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as leading America into a “New Era” of never-ending prosperity, there seemed to be nothing untoward about Wiley’s old unit, which was re-named the Food and Drug Administration, cooperating with large food processors to ensure the safety of their products.⁶⁷
Wiley himself followed a trajectory similar to that of his ex-depart-ment. He became the director of the Bureau of Foods of Good Housekeep-ing, which gave its “Seal of Approval” to its advertisers’ products. Given the large number of food advertisements in the magazine, one might expect that he would have had some diffi culty repeatedly writing, “You may safely rely on those articles of food which are advertised in Good Housekeeping.”⁶⁸ But this seems to have posed him no problem, per-haps because most of the magazine’s corporate advertisers were exactly the kind of large companies that had originally supported him. In his monthly column, he occasionally condemned adulteration, but, as in the past, he aimed at the kind of chicanery that involved small-timers: butt er adulterated with water, whole wheat fl our mixed with other grains, and so on. There is no record of him ever recommending that the magazine’s Seal of Approval be withheld from any food advertiser. It was awarded to Jell-O and other foods of questionable nutritional value, as well as to Fleischmann’s Yeast, which made outlandish claims that its yeast cakes cured such things as acne, tooth decay, “fallen stomach,” and “underfed blood.”⁶⁹ Occasionally, Wiley did raise the benzoate of soda issue, but other old causes remained dormant. His concerns about the deleterious eff ects of caff eine disappeared as rapidly as the magazine’s ads for coff ee proliferated. In 1928, responding to a reader’s question about the use of sulfur dioxide in dried fruit, he now applauded it. Not only did it pre-serve the fruit’s color, he said; it killed harmful insects as well. One won-ders whether this reversal was connected to the many ads the magazine carried for California Sun-Maid dried fruits.⁷⁰
With regard to diet, Wiley’s columns recommended “moderation in everything,” and it certainly seemed to work for him. He married for the fi rst time in 1911, at age sixty-seven, fathered two children, and kept working at Good Housekeeping until shortly before his death in 1930 at age eighty-six.
By then, the country was spiraling down into the Great Depression, and public sentiment was again turning against big business. Once again, critical eyes were cast on what it was doing to the food supply. In September 1933 the Food and Drug Administration mounted an exhibit called the “Chamber of Horrors” that gave horrifi c examples of
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ous, sometimes lethal, substances that it had no power to ban. Although most were cosmetics, some involved foods, including questionable prod-ucts of the butt er industry and sprays used on fruits and vegetables. The fi rst lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, emerged from the exhibition disgusted and alerted her husband, Franklin, to the need for changes in the law.⁷¹ Then Arthur Kallet and Frederick Schlink’s best-seller 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs:
Dangers in Every day Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics revived many of Wiley’s charges about chemicals in food. Originally entitled Poisons for Profi t, it warned that “poisons” such as sulfur dioxide and lead arsenic were rou-tinely sprayed on fruits, and it condemned benzoate of soda and sulfi tes as dangerous chemicals that camoufl aged rott en foods.⁷² A mini-wave of so-called “guinea pig journalism” followed, raising the same kinds of suspicion of processed food as had the “muckrakers” of the early 1900s.
As a result, in 1934 President Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, Rexford Tugwell, sent a new food and drug bill to Congress, which would give the FDA the power to prevent the use of poisonous food additives and pro-hibit false health claims for foods.
What ensued represented a striking contrast with Wiley’s campaign for the original pure food act. Tugwell was a combative Columbia Uni-versity economics professor who, unlike Wiley, was unwilling and un-able to persuade major food producers to support it. As a result, indus-try representatives in Congress easily fought the bill to a standstill. The Republican-dominated press att acked “Rex the Red” Tugwell, calling the bill Communist-inspired. Women’s magazines such as Ladies’ Home Jour-nal, which had forcefully supported Wiley, responded to food advertisers’
pressure and joined the red-baiting chorus. The powerful Hearst chain, which had published Wiley’s column in Good Housekeeping, ignored the pleas of Wiley’s widow and joined in. Only a particularly horrendous poisoning scandal, in which a Tennessee druggist who produced a pat-ent medicine that killed sevpat-enty-three people was given the maximum penalty under the old law—a $200 fi ne for false labeling—fi nally spurred passage of the new Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938. By then, it had been quite thoroughly disemboweled.
The act’s weakness in regulating the food supply was exemplifi ed soon aft er it passed. The fi rst major action against foods that made false health claims—one that forced Fleischmann’s to stop making ridiculous claims for its yeast—was initiated not by the Food and Drug Administration, but by the Federal Trade Commission, which regulates advertising. Mean-while, all of the chemical additives currently in use—including Wiley’s bête noire, benzoate of soda—were included in a list of additives that the
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FDA deemed (without actually having tested them) “generally recog-nized as safe.” For the moment, though, this was hardly noticed. Fear of what was being added to foods had now been overshadowed by the oppo-site concern about food processing: that it deprived food of its healthful qualities.