Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 10: Codes of Honesty

The Pure Food and Drug Laws are frequently regarded as landmarks in the history of social legislation. Certainly, government can have no higher aim than to attempt to protect the health of the people. Perhaps biological decline was well along when it became necessary to pass laws to prevent people, out of excessive devotion to moneymaking, from poisoning one another.

When people lost sight of the way to live, wrote Lao Tsu, came codes of love and honesty.

Keeping sugar out of beer had been a burning public barroom issue in England for centuries. Finally, Parliament passed an act in 1816 making it illegal for a brewer to have sugar in his possession. A brewer would be presumed guilty of intent to sophisticate if he so much as had sugar around. Where once knavish brewers had been dragged around town in a cart in which privy refuse had been collected, Parliament settled for fines and warnings. Sophisticators were handled in a civilized fashion. They were taken to court. The lawyers took over. The brewers organized and lobbied Parliament for twenty years until they were finally allowed to make — for their use only — a syrup from sugar for darkening their beer.

So much for progress.

By that time an anonymous British consumerist had created a public uproar in 1830 with his book, Deadly Adulteration and Slow Poisoning Unmasked, or Disease and Death in the Pot and the Bottle, in which the blood-empoisoning and life-destroying adulterations of wines, spirits, beer, bread, flour, tea, sugar, spices, cheesemongery, pastry, confectionery, medicines, etc., etc. are laid open to the public.

In 1850, a British physician had the happy idea of looking at suspected foods through that new invention the microscope. When he read a paper before the Botanical Society of London in 1850, on the shocking discoveries the microscopic examination had revealed in the sugar, there was uproar in the papers and among the populace. Dr. Arthur H. Hassall was in consequence commissioned by the owner of the eminent British medical periodical The Lancet to extend his microscopic examination to other foods. The pendulum of public panic swung all the way. The Lancet published Hassall’s reports for four years, providing unassailable chapter and verse on the appalling state of the food supply. They pulled no punches. Names and addresses of hundreds of thousands of manufacturers and suppliers of adulterated food were laid bare. The figures were horrendous: Out of 34 sample coffees, only 3 were pure; of 49 loaves of bread, all contained alum; of 56 cocoa samples, only 8 were satisfactory; of 26 milks, 15 were adulterated; out of some 100 sugared confections, practically all contained one or more harmful chemicals. R. Tannahill, Food in History, p. 346.

Parliamentary commissions were appointed; there were Watergate-type hearings for years. In the end, tough laws were passed; and the litigation went on for years. By 1899, however, much of Britain’s food production had become industrialized, which created a fresh problem. Manufacturers were able to deceive the unsuspecting public. Then, a major disaster occurred in 1900. Some 6,000 people fell ill of a strange new disease for which nobody had a name. It was alternately labeled alcoholism, peripheral neuritis; or multiple neuritis.

Before any great medical brains could find a foreign bacterium, an exotic insect, or an obscure amoeba to hang this on, it was discovered that most of the victims — including some seventy who died — had one thing in common. All were beer drinkers. Many worked in breweries — models of modern breweries. Eventually, an investigation revealed dangerous amounts of arsenic in the suspected brew. The beer was hauled off the market; the epidemic was no more. It was as simple as that. All the breweries implicated in the epidemic had been using brewing sugars — glucose and invert sugars — supplied by a single firm. The brewing sugars from this source were found to have been contaminated by arsenic in the course of their manufacture. Some specimens contained as much as 2.6 percent!

A royal commission was appointed to get to the bottom of the British beer barrel. In the course of their investigation, frightening details were uncovered about sugar refining: carbonic acid gas was passed through the liquid juice of the cane or beet to precipitate other impurities such as lime and strontia used in a previous stage of refinement. When this carbonic acid gas is obtained from coal, sugar often shows traces of arsenic! When arsenical malt or sugar additives are fermented, as in brewing, the yeast precipitates upon itself a considerable proportion of the impurity, thus partly cleansing the beer, but all preparations made from this yeast are thus exposed to contamination from arsenic.

The royal commission discovered what the country people had known intuitively when they rode knavish brewers out of town. On the continent, beer was still made in the old-fashioned way — malt was not dried in kilns with combustion gases but on floors heated from below. The slow traditional process was safe. German and other continental beer did not contain arsenic. This lethal substance had only been found in the beers of industrialized, progressive Britain! This discovery opened up alarming possibilities. The dangerous brew of invert sugars was not only used in beer — after Parliament gave in and permitted it in 1847 — but in a host of other sophisticated products such as honey, jam, marmalade, and candy.

