Fizz by Tristan Donovan Page B

it possible to change what people put in their stomach beyond all recognition. Wiley was deeply suspicious of this mania for adulterated and manufactured food, but what annoyed him most was the thought that people no longer knew what they had on their plates. After all, how could anyone trust that their meat was what they thought it was, when chemicals could change how it tasted, how it looked, and how long it took to spoil? So on arriving in Washington, the iron-willed bureaucrat made it his goal to usher in a new era of purity in American food and beverages.
    But while Wiley had a fanatical streak and an intimidating glare, he was also a skilled political operator capable of winning people over with his charm, wit, and eye for headline-grabbing stunts. The drama of the Poison Squad was his biggest stunt yet. Its creation swelled public interest in the issues he held dear as well as arming him with more data to help nudge politicians into seeing things his way. That all of the Poison Squad walked away from their meals unharmed was merely a bonus.
    In 1905, a few years after the Poison Squad’s creation, a freelance reporter named Samuel Hopkins Adams contacted Wiley asking for help with his current investigative assignment. Adams had been hired by
Collier’s
magazine to probe the patent medicine business, and he wanted Wiley’s help in identifying what substances and so-called medicines were of greatest concern. With Wiley’s support, Adams dug deep into the world of the nostrum makers, discovering the poisons lurking in popular medicines and the lies they used to sell their products. On October 7, 1905,
Collier’s
published the first article in Adams’s ten-part “The Great American Fraud” series. It became one of the most significant pieces of journalism ever written. It ripped away the curtains hiding the pathetic truth of this Wizard of Oz industry. The articles picked apart the bogus claims of the health-giving pills, shamed the newspapers that had turned a blind eye to their shameful practices in order to feast on their ad dollars, and exposed opium-addiction and alcoholism “cures” that were themselves packed full of liquor and opiates. In December 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt responded to the resulting clamor for government action in his annual address: “I recommend that a law be enacted to regulate interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks, and drugs.”
    The man who would write that law was Wiley, and when the Pure Food and Drug Act passed in June 1906 he became its enforcer. The act didn’t destroy the patent medicine business, but it blew the legs out from under it and ended a century of nostrum mania in America. But the snake oil salesmen were not the only ones who needed to worry about Wiley’s law, for the campaigning chemist already had soda, and Coca-Cola especially, on his hit list.
    Wiley disapproved of soda. He believed that people should “be contented with water, which is the only real thirst quencher and the one beverage for which you can safely form a habit.” He had heard the rumors about the cocaine-laced soda of the South but was too busy fighting nostrum makers to focus on it. Then in spring 1907 the US Army banned the sale of Coca-Cola from its bases after receiving complaints that it contained alcohol and cocaine. Coca-Cola was, understandably, horrified by this decision and sprang into action. Coca-Cola lawyer John Candler contacted theWar Department to inform them that these claims were false and the ban unjust. The War Department responded by asking Wiley to investigate the claims. Wiley already viewed Coca-Cola with suspicion, but his concerns about this southern menace only deepened when his deputy Dr. Lyman Kebler returned from a tour of the South with wild tales about the popular soda. Kebler painted a vivid picture of Coca-Cola fiends hanging out in Atlanta soda fountains, of soldiers driven wild