The Poison Squad

  Wedderburn, no longer a department employee, was free to defy Morton’s order. He mailed copies of his work to farm journals and agricultural publications. This prompted a gratifying response from at least one reader, a farmer, who wrote, “The sentiment and truths contained therein can but meet the indorsement and approval of every honest man throughout our land. If there was ever a time in our history when it became the duty of the farming and laboring class of our people to organize and act in concert for the protection of their families against adulterated and poisoned food, that time is now.”

  Morton might have sacked Wiley too, but the chief chemist had achieved immense stature in his field, which reflected well on the department. Wiley was, at that point, president of the chemistry section of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, president of the Chemical Society of Washington, and president of the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists, which he had helped found. “President of all the chemical societies in the United States” was his new ambition, Wiley joked. The positions were certainly more gratifying, at the moment, than the position of chief chemist at the Agriculture Department.

  * * *

  —

  He’d learned that the jobs of his staff members researching food adulteration were also under threat. He wrote to Morton that the services of these chemists, who earned an average of a mere $600 per year, after all, “could not be dispensed with without detriment to the public service.” Morton’s response was that perhaps it would make more sense to cut clerical staff. Wiley fended off that too, pointing out that the support employees, even more modestly compensated, allowed the chemists more time to do their valuable work: “The secretary can rest assured that in their retention there will be no waste of public funds.”

  Wearing of Wiley’s apparently unlimited capacity for pushback, Morton decided the best strategy was to keep his prickly chief chemist busy. “You are hereby directed to proceed to Chicago for duty in connection with the food and cereal exhibit of the Columbian Exposition of 1893,” he instructed. Wiley’s job would be to promote American agriculture and the public image of the department. He added, “Your traveling expenses to and from Chicago will be paid from the fund appropriated for the investigation of the adulteration of foods.”

  * * *

  —

  Wiley wasn’t happy about the funding but also appreciated the break from battle—and the chance to be part of the dazzle of the Chicago exposition. Six hundred miles removed from Julius Morton, he was free to conduct a series of public presentations, talks that he delivered personally, focusing on the sad state of the American food supply and his division’s work in the detection of fake spices, adulterated cheese, tainted milk, and more. The exhibit he helped organize included a full-scale model of a food chemistry laboratory, live demonstrations of analyses of everything from bread to beer, and a public lecture series on modern chemistry. When it was Wiley’s turn to speak, he emphasized his belief that chemistry was a science that had enormous power to improve and be part of people’s lives—and that scientists themselves should share their work with others: “The chemist is a social being, and there is a life outside of the laboratory as beautiful and useful as the life within. The highest culture is not found in books, but in men. And thus to widen his horizon and broaden his views the chemist must leave his desk and seek the acquaintance of his fellows.”

  In the last week of the exposition, Wiley received a note from a woman he’d met after one of the talks: Helen Louise Thompson, an editor at the popular food magazine Table Talk (“devoted to the interests of progressive housewives”). Leaving the great fair had been like “saying goodbye to a fairyland I never expect to see again,” she wrote. But she also wanted him to know that she was taking with her, back to the real world, a new conviction that food additives were a dangerous problem, one her readers needed to know about. She asked Wiley for copies of all the old Bulletin 13 publications, and any that might still be upcoming as well, and to write for her magazine, proposing that he do “six or seven papers for the coming year on food adulterations, of the kind to be of interest to the housekeeper who does not know chicory from coffee and who really prefers cottonseed to olive oil.”

  With Algernon Paddock’s prediction that Congress would take up food safety regulation only when American consumers cared enough to force action in mind, Wiley accepted. He did not consult Secretary Morton, who, it was becoming clear, regarded Wiley as an enemy. Morton’s most recent cost-cutting move had been to reduce the division’s budget for test tubes and beakers. During the process of shutting down the sugar research field stations, Morton had deliberately sought evidence that he could use to discipline his chief chemist. After one report from the field, the secretary charged that Wiley had illegally spent twenty-four cents of department funds on shipping whiskey back home while inspecting research operations in Kansas. The accusation turned out to be as false as it was vindictive. “I was the manager of that company and I am very positive that no bill was ever paid for liquors, or anything else for that matter,” wrote an executive at the Parkinson Sugar Company in Fort Scott, Kansas, to Morton. “To those acquainted with Dr. Wiley and his habits, the insinuation that he had liquors shipped here for his own or anybody’s private use is absurd.” Morton withdrew the charge without apology.

  But Wiley recognized that he had to step lightly. In the year after the Columbian Exposition, the Chemistry Division’s work focused almost entirely on crop research. Typical was an 1894 bulletin on the chemical composition of the cassava plant. Wiley’s public speaking schedule reflected the same approach; at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences he discussed “The Relation of Chemistry to Agriculture.” Still, occasionally he could push through a small adulteration study.

  In the summer of 1894, on his way to help shutter a sugar station in California, he begged a little department money to investigate wine production, especially the use of preservatives. “These are matters which relate particularly to the wholesomeness of a wine and the purity of a food product.” Morton agreed to let him have a maximum of $150, which of course proved too little. Wiley spent $250 and Morton made him pay the overrun out of his own pocket.

