The Kitchen Cartel: Pure Food & Drug Act 1906
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. Welcome to Episode 17, The Kitchen Cartel.

In the year 2019, a huge controversy fractured American discourse. This debate turned brother against brother, coworker against coworker. It split us apart into two irreconcilable factions, and in many ways it challenged every assumption we had about who we were as a nation. I'm referring, of course, to the Popeye's chicken sandwich.

Four years, Chick-fil-A had reigned supreme in the annals of fast food fried chicken sandwiches. Nothing could touch it. It was perfection on a pedestal. Then, Popeyes threw down the gauntlet.

It's hard to describe what a unique media experience this was in America. What began as a whisper turned into a buzz, and then a roar. Popeyes had a chicken sandwich and it was supposedly excellent. Better than Chick-fil-A's by a country fried mile. There were lines to try this thing.

Popeye's locations frequently ran out within hours. There were even scattered incidents of violence. Some people were killed over this sandwich, no joke. And all the word of mouth was supplemented by a deluge of TV and social media advertising. In the eye of this marketing maelstrom was one perfect image. A glorious shot of the Popeye's chicken sandwich. It was so immaculate. It looked like a painting.

Between two golden, cloud-like buns sat a perfectly crunchy piece of fried chicken on a bed of bright green pickle slices. It defied gravity and reality. Because when you actually got the sandwich, it left something to be desired, appearance-wise. The bun was smushed. It was a little dry and desiccated.

The chicken was good, but it wasn't the ambrosia that the advertising had led us to believe it was. The chicken was askew, it looked a little sloppy, the pickles were kind of soggy, and the sauce was gloopy and unevenly distributed. But of course, that's to be expected. We know that the food that we see in commercials is a fabrication, an impossible standard, a myth that we subconsciously accept.

Because in reality, that immaculate chicken sandwich on TV is actually propped up by toothpicks to give it its gravity-defying posture. The bun is spritzed with a spray bottle to give it a buttery shine. And the sauce, well, the sauce is likely not sauce at all. It's usually an inedible liquid with the exact degree of viscosity necessary to stay consistent under the blinding hot lights of a photography studio. But that's all true about most of the food that we see on TV.

Modern food stylists are wizards. They will use anything and everything, no matter how unnatural or artificial, to make food look as delicious as possible. It is an art form unto itself. For example, whenever you see perfectly smooth maple syrup cascading over a stack of pancakes, that's motor oil. Pennzoil. It has just the right hue and consistency, plus it won't absorb into the pancakes.

When you see Cheerios floating in a bowl of perfectly white milk, they're actually just sitting in a pool of Elmer's glue because it won't make the cereal soggy.

And if you need to add some steam to a shot of a piping hot meal, you might soak cotton balls or tampons in water, microwave them, and then conceal them behind the plate. That way you get these thick rolling vapors of steam. At least that's how it used to be done. And the point I'm trying to make with all of this, and I promise there is one, is that we are willing to accept a certain amount of fiction in our food.

All of these advertising tricks and embellishments are innocent enough, it's not physically hurting anyone, right? It's telling a story. Besides, we like being lied to a little. We like having the platonic ideal of a chicken sandwich in our heads when we bite into the soggy, smushed version. And we know the food that we get isn't going to be spritzed with motor oil or filled with toothpicks or swimming in glue. The real version is a little ugly, but edible and substantive. And

And we're okay with a little self-deception. But what about actual deception?

Imagine that the fiction didn't just stop with the ad campaign, that it wasn't just white lies on a TV commercial, but a harmful chemical deception that found its way into your home and your stomach, and your kids' stomachs. Imagine that beautiful piece of fried chicken was well past its expiration date and filled with embalming fluid to keep it from rotting, that the crispy fried batter wasn't so much flour as it was sawdust and

and insect parts. That the pickles were given their bright green color courtesy of toxic copper oxide. Now imagine that all of this is legal.

You would go to the grocery store and every aisle is a game of Russian roulette because companies would have no obligation to tell you what's in the stuff they're selling. They had no legal obligation to keep you safe. Their only obligation was to their own profit margins. Thankfully, that is not the case today. For the most part, our modern food supply is safe and heavily regulated. But in the closing decades of the 19th century,

It was a jungle, a wild west of lies, landmines, and horrific duplicity. A time when it was almost impossible to ascertain what food was real and genuine and which ones were literally poison, masquerading as healthy food. Parents were as likely to give their kids a toxic dose of lead as they were a nutritious meal. So, what changed? Why don't we have poisons and toxins in our food today?

Did large corporations just suddenly grow a conscience and decide to do the right thing? No. It took decades of reform and struggle and dead ends to make it happen. Well, today's episode is about that struggle. About the handful of men and women who fought tooth and nail to make America's food supply safe. Hounded by enemies and discredited at every turn, a handful of scientists and activists challenged the titans of the 19th century food industry and won.

Now, I recognize that I have a compulsive tendency to zig when I should zag. So in this season of holiday feasts and huge spreads of delicious food, of course, I'm going in the opposite direction. And some of this stuff is absolutely harrowing. It will challenge the strength of your stomach. But it's a very inspiring story with some huge, larger-than-life characters. And it might make you just a little bit more thankful this holiday season. So let's get into it.

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In the city of London, around the year 1820, a young woman arrived at her favorite hairdresser. She was there to get her hair done. A simple cut in style, just a nice new do. She sits down in the chair and the hairdresser gets to work with clippers and combs and brushes, and this young woman knew she was going to be there for a while, a few hours probably, so she thought ahead and brought a little snack. It was a jar of pickled cucumbers.

As the hairdresser cuts the young lady's hair, this woman eats her snack. And they chat and they talk and gossip. And the girl was probably super excited to hit the town with her new hair, freshly trimmed and styled.

Now when she's finished, the girl throws the empty pickle jar away, pays the hairdresser and heads home. But a few hours later, she starts feeling really weird. She feels lightheaded and nauseous, and then the waves of nausea turn into cramps, and the cramps turn into an agonizing pressure, pushing relentlessly against her diaphragm and her lungs. She immediately lays down to rest, but she doesn't get any better. She just feels worse and worse.

Now her family can only watch helplessly as the discomfort turns into agony. And the young woman's belly becomes distended, filling with air and fluid with every passing hour. She starts vomiting blood. And they pull up her shirt and see that her abdomen is crisscrossed with networks of blue veins bulging beneath the skin. Well she cries out in pain over and over again but no one knows what to do.

This young woman spends the next 11 days, roughly 264 hours, in excruciating pain. Until finally, she dies. Post-mortem, a physician was summoned, a certain Dr. Percival. And Dr. Percival, a man with an eye for chemistry, deduced the cause of death.

It was the jar of pickles. This innocent snack could have been bought from any grocer on any corner in any neighborhood in London, and it was impossible to know for sure. But this particular jar of pickles had been poisoned. Not deliberately, or at least not with the intention of killing this young woman, but they were toxic, and not by accident. The pickles had been dosed with copper oxide.

Why? Well, copper oxide, although poisonous, gives vegetables what one chemist called, quote, a lively green color, end quote. And a jar of pickles is much easier to sell if the contents look fresh and green. Well, there was nothing lively about the young woman. She was dead. At least her hair looked good in the casket.

The family was naturally heartbroken, but there was no one to turn to. No court or cop or government official could help them. As historian Deborah Blum writes, "Britain had no law against making unsafe or even lethal food products." The sad truth was this young woman was just one casualty in a long line of casualties linked to deliberately poisoned or adulterated food.

So let's zoom out a bit. The 19th century was a time of tremendous change. It was the era of industrialization, automation, and the birth of modern science. The post-enlightenment world was brimming with possibility. Every day it seemed new discoveries were being made, new machines were being invented, and new oddities were being revealed to a fascinated European public.

And the atmosphere wouldn't have been that different from the one we have now in the internet age. Today, it seems like every other hour a new gadget or app or device is being churned out. And that sense of breathless innovation was how it would have felt in the early decades of the 19th century. And one of the fields that was getting the most attention was chemistry.

What began as a basic understanding of the relationship between oxygen and combustion quickly snowballed into a cutting-edge new scientific field. By mastering nature's fundamental elements and understanding how substance reacted with one another on a molecular level, human beings could remake and alter matter in unprecedented ways. As one historian noted, quote,

In the space of about 20 years, commencing in 1770, the science of chemistry experienced a change more complete and more fundamental than any that had occurred before or has occurred since.

End quote. But like all sciences, chemistry soon made the leap from the halls of academia to the alleys of commerce. Enterprising minds began to realize that this new frontier of knowledge could be used to make money. A lot of money. Even the simplest chemistry could deceive the human senses. It could make rotten food taste like new. It could make old withered produce look bright and

and colorful. It could prolong the life of foodstuffs for days, weeks, months, maybe even years. It was like magic. Or at least it seemed to be. British food producers and retailers start using chemistry to cut corners.

