PURE FOOD AND DRUG ACT

By 1900 most American states had enacted food laws, but they were poorly enforced. The effort to enact a federal law was led by Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, head of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture. Wiley enlisted the support of the more responsible food producers and pharmaceutical manufacturers, the American Medical Association, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and other consumer groups. He faced the entrenched opposition of the politically powerful "Beef Trust," small producers of patent medicines, and southern congressmen concerned with the constitutional validity of the proposed law.

The tide was turned in Wiley's favor by a series of sensational articles by muckraking journalists. Following the "embalmed beef" scandal of the Spanish-American War in 1898 (this concerned the quality of food supplied to U.S. troops), Charles Edward Russell produced a series of articles exposing the greed and corruption of the Beef Trust. Samuel Hopkins Adams demonstrated that patent medicines were often pernicious compounds of alcohol and other drugs. Then, in January 1906, Upton Sinclair published his best-selling novel The Jungle, replete with hair-raising descriptions of the manner in which meat products were prepared in the Chicago stockyards.

Amid a storm of public indignation, a Pure Food and Drug Act was passed on June 30, 1906. The act forbade foreign and interstate commerce in adulterated or fraudulently labeled food and drugs. Products could now be seized and condemned, and offending persons could be fined and jailed. The first of a series of consumer protection laws passed in the twentieth century, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was a triumph of progressive reform.

See also Jungle, The; Muckrakers; Progressivism.