  In 1896 the secretary began requiring that he personally approve every purchase in the department. A request to restock the funnels used in experiments took two months to win his go-ahead, and only after Wiley agreed to sign a document stating “I certify that the following named articles are needed for use in the Division of Chemistry and that the public interest demands their earliest delivery.” Wiley tried to economize by skimping on office supplies, but Morton complained that the chief chemist’s letters, typed using a nearly spent typewriter ribbon, were too hard to read. “The letters are all returned to you with the request that they be prepared anew.”

  In private, Wiley complained that Morton ran the department with “repression, persecution, and sham reform.” Even members of Congress had noticed. In February, Congressman Chester Long of Kansas, chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, wrote to Wiley directly to tell him that the secretary had once again slashed the Chemistry Division’s budget. “It is difficult usually to do anything under such circumstances but the House at present is not disposed to follow the suggestions of the Secretary of Agriculture,” Long wrote. He hoped, sincerely, that the department’s admired chief chemist would not give up.

  Three

  THE BEEF COURT

  1896–1899

  A film of the butter so yellow and sweet,

  Well suited to make every minute

  A dream of delight.

  Wiley, as he confided in his diary, was depressed. Some of that was purely personal. His mother, Lucinda, died shortly after Morton took office in 1893. “I was plunged at once out of my long boyhood,” Wiley wrote gloomily. Two years later his father, Preston, died as well, leaving him feeling further adrift and alone—an aging bachelor, renting a room in another
family’s house. His job now was the central focus of his life. And that too seemed to be foundering.

  The election of William McKinley in 1896 brightened his outlook. McKinley was not a reformer but he was at least not a Democrat. With a Republican back in the White House wanting his own team, the chief chemist felt confident that Morton would be replaced. And when Wiley received his first-ever invitation to an inaugural ball, he allowed himself to hope it was a signal of resurgence, not just for him but also for the status of the Chemistry Division.

  The early signs for that were good. McKinley appointed a former congressman, James Wilson, as the USDA’s next secretary. A sixty-two-year-old professor of agriculture from Iowa State University, Wilson still farmed, growing feed corn in Iowa’s Tama County, which had earned him the nickname “Tama Jim.” The new secretary told Wiley immediately that his job was secure and within six months had restored full funding to the Division of Chemistry, encouraging him to begin planning new food-adulteration studies.

  Perhaps it was under the influence of such a wave of renewed optimism that the chief chemist, at the age of fifty-three, took an unexpected and uncharacteristic step. He fell in love at first sight with a twenty-one-year-old USDA librarian. “I saw a young woman with a book in her hand, apparently looking for the proper place to deposit it. I was immediately struck by her appearance,” he confided to a friend. She was slight, fine featured, with light brown hair and dark blue eyes. He noticed with admiration her direct, intelligent gaze. As he liked to tell the story, Wiley grabbed the arm of Edward Cutter, the library manager, and demanded to know the woman’s name. The manager identified her as Anna Kelton.

  “Cutter,” Wiley said, “I’m going to marry that girl.”

  “Perhaps it would be well for you to meet the young lady before proposing matrimony,” Cutter replied. Wiley greeted Anna Kelton politely, as befitted a senior official in the department, but he resolutely began plotting a courtship.

  Anna “Nan” Kelton, a graduate of George Washington University, was more intent on a career. Her protective mother, Josephine, recently widowed, was even more intent in that desire. Born in Oakland, California, Anna had come with her family to Washington in 1893, when her father, Colonel John C. Kelton, was appointed governor of the Soldiers Home, a military retirement facility in the northwest quadrant of the capital. He had died of an infection just a year after taking the post, leaving his widow determined to see that her children thrived in their own right.

  Wiley knew the odds were against him, but he began by politely asking Cutter if he could borrow Miss Kelton for some stenography work. From there, she gradually came to take over many of the chemistry chief’s secretarial needs. Also gradually, she allowed him to escort her to the occasional play or concert. But when he called at her home, Josephine deliberately made him feel unwelcome, and he found himself again balanced between hope and discouragement.

  * * *

  —

  As McKinley’s presidential term began, Congress once again reluctantly considered the quality of the nation’s food and beverages. The legislative attention was focused, though, on a particular beverage—and, as newspapers cheerfully pointed out, one that enjoyed legislative favor. That would be whiskey, and the rule under consideration was one setting “bonded” standards for the spirit.

  The term dated to an 1868 law, which had granted distillers a delay between the time when they produced their product and when they had to pay a federal tax on it. This “bonded period” had originally been set at a year but over time was increased. It provided a financial incentive for letting spirits sit in barrels before being bottled for sale, and it resulted in aged whiskey—amber colored and more complex and mellow in taste. A distiller could charge considerably more for a well-aged bottle of spirits than for liquor straight from the still. High-end makers began to campaign for federal regulation that would do more than give them a tax-free grace period but that would also protect their profitable reputations for making the good stuff. Edmund Haynes Taylor Jr.—who bore the Kentucky honorific “colonel” and was the namesake of Old Taylor brand bourbon—was among the distillers who sought rules to distinguish products like his from, as he put it, “carelessly made whiskeys whose aim is quantity and whose objective is mere chaffering for cheapness.”