They used chemical shortcuts and tricks to deceive a gullible public, to commit what today we would call blatant criminal fraud. As one businessman named Richard Wallington said in 1855, quote, what the eye never sees, the heart does not grieve over, end quote. Or as we say in modern times, what they don't know won't hurt them.

Bottom line, if you were a human who ate food in 19th century England, you were either being swindled or poisoned every day of your life. By 1820, it was inescapable, and I think the best way to fully grasp the sheer ubiquity of food fraud and adulteration in this time period is to examine it through the lens of a single day.

So imagine you wake up, 6 a.m. You're groggy, you gotta go to work, so you make yourself a cup of coffee. But odds were, that bag of grounds you bought from the grocer down the street is not coffee at all.

It is, according to historian B. Wilson, quote, End quote. Now, your kids are thirsty too, so you pour them a glass of milk. But the milk was not pure either.

It was usually way past its shelf life, watered down, and infused with a heavy dose of formaldehyde to mask the rotten taste. Now, the dairy seller might have even added a few drops of toxic yellow dye to give it a healthy, creamy color. So, after having your fake coffee and poisoning the kids with bad milk, you had to work. At lunchtime, you grab a bite to eat, maybe a sandwich. Well, unfortunately for you, that nice white bread was adulterated too.

According to Wilson, quote, End quote.

After work, you head home, and maybe you want to do something nice for the kids, buy them some sweets, so you stop at a shop and grab a handful of bright, colorful candies. Well, all that color comes with a cost. As Wilson writes, quote, End quote.

Lead was actually a very convenient additive at this time, because not only did it inhibit the growth of bacteria, it was also naturally sweet. That's actually a little known fact, that lead is delicious. As a result, it was everywhere in the food supply, used as a sweetener and a shortcut by everyone from confectioners to winemakers. Unfortunately, it also caused, quote, severe constipation and unbearable colic pains, loss

loss of speech, deafness, sterility, blindness, paralysis, loss of control of the extremities, and eventually, death. End quote. Well, back to our hypothetical working Joe. After a long day, maybe you want to relax with a stiff drink. So you head to the pub to grab a pint, and the bartender places a tall glass of ale with a fluffy white head in front of you.

Well, brewers often added a chemical called green vitriol to their beer to produce a satisfying foamy head. It was, of course, toxic and a marker of bad quality. So hopefully by now you can start to see how pervasive this problem is. There's almost no way to escape it, and it often had dire consequences. According to Deborah Blum, quote,

In 1847, three English children fell seriously ill after eating birthday cake decorated with arsenic-tinted green leaves. Five years later, two London brothers died after eating a cake whose frosting contained both arsenic and copper. In an 1854 report, London physician Arthur Hassel tracked 40 cases of child poisoning caused by penny candies. End quote.

And these were just the cases where people ingested so large or so concentrated a dose that the effects were immediate. For most people, it was a slow, gradual poisoning. Lead, for example, takes years to build up in your bones before it starts to kill you. Now, you might play devil's advocate and say, "Okay, surely these food sellers didn't know what they were doing." This was an ignorant time. They didn't understand the long-term effects of all these chemicals.

Sadly, you would be wrong in that assumption. These sellers knew exactly what they were doing, and it was all to squeeze a little more money out of their customers and cut cost of production. But the irony of it all was these sellers also relied on the local food supply. So the result was just that everybody was poisoning each other. As B. Wilson writes, quote,

Thus, the apothecary, who sells poisonous ingredients to the brewer, chuckles over his roguery and swallows his own drugs in his daily, copious exhibitions of brown stout. The brewer, in turn, is poisoned by the baker, the wine merchant, and the grocer. End quote.

And if any retailer, grocer, or food supplier tried to do it honestly, he was often run out of business. Cost-saving adulteration was so widespread that cutting corners was the only way to stay competitive. According to B. Wilson, honesty was quote "suicidal."

As one English food swindler told a journalist, quote, we're all trying to cut one another down because we all want a livelihood. And unless we did cut one another down, we wouldn't get it. End quote. One historian summarizes the problem, quote, if swindling was everywhere, what is the point of being honest? End quote. Predictably, the people who suffered the most under these chaotic, unregulated circumstances were poor people.

As a British journalist named Henry Mayhew wrote in the 1840s, quote, End quote. To put food on the table, parents often had no choice but to serve their kids rotten meat or formaldehyde-laced milk. It was toxic, but at least it was calories.

The choices were either starve or slowly poison yourself to death. At least with adulterated food you'd last a little longer. And this problem was an open secret. There were even popular songs and poems at the time demonizing grocers as cheats, swindlers, and poisoners. One of those went like this: "He sells us sands of araby, as sugar for cash down. He sweeps his shops and sells the dust as the purest salt in town.

He crams with cans of poisoned meat the subjects of the king, and when they die by the thousands why he laughs like anything.

Now, you might be asking, where was the government in all this? Where is the law? Surely, all these people dropping dead inflamed the consciences of government officials and spurred them towards regulation. Unfortunately, this was a case of wrong people, wrong place, wrong time. The science of chemistry was coming into its own at the exact same time that another revolution was taking place.

"unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism." As Wilson writes, quote, "The prevailing mood of the British press and government in 1820 was still excessively laissez-faire. Non-intervention remained the dominant philosophy of the day." End quote. And she goes on later in the book. There was, quote, "a reluctance of government to upset the wheels of commerce, and a reckless willingness of the worst swindlers to sacrifice the health of others to turn a quick buck." The market

was God, and many believed that through some magical process of equilibrium, the market would provide." End quote.

As the German chemist Friedrich Acume said, quote, "...the eager and insatiable thirst for gain, which seems to be a leading characteristic of the times, calls into action every human faculty and gives an irresistible impulse to the power of invention. And where lucre becomes the reigning principle, the possible sacrifice of even a fellow creature's life is a secondary consideration."

End quote. But this indifference to public health and worship of cold hard capitalism was a new phenomenon. It had not always been this way. Europe, in fact, had a robust history of regulating the production of food to make sure it was safe for consumption and honestly produced. As early as 802 AD, the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne had, quote, "...issued what was probably the first edict against fraudulent wine in the post-classical age," according to historian B. Wilson.

In the Middle Ages, in England, the manufacture and sale of wine was rigidly enforced. In 1364, a vintner named John Penrose was accused of selling bad or adulterated wine.

He was hauled before the Mayor of London, forced to drink a cup of his own bad wine, and then promptly kicked out of town and forbidden to ever make wine again. Bakers in the Middle Ages were required to imprint their seal into every individual loaf of bread they baked, so that if a customer noticed any adulteration or undesirable qualities in the dough, they could trace it back to the man who baked it. One 16th century London baker who'd sold a bad loaf of bread was publicly shamed; he

He was dragged through the muddy streets with a loaf of his own bad bread hanging around his neck. And bread was a serious business in the Middle East as well. A local judge in Turkey is recorded as saying that he threw a swindling baker into his own oven as punishment. Quote, I went to his bakery, I had his bread weighed, and found it light. His oven was still red hot. I had him thrown in, and my business was finished. End quote.

Spices and herbs were also emphatically regulated. In fact, in England there was a special profession for ensuring their purity. They were called garblers, a term taken from the Arabic word garbala, which means to sift or select. And B. Wilson describes them as, quote, the first guardians of public health. And these garblers even had to swear an oath, promising that they would not engage in corruption or schemes.

But as the centuries wore on, and the cult of the unregulated free market began to take hold, public health took a backseat to personal enrichment. Caveat emptor, or buyer beware, was the axiom of the day. And the burden was not on sellers to provide a safe product, but on the customer to ascertain which products would kill them or not. It was an impossible task.

Not only because of the pervasiveness of fraud and adulteration, but because of how ingeniously the toxic chemicals were woven into the products. Oftentimes, you couldn't taste the difference between a piece of candy filled with lead dyes and one filled with harmless, natural dyes. At one point, it got so bad that chemists would sell little pamphlets and how-to guides on how to test for harmful chemicals in everyday food items.

For example, if you wanted to know whether your milk was laced with formaldehyde or arsenic or bleach, you would drop certain additives into it and depending on the color or the reaction type, you'd know whether your milk was pure or not. And then there was the other problem: how do you hold anyone accountable when everyone is doing it? And who is to blame when the chains of production are so long and so multifaceted

that it's impossible to assign culpability. And there was no single villain twirling their mustache and dropping a vial of poison into the food supply. It was a complex web of people involved. As B. Wilson writes, quote, "'No single person can take responsibility for the quality of a given food or drink since it has passed through so many hands.'"

Adulteration thrives when trade operates in large, impersonal chains. In a rural setting, swindling is a risky business. If you are a village milkman, the chain between you and your customers is very short. You know them all by name, because they are your neighbors. And if you start watering down your milk, the chances are that word will soon get out and you will be ostracized.