With fine understatement, the Encyclopaedia Britannica confirms the axiom of Lao Tsu: It is difficult to say in the present state of the law whether such admixture amounts to adulteration. It was clearly made originally for fraudulent purposes, but usage and high court decision have gradually given the practice an air of respectability. The epitaph for pure food legislation in an industrial society was written in Britain before the United States ever got moving on the question. The battle began in Britain over beer. In the U.S., it arose over whiskey and Coca-Cola.

In both countries, then as now, government was an annex to trade. Political corruption was an offshoot of business corruption. From the whiskey scandals at the time of President Grant in the 1870s to Teapot Dome in the 1920s to the Watergate in the 1970s, the public is often better informed on political corruption than on business corruption. Government cannot be conducted wholly in the dark; business can, in the words of John Jay Chapman. That’s especially true of the food business. When a man runs for Congress, his life becomes an open book. Even though in 1975 other foods have to be labeled clearly to show their ingredients, consumers who want to know the ingredients of ice cream find it’s none of their business.

The U.S. government, through the Department of Internal Revenue, has had its mitts in the whiskey business from the earliest days of this republic. A heavy excise tax was levied on manufactured alcohol, both for industrial use and for imbibing in the pursuit of happiness. For years, whiskey was whiskey: a distillate, in a pot still, of the fermented mash of a cereal or a mixture of cereals. All the natural elements of the grain were contained in it, as well as ethyl alcohol and its congeners, which were volatile at the temperature of distillation. The whiskey also contained coloring matters and other soluble products extracted from the oak storage casks, and any new compounds arising during storage. Potable whiskey was kept in storage for four years. Whiskey was an Irish and Scotch version of the Latin aqua vitae, water of life, which the French made from the grape and called eau de vie. Its Scottish Gaelic name was uisge beatha, and then usquebaugh, and finally Anglicised as whiskey.

Then came the invention of the continuous still, a device which — like the sugar refinery — revolutionized production. Cheap, distilled, untaxed alcohol could now be manufactured. Mixed with genuine whiskey with flavoring and coloring added, the mixture could be passed off as whiskey. Fake whiskey was described as rectified. Overnight, the manufacture of cheap alcohol became a tremendous new business. The fake stuff was put on the market under the name and appearance of the regular natural stuff. Congress was persuaded to go along with this palpable fraud in return for taking its cut in taxes. Drunkenness and alcoholic poisoning were now within reach of everyone, rich and poor. Alcoholism soon became a national disease and eventually, in its turn, created the antidote: the crusade for prohibition of all booze, real and fake.

It was an era of anything goes in the food, drink, and drug department. Heroin, morphine, and cocaine were sold over the counter in drugstores and shops. Patent medicines, based on addictive drugs, were a billion-dollar mail-order business. Rectified whiskey was for sale in the country store and the saloon. Makers of addictive nostrums were the largest single advertisers in the newspapers and magazines. During the Spanish-American War, suppliers of bully beef to the armed forces went too far. Fighting men sickened and died from eating rotten meat. The meat scandal created a public uproar. Crusading magazines began exposing the shocking use of additives, fake flavorings, and colorings in canned and bottled food. Upton Sinclair did a job on the meatpackers; his novel The Jungle shocked the public and created a clamor for government action.

The chief of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry, Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, was the Ralph Nader of his time. After crusading for pure food and drug legislation for decades, he finally undertook a public experiment in 1902 which caught the imagination of the populace. Male volunteers were drafted into teams (which the newspapers soon called The Poison Squad). Young, healthy men were fed the old-fashioned American diet. One by one, the new-fangled food additives, which manufacturers were adding to ketchup, canned corn, bread, and meat, were introduced to their diet. Food processors trembled, the public cheered and followed the experiment — which was reported in the newspapers daily — with avid interest. For five years, the Poison Squad was given regular doses of the food preservatives, adulterants, and coloring matter then in general use by food processors: boric acid, borax, salicylic acid, salicylates, benzoic acid, benzoates, sulfur dioxide, sulfites, formaldehyde, sulfate of copper, and saltpeter. Periodically, Dr. Wiley published bulletins detailing the serious physical effects of these chemicals then being used in food. The newspapers soon made Wiley’s name a household word. The Poison Squad was as famous in its heyday as the astronauts were in theirs.

The combined forces of the food lobby, the drug lobby, and the rectified whiskey lobby were routed. After twenty-five years of public agitation for reform, pure food and drug laws were piloted through Congress. The combined vote of Senate and House was 304 for, only 21 against. On January 1, 1907, Dr. Wiley’s Bureau of Chemistry was empowered to police the U.S. food industry: To legislate, to inspect, and to take offenders to court.

Wiley and his bureau began enforcing the law to the letter. Casks of fake whiskey were seized and manufacturers were dragged into court. Shipments of Coca-Cola across state lines were seized for being adulterated and misbranded. H. W. Wiley, The History of a Crime Against the Food Law, pp. 57, 376-381.

What was Coca-Cola?

Well, in the early seventeenth century, an Italian voyager to South America found the Indians there constantly chewing on the leaf of the coca plant; at work, on trips, they carried it in small pouches and kept their mouths with a small amount of ground lime or ashes of the quinine plant. Having it, they work happily and walk a day or two without refreshing themselves or otherwise eating anything, wrote Francesco Carletti in his journal of 1594–1606.

Three or four times a day, everything stopped for the coca break. For the Peruvian Indians, it had been the pause — from time immemorial — that refreshes, stimulates, sharpens the mind, and increases physical prowess. Through refinement of the South American coca leaf, a constellation of alkaloid drugs, which are called cocaine, was derived. The coca plant is now cultivated in the West Indies, Java, Sumatra, and other parts of the tropical world.

In North America, the Indians chewed or smoked tobacco. However, in West Africa, the natives had a habit of getting high from chewing kernels of the cola nut. The nut contained caffeine (found in lower concentrations in coffee) and another stimulant, which found its way into Western medicine as the heart stimulant kolanin.

In the good old days in the South, when many highborn ladies routinely doctored themselves with daily doses of laudanum and other addicting opium syrups, Coca-Cola began as a patented headache remedy. Drug pushing was a multibillion-dollar, wholly legitimate, and legal business in those days. Opium, cocaine, morphine, and later heroin were advertised on the front pages of newspapers and magazines as a cure for everything from syphilis to bad breath. The patented headache remedy, like most sugared medicines on the market, was habit-forming by definition and design. The Coca-Cola habit became the basis of a multimillion-dollar business in the South. In the 1890s, Coca-Cola advertising described the product as A Wonderful Nerve and Brain Tonic and Remarkable Therapeutic Agent. The federal government took its first official look at the tonic after passage of the first Pure Food and Drug Law in 1906. In carrying out provisions of the law, the Bureau of Chemistry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture analyzed Coca-Cola. Charges were brought against the company by the Bureau of Chemistry, who seized an amount of Coca-Cola in interstate transit and recommended that criminal charges for adulteration and misbranding be brought against the manufacturers and dealers.

Those who adulterated our food and drugs foresaw that if they could cripple the activities of the Bureau of Chemistry, its founder and chief Dr. Harvey W. Wiley wrote some years later, they could save themselves from indictments. They proceeded along successful lines to effect this paralysis. It proved impossible to have any of the bureau’s accusations against Coca-Cola endorsed by higher authority. Finally, the Bureau of Chemistry was ordered, over the signature of the secretary of agriculture, to cease and desist in its activities in trying to get the Coca-Cola company to the bar of justice.

The fix was in, everybody thought, at the highest level, like Watergate and ITT in the 1970s. And then a gutsy newspaper owner from Atlanta, Mr. Seeley, came up to Washington and paid a visit to Dr. Wiley. He wanted to know why the bureau was pressing criminal charges against the manufacturers of ketchup and string beans and laying off Coca-Cola. Dr. Wiley calmly showed him his signed orders from the secretary of Agriculture. Mr. Seeley blew his top. He was greatly astonished that the secretary of Agriculture had thus interfered with the administration of justice, said Dr. Wiley.

The angry visitor immediately bounced over to the office of the secretary of Agriculture and entered a vigorous protest against the policy of the department in protecting adulterators and misbranders of foods.

He threatened to publicize all the gory details in his Atlanta newspaper unless the secretary recalled the order. The Bureau of Chemistry was directed to go ahead with the prosecution. Publicly, the Department of Agriculture gave the go-ahead. They had no choice. Privately, they did everything possible to scuttle the case from the inside. The bureau wanted to bring the case to the District of Columbia; transporting experts and assembling evidence would be simpler, as well as less expensive for the government. However, the top echelons in the department were determined that the case should be Chattanooga, Tennessee. Coca-Cola had its chief bottling works there, and the company also owned a great deal of real estate including the principal hotel — and perhaps a judge or two. The whole environment in Chattanooga was favorable to the Coca-Cola industry, said Dr. Wiley. The department was put to a large expense to send its scientific officers so far away from base. It was equivalent to trying the case in Atlanta.

