Doctor Wiley and His Poison Squad (February/March 1996 | Volume: 47, Issue: 1)

Doctor Wiley and His Poison Squad

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Authors: Bernard A. Weisberger

Historic Era: Era 6: The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)

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February/March 1996 | Volume 47, Issue 1

 

As Congress reassembled last autumn, the press reported an upsurge in campaign contributions by tobacco companies to fight new efforts to combat smoking—especially by declaring nicotine an addictive substance that can be regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The industry regards the FDA as fondly as a whale would look on Captain Ahab. So, it seems, do a number of food-processing and pharmaceutical companies. Conservative complaints about the “regulatory burden” supposedly handcuffing American manufacturers often target the FDA for being too slow or too persnickety in deciding what products are allowable on the market without undue risk. But the agency catches it from both sides; consumer organizations occasionally worry that it’s too complaisant in bending the rules when Congress leans on it to spare corporations fiscal pain. A federal regulator’s lot is not a happy one.

Well, it never was. And the PDA’s specific history has been stormy from the opening paragraph. For those who think that regulation is a net dropped on the American economy by left-wing plotters during the New Deal, it may be enlightening to learn that while the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act currently in force does indeed date from 1938, the antecedent of the present-day FDA was set up in 1927 under Calvin Coolidge. What is more, the original Pure Food and Drug Act, the primal fount of consumer protection by Washington, dates from 1906. It placed enforcement powers in the Bureau of Chemistry of the Department of Agriculture, to the vast satisfaction of that bureau’s chief, who had waged a long, passionate campaign against what he saw as the outrageous and sometimes lethal frauds of the meat-packing, canning, and other food-processing corporations of the day as well as their partners in crime who peddled patent medicines.

The crusader’s name was Harvey Wiley. Like many members of the Progressive flock, he came from a Midwestern evangelical background, and he translated the quest for salvation into worldly battles against political and economic unrighteousness. Born in Indiana in 1844 to a farmer who was also a Campbellite preacher, the young Wiley as a freshman at Hanover College in Indiana found the “consolations of religion sweeter than all.” But, when his studies led him to graduate work in chemistry at Harvard and Berlin, he put science at least on a par with faith as a great avenue to moral and spiritual improvement, and he forsook sectarianism. All religions could join “to lead forward the human race into the freer light of truth and the fresher air of brotherly love.” Brotherly love was slightly compromised in his case by a feeling enunciated later in life that “I had the good fortune to be ranged on the side of right in every important contest I can remember.”

He got a professorship of chemistry at Purdue, and while there he helped write a report for the Indiana State Board of Health condemning adulterated food as an underrated danger. Those who thought of