But if you are selling milk in the metropolis of London in 1820 to an ever-shifting clientele, it is easier to cover your tracks." And she goes on, "...to ensure secrecy of these mysteries, the processes are very ingeniously divided and subdivided among individual operators, and the manufacturer is purposefully carried on in separate establishments."

But eventually, people start to get angry, and anger is always an accelerant for reform. Activists, scientists, and journalists start exposing these practices, driven by a righteous anger.

Frederick Acume, one of the many activists who was appalled by the state of public health and food safety in mid-1800s Britain, had this to say, End quote.

The reformers believed, according to Wilson, that, quote, "...to poison cunningly and knowingly was a crime akin to murder, driven by naked greed."

And the tipping point came in 1857, when 21 people in Yorkshire died after eating candy that had been mixed with arsenic by accident. The confectioner defended himself by saying that he had meant to mix in chalk instead. No one was convicted because there was no crime to convict anyone of. And that tipped the balance in favor of reform.

In 1860, Britain passed a far-reaching Adulteration Act. It clamped down hard on food producers and industrial practices and it made the average person in Britain much, much safer. It wasn't perfect, but in subsequent decades it would be expanded and improved.

But the fight was far from over. Across the Atlantic, in America, the situation was much, much worse. The economic vacuum left by the Civil War, combined with the revolution in industrial technology, turned every American's pantry into a veritable death trap. There was no oversight, no regulation, and no rules. Thousands of unsuspecting Americans were being sacrificed every year at the altar of the free market.

And no one in Washington seemed to care, as long as they were all getting rich in the process. In the end, it would take a tense and unlikely alliance between a chemist, a novelist, and a president to save America's food supply. It would be a battle, as B. Wilson put it, quote, "...between the science of deception and the science of detection."

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In the spring of 1880, students at Purdue University in Indiana were treated to a very odd sight. A huge man, muscled like a ditch digger, according to one source, was riding a bicycle through the campus grounds. He zipped effortlessly through the paths and gardens wearing a suit and a hat, waving and smiling as he went.

This eccentric individual was not an entertainer or a member of the circus. He was a professor named Harvey Washington Wiley. The rest of the faculty at Purdue disliked and resented this oddball gallivanting among their distinguished ranks. But the students loved him. Professor Wiley was even known to play baseball with the students after classes. The 36-year-old Harvey Washington Wiley

was no stranger to operating outside the mainstream. He had been raised by staunch abolitionists on a farm in rural Indiana, not a popular political position at the time. His childhood home, situated a few miles from the Ohio River, had even been a stop along the Underground Railroad. When he was young, Harvey Wiley absorbed a lot of lessons from his parents, but the most impactful one was the belief in always doing the right thing, especially when everyone around you was doing the wrong thing.

One of his earliest memories was of his father casting literally the only vote for abolition in their county. And at the time, votes had to be cast verbally, aloud, in front of everybody. But his dad stood up and declared loudly and proudly that he was for the abolition of slaves. Well, the other voters were furious. They hurled insults, slurs, and ridicule at him. One even called him the N-word.

Well, Harvey Wiley internalized that sense of social justice and as a young man fought for the Union in the Civil War. He had seen so many of his fellow soldiers maimed and mangled in the fighting, he developed an interest in medicine and science. Surely, mastery of those disciplines would allow him to do some good in the world. As he said at the time, quote, a medical man cannot climb to heaven and pull down immortality, but he can help give others a life full of health and happiness and hope.

End quote. And the field of chemistry interested him most. It was exciting, a modern mystery to be unraveled bit by bit. There was so much space left on the map, so to speak, so much to be discovered. As he wrote in his diary, quote, "...I find so many things that I do not know as I pursue my studies. My own profession is still a wilderness."

End quote. After getting his degrees, studying abroad in Germany for a little while, and scoring a gig at Purdue, Dr. Wiley had achieved quite a lot by his mid-30s. But then another opportunity came along. In 1881, the Indiana State Board of Health tasked Wiley with researching the purity, or lack thereof, of commercially available honeys and syrups.

And it sounds like a very esoteric and mundane area of research, but what he found under the lens of his microscope was shocking. 90% of the samples that he had been asked to examine were fake. The vast majority of American honey sellers were not selling honey at all.

They were selling cheap, artificially made corn syrup and advertising it as honey. And it wasn't just a case of slapping on a label or writing a slogan. These sellers went to elaborate lengths to deceive and cheat their customers. First, they would tint the glucose with a yellow dye to give it a rich amber color. Then, they would create a wax paraffin mold that looked exactly like honeycomb, fill it with glucose, and seal it up.

Sometimes, sellers would even stick insect parts like a bee wing or a leg to create the illusion of straight-from-the-hive authenticity. While the blatant fraud was bad enough, but Wiley also found toxic residue in the containers. Copper and chemical remnants, bits of animal bones, and sulfuric acid. This wasn't just fake honey. It was toxic fake honey.

Wiley was furious. His findings offended that deeply ingrained instinct towards fairness and honesty that he had adhered to for his entire life. As he wrote, quote, "'How could one corrupt what was produced by God and nature and needed for life by humans?'

End quote. His report to the Indiana State Board of Health was a blistering indictment of the nation's lack of food labeling laws. Quote, The dangers of adulteration are underrated when it is for a moment supposed that any counterfeit food can be tolerated without depraving the public taste and impairing the public safeguards of human life. End quote. Harvey Wiley had been searching for a crusade all his life, and now he'd found one.

In the same year, 800 miles to the east in Albany, New York, another young American outsider was taking a stand against American corruption. January 2nd, 1882, was the eve of the assembly of the New York State Legislature. Newly elected representatives were pouring into Albany, eager to begin their work the following day.

It was an extremely cold evening, about 17 degrees, well below zero with wind chill, and pacing through the streets, without a care in the world, was a 23-year-old man.

The people he passed on the sidewalk thought he was insane because he was wearing no winter overcoat. But that didn't seem to bother him one bit. He seemed to relish the challenge of enduring the cold. This young man marched straight up to the New York State Capitol building, which featured a silhouette that historian Edmund Morris describes as quote, "jagged against the skyline, an improbable forest of steeples, turrets, dormers, and gables all gleaming in the moonlight."

End quote. The young man walked inside the building and almost leapt up the staircase leading to the upper floors. His destination was a sumptuously decorated meeting room, where 52 members of the Republican caucus were meeting and strategizing. This young man was the 53rd member. A representative named John Walsh describes what happened next. End quote.

Suddenly, our eyes and those of everybody on the floor became glued on a young man who was coming in through the door. His hair was parted in the center, and he had sideburns. He wore a single eyeglass with a gold chain over his ear. He had on a cutaway coat with one button at the top and the other button at the bottom.

and the ends of its tails almost reached to the top of his shoes. He carried a gold-headed cane in one hand, a silk hat in the other, and he walked in the bent-over fashion that was the style with the young men of the day. His trousers were as tight as a tailor could make them, and he had a bell-shaped bottom to cover his shoes. "'Who's the dude?' I asked another member, while the same question was being put in a dozen different parts of the hall. "'That is Theodore Roosevelt, of New York,' he answered." End quote.

Teddy Roosevelt was just a 23-year-old kid when he began his career in government. But he would go on to shape the future of the United States, most famously as its 26th president. But that was in the far-flung future. Back in 1882, he was just a punk kid, with a big mouth and something to prove.

And if you're not overly familiar with Teddy Roosevelt, that's okay. You'll get to know him fairly well over the course of this episode. And full disclosure, he is easily one of my favorite American presidents. He's riddled with flaws and contradictions, but he's absolutely fascinating. He's just such a character, you know? And in many ways, he's almost like a cartoon.

Teddy Roosevelt, or TR as some people call him, is a mythic figure. People around him just seem to be in perpetual awe of how unique he was, particularly of how energetic he was. The young politician was known, according to colleagues, for his, quote, elastic movements, voluminous laughter, and wealth of mouth, end quote.

Another said Roosevelt would enter a room, quote, as if ejected from a catapult. One friend said years later that Teddy's early years in politics were, quote, just like Jack coming out of the box, end quote. You know those people who seem to have an inexhaustible reserve of energy? The people who want to stay out until 4 a.m. or hike up a mountain or get to the office at the crack of dawn for no conceivable reason? Well, Teddy Roosevelt was one of those people, cranked to 11, end quote.

He would often invite other representatives for long, stamina-sapping walks through the city of Albany. Most people who accepted his invitation never wanted to go on another one again. Teddy just wore them out. They could not keep up. One told him, quote, You'll have to get somebody else to walk with you. One dose is sufficient for me. End quote. But the truth was, this vast reservoir of energy was a smokescreen for a deep well of insecurity and pain.

Teddy Roosevelt had been an extremely sickly child, plagued by asthma, illness, and pessimistic prognoses from physicians. Some said that he wouldn't even live past childhood, or at least not live at a normal quality of life.

