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“Old Methods Not Up to New Ways”: The Strategic Use of Advertising in the Fight for Pure Food After 1906

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

Alana Toulin
Alana Toulin*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: alanatoulin2019@u.northwestern.edu
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Abstract

This article considers how American food manufacturers used advertising and outreach to sway public opinion in the immediate years after the 1906 passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Although this federal legislation has long been heralded as a landmark victory for consumer protection, the new law was not a watershed moment for progressivism. Food production and consumption in the United States remained deeply fraught. In the absence of a clearly defined apparatus to enforce the new law and much contestation among policy-makers, business interests, and reformers, the food industry's co-option of reform ideals and rhetoric exemplifies the increasing power of big business over both public policy and mainstream cultural discourse in the United States during the early twentieth century and beyond. While scholars have often framed the push to introduce federal food policy as a fairly linear institutional or political narrative, a cultural historical approach gives new insight into how unresolved questions about purity in food production and consumption have vexed Americans and stymied business interests and policy-makers in ways that have continued to reverberate into the present day.

Type
Special Issue: Food Studies and The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 461 - 479
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2019 

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References

Notes

I would like to thank Susan Pearson for her encouragement, criticism, and support, and Andrew Johnston, whose guidance shaped this project in its earliest stages. I would also like to express my gratitude to the anonymous readers for their generous feedback and suggestions.

1 Parksdale brand butter advertisement, 1909, folder 2, collection no. 59, box 27, N.W. Ayer & Son Advertising Agency Records, Courtesy Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC (hereafter referred to as N.W. Ayer & Son Advertising Agency Records).

2 Ibid.

3 Though her work deals with pronatalism, Lovett's definition and use of the term “nostalgic modernism” is also useful in this context. In comparison to T.J. Jackson Lears, who describes this phenomenon as “antimodernism,” Lovett's terminology is more precise, as nostalgic modernism is not as staunchly traditional as the term “antimodernism” implies. Lovett observes that although traditionalists and nostalgic modernists both looked backwards to the past, only the latter “always moved forward” to embrace new opportunities, albeit cautiously and even at times critically. Lovett, Laura L., Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 10–12Google Scholar; Lears, T.J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981)Google Scholar.

See also the work of Michael Kammen, who has argued that “dramatic or unanticipated alterations” often bring about a fetