As evidence undermining his claims about the dangers of ingesting chemical preservatives mounted, Wiley altered his tune, emphasizing how they could camoufl age “spoiled” foods that wrought havoc on the digestive system. However, critics were quick to point out that the tra-ditional preservatives of which he approved, such as vinegar and salt, were much more eff ective at masking spoiled foods than benzoate of soda and other chemicals.⁵²
Wiley did score a victory of sorts on one front: the Remsen Board’s second decision on additives, issued in April 1911, supported his conten-tion that saccharin should be banned, declaring that it could be “harm-ful to digestion” if taken over long periods of time. Wiley refrained from crowing about this, probably because the decision angered a number of powerful food companies, thereby undermining his contention that the board was biased in their favor. Moreover, the fact that chairman of the
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board, Ira Remsen, was the scientist who discovered how to produce sac-charin out of coal tar, and that his German co-discoverer was making a fortune out of commercializing it, reinforced the board’s reputation for integrity.⁵³
More important to Wiley was a German government report that said benzoate of soda should not be used as a preservative because such pre-servatives give “the appearance of freshness to foodstuff s that already have entered upon decomposition and the buyer may be deceived as to quality.” Some months later, H. J. Heinz persuaded the National Canners Association to come out against benzoate of soda, something that was easy to do since few of them now used it.⁵⁴
Still, Wiley’s repeated att acks on benzoate and the Remsen Board, as well as his refusal to let whisky and corn syrup manufacturers off the hook, fi nally emboldened his enemies in government to try to get rid of him. In the summer of 1911, aided by Frank Dunlap, his bureau’s deputy chemist, they persuaded the att orney general to recommend Wiley’s dis-missal on the grounds that he had indulged in some bureaucratic hanky-panky to hire a chemist for a larger per diem payment than was autho-rized. Wiley’s supporters in Congress then called a committ ee hearing at which Wiley railed against his enemies in the administration who, he charged, had suppressed his critical reports on dangerous additives and had given his bureau’s power to ban them to the Remsen Board. To justify his position, he trott ed out the German government report on benzoate.
Faced with this strong show of support from Progressive congressmen, President William Howard Taft let him off with a mild reprimand over the chemist’s salary.⁵⁵
Heinz and the heads of some other large food companies now de-manded a “reorganization” of the Department of Agriculture that would make Wiley “supreme in food matt ers.” However, quite the reverse hap-pened, as Wiley’s enemies in the government intensifi ed their campaign to subvert him. Finally, in March 1912, aft er being forced, he said, “to come into daily contact with the men who plott ed my destruction,” Wi-ley resigned. His resignation lett er evoked the twin dangers of poisonous additives and adulteration. The power to ban dangerous additives such as benzoate of soda was taken from him, he said, and given to the Remsen Board. He was also forced to abandon his att empts to forbid the sale of
“so-called whisky” and of glucose masquerading as corn syrup.⁵⁶
Hitherto a lifelong Republican, Wiley resigned from the party and began campaigning vigorously for Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate in the 1912 presidential election. He att acked Wilson’s two
op-73 : Lucrezia Borgias in the Kitchen?
ponents, former president Roosevelt and President Taft , for allowing the continued use of dangerous food additives. He recounted the story of how Roosevelt blew his top over saccharin and tried to stop him from warning of the dangers of benzoate of soda and saccharin, something Wiley called “a crime against humanity.” Taft , he said, had ordered key prosecutions to be dropped.⁵⁷
Wilson, in return, backed Wiley’s campaign against benzoate of soda.
Although he had been a professor at Johns Hopkins and president of Princeton, he declared that he had no confi dence in boards of academic experts such as the Remsen Board, for they looked at problems too nar-rowly. It had concluded correctly that benzoate of soda in small quanti-ties was not harmful, but it had failed to ask whether, as Dr. Wiley charged, it was being used to mask products that had “gone bad.”⁵⁸
Four days earlier, though, Wiley’s campaign against benzoate of soda had received another major blow. A meeting of the nation’s top nutri-tional scientists approved the report of Dr. John H. Long, a chemist at Northwestern University, which said that a Poison Squad of his students had been fed the chemical for one hundred days with “absolutely no ill eff ects.” Wiley could only respond with a cryptic analogy: “The people ask for bread,” he said, “and Dr. Long and his assistants give them a stone in the form of the moribund benzoate.”⁵⁹
By then, so many Poison Squads had been put to work that the term had lost its impact. Wiley himself had contributed to this. He had cre-ated one to test soda fountain drinks and “nerve tonics” to see if they contained opium, cocaine, or caff eine. Another tested headache pow-ders. When baby foods came under his scrutiny, there were rumors that he was going to create a Poison Squad of babies. This was by no means far-fetched, for he did set up a “Dog Poison Squad” to test dog food. (The experiment was stopped prematurely when the bureau’s neighbors com-plained about the nightt ime howling.)⁶⁰ Also, as we have seen, Wiley’s critics set up their own Poison Squads to refute him.⁶¹ Dr. Long used a squad to test one of Wiley’s targets, copper sulfate, which made canned green peas look green. He reported that not only did it not have any ill eff ects; it “could be considered a desirable component of French peas.”⁶² In the end, no member of any of the squads, not even a dog, was ever re-ally poisoned, at least in the conventional sense of the word.
Nevertheless, for about eleven years the public had heard the highly respected offi cial watchdog of food safety repeatedly warn that food pro-cessors were using poisons in their products. The long-term eff ects of this, while impossible to gauge, could not have been negligible.
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