But as a boy, Teddy had resolved to never let that physical weakness define him. He was determined that he would be able to do anything any of the other boys could do, better even. He threw himself into outdoor activities, sports, boxing, hunting, running, you name it. A normal asthmatic would have dropped dead from the exertion, but Teddy somehow overcame it. It was an obsession, an insatiable restlessness that would define his entire life.

As a result of his childhood fragility, Teddy Roosevelt hated two things above all, weakness and bullies, and he encountered plenty of both in his first year of politics in 1882.

The weakness that he saw was corruption, a kind of moral weakness. His fellow representatives took bribes without a second thought, doled out hush money, did favors for business partners, and used their elected positions as slush funds to enrich themselves. Roosevelt had as little respect for their performance as he did their personalities, calling the opposition, quote,

End quote. His insults could be extremely colorful. One time he called a corrupt colleague, quote, End quote.

He referred to these unethical lot collectively as, quote, the Black Horse Cavalry. And when you read Roosevelt's words on the page, you get the impression of a thundering presence. But in reality, he was not a formidable public speaker in those early days. His voice was, quote, high and squeaky, according to historian Edmund Morris. He goes on, quote, Between phrases he would open his mouth in a convulsive gasp.

dragging the air in by main force. Clearly, his asthma was troubling him, and at times the slight stammer which friends had noticed at Harvard intruded and his teeth would knock together as the words fought their way out. He spoke as if he had an impediment in his speech, said a friend. He would often open his mouth and run out of tongue, but what he said was alright."

The young Roosevelt had no issues or reservations about pissing off the older establishment members. He was colorful and incessantly bombastic. As a fellow representative remembered, quote, "...there wasn't anything cool about him. He yelled and pounded his desk, and when they attacked him, he would fire back with all the venom imaginable."

End quote.

Naturally, the bigwigs in the New York State Assembly were not wild about this inexperienced, self-righteous kid barking up their trees and giving them grief for running the side hustles they had always ran. It even threatened to put Roosevelt not only in professional danger, but physical danger. One day, Teddy got wind that another representative who he had sparred with, an ex-prize fighter from New York named Big John McManus,

was planning on ambushing him with some friends. Their plan was to wrap him up in a blanket and humiliate him in public. Well, once Teddy heard about the plan, he walked up to McManus, who was much, much bigger and taller than him, and sneered, quote, I hear you're going to toss me in a blanket. By God, if you try anything like that, I'll kick you, I'll bite you, I'll kick you in the balls. I'll do anything to you. You'd better leave me alone. End quote.

Teddy Roosevelt hated bullies, and he would not be bullied under any circumstances. Nor could he be bought, as the rest of the assembly quickly realized. He turned down lavish bribes and declined favors, offered up to him if he'd agree to vote a certain way or kill a certain bill. He gained a reputation as a rabid reformer, a goody-two-shoes with teeth. As a journalist named George Spinney wrote at the time, Teddy had, quote, a most refreshing habit of

of calling men and things by their right names. End quote. T.R. quickly became known as, quote, the Cyclone Assemblyman. One acquaintance described him as possessing, quote, such a superabundance of animal life that was hardly ever condensed in a human being. End quote.

His crusading nature even brought him into conflict with members of his own family. As Edmund Morris describes in his biography of Roosevelt, quote, Roosevelt asked if that meant he was to yield to the corruptionists.

His uncle replied irritably that there would always be, quote, an inner circle of corporate executives, politicians, lawyers, and judges to control others and obtain the real rewards. Roosevelt never forgot those words. It was the first glimpse I had of that combination between business and politics that I was in after years so often to oppose, end quote.

Despite his instinct for doing the right thing, the young Teddy Roosevelt had his blind spots. He could be credibly called an elitist. He saw people of lesser means as being of lesser means because of a deficiency of character. He attributed economic hardship or lack of mobility to weakness or laziness. And that jives with his psychology. I mean, in his mind, he had overcome so much, why couldn't other people?

Roosevelt believed, according to biographer Nathan Miller, that, quote, the degradation of the working man was the result of natural law or character rather than economic or social injustice, end quote. Basically, Teddy Roosevelt was a blue blood.

He was from a filthy rich family in New York City and while he wouldn't endorse, tolerate, or abet outright corruption, he didn't have much sympathy for the working man. He refused to vote for bills that would raise the minimum wage or salaries for policemen and firemen. He even thought that some civil service workers were paid too much, calling them quote "large leaks" in the state budget.

But those blue blood calluses would begin to soften over time, and it all began with a heavy dose of reality. In investigating the veracity and validity of a certain bill that would abolish the private manufacture of cigars in immigrant housing, Roosevelt took a tour of the slums in New York City, and he was taken aback at the squalid environment and the inhumane working conditions. He was frankly horrified by it and emerged from the tenements

a changed person. I can't remember the exact quote and I'm paraphrasing a bit, but afterwards he said something like, I had no idea that people lived this way. As historian Philip J. Hiltz writes, quote, The realization that hardworking people who were neither lazy nor corrupt could nevertheless find themselves in such awful living conditions began to bring a change in Roosevelt's thinking. End quote.

In 1882, no one would have guessed that this 20-something peacock from New York would do anything to make life better for everyday people. He could have lived in a blissful bubble of privilege and power, unconcerned with the struggles of others. But that would not be Teddy's path. Later in life, Roosevelt would encounter a criminal conspiracy capable of turning even his formidable stomach.

While a young Teddy Roosevelt was making waves in New York State, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley was settling into a brand new gig. Gone were the whimsical rides on a high-wheeled bicycle through the grounds of Purdue University. Dr. Wiley was moving up in the world. He was now Dr. Wiley Chief Chemist at the United States Department of Agriculture.

His study on the widespread adulteration of honeys and syrups had made a big splash in the scientific community, and a year or so later he was tapped to join the newly formed Bureau of Chemistry. His main job in Washington would be investigating allegations of adulteration in other industries. As expected, he had gotten a lot of flack from the honey people after his pioneering study. They did not like people poking around in their industry and alerting customers to the scams.

Wiley got threats, insults, mean tweets. There was even a pamphlet circulated entitled Wiley's Lie. He had put a target squarely on his own back. Dr. Wiley stuck out like a sore thumb in D.C. Again, he was a huge guy from the country, well above six feet tall, built like a linebacker. You can almost imagine this bizarre image of this hulking, massive guy perched over a microscope in a tiny basement lab,

examining indetectable molecular structures. And despite the wrath of the honey folks, he decided at the end of the day he needed to just keep his head down and do the work. Quote, I felt hurt to be the victim of such insinuations and misstatements, but it is best to go about one's business and let enemies do their worst.

End quote. Dr. Wiley would make plenty of enemies over the course of his time in Washington, D.C. In 1885, his first major assignment presented itself, the investigation of a cornerstone of the American diet, milk.

To really understand some of the stuff we're about to get into, you've got to understand the landscape of industry and business in America in the late 19th century. Dr. Wiley and the people of his generation were living in a watershed moment for Western civilization. As Philip J. Hiltz writes, quote, In the first half of his life, two-thirds of the nation still worked on farms, but the flight from the land had begun. Soon, a majority of Americans would be living on crowded avenues and in city tenements.

And by the second half of Wiley's life, machines were being invented and applied in every field, and factories built around these hissing, tapping objects. Workers were lined up to feed and operate them. And out the other side came profit. Where the Founding Fathers had imagined a farm-based republic, America was now a high-contrast, high-energy landscape of machine and industry, in concert with the restless activity of buying and selling.

End quote. This is the time when massive food corporations and companies like Heinz, Nabisco, and Campbell's start to come into existence. And with that explosion of commerce came underhanded selling practices. Regulation and reform could not keep up with the pace of change, and that left an opening for unethical and unscrupulous businessmen to do whatever they wanted.

Back to Philip J. Hiltz, quote,

as they did in America in the late 19th century. New forms of cheating were now possible on a large scale for the first time, at exactly the moment when a food or medicine maker did not have to face his customer directly, given the expanded distribution network.

Adulteration and deception became easy and very profitable. Societies throughout history have always imposed social controls on business and economic activity through civil or religious authority. But during the 19th century, when unfettered capitalism dominated the scene, the long historical relationship was reversed, and society was ruled by economics with a strong presumption that no controls should govern it. The boldest achievement of the time

End quote. Dr. Wiley and his crew at the Bureau of Chemistry faced a lawless wilderness. Quote,

There were no national rules about hygiene, purity, or honesty in the labeling of food and drugs. End quote. In fact, the United States was the only industrialized nation who didn't have these kinds of laws on the books. American food exports were often turned away in Europe because they were seen as untrustworthy and unsafe. Plus, Wiley had to contend with a government bureaucracy that had little interest in doing anything about it. As Hiltz writes, quote,

Wealth in America was rapidly leaving the hands of a large number of landowners and flying into the hands of a few industrialists, reaching the point before the end of the century when 60% of the wealth was in the hands of 1% of the population. Political corruption was beyond anything easily imagined today. The US Senate was referred to as "the Millionaire's Club" and it resembled a convention of industry representatives.

