roosevelt to defend their friend. In October, Ladd joined with two other state food commissioners, John G. Emery of Wisconsin and Arthur C. Bird of Michigan, in a letter that noted, “There is a persistent rumor that the Secretary of Agriculture will dismiss Dr. Wiley or ask him to resign,” because of Wilson’s assumption that the chief chemist was responsible for the confrontation in Mackinac. “His assumption is without foundation,” the letter continued. Ladd took full credit, or blame, for organizing the protest. He and his cosigners hoped that Roosevelt would work to prevent any such unfair and harmful actions. But if things got worse, Bird wrote to Wiley, they were prepared to visit the White House in person.
Roosevelt, they acknowledged, would be in office only a few months longer. He had earlier announced that he would not seek another term (a decision he came to regret) and the upcoming November election pitted Roosevelt’s chosen successor, William Howard Taft, against returning Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. If need be, the food chemists declared, they would take up defense of the food law—and of Wiley—with the next president as well. Even after Taft won the presidential election in November, new rumors flourished, suggesting that Roosevelt would dismiss Wiley before leaving office. Newspaper coverage made it clear that the nation’s editors—and by proxy their readers—saw that idea as an industry-backed threat to American food safety.
The New York World, December 20, 1908: “Dr. Wiley says ‘I have not been asked to resign but I have been fought at every turn of the road by adulterators of food and I am ready to go if the Government wants to take their recommendation. Otherwise, I will remain to defend the food law, no matter how thick the bullets fly.’”
The Boston Evening Record, December 29, 1908: “Pure Food Doc Wiley . . . has made hundreds of enemies but he has made them for the sake of the public. If the food tinkerers ever do actually get him removed, the consumer will pay the freight.”
The New York Evening Mail, December 31, 1908: “It is earnestly hoped that Mr. Wiley will fight his enemies, open and secret, and that he will continue to denounce the modern system of mixing poison with food to increase the profit.”
The chorus of public dismay became so loud that Roosevelt’s executive secretary, William Loeb Jr., issued a statement declaring that he “knew of no friction” between the president and the popular chief chemist and had heard of no plans to replace Wiley. Roosevelt agreed that he had no plans to remove the chief chemist but he qualified that expression of support shortly later. He told a reporter that he had personally reviewed Wiley’s opinions on the issues of corn syrup, accurate labeling of imported French vinegar, and the safety of saccharin, and he had disagreed with him every time. “Those instances gave me a great distrust of Wiley’s good judgment.” On the other hand, the president continued, “I have such confidence in his integrity and zeal that I am anxious to back him up to the limit of my power wherever I can be sure that doing so won’t do damage instead of good.”
If regulations became too rigid or petty, Roosevelt emphasized, then a backlash could lead to “upsetting of the whole pure food law.” He hoped that reasonable men could agree that such a result would serve no one well.
That same December, the Bureau of Chemistry issued a summary report on formaldehyde as a food preservative. It was a straightforward condemnation of the practice: Formaldehyde, still heavily used in milk, especially in summer, was a poisonous additive with an “insidious effect on the cells.” The compound had sickened every single one of the Poison Squad members who had taken it with meals; they’d suffered sleeplessness, headaches, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, and vomiting. They’d lost weight. An analysis of their blood and urine had found that in every case calcium oxalate crystals were forming in the urine and white blood cell counts were dropping, suggesting immune system harm. The bureau concluded with a flat statement: The use of formaldehyde in food “is never justified.” Despite the forceful language, this was one of Wiley’s least controversial findings.
A review of findings in the New York State Journal of Medicine cited a litany of evidence that formaldehyde was a “violent poison.” Examples ranged from the death of a teenager (who drank a 4 percent solution of formaldehyde and died twenty-nine hours later) to a study in which five kittens were given milk containing 1/50,000 formaldehyde. Three of the five died within hours. Despite their many differences, Wilson, McCabe, and Dunlap all concurred with Wiley that the federal government should bar formaldehyde as a food additive.