  Those chafferers, as Taylor called them, sometimes sold their lesser products with phony labels proclaiming them to be Taylor’s brand or Jasper “Jack” Daniel’s famed Old No. 7. The fakes were often made using rectified alcohol, also called neutral spirits. These were a concentrated form of ethyl alcohol, usually produced on an industrial scale by repeatedly distilling the liquid to purify it and increase its strength. To simulate whiskey, the product was diluted with water and tinted brown—often with tobacco extracts, tincture of iodine, burned sugar, or prune juice.

  In 1897, after decades of complaints over the widespread adulteration and fakery of alcoholic spirits, Congress passed the Bottled-in-Bond Act, which attempted to encourage basic quality standards. The act stated that each bottle of spirits could be marked with a green “bonded” seal from the government if it was aged for at least four years in a supervised federal warehouse. Bonded whiskey was also labeled for proof (a measurement set in the United States as twice the percentage of alcohol) and the location of the specific distillery.

  Makers of blended whiskeys, meanwhile, were also trying to fend off counterfeiters and set quality standards. Blended whiskeys are, as the name indicates, made from a mixture of distilled spirits. They usually contain a high-quality aged product, derived from a single distillation, to establish flavor, together with other, lesser whiskeys added for economy. Sometimes, in lower-quality blends, there are also neutral spirits added to the mix, along with dyes to enhance color.

  Although they could not qualify for the bonded designation at their best, blends could be high-quality products sold at premium prices—prime targets for the counterfeit-label scam. In the nineteenth century, Canada’s Hiram Walker Company, producer of Canadian Club blended whiskey, reacted to fakery in the U.S. market by hiring detectives to hunt cheats. The company took out newspaper advertisements listing the perpetrators or had the names listed on billboard posters proclaiming “A Swindle, These People Sell Bogus Liquors.” Yet inexpensive blended whiskeys were too often no better than the counterfeits. For that reason, producers of blended whiskeys were sometimes lumped together under the somewhat derogatory label “rectifiers.” Wiley—who of an evening often enjoyed a glass of fine, aged bourbon—had little regard for anything called a blend and tended to dismiss any alternatives to straight whiskey as belonging to a catalog of fakes, admittedly of varying quality.

  After the Bottled-in-Bond Act, Colonel Taylor and his friends began publishing advertisements touting bonded whiskey as the only “real” whiskey. Producers of blends—both good and bad—protested, to little effect at the time. But their sense of a real injustice did not end, and neither did their determination to fight for a change. The rectifiers, and their quest for equality, would lead to years of wrangling over what could rightly be called whiskey, plaguing Wiley, Wilson, and a series of presidents in the years ahead.

  McKinley himself showed no interest in the topic—or in food or drink quality in general. He had other far more pressing issues, including a politically charged decision to go to war with Spain over Cuban independence in 1898. Although the conflict was brief—lasting only from April to August of that year—the aftershocks were profound. The United States became something of an imperial power, gaining former Spanish colonial possessions, including Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. And although the war was brief, it showcased so many examples of outdated and inept management of the U.S. military that McKinley was forced to replace the secretary of war, John Hay.

  To the president’s dismay, among the most stubborn scandals regarding mismanagement was one involving the quality of food fed to the troops. The story—which made newspap
er headlines coast to coast—involved the shoddy state of the beef fed to American soldiers during the conflict. Testimony at the resulting hearings before the War Department would range from Wiley as an expert witness on food safety to then–New York governor Theodore Roosevelt as an aggrieved former soldier.

  The “embalmed beef” scandal arose soon after the war’s end in August. Major General Nelson Miles, commanding general of the army, called for an investigation of food that had been supplied to soldiers in Cuba. He’d asked all the commanders stationed in the Caribbean to write evaluations of the canned beef delivered to their regiments. Miles, citing reports of a chemical smell wafting from the product, called it “embalmed beef,” a term that caught on in the nation’s newspapers. The press reported that Miles had received descriptions of cans swarming with maggots and cans supposedly containing a mix of meat and charred rope. The Chicago Tribune—a paper particularly interested in the business of the meatpacking industry—quoted soldiers who said that often when the cans were opened they “had to retire to a distance to prevent being overcome” by the stench.

  As Miles was airing his complaints, the War Department (roughly analogous to today’s Department of the Army) began a general inquiry into the overall conduct of the war. At the direction of President McKinley, secretary of war Russell A. Alger appointed a long-retired Civil War officer, Major General Grenville Dodge, to lead an investigative panel that became known as the Dodge Commission. A wealthy businessman and former congressman, Dodge transported the commission aboard his own private railroad car to interview witnesses around the country. He also held numerous hearings in Washington, DC, where Miles was called to testify that December.