Because of strong party control over state legislators and election rules, it had become common for wealthy men to pay a fee to the party to get themselves nominated and elected to office. End quote. This shift alarmed no less august a figure than Abraham Lincoln himself, who warned darkly before his death that, quote, corporations have been enthroned.

End quote.

That quote and its prescience just sends chills down my spine. It's unbelievable how right on old Abe was about that, but anyway, moving on. Such existential concerns were a little above Dr. Wiley's pay grade. His chief concern in 1885 was America's milk suppliers and whether they were legit or not.

A vanguard of muckraking journalists had already done most of Wiley's investigative work for him. In the 1850s, a New York journalist named John Mullaly had begun looking into the practices of dairy producers. His reaction to what he found was, quote, where are the police? End quote. As you approached one of these massive dairy facilities, you would be engulfed in a gag-inducing stench. You could smell it from as far as a mile off.

If your nose and stomach could endure long enough to actually step inside, you would see hundreds upon hundreds of malnourished cows, 600, 700 to a barn, standing shoulder to shoulder, ankle deep in their own excrement. According to one historian, quote,

Over the cow's short, miserable life, its teeth tended to rot out before the animal stopped giving milk and was sent to slaughter or drop dead in the stall. The cow's udders were frequently ulcerated, but they would be milked regardless. They would continue to be milked up to the hour of their death, even when they could barely stand.

And the reason that they were so sick was a lack of nourishment. The dairy producers, to save money, fed their animals what was called swill, a byproduct from nearby whiskey distilleries. Basically, it was leftover, half-fermented grain mush. According to Philip J. Hiltz, quote, After a distillery had finished using grains and water, the leftover swill was sent red-hot down into the trough. The animals couldn't get much nutrition from it, but got huge amounts of liquid, and

and when milked, gave large quantities of nutrition-stripped milk." This nutritionally worthless product was known as swill milk, and as bad as it sounds, that was only before it went into the bottle. When the liquid finally found itself under Dr. Wiley's microscope, the true depth of the malpractice was revealed. As historian Deborah Blum writes, "...Wiley's investigating chemist had found a routinely thinned product."

dirty, and whitened with chalk. And it wasn't just bacteria swimming in the milk. At least one of the samples that Wiley's crew tested had worms wriggling in the bottom of the bottle. A subsequent report in Indiana by that state's Board of Health added that a random sampling of milk found, quote, sticks, hairs, insects, blood, pus, and filth, end quote. Now, because food regulation did not exist in any meaningful capacity, this unacceptably deficient product

was sent out into the world by the hundreds of thousands of gallons. As the New York Times observed at the time, quote, "...it is now fit for nurseries, tea tables, ice cream saloons, and it is distributed throughout the city insidious, fatal, and revolting poison."

End quote. And the people that were most harmed by this swill milk were, as you might have guessed, kids. Lack of regulation harmed all social classes, but working class women were hit the hardest. After giving birth, they usually had to go right back to their jobs. And rather than breastfeed or employ wet nurses, these women often relied on cow's milk to feed their babies.

The first people to notice the link between swill milk and sick children were obviously pediatricians. As one wrote, quote, "...I have every year grown more suspicious of distillery milk. Whenever I have seen a child presenting a sickly appearance, loose, flabby flesh, weak joints, capricious appetite, frequent retchings and occasional vomitage, irregular bowels with a tendency to diarrhea, and fetid breath."

An old researcher friend of Dr. Wiley's from Purdue had even found heavy traces of embalming fluid in certain milk samples. The rationale was that, quote, two drops of a 40% solution of formaldehyde will preserve a pint of milk for several days, end quote. A reporter who was on the dairy industry's payroll asked this researcher, what was so bad about that? And he angrily replied, quote,

Well, it's embalming fluid that you're adding to the milk, so I guess it's all right if you want to embalm the baby, end quote. In 1887, Dr. Wiley and his colleagues at the Bureau of Chemistry released a damning three-part national report on their findings.

Now, decades of Hollywood pacing has trained us to believe that when a meticulously researched expose like this one comes out, that's game over. The good guys win, gavels are slammed, legislation is passed, and we have a happy ending. But the reaction to this report was more or less a collective national shrug, at least on the federal level. A few sporadic state and local laws were passed, but it did nothing to alleviate the problem.

Without a massive federal mandate that forced private interests to change their business practices, dairy producers would just continue doing what they wanted. The reports also made Dr. Wiley more of a political target. Lobbyists and special interests in the food industry were starting to look at this crusading chemist and see a big problem. This guy was bad for business. One editor of a food trade journal refused to shake Wiley's hand at a party.

He said Wiley was, quote, the man who is doing all he can to destroy American business, end quote.

But Dr. Wiley was undeterred. He kept going. He decided to look into a wide range of food products for evidence of fraud, adulteration, and toxicity. This was not just a milk problem. It was systemic. It ran through all facets of American food. In the course of his research, Wiley discovered that most commercially sold butter was not butter at all.

It was oleomargarine. Leftover animal scraps, fat, and detritus congealed and pureed into a kind of spread. We have margarine today, but back then it was just garbage. Margarine producers would drop some yellow food coloring in it, wrap it in packaging that promised purity and pride, and marketed it as butter. It wasn't necessarily poisonous, but it was fraud all the same.

Wiley's team found that most bread and flour sold in the U.S. was, as Deborah Blum puts it, quote, end quote.

Next, the Bureau of Chemistry looked at cocoa, coffee, and tea. According to Deborah Blum, quote, "Cocoa powders contained everything from clay to sand to iron oxides. The latter was used as a coloring agent. Finely powdered tin is sometimes added to give the chocolate a metallic luster," the report added. Coffee, Long America's hot beverage of choice, had frequently been cut with all manner of adulterants, ranging from tree bark, sawdust, and ground beets and acorns.

two relatively flavorful substitutions such as chicory root and the bitter seeds of the blue lupine flower.

By 1892, Wiley's staff had determined that about 87% of all ground coffee samples tested were adulterated. One sample contained no coffee at all, but they'd also found that the processors had devised a way to make coffee-free beans by pressing a mixture of flour, molasses, and occasionally dirt and sawdust into molds. End quote. Mustard was made by, quote,

mixing water with coarsely ground flour or crumbled gypsum, a mineral commonly used to make plaster, to give the resulting sludge a mustard-like tint, Martin's yellow, more technically 2,4-denitro-1-naphthol yellow, a coal-tar dye containing benzene, end quote.

End quote. Now, to the modern mind, all of this evidence seems like a slam dunk.

But you gotta remember, this is the 19th century, there was not widespread understanding or even belief that these adulterative substances were bad for you. The reaction was often, "Okay, well, it tastes fine, it fills me up. If the producers take a few liberties, well, that's just life. Something's gonna kill me someday, I'm just trying to live my life."

As Dr. Wiley sarcastically observed in a riff off of an old circus expression, quote, To be cheated, fooled, bamboozled, cajoled, pedifogged, demagogued, hypnotized, manicured, and chiropratized are privileges dear to us all. Americans like to be humbugged. End quote. It was around this time that Dr. Wiley started to slip into a depression.

You can actually read his diary entries from this time period and they make it clear that he is just beaten down. His research had brought him ridicule, pushback, and political heat. Even his own supervisor was telling him to tone it down, going so far as to cut Wiley's funding. Not to mention that it is incredibly depressing to see example after example of lying, deceit, and swindling. Corruption so systemic as to be insurmountable.

And his personal life wasn't going much better. His parents, who had instilled such a strong moral compass in him, had recently died. As he wrote, quote, I was plunged at once out of my long boyhood, end quote. It also served as a sharp reminder that in all his years, he had never settled down. Dr. Wiley wasn't a boy anymore. He was a middle-aged workaholic bachelor.

He had been far too consumed with his work in DC to ever meet someone or start a family. It was something he'd always wanted for himself, but it never seemed to work out.

At one point, Wiley had fallen hopelessly in love with a beautiful young librarian named Anna. He courted her for months, carrying her picture around in his pocket watch. Finally, he worked up the courage to ask her to marry him, and she politely declined to become Mrs. Wiley. So, Dr. Harvey Wiley threw the full force of his energies and passion back into his first love, science and chemistry, and he was determined to make an impact this time.

Despite accusations of being a foe of big business and capitalism, Wiley respected every American's freedom to do and eat as he pleased, saying, quote, "...it is not for me to tell my neighbor what he should eat, what he should drink, what his religion should be, or what his politics are. These are matters which I think every man should be left to settle for himself."

End quote. But Wiley didn't believe that American corporations should be free to deceive, defraud, and poison the American public. But he needed something to break through. He needed ironclad proof that big business was making America sick. He couldn't just tell the American public that these adulterants were bad. He needed to show them.