Wiley also could take comfort in the fact that he’d successfully argued against borax as a food additive and that his position had been upheld within the department. At Wilson’s direction, the agency began seizing borax-laced products to get them off the market. After a seizure of a train carload of its cheese, the MacLaren Imperial Cheese Company (a Canadian manufacturer later purchased by the J.L. Kraft & Brothers Company) asked Wilson to refer the borax question to the Remsen Board. Wilson refused to do so.
The secretary also had endorsed a November decision to seize fifty-two industrial-sized cans of eggs preserved in a 2 percent solution of boracic acid. The Hipolite Egg Company of St. Louis sold these huge cans—forty-two pounds each—to the baking industry at a price much lower than that of fresh eggs. Hipolite specialized in salvaging dirty, cracked, and even rotting eggs for use in breads and cakes. The company was particularly known for using “spots” (decomposing eggs); mixing their contents into a thick, homogenous mass; using boracic acid, a by-product of borax, to halt further decomposition; and then selling the eggy soup by the can. Wilson not only approved the seizure but also initiated a legal action against the company to halt its use of the preservative. As with the move to ban formaldehyde, this was a politically astute decision. Borax had fallen out of favor precipitously since Wiley’s first Poison Squad report—and since the unscrupulous propaganda tactics of the Pacific Coast Borax Company had come to light.
For some years, magazines and newspapers across the country had been printing the anti-Wiley, pro-preservative opinions of H. H. Langdon, who identified himself as a public health advocate with a scientific background. Langdon’s ideas usually appeared in letters to the editor but also in the occasional magazine essay. After Wiley had published in 1907 a book compiling the bureau’s analyses under the title Foods and Their Adulteration, the apparently science-savvy Langdon had written a fiercely critical review of the work. But “Langdon” was a fictional creation of H. L. Harris, the chief publicist for the Pacific Coast Borax Company. Harris planted his Langdon letters in large publications and small. In a missive to a newspaper in eastern Ohio, the Alliance Review, he wrote, “A recent case of ptomaine poisoning in Alliance has caused the thought that it is certainly appalling to learn how rapidly ptomaine poisoning cases have increased since the passage of the pure food law.”
To the New York Times the fictional Langdon described Wiley as an untrustworthy scientist of “radical views.” In Scientific American he insisted that the health of the Poison Squad volunteers was improved by eating borax-laced food. His work even appeared in Paul Pierce’s What to Eat, where he wrote that the Poison Squad experiments could not be trusted because the bureau’s dining room was so shabby and dirty as to depress anyone’s appetite. These entirely fictional statements were reprinted with enough effect that scientists hostile to Wiley—such as the German industrial chemist Oscar Liebreich, who had helped bring borax into favor—sometimes included them in their own testimony.
It was the adoption of the Harris/Langdon statements by high-profile pharmaceutical chemists like Liebreich that led the American Medical Association to investigate. AMA physicians reviewed the cases of ptomaine poisoning reported in the fake letters and discovered that many had never occurred; most of the illnesses ranged from indigestion to a few suicidal “self-administrations of arsenic.” In other words, there had been no sudden increase in bacterial food poisoning due to the reduction in use of borax and other preservatives. In an article titled “Press Agents and Preservatives,” the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) faulted other periodicals for the tendency of the lazy editor to “calmly appropriate Harris’s ‘dope’ as fact and print it as his own.” They advised the group’s physician members to report any Langdon letters to newspaper editors. In some cases, newspapers had started adding editors’ notes to the Langdon opinions, a positive step that the AMA noted, “must cause chagrin and disgust at the headquarters of the Pacific Coast Borax Company.”
But despite such evidence of skullduggery by the food industry, and despite his support for prohibiting additives such as borax and formaldehyde, Wilson remained deeply wary of Wiley and his activist tendencies. He again refused to consider restrictions on the use of sulfur compounds in food. He again said that he was waiting for the Remsen Board’s recommendation on sodium benzoate before he would make any decision. It surprised neither Wiley nor his allies when the board’s report, issued on January 26, 1909, found no problem worth mentioning with sodium benzoate. “You will find it rich reading,” Wiley wrote to a friend after reading the published report and noting that he had not been shown an advance copy. “Excuses for everything.”
