By Fred Fuller
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me like almost everyone is scamming everyone else these days. If we can agree that honesty is a good thing and that it is necessary for maintaining good human relationships and a strong community, then it appears that our society has become pretty messed up.
It seems like almost everyone is out to make a buck, and they don’t care about honesty. Of course, there are some honest business people, and we should treasure them. But so many of the ads that fill the internet on almost every website are huckstering dishonest products. It is coming to the point where we can’t believe anything. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is likely to make things even worse. Heck, it already has, with fake videos and simulated voices.
A brief aside: In researching some of my family history, I discovered that the occupation of one of my ancestors, as shown in an 1870 census, was listed as “huckster.” That shocked me a bit, but I found out that in that era, “huckster” simply meant someone who sold small articles, anything from vegetables to tools, perhaps door-to-door, by horse cart, or at a stall in a market. Only later did it come to have a negative meaning.
All the medicines and supplements that are advertised everywhere these days to cure just about every illness or problem remind me of the old days of patent medicines and the stereotypical “medicine shows” where “quacks” peddled “snake oil.” If you look at just about any newspaper from the mid-1800s until the turn of the century, you will see ads for these patent medicines of all kinds to cure every human ailment, from indigestion to consumption (which is what tuberculosis, a bacterial lung infection, was called), to worms, rheumatism (arthritis), headaches, “female complaints,” venereal disease, cholera, cancer, and colic in babies.
Most of these had similar recipes with high doses of alcohol, which, of course, provided some immediate sensations of relief. Many also contained morphine, opium, and cocaine, which parents unknowingly gave to children. As most people know, Coca-Cola was originally a tonic like this that contained cocaine.
Many physicians and medical societies tried to challenge these patent medicines by arguing they did not cure illnesses, that they discouraged the sick from seeking legitimate treatments, and caused alcohol and drug dependency. The Temperance Movement made inroads against these tonics because of the alcohol they contained. Laws were proposed to force manufacturers to disclose the remedies’ ingredients and use more realistic language in their advertising. But patent medicines had become a major industry in America, and in 1881, the Proprietary Association, a trade group of patent medicine producers, was founded. The Association was supported by the newspaper industry, which had grown dependent on the money received from patent medicine advertising.1
In 1906, however, the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed by Congress, after 27 years of struggle to finally enact it.2 The law banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of poisonous patent medicines and required all patent medicines to reveal on their labels if they contained addictive substances. It also attempted to improve the quality of foods with truthful labeling.
Without the dedication of journalists like Upton Sinclair, who exposed the atrocious conditions in the meat-packing industry in his 1904 novel, The Jungle, and the work done by Dr. Harvey Wiley, a physician and chemist, the Pure Food and Drug Act would not have been passed.
I was shocked when I first read about Dr. Harvey Wiley in Smithsonian magazine. Before he systematically exposed the contamination of foods, it was not uncommon for food producers to add things like formaldehyde to milk to keep it from spoiling and chalk to make it appear whiter. Copper sulfate was added to canned green beans to make them greener, and sulfuric acid was added to vinegar to make it taste sharper. Salts of lead were used as food coloring, and plaster of Paris was added to flour to make bakery products stouter.
When I read about this, I wondered how my ancestors ever coped with having food that was so unsafe, and why I hadn’t heard about it before. But they lived in rural areas like most people at that time, and most of these additives showed up in cities, where food needed preservatives while being transported from farms, and where people often dealt with strangers when they bought food.
Wiley was not the first person to expose these additives in food, but through his research and persistent lobbying, he was the one person most responsible for finally getting the Pure Food and Drug Act passed. As the Chief Chemist of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture, Wiley researched what was toxic in foods by hiring young men to eat food that he systematically added chemicals to, and he recorded the effects on them. Some men were in a control group with no additives. He paid them all $5 a month plus free food. The national press publicized these tests, and the young men were dubbed “The Poison Squad.” The young men were unfazed, however, and adopted the motto, “Only the Brave dare eat the fare.” Despite his controversial methods, Wiley succeeded in bringing food safety to the public’s attention, which eventually led to the banning of many of the toxic additives.
So, in light of this history, can we all agree that some government regulation is a good thing? While I tend to be a Libertarian about many things, I have come to realize that we don’t live in the sparsely populated frontier anymore, where we could depend on a small group of people we trusted. For better or for worse, we live in a mass society with huge populations, and we need some regulations to be able to survive together. Unfortunately, not everyone is honest. Greed is too much of a temptation for many people. Because of the complexity of our modern society, we can’t research every chemical and product
ourselves. As John Donne wrote in 1624: “No man is an island….ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”
1 “History of Patent Medicine,” Hagley Museum, Wilmington, DE, https://www.hagley.org/research/digital-exhibits/history-patent-medicine
2 Wikipedia, “Pure Food and Drug Act,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Food_and_Drug_Act