In the summer of 1898, an American soldier was sitting on a dock in Tampa Bay, Florida. He was digging in his pack for some food, waiting for a ship that would take him and thousands of other soldiers like him to war. Conflict had broken out between the United States and Spain, and the American army was being sent to the island territory of Cuba. As the hungry soldier was waiting on the dock, he found a tin can in his pack marked "Beef," part of the ration kit supplied to him by the army.

He pried open the top to discover a meal that was frankly inedible. As one veteran described, quote, "The top was nothing more than a layer of slime. It was disagreeable looking and nasty, and the beef was stringy and coarse and seemed to be nothing more than a bundle of fibers.

The soldier noticed a distinct aroma coming from the beef. It was chemical, a preservative tang that smelled like embalming fluid, and he noticed crystal deposits had formed on the meat. These were the same kinds of crystal deposits that often formed inside cadavers

after they had been embalmed. As the soldier was looking at this dubious meal, a 40-year-old American colonel swaggered over. The colonel wore a magnificent cavalry uniform, tall leather riding boots, a cocked hat, and a pair of distinctive spectacles. The colonel asked the soldier what was wrong, and the man complained, quote, "'I can't eat the meat.'"

This pissed the colonel off. He said, quote, If you are a baby, you shouldn't have come to war. Eat it and be a man. Well, the soldier did as he was ordered and nibbled at the slimy meat. A few seconds later, he vomited all over the dock. The colonel, intrigued, tried some of the meat himself, and he immediately spat it out. Colonel Teddy Roosevelt had to admit, this queasy soldier had a point. The meat was disgusting and inedible.

In 1898, at the start of the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt was 40 years old. Since his time in the New York State Legislature, he had lived quite a life, one that we would need like six hours to fully document. He'd developed a taste for adventure and hardship and glory. His political career had flourished, propelling him to the highest echelons of the U.S. government.

But he'd also experienced unfathomable personal loss. He'd buried a young wife and a mother on the same day, and he'd lost a brother to alcoholism. Death and sickness stalked every chapter of his life, but he always overcame it.

That didn't mean that he was immune to insecurity, though. A point of family shame had always been that Roosevelt's father had failed to serve his country in the Civil War. So when a new war came along, Teddy couldn't pass up the opportunity to test his mettle. He went on to fight very famously in the Spanish-American War, leading a cavalry regiment dubbed the Rough Riders,

And less than five years after the war, Teddy Roosevelt would be President of the United States. But he never forgot his encounter with that soldier and the poor quality of the meat in the US Army's rations.

He later said that he would, quote, rather have eaten my hat than eat the meat the army supplied to its soldiers. He said it was, quote, uneatable, unpalatable, unwholesome, utterly unsafe, and utterly unfit, end quote. This raised a lot of questions back home. Something about America's best and bravest having to subsist on rancid meat while they served their country touched a nerve with the public and its representatives.

Congress, in particular, wanted to know why its fighting men were being fed such garbage food. After all, you cannot win wars if your soldiers are doubled over on the battlefield from food poisoning. But it was hard to ascertain whether the issue was bad meat, bad chemicals, or both. The company that had supplied the meat to the army blamed the problem on the soldiers themselves. The cooks were not seasoning the meat properly, they had the audacity to say, quote, "All meats require pepper and salt.

And as the soldiers did not have any seasoning, it's likely the canned meat tasted flat to them. That may have had some effect on them. End quote. After many investigations, it was revealed that the meat was not actually embalmed or injected with formaldehyde or anything. It was just rancid, terrible cuts of beef supplied by the meat processors. The beef barons of the meat industry escaped any consequences, but the bell could not be unrung.

It was at this juncture that people began to start asking questions about chemical preservatives and how safe they were, which brought our old friend Dr. Wiley once more into the national arena. In the spring of 1902, a series of advertisements ran in government newsletters throughout the U.S. The ads were, quote, "looking for young, robust fellows with cultivated palates" to participate in a scientific study by the Bureau of Chemistry.

The participants would receive three square meals a day as part of their involvement in what the ad called, quote, hygienic table trials. It was also mentioned that the participants needed to have, quote, a sense of adventure and strong stomachs. Many young men responded, mostly government employees, and one man expressed his interest saying, quote, I have a stomach that can stand anything, end quote.

The Washington Post reported that the study would be opening, quote, for the first time in history, a scientific boarding house under the direction of Dr. Harvey Wiley, end quote. Wiley was about to embark on a bold new scientific endeavor, what historian Deborah Blum called, quote, one of the most influential scientific studies of the 20th century, end quote.

As Dr. Wiley sifted through the swamp of American food, he became aware of a huge array of chemical additives and preservatives being added to a host of products. Chemicals with innocent, market-friendly names like Preservaline, Freezyne, Rosalind Berliner, and Borax, to mention a few.

These preservatives were very, very necessary to the profit margins of food corporations and meat packers. See, the companies had to ship their products by railroad to markets all over the country, but they also had to keep the food fresh somehow. Widespread refrigeration did not exist yet, and canning and bottling could only go so far in delaying spoilage. So once again, capitalism turned to science and found a willing accomplice. Everything from ham to vegetables to cakes and tea were packed with these

with these chemical preservatives. The substances were often tasteless, colorless, odorless, sometimes they even enhanced the flavor, and they prolonged the life of products for exponential amounts of time. The result was food that was seemingly, as Deborah Blum puts it, quote, indestructible.

This set off some alarm bells for Dr. Wiley. He had long been suspicious of chemical preservatives, because no one had any idea what they did to the human body over long periods of time, and his suspicion was that they were very, very bad for us. But without hard data, all he had was suspicion and a hodgepodge of anecdotal evidence. He needed indisputable proof of the harmfulness or harmlessness of these preservatives.

So in 1902, Wiley gets permission from Congress to organize a study.

An experiment. One that would be performed on human subjects. His plan was simple. He would gather a group of 12 volunteers and selectively dose their food with chemicals. Then see what happened to their bodies over the course of time. Maybe they would get sick. Maybe they would die. Maybe they would be fine while he had his suspicions but he couldn't know for sure. To save America's food supply, he would have to deliberately poison a handful of American guinea pigs.

Now, this is the part of the episode where the topic really earns the title of the show. Dr. Wiley was incredibly conflicted about this study. He knew, with a fair degree of confidence, that he would be irrevocably damaging the health of a dozen young people. But in his mind, there was no other way to demonstrate to an indifferent public what their food was doing to them. If his findings were conclusive enough, the outraged people of America would demand change, and all the lobbyists and money in Washington couldn't stop it.

But, first, he needed to conduct his study. It was a very simple experiment. As Deborah Blum breaks it down for us, quote: "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 get fresh, additive-free dishes, and 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. End quote. To ensure the integrity of the results, the guinea pigs were not allowed to eat anything between meals. They couldn't have a beer in a pub or a snack in the street. As Wiley wrote, quote,

Each individual subject pledged himself to abstain entirely from food and drink not prepared by the scientist in charge of the dining room." Also, to the great amusement of local journalists, the participants had to agree to collect their urine and feces in bags and bring it to Wiley's laboratory for analysis. And you can actually find photographs of these volunteers eating at the little dining room that Wiley set up in the basement of the Department of Agriculture. And it looks just like 12 guys sitting in a restaurant.

Wiley even hung up a sign above the dining room that said quote, "None but the brave can eat the fair." And the overall weirdness of this study, the fantastical nature of it, turned the experiments into a pop culture phenomenon. These brave participants, willing to put their lives on the line for science, were soon referred to by newspapers as the Poison Squad. Someone even wrote a vaudevillian parody song about the Poison Squad at the time, quote,

On Prussian acid we break our fast, we lunch on morphine stew, we dine with match head consomme, we drink carbolic acid brew. Thus all the deadlies we double dare to put us beneath the sod. We're death-immunes and proudest proud, hooray for the poison squad.

What was slightly less whimsical was Dr. Wiley's findings. The first chemical he tested on his subjects was borax, or sodium borate. It was technically a cleaning product, but when added to rancid meat or wilted vegetables, it would react with the proteins and tighten the molecular structure, making the food appear crisp and fresh, even though it wasn't. Wiley's findings were contained in a 500-page report to the Secretary of Agriculture in 1904.

Within a matter of weeks after the study began, the volunteers quickly began experiencing adverse effects. They were put on a steady diet of borax capsules and clean, safely prepared food. Initially, Wiley had tried hiding the borax in the butter and the milk, but the volunteers caught on and stopped buttering their bread or putting milk in their tea. So Wiley goes, okay, we're just going to give them a pill. One group gets borax, one group gets placebo. Well, the borax group started feeling, quote,

"distress in both the stomach and the head." They had a hard time thinking clearly, which then extended to more pronounced symptoms like unexpected waves of nausea, headaches, and vomiting. They start rapidly losing weight, it's just falling off of them. And all of a sudden these healthy 20-something guys look sick and emaciated. Eventually, several members of the poison squad had to drop out of the study. Their bodies just couldn't take it anymore. Dr. Wiley and his team chalked it up to a two-faceted problem.