The trial was long, drawn-out, and hotly contested.

An array of experts testified on both sides. The attorneys for Coca-Cola finally moved to dismiss the case on a technicality: caffeine, the chief injurious substance in Coca-Cola, was not an added substance under the law because it was in the original formula. The Chattanooga judge promptly obliged and that was supposed to be the end of that. Finally, the Bureau of Chemistry appealed that decision, eventually to the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote the unanimous opinion reversing the Chattanooga judge and upholding the Bureau of Chemistry in September 1917. We can see no escape from the conclusion that [caffeine] is an added ingredient within the meaning of the statute … the claimant has always insisted and now insists that its product contains both [coca and cola] … We conclude that the Court erred in directing a verdict … judgment is reversed … Ibid., pp. 376-381.

The Supreme Court decision had demolished the contentions of Coca-Cola by deciding that caffeine was an added substance and that Coca-Cola was a descriptive and not a distinctive name. Coca-Cola was in trouble. As would happen later, when Supreme Court decisions on enforcement of the Harrison Drug Control Act of 1914 were perverted by the executive branch of government, the court was unable to enforce its decisions. The judicial — like the legislative — branch of government has no troops. T Men and G Men and agents for the Department of Agriculture work for the White House and the Executive. Defiance of law and order is a game at which government can beat you. What Coca-Cola undertook to do behind the scenes to save its corporate life, we can only surmise. When brought back into court in Chattanooga in 1917, Coca-Cola pleaded nolo contendere, no contest.

On motion of the district attorney, the court passed sentence which, at face value, seemed severe enough to satisfy the most belligerent newspaper editor from Atlanta. The company was ordered to pay all costs of the action; forty barrels and twenty kegs of seized Coca-Cola were to be released to the company with the provision that Coca-Cola shall not be sold or otherwise disposed of contrary to the provisions of the federal Food and Drugs Act, or the laws of any state, territory, or district, or insular possessions of the United States.

That would seem to be clear enough. Coca-Cola cannot be sold outside of Georgia. But the judge’s decision also included a safety valve clause: … Judgment of forfeiture shall not be binding upon the said Coca-Cola Company or its product, except as to this cause, and the particular goods seized herein …

In other words, Coca-Cola could not sell the forty barrels and twenty kegs, but they were free to go ahead and sell other barrels and other kegs in other places. The government would have to bring action through the Bureau of Chemistry under the Pure Food and Drug Law again and again, barrel by barrel, keg by keg, bottle by bottle. A few innocent, little judicial words provided a loophole big enough to accommodate a tank car.

The secretary of Agriculture had to be blackmailed into enforcing the law against Coca-Cola in the first place. Secure in the belief that the public, preoccupied with preparedness for a war of survival against the beastly Hun, would settle for the symbolic gesture, and not the reality, he forbade the Bureau of Chemistry from bringing in any more action against the Coca-Cola Company. By this time, the valiant Dr. Wiley had been the subject of retaliatory investigations and phony charges — of the kind that General Motors tried to use in the 1960s against Ralph Nader.

As Wiley wrote in his book:

No attempt was made by the executors of the food law to enforce the decree of the courts by beginning action against Coca-Cola products every time they crossed a state line. Under the opinions of the Supreme Court, such proceedings would have been uniformly successful.

Owing to a lack of these proceedings, the Coca-Cola Company has its stock now listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its sales have been enormously increased, invading the North, as they previously invaded the South. The effect of drinking caffeine on an empty stomach and in a free state are far more dangerous than drinking an equal quantity of caffeine wrapped up with tannic acid in tea and coffee. The threat to health and happiness of our people is reaching far greater proportions due to this expansion of trade. The governors of the New York Exchange have admitted the stock of the Coca-Cola Company, the products of which have been condemned by a United States court as both adulterated and misbranded. This baleful condition could have been easily avoided if the enforcing officers had raised their hands to protest against the further development of this business by seizing its products and bringing criminal action against its manufacturers. Another interesting story would have been clarified if the Supreme Court could have passed an opinion on the immunity granted the Coca-Cola Company by the Court.

The campaign for passage of the Pure Food and Drug Laws had been conducted out in the open. Its undoing was accomplished in the dark. Food processors and rectified whiskey makers formed a united front to sabotage Wiley and his bureau. Representatives of the food business camped on the doorsteps of legislators, cabinet officers, and the president of the United States, complaining that sacred capital was being confiscated, praying, begging, and blackmailing for relief from the policies of Wiley and his bureau. But Wiley had become a symbol of incorruptible service in the public interest, so they had to proceed gingerly, deviously.

When the ketchup makers and the canners of corn visited the White House, President Teddy Roosevelt listened to their woeful pleas. Then he summoned his secretary of Agriculture and Dr. Wiley to listen to the complaints. After their pitiful recital of restrictions that hampered their moneymaking activities, the President turned to his secretary of Agriculture and said: What is your opinion about the propriety of enforcing the rulings of your Chief of Bureau? (No presidential tapes exist of this encounter, only Wiley’s notes — and history is fortunate to have even these.)

The secretary replied that the law was the law. Substances added to food for any purpose which are deleterious to the health shall be forbidden. Dr. Wiley made extensive investigation in feeding benzoated foods to healthy young men and in every instance he found that their health was undermined.

Then Teddy turned to Wiley and asked him what he thought.

Mr. President, Wiley replied, I don’t think, I know by patient experiment that benzoate of soda or benzoic acid added to human food is injurious to health.

The President banged the table with his fist and told his important corporate visitors: This substance that you are using is injurious to health and you shall not use it any longer.

That would seem to be that. But one of the emissaries — perhaps the most prestigious — was an important political figure, a man about to be elected vice president of the United States to replace Roosevelt (who had succeeded to the presidency on the assassination of McKinley). James S. Sherman was high in the counsels of the Republican party, although that day he was representing his own firm, Sherman Brothers of New York.

Mr. President, he began, there is another matter that we spoke to you about yesterday that is not included in what you have just said about the use of benzoate. I refer to the use of saccharin in foods. My firm last year saved $4,000 by sweetening canned corn with saccharin instead of sugar. We want a decision from you on this question.

Dr. Wiley was no politician. All the others were. He was no intimate of the President’s, as were the others. If he had ever had tea or coffee with the President he might have known what they knew. He walked into a trap. Violating presidential protocol, instead of waiting for the President to ask his view, he was so outraged at this bare-faced political appeal, he blurted it out.

Every one who ate that sweet corn was deceived, Wiley declared. He thought he was eating sugar, when in point of fact he was eating a coal tar product totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health.

As Wiley recalled later, the President changed abruptly from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. Turning angrily to Wiley, he said:

You tell me that saccharin is injurious to health?

Yes, Mr. President, said Wiley, I do tell you that.

Dr. Rixey gives it to me every day, the President replied.

Mr. President, he probably thinks you may be threatened with diabetes, said Wiley.

Anyone who says saccharin is injurious to health is an idiot The President was angry. The meeting broke up. Wiley never saw the President again. Dr. Wiley dates the dismantling of the enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Laws to that incident that day in the White House Cabinet Room, during the first year of enforcement of the law. Ibid.

Teddy Roosevelt had been an ailing, sickly youth. Overcoming these physical shortcomings, he had become a crusading New York police commissioner, a tough Rough Rider War Hero, an authentic American hero. Low glucose in the blood had not yet been officially called hypoglycemia. It was the custom for doctors with potentially diabetic patients to prescribe saccharin instead of sugar. Wiley hadn’t known that the President may have been one of those. You can bet that the food lobbyists, especially the chap who was about to be nominated as vice president, were better briefed than the chief of the Bureau of Chemistry.

Wiley had contravened the advice of the President’s doctor. He stood convicted of lèse majesté. Who knew that the former First Lady, Ida McKinley, was prone to have epileptic fits at state dinners? Who knew that President Kennedy’s doctors were giving him cortisone and/or amphetamines, or that President Franklin Roosevelt’s doctors were giving him morphine toward the end? Excessive devotion to the public health had turned a minor gaffe into a major political crisis. Wiley never ceased to blame himself for unwittingly providing the trigger for undoing the pure food laws which he fought for all his life.

The very next day, Teddy Roosevelt staged an executive coup by appointing a referee board of consulting scientific experts. He made sure his new board would uphold him and his White House physician by appointing as its chairman Dr. I. Remsen, the man who had been given a medal as the discoverer of saccharin. The chairman was empowered to select other members of the panel. This was the beginning of the end of Dr. Wiley and his Bureau of Chemistry. The manufacturers of ersatz whiskey took their case to the White House; another board was appointed to supersede Dr. Wiley. Wiley was totally occupied fighting bureaucratic battles inside his office. A phoney investigation brought silly charges in an attempt to discredit him. He was gagged by executive decree. His scientific bulletins warning against new food additives went unpublished. Eventually, he was forced to resign in order to be able to speak out in public and before the Congress.

It was the plain provision of the act, and was fully understood at the time of enactment, as stated in the law itself, that the Bureau of Chemistry was to examine all samples of suspected foods and drugs to determine whether they were adulterated or misbranded and that if this examination disclosed such facts the matter was to be referred to the courts for decision. Interest after interest, engaged in what the Bureau of Chemistry found to be the manufacture of misbranded or adulterated foods and drugs, made an appeal to escape appearing in court to defend their practices. Various methods were employed to secure this end; many of which were successful.

One by one I found that the activities pertaining to the Bureau of Chemistry were restricted and various forms of manipulated food products were withdrawn from its consideration and referred either to other bodies not contemplated by the law or directly relieved from further control. A few of the instances of this kind are well known. Among these may be mentioned the manufacture of so-called whiskey from alcohol, colors, and flavors; the addition to food products of benzoic acid and its salts, of sulfurous acid and its salts, of sulfate of copper, of saccharin, and of alum; the manufacture of so-called wines from pomace, chemicals, and colors; the floating of oysters in polluted waters for the purpose of making them look fatter and larger than they really are for the purposes of sale; the selling of moldy, fermented, decomposed, and misbranded grains; the offering to the people of glucose under the name corn syrup, thus taking a name which rightfully belongs to another product made directly from Indian corn stalks.

The official toleration and validation of such practices have restricted the activities of the Bureau of Chemistry to a very narrow field. As a result of these restrictions, I have been instructed to refrain from stating in any public way my own opinions regarding the effect of these substances upon health, and this restriction has interfered with my academic freedom of speech on matters relating directly to the public welfare. Ibid.

Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle had helped turn the tide in favor of the Pure Food and Drug Laws. After he left government, Dr. Wiley wrote a book telling the whole sordid story of how those laws had been scuttled from within government. He knew where the bodies were buried, and he resolved to tell it all and let the American people get riled up once again. However, he was no politician. Again he underestimated the forces arrayed against him. Wiley, undertaking to finance his book, turned his precious manuscript over to a printer. That manuscript mysteriously disappeared and has never been found to this day. Just how these things are done is rarely uncovered.

Shattered but unbroken, Dr. Wiley valiantly returned to work, rewriting his book from scratch. This chore occupied him totally for ten years. He tried to update matters, but by 1929 many of his shocking revelations were already old hat. Some of the villains were dead. Most of the politicians had passed on or at least out of power. Still, his volume The History of a Crime Against the Food Law was a primer on government corruption, quite unlike anything that had ever been written before. This time, he tried to protect himself. He took no chances on the manuscript getting lost again. Every facet of its production and printing was personally supervised by Wiley. When distribution began in 1929, it looked like a best-seller. Books disappeared rapidly from bookstore shelves. Yet no letters were received from readers, no congratulations, no kudos, and virtually no reviews. The books kept on disappearing, yet copies could not be found anywhere.

In desperation, Dr. Wiley put the few remaining books in libraries around the country — they disappeared from libraries as quickly as they had vanished from the stores. Try your neighborhood library today and see if you can find a copy. It should surprise no one today that these things can happen, when the advertising budget for one food conglomerate is larger than the entire annual budget of the government agency charged with policing the industry. Dr. Wiley’s valedictory on the last page of his exposé was prophetic in 1929. Today it is shattering.

If the Bureau of Chemistry had been permitted to enforce the law as it was written and as it tried to do, what would have been the condition now? No food product in our country would have any trace of benzoic acid, sulfurous acid or sulfites, or any alum or saccharin, save for medicinal purposes. No soft drink would contain any caffeine, or theobromine. No bleached flour would enter interstate commerce. Our foods and drugs would be wholly without any form of adulteration and misbranding. The health of our people would be vastly improved and their life greatly extended. The manufacturers of our food supply, and especially the millers, would devote their energies to improving the public health and promoting happiness in every home by the production of whole ground, unbolted cereal flours and meals.

The resistance of our people to infectious diseases would be greatly increased by a vastly improved and more wholesome diet. Our example would be followed by the civilized world and thus bring to the whole universe the benefits which our own people had received.

We would have been spared the ignominy and disgrace of great scientific men bending their efforts to defeat the purpose of one of the greatest laws ever enacted for the protection of the public welfare. Eminent officials of our government would have escaped the indignation of outraged public opinion because they permitted and encouraged these frauds on the public. The cause of a wholesome diet would not have been put back for fifty or a hundred years. And last but least, this History of a Crime would never have been written.

The Bureau of Chemistry was finally legally dismantled. In its place, the Food and Drug and Insecticide Administration, precursor of the Food and Drug Administration, was established. The Poison Squad, that group of healthy young men on whom Dr. Wiley had tested proposed new food additives before allowing the foods to be turned loose on the public at large, was ultimately replaced by the FDA’s GRAS (Generally Regarded as Safe) list — a list of food colorings, additives, and adulterants. Manufacturers and food processors were given carte blanche to use practically anything in its products until evidence turned up that it might be injurious to the public health. The whole intent of the Pure Food and Drug Laws had been turned on its head.

The Poison Squad was enlarged to include everybody in the country. Today, the GRAS list has become so lengthy that the average American ingests five pounds of chemical additives every year, together with approximately another fifty pounds of hidden sugar.

Like the British admiralty two hundred years ago, the FDA spends much of its time acting as unofficial cheerleader for the food industry, telling us that the average American diet, whatever that is, is the best in the world’s history. Dr. Wiley was posthumously honored by his government: A stamp bearing his name and face was issued. Eventually, he was nominated for the U.S. Hall of Fame. He won’t make it in the 1970s. But one day, perhaps the day after the FDA tells us that Wiley was absolutely right about saccharin (among other things), and the pendulum of public panic really swings, his statue will surely be rushed to the pantheon of American heroes.

In 1971, saccharin was quietly removed from the GRAS list by the FDA. That quiet validation of Wiley’s views took sixty odd years. Now the FDA has begun to restrict its use, but not in so-called low-calorie or sugarfree drinks, which are the biggest users of saccharin. The sugarfree, diet-food business booms as more and more Americans discover they have the sugar blues: It now grosses more than a billion dollars a year with diet soda as the top seller. In the last fifty years, plenty of alarms have been registered on the subject of America’s addiction to sugar. How many of them have come from our official watchdogs in the Food and Drug Administration? None that I have been able to discover. In fact, when the operatives of the government bureau become unwillingly trapped in any facet of the sugar controversy, they seem to be telling us that everything is A-OK.

In 1961, an Ohio food company came up with a real marketing coup. They introduced a new product, fortified sugar. For years, grains, flours, and bread — gutted of vitamins and minerals in the refining process — had been sold as fortified and enriched, after addition of a few synthetic vitamins. The FDA kept telling us that enriched flour was just as good as the real stuff. Billions of dollars in advertising had programmed the American housewife into grabbing for enriched this and fortified that So why not enrich white sugar? Suddenly somebody did. Fortified sugar appeared on the market with a list of vitamins and minerals on the package: Iodine, iron, vitamin C, four B complex vitamins, and 400 units of vitamin A.

What were the sugar pushers to do? They could lick them or join them. Joining presented certain problems. If the peddlers of refined white sugar were going to compete by listing their vitamins and minerals on the package, they would have nothing to reveal except a string of zeroes. If the sugar pushers rose to the bait and began fortifying their refined white sugar with vitamins and minerals, they were between the devil and the deep. Some of their biggest customers like Coca-Cola and the soft drink makers might regard this as distinctly unfair.

Whatever happened in the higher councils of the sugar industry we shall never know. The FDA rode to the rescue. Whose rescue? Government inspectors seized quantities of fortified sugar and declared by administrative fiat that the product was misbranded. Misbranding, a blunderbuss FDA regulation, usually means a charge that will have to do until they can dig up something else.

In other FDA raids, misbranding has been construed to mean that if a natural food store has a book on display which says that brown unpolished rice is good for what ails you, and better than white rice, the book has to be fifty feet away from the rice or it can be construed as a label misbranding the rice. The FDA can then proceed either to seize and burn the book or the rice. Since book burning reminds some sensitive people in the Western world of Hitler, the FDA has opted in favor of burning the rice, as has been done in Vietnam, which strikes some people as OK.

The manufacturers of fortified sugar thought they had a good thing going for them. After all, the U.S. is a free country, and they did have the money and lawyers to take the matter to court. The litigation went on for two years before a decision was reached. During the court proceedings, the FDA contended that listing of vitamins and minerals on the packages of enriched sugar was misbranding in that they were not nutritionally significant because adequate amounts of these nutrients are available in the average American diet.

Was the FDA saying that you don’t need enriched sugar because you’ve already got enriched bread? The federal judge threw the FDA case out of court with legal scolding. If the government’s case were valid, he said, any vitamin fortified product could be singled out and challenged on the ground that … these nutrients are available everywhere in the food supply … the government’s position is clearly untenable.

The enriched sugar people won their court case. But they got the message. How long has it been since you’ve seen any singing commercials for fortified and enriched sugar?

In 1951, a doctor who had been in charge of nutritional research for the U.S. Navy during World War II testified before a congressional committee. (When the Navy discovered the amount of money their men were spending on Coca-Cola, all cola beverages were studied. It was found they contained about 10 percent sugar.) The soft drink industry was given sugar rationing certificates so they could collect on all sugar sold to the armed forces. The Navy nutritionist, Dr. McCay, began studying these certificates:

I was amazed to learn, he testified, that the beverage contained substantial amounts of phosphoric acid … At the Naval Medical Research Institute, we put human teeth in a cola beverage and found they softened and started to dissolve within a short period.

While the congressmen gaped, the doctor went on:

The acidity of cola beverages … is about the same as vinegar. The sugar content masks the acidity, and children little realize they are drinking this strange mixture of phosphoric acid, sugar, caffeine, coloring, and flavoring matter.

A congressman asked the doctor what government bureau had charge of passing on the contents of soft drinks.

So far as I know, no one passes upon it or pays any attention to it, the doctor replied.

No one passes on the contents of soft drinks? asked the congressman.

So far as I know, no one.

Another congressman asked if the doctor had made any tests of the effect of cola beverages on metal and iron. When the doctor said he hadn’t, the congressman volunteered: A friend of mine told me once that he dropped three tenpenny nails into one of the cola bottles, and in forty-eight hours the nails had completely dissolved.

Sure, the doctor answered. Phosphoric acid there would dissolve iron or limestone. You might drop it on the steps, and it would erode the steps coming up here … Try it. W. Longgood, The Poisons in Your Food, pp. 200-201.

Since soft drinks are playing an increasingly important part of the American diet and tend to displace foods such as milk, they deserve very careful consideration, the doctor suggested.

That was in 1951. Today it’s gone from bad to worse. Figures suggest that 25 percent of the sugar consumed in the U.S. reaches the American gullet in the form of soft drinks of all kinds.

Between 1962 and 1972, coffee drinking dropped, as did the consumption of milk, while the consumption of soft drinks almost doubled — in excess of 30 gallons per person per year for 1972 as against 16.2 gallons for 1962.

Beer and tea are fourth and fifth on the list of favorite American drinks. Both registered an increase in a decade. The boost in tea sales was largely attributed to the sale of teas ready to drink, some with lemon and sugar already added. Tea has been turned into a sugared soft drink, so it begins to compete with other flavors. Virtually everything Americans drink — coffee, soft drinks, milk, beer, tea, juices, distilled spirits, and wine — is loaded with sugar or artificial sweeteners.

Our addiction to drink — from the cradle to the grave — is an addiction to sugar.

Centuries ago, the country people got into an uproar over knavish sophisticators adding sugar to their beer in tiny amounts as a fermenting agent. Way back in the 1920s, fighting Senator Robert La Follette, the populist senator from Wisconsin went to bat against the sugar lobby. He concluded that the sugar trust not only controls prices, it controls the government.

Today the sugar pushers and cola tycoons have presidents and prime ministers in their pocket. The famous kitchen debate between former Vice President Nixon and Premier Khrushchev in Moscow in the 1960s was in large part a promotion stunt to photograph the premier with a bottle of Pepsi-Cola. Nixon had been Pepsi’s lawyer. The president of Pepsi-Cola, Inc., became president of the Nixon Foundation after his lawyer became president of the United States. In 1972, Pepsi obtained the first Russian franchise to peddle its products in the Soviet Union in exchange for distribution rights here for Soviet wines and spirits.

The billion-dollar, sugar-pushing, soft-drink industry deserves very careful consideration, as the World War II Navy nutritionist suggested to Congress.

You can be sure that’s what they got.