Three of the board members—Long, Herter, and Chittenden—had independently conducted their studies, loosely following Wiley’s design, and failed to replicate the signs of serious illness seen in the Poison Squad study. They had tested the preservative on a group of young men, but they had added several additional months to the testing and they had experimented with a wider range of doses. All three of the Remsen Board researchers saw some signs of ill health in their subjects but dismissed them as “slight modifications in certain physiological processes, the exact significance of which modifications is not known.” To a man, they suggested that the causes were anything from lack of sleep to the weather. Chittenden, for instance, blamed the nausea and diarrhea that he observed on a “hot, dry New England summer.” The Remsen Board announced that it could reassure the government and the public that sodium benzoate—at an industry-standard dose of 0.01 percent—was perfectly safe.
Preservative makers declared the Remsen report a victory over an “arrogant official scientist.” Once again, the food-manufacturing association called for Wiley’s removal from office and predicted that the food additives he had criticized—from copper sulfate to saccharin—would be found innocuous. But such public celebration, as the New York Times reported, almost immediately backfired. Pure-food advocates immediately charged that the Remsen report was biased, beginning a new round in what the paper called “a first class fight.”
The Journal of the American Medical Association wrote that the Remsen Board seemed determined to find no health implications. “[T]his decision of the board leaves the question of the physiologic action of sodium benzoate on the community practically where it was before; that is, that while the substance is known to be a bacterial poison, its deleterious action on the human organs is, in the words of the Scotch verdict, ‘not proven.’” A Scottish “not proven” verdict meant, in this context, that although the charge had not been established as true, the defendant had not been absolved of guilt, either. “It is to be hoped that Dr. Wiley will be in no way discouraged and will remain at his post and continue to hew to the line,” the piece continued. “He is a government official of a type that happily is becoming more common—one of those men who appreciate that they represent the public and that they are expected to look after the interests of the public and not the interests of any class. . . . No wonder he is so cordially hated by those who heretofore fattened at the expense of public health and well-being.”
Women’s clubs, consumer leagues, newspaper editorial writers, even the Canners Association and the National Wholesale Grocers Association all came angrily to Wiley’s defense. On the day that the Remsen report was published, Paul Pierce announced the formation of a new advocacy group, the American Association for the Promotion of Purity in Food Products, which included representatives from industry including the Shredded Wheat Company, the Franco-American Food Company, the Beechnut Packing Company, and the H.J. Heinz Company. Heinz paid for the association’s press agent, who kept journalists supplied with pamphlets detailing both the risks of preservatives and the corporate corruption of the Agriculture Department. “If you could see the letters, telegrams and newspaper clippings pouring in upon me,” Wiley wrote to Edwin Ladd, “you would think the Referee [Remsen] Board had not a single supporter in the country.”
Wilson was unmoved by such political drama. He accepted the Remsen report without criticism, simply recommending that the preservative be allowed at a low enough level to be considered safe until proven otherwise by objective science. In March 1909, just before leaving office, President Roosevelt approved a regulation permitting the use of sodium benzoate in food at a level set at 0.01 percent. If he’d been less on the defensive, Wiley could have celebrated the fact that he’d at least gotten a limit put in place. But he, his allies, and the press took the decision as a resounding defeat for the chief chemist and his cause. The assessment was that the army of pure-food advocates had flexed their political muscle to an impressive extent, but they had lost.
Wiley thought again about quitting but rejected that idea. He’d come too far and he felt he owed his loyalty and allegiance to his many like-minded comrades in battle. As he wrote to a friend, it would be cowardly for “a general to resign his command because one part of his army was engulfed.” He had flaws, he acknowledged, but he could say proudly that cowardice was not one of them.