Borax seemed to affect the kidneys and possibly other organs. And the average person wasn't just getting a dose of it here or there, it was the sheer ubiquity of the chemical that was the problem. Over the course of a single day, a person could ingest several grams of borax in their butter, cream, meat, sweets, whatever.

and that stuff, day after day after day, would drastically shorten the average person's lifespan. Wiley knew that his findings wouldn't result in an outright ban of borax, it was far too integrated into the logistical necessities of food preservation, but at least, he thought, the food producers owed the public the honesty of clear labeling. Quote, As a matter of public information, and especially for protection of the young, the debilitated, and the sick,

Each article of food should be plainly labeled and branded in regard to the character and quantity of the preservative employed. The real evil of food adulteration is deception of the consumer." But the more he watched his volunteers lose weight, get sick, and drop out, Wiley was, quote, "...converted by my own research." And he came to believe that these chemicals should not be present in the food supply at all.

at any level. Wiley went on to test several other preservatives on the poison squad: salicylic acid, sulfuric acid, benzoic acid, formaldehyde, and saltpeter. And the results were always the same: catastrophic health effects.

Internal bleeding, gastrointestinal disease, just nightmarish, conclusive evidence. This stuff could not be allowed in the food supply anymore. As the public became more and more disturbed by this growing body of evidence collected by the eccentric six-foot-tall scientist and his squad of guinea pigs, the tide began to shift.

Wiley starts gathering allies. He hooks up with influential women's groups. He organizes pure food exhibits at the St. Louis World's Fair. He does everything he can to raise awareness about this issue. But once again, Wiley became a target for the powerful food manufacturer's lobby. And this time, they were not playing around. They accused him of sensationalism, spotlight-seeking, and publishing fabricated data. One newspaper called him, quote,

"The most hated man in America." Another ran the headline, quote, "Chemistry on the rampage." Wiley was trying to, quote, "destroy our appetites and should be muzzled." One especially brutal piece of character assassination said, quote, "Dr. Wiley seems to thirst deeply for notoriety. He is happiest when looking complacently into the horror-stricken eyes of a woman he has just scared half to death."

End quote. But despite all the attacks, the publicity drummed up by Wiley and his experiments was ever slowly inching public opinion toward reform. And best of all, America had a brand new president, one who Wiley believed would be the perfect ally in his fight against impure food.

Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as the 26th President of the United States on September 14, 1901. His predecessor, William McKinley, had been shot, and when he died a week later, the big job passed to the Vice President, Teddy Roosevelt. In the handful of years after, Roosevelt had acquired a reputation as a trust buster, a scourge of big business and a progressive lightning rod that would drag America into the 20th century by hook or by crook.

And Dr. Wiley thought this is the guy. This is the ally that the pure food movement needs. But being president is much different than being a 20-something state representative in Albany, or a cavalry commander in Cuba, or assistant secretary of the Navy. Teddy's maverick personality and unorthodox tactics could only get him so far in his new role. The money in Washington, the lobbies, the special interests were powerful obstacles to overcome.

Nevertheless, Roosevelt had done a lot to put the fear of God into big business. He put the coal industry on blast, he whipped the railroads into shape, all kinds of stuff. Unfortunately, we can't get into all that or else we will literally be here forever. But the food manufacturer's lobby proved to be an especially tough nut to crack. As Teddy looked deeper into the issue, he came to realize that some of his closest political allies were heavily involved in the muck.

Giant food corporations were greasing palms all over Washington, several of them within Teddy's inner circle. As Roosevelt admitted in 1902, quote, "'It will take more than my recommendation to get a law passed. I understand there's some very strong opposition.'"

End quote. It didn't help that the pure food movement seemed to be composed of a bunch of puritanical, self-righteous busybodies. Theodore Roosevelt looked at Dr. Wiley and his legions of pure food crusaders and saw, frankly, a bunch of zealots, fanatics, who could not and would not compromise on any of their demands.

And of course a lot of this was due to what representatives of the food industry were telling Roosevelt directly. Their deep pockets allowed them special access to the president, and they portrayed Wiley as quote, "a radical, impervious to reason and determined to destroy legitimate business." End quote. And Roosevelt didn't need much convincing to dislike Wiley anyway. At one point early in his presidency, Teddy had even called for the doctor to be fired.

It's a little complicated, but basically Wiley had publicly disagreed with the administration about some Cuban sugar tariffs. Well, Roosevelt didn't like that, and he demanded that Wiley's superiors fire him. But someone talked him off a ledge, and instead Roosevelt sent a stern note to the doctor saying, quote, I will let you off this time, but don't do it again, end quote. And Dr. Wiley knew that Roosevelt didn't like him, writing years later, quote, He never had a very good opinion of me.

End quote. But around 1904, 1905, the pure food controversy had brought the two men back into each other's orbits. Roosevelt agreed to back a bill that would impose certain restrictions on the food industry. And Dr. Wiley knew the bill wasn't perfect, but having any law of its kind on the books was at least a start. But Congress stopped the thing dead in its tracks. Their pockets were overflowing with bribes and political contributions from the food lobby.

One senator from Rhode Island named Nelson Aldrich attacked even the concept of food regulation, saying, quote, 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?

End quote. Well, the bill actually passed by a decent margin in the Senate, but it was left to languish on the House floor. And there it would stay, preserved but lifeless, just like the embalmed food Wiley had been investigating so famously. The bill would not be moving forward. Reform was not going to happen. Dr. Wiley was devastated.

He had failed. After 20 years of tireless research, endless personal attacks, and so much work, nothing had been accomplished. He had poisoned those 12 young men of the Poison Squad for nothing. He had wasted half his life, his good years, when he could have been settling down, finding love, raising a family. It was all for nothing.

But then, in February 1906, a package arrived at the White House, addressed to President Teddy Roosevelt. It was an advance copy of a new novel, due to be published later that month. Roosevelt opened the book and saw that the writer had autographed the cover page. Upton Sinclair was the writer's name, and the title of the book, The Jungle.

Roosevelt was a speed reader. He could fly through books and retain information in great detail. Well, 413 pages later, he was rattled on a fundamental level. This little book was about to change America forever. ♪

In November of 1904, a thin 28-year-old man slipped unnoticed into the massive complex of slaughterhouses, stockyards, and meat processing plants in the heart of Chicago, a place known locally as Packingtown. This young guy was nervous and jumpy because he was not supposed to be there. To blend in, he had disguised himself as an ordinary employee, which just meant he carried a simple lunchbox at his side.

And to his surprise, no one bothered him. No one asked him what he was doing there or who his supervisor was. No one suspected a thing. As the young man remembered many years later, quote, So long as I kept moving, no one would heed me. When I wanted to make careful observations, I would pass again and again through the same room. End quote. But if anyone had asked him a single question, they would have realized this guy was not a meatpacker at all.

He was a writer named Upton Sinclair. Upton Sinclair had come to Chicago by train a few weeks earlier and had rented a small room near the sprawling facilities of Packingtown. It would have been a cheap room, no one really wanted to live in that part of town if they had a choice, but Sinclair was there for a reason. He was there to gather research for a novel, working undercover to document what exactly was going on in the gloomy killing floors and assembly lines of America's big meat corporations.

Upton Sinclair was not the ideal candidate for this kind of work. According to Philip J. Hiltz, quote, This was no place for an anxious young man with stomach worries and a tendency to panic. Sinclair, who was the product of an alcoholic father and a puritanical mother, was said to have, quote, an obsessive fear of alcohol, sex, and impurities of any kind. End quote.

But for seven weeks, Sinclair snuck into Packingtown almost every day. And every day he would observe the things he saw, commit them to memory, and write them down in his crummy Chicago apartment. He would make sketches and ask questions,

But he never raised any undue suspicion. Unlike Dr. Wiley back in Washington, Upton Sinclair's chief concern was actually not food safety. It was worker safety. He was a die-hard socialist, and he was interested in documenting the terrible working conditions in Packingtown. But what he ended up finding was far more sinister.

As Sinclair meandered through Packingtown, he saw a consistent, rampant disregard for sanitation and quality control. Many of the animals were diseased, but they would be butchered and sold as meat to the unsuspecting American public all the same. Quote, End quote. There were rats everywhere.

The workers would try to lure the rodents with poisoned bread and then "the rats, the bread, and the meat would go into the hoppers together." Much of the meat was rotten, gray, and covered in fuzzy mold. It was simply bathed in acidic compounds like Dr. Wiley's old nemesis borax or glycerin, then fed into grinders to become links of sausage.

Sinclair describes one incident where a dead pig fell off the assembly line into the latrine pit that the workers used. They just hauled the carcass out and without bothering to wash it off, chopped it up and fed it into the grinders. But there were other things that found their way into America's meat. In a 19th century packing plant, there are lots of sharp edges, lots of cleavers and blades and buzz saws.

a careless worker might lose a thumb, a finger, or even an entire hand to the assembly line. Rather than stop the flow of production and try to fish it out, it just went into the grinders like everything else.

