There is no shortage of debate today about the safest and healthiest approach to food growth, production, preservation and distribution, though few may realize just how bad things had gotten by the end of the 19th century — and even fewer are aware of the leading role the state of Indiana, and a few of its reformers, played in national efforts to rectify the hazards of food across the United States.
Those efforts came to fruition on June 30, 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the Pure Food and Drug Act. So prominent was Indiana’s role that the law was also known as the Wiley Act, named for Jefferson County-born Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who began his work while a chemist at Purdue University.
While many history students rightly cite the cultural impact of Upton Sinclair’s 1905 novel, “The Jungle,” which described in nauseating detail the food industry’s abuses, the hard data from Wiley’s “hygienic table trials,” whose participants were known as the Poison Squad, played a significant role in the act’s passage.
In the article “The 19th-Century Fight Against Bacteria-Ridden Milk Preserved With Embalming Fluid,” Smithsonian Magazine noted, “At the turn of the 20th century, Indiana was widely hailed as a national leader in public health issues. This was almost entirely due to the work of two unusually outspoken scientists,” Wiley among them.
As the article notes, growing urbanization in the United States necessitated more processed food, since fewer Americans could grow their own. But food mass production was unregulated, leading to widespread abuses.
Dr. Wiley and the Poison Squads
Wiley, born in 1844 on a farm near the Hoosier town of Kent, served in the Civil War and attended Hanover College. He taught at Butler University while earning a doctorate from the Medical College of Indiana. By 1874, he was a chemist at Purdue, later appointed chief chemist of the Bureau of Chemistry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1883. He began testing food and beverages in 1902.
At the time, the greatest danger was impure food and the equally harmful adulteration of food with preservatives or chemicals. Wiley focused on the latter.
His methods of human experimentation might appear extreme today, though at the time, skepticism existed about the harms of preservatives.
These included formaldehyde — used to embalm corpses — borax, salicylic acid (an aspirin ingredient), arsenic (which gave chocolate a sheen) and lead, used in coloring candies and cheeses. Newspaper headlines for years referenced the “embalmed milk scandals,” widespread poisonings from formaldehyde in milk.
Formaldehyde, to be fair, was the dairy industry’s answer to microorganisms in milk that carried diseases such as bovine tuberculosis, typhoid and diphtheria. It wasn’t until the 1850s that Louis Pasteur proved heating liquids killed bacteria — later called pasteurization. German chemist Franz von Soxhlet first suggested using it on milk in the 1870s, and in 1899 Harvard microbiologist Theobald Smith demonstrated its effectiveness against tough milk pathogens.
Still, it took more than 30 years before pasteurization became common in the United States. The American Pediatric Society’s mistaken belief that heated milk caused scurvy didn’t help.
In the meantime, many dairies added formaldehyde liberally to milk. Wiley’s Poison Squads — 12 young clerks who lived in the Agriculture Department’s basement in Washington, D.C., beginning in late 1902 — were formed to investigate.
Over two-week intervals, six men ate unadulterated food and six ate food with borax, formaldehyde, salicylic acid, copper salts, saccharin and sodium benzoate. The groups switched diets biweekly.
Media coverage of the trials spurred satire in songs and poems, but the trials’ findings were undeniable and helped support the Pure Food and Drug Act. The law aimed to prevent the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors.”
It also addressed harmful ingredients in bread, including chalk, alum, sawdust, clay and plaster, which were used to cut costs at the consumer’s expense.
Hurty Attacks Sanitation Horrors
Another Indiana scientist, John Newell Hurty, complemented Wiley’s efforts. A pharmacist who studied at the Medical College of Indiana, Hurty was hired in 1873 as chief chemist by Col. Eli Lilly. He later taught pharmacy at Purdue.
As secretary of the State Board of Health and state health commissioner starting in 1896, Hurty authored the first comprehensive pure food and drug law enacted by any U.S. government. Passed in 1899, it regulated food, drink, medicine, cleaning agents and cosmetics — predating the federal act by seven years.
Hurty aimed to eradicate disease in Indiana. He addressed poor sanitation as the root of typhoid and dysentery and focused on unsanitary milk production, already a national concern.
A New Jersey analysis in the 1880s found bacterial colonies in milk too numerous to count. Indiana dairymen were found thinning milk with dirty pond water or recoloring gray milk with chalk, plaster dust or dye.
One milk bottle analyzed by the state health department reportedly contained worms from stagnant water. The department documented “sticks, hairs, insects, blood and pus in milk,” and estimated Indianapolis residents consumed more than 2,000 pounds of manure annually in dairy products.
To fake the appearance of cream, dairymen used pureed calf brains — which curdled in coffee.
These abuses, Hurty said, sickened and killed children. Though he initially supported minimal formaldehyde use in milk as a last resort, dairies ignored his limits. By 1899, he condemned its use outright. Thirty children had died from formaldehyde the prior year, and three more died the next summer in an Indianapolis orphanage. He later cited more than 400 deaths from contaminated milk.
Thanks to the work of Hurty and Wiley, alongside the support of Indiana lawmaker, the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act began curbing food production abuses.
Though modern food systems are far from flawless, we owe much to these two visionary Hoosier scientists whose efforts saved countless lives.
Jeff Kenney serves as Museum and Archives Manager for Culver Academies in Culver, Indiana.