But the most horrifying anecdote Upton Sinclair came back from Chicago with was this. Sometimes, a worker would accidentally fall into the vats of acidic chemicals used for rendering the beef into lard. Quote, When they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting. End quote. Their bodies simply disintegrated and became part of the gelatinous mass. If an employee was working late and fell in, they might be, quote,

End quote.

To add insult to injury, the big meat corporations selling this stuff were engaged in what B. Wilson called, quote, outrageous profiteering. They would mark up their prices 2%, 5%, 10%, even as the quality plummeted. Sinclair feverishly completed chapter after chapter of his tell-all, quote, I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all the pain that life had meant to me.

Sinclair realized that America's food industry as a whole, and Packingtown in particular, was one giant criminal conspiracy, a cartel of grift, lies, and poisoned products. In Sinclair's eyes, the greatest victims were the workers themselves, paid almost nothing to brave life and limb to put an inferior product on the shelves.

The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country. From top to bottom, it was nothing but one gigantic lie." This was an environment where apex predator corporations devoured the weak, unsupported wage workers, all while lawlessly selling a dangerous, unregulated product.

And it was that metaphor which supplied the title to Sinclair's book, The Jungle. Initially, no one would publish this novel. It was too outrageous, too sensational, too much blood and guts and grime. His editor called it, quote, gloom and horror unrelieved.

But Sinclair refused to dial it down, and eventually he found a publisher. He was warned it might not sell because of all the graphic content. But Sinclair pushed ahead, saying, quote, I had to tell the truth and let people make of it what they would. End quote.

Well, the American public was outraged, nauseated, disgusted, and furious. Most of all, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had vivid and livid memories of the disgusting beef rations that his men had been supplied with in the Spanish-American War.

And the thing that really got everyone riled up were the allegations that human appendages had been ground up with the beef and pork. As Deborah Blum said, quote, now you've got the American public wondering if they're a nation of cannibals, end quote. President Roosevelt realized that this book could be used as a political cudgel to break through the deadlock of Washington apathy and legislative inertia. He was getting 100 letters a day about this novel. And in a rare moment of alignment,

ethical interests, and political necessity were pointing in the same direction. So Roosevelt decides he wants to meet Upton Sinclair in person, this young man who'd spent two months casing the stockyards and slaughterhouses of Chicago. So he invites Sinclair to the White House. And these were two guys who could not have been more different. And they did not like each other at all.

Roosevelt would pound the table as he talked for emphasis, and the jumpy Sinclair would flinch and wince at these theatrical flourishes. Ironically, Roosevelt thought Sinclair was the unhinged one, a hysterical socialist who had a contempt for red-blooded American capitalism.

But Teddy Roosevelt, for the most part, was not a hypocrite, and he didn't like big business taking advantage of the average American. As Roosevelt reflected, quote, I could not afford to disregard ugly things that had been found out simply because I did not like the man who had helped in finding them out. End quote. But there was one little problem with The Jungle that provided a stumbling block for the progressives. The Jungle was a novel.

technically a work of fiction. It told the story of a Lithuanian immigrant whose American dream begins to unravel and implode after working in the crushing conditions of a Chicago meatpacking plant. Sinclair's critics claimed that there was not a shred of real, factual evidence in this novel. These gory details were just meant to spice up the story. There was no actual truth to them. The jungle, they said,

was simply a rhetorical rag of socialist propaganda. The Chicago Tribune, deep in the pockets of the meatpacking corporations, said Sinclair's book was, quote, 95% lies, end quote.

So President Roosevelt feels compelled to send investigators of his own. He needed more than the word of a 28-year-old muckraking writer. So Teddy sends his own team of investigators to Chicago, and they discover that it was all true. Almost every single detail in Sinclair's book could be corroborated.

They put out a report called the Neil Reynolds Report, and it translated into nonfiction what Upton Sinclair had alleged against Packingtown in his novel. They even dug up new details, saying, quote, End quote.

The American public was, quote, haunted by these revelations, according to one historian. Before long, Europe was refusing to import any American meat. There were even songs written about it. One was a riff on Mary Had a Little Lamb, quote, "'Mary had a little lamb, and when she saw it sicken, "'she sent it off to Packingtown, "'where now it's labeled chicken.'"

End quote. Most American food companies were blindsided by this. No one expected the American public to ever catch on in any meaningful way and demand that their food be properly regulated. However, some clairvoyant captains of industry had already gotten ahead of this. Some started to realize that the label of purity could be a tremendous branding opportunity. There was money in selling a good, clean product.

And so the mindset of the American food industry begins to change, away from swindling and towards the power of branding. One example of this was an entrepreneur named Henry J. Hines. His company figured out how to make a shelf-stable condiment that used natural preservatives like vinegar and real quality ingredients. And now you can find Hines tomato ketchup in almost every fridge in America.

Dr. Wiley had seen this shift coming too. A lobbyist had once accused him of, quote, "...trying to ruin our business," end quote. Wiley had responded, quote, "...Sir, I am trying to save your business," end quote.

So, in the end, three things cohered into an unstoppable tidal wave of political activism. The audacious scientific research of chemists like Dr. Harvey Wiley and the Poison Squad, the muckraking investigations of writers like Upton Sinclair, and the realization that honesty and quality could be good for big business by capitalists like Henry Hines and others.

The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on June 29, 1906. President Theodore Roosevelt signed it into law the next day.

The law banned, quote, the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, or medicines, and liquors, end quote. It was, along with the Meat Inspection Act, the first federal consumer protection law in American history.

It had only been four months since The Jungle had landed on American bookshelves. But for the author himself, Upton Sinclair, it was a hollow victory. As he saw it, the real lesson of his book had not been the evils of food adulteration, but the evils of unregulated capitalism. He hoped his squalid portrayal of overworked and underpaid stockyard employees would ignite a wave of socialist sentiment in the US. But that was not to be.

As Upton Sinclair remarked, quote, I aimed for America's heart. By accident, I hit it in the stomach. End quote. Sinclair may have lit the fuse, but scientists like Harvey Washington Wiley had spent years collecting the kindling, slowly and methodically building a bedrock for the Pure Food Bill of 1906 to be built upon. But Teddy Roosevelt, always needing the lion's share of the spotlight, played down the role of Dr. Wiley's research.

TR had a compulsive need to be the hero in every story. As he self-congratulated, quote, the pure food and drug bill became a law purely because of the active stand I took in trying to get it through Congress, end quote. Dr. Wiley, Upton Sinclair, and other activists were, quote, although honest men, so fantastically impractical that they played right into the hands of their foes, end quote.

Historians would come to hold a different view. Today, the Pure Food and Drug Act is often referred to as Dr. Wiley's Law. Asked how he felt about the passage of the law, Dr. Wiley, his six-foot frame now slightly hunched at the age of 62, said he felt like, quote, "...a general who wins a great battle and brings a final end to the hostility."

End quote. Now, whenever there's a great moral or political victory in America, there's always an inevitable backlash. The food corporations and lobbyists came back with a vengeance, chipping away at the efficacy of the 1906 law bit by bit. But to a certain extent, a bell had been rung that could never be unrung. You cannot put the ketchup back in the bottle, so to speak. The American public had woken up to the lies and fraud and dishonesty rampant throughout the industry.

Some would say they had to be violently shaken awake, but their eyes were open nonetheless. It's funny, writing and researching about this topic has gotten me thinking a lot about the delayed reaction we seem to have when it comes to reform of any industry, whether it be food production, electronic technology, or social media.

It seems to take us a while as a nation to fully understand the little cracks and crevices that can be exploited before we get around to reforming it. And when something is so new and so game-changing, the pace of innovation can rocket far beyond the reach of legislation. In my home country, the U.S., we're just now beginning to reckon with the lawless and untamed nature of social media networks.

Who knows, maybe in our lifetime, we'll see the equivalent of a Dr. Harvey Wiley or an Upton Sinclair who can pull the veil off and push the country towards some kind of reform or regulation that makes life better for everyday people. With that in mind, I want to end today's episode with a passage from a book by Philip J. Hiltz. It describes this uneasy relationship between industry and the public good and Dr. Wiley's views about it. Quote, Wiley and other progressives believed strongly—

First, that progress was essential and desirable. Second, that business was a great engine of progress, along with science and education, and should be greatly encouraged. Third, that business had shown in the 19th century it could not well serve two masters. It could not seek profit with a single-minded energy and at the same time take care that citizens were protected from the injustices and injuries of the world.

that its actions or products might cause. The new kind of business could not, in other words, honestly police itself. Fourth, that because the new corporations had grown to such great size and influence, the policing of businesses should be done by the government, the only other organization in society of sufficient weight to confront business successfully if needed. These ideas produced fierce arguments at the time and still do.

This has been Conflicted. Happy holidays and thanks for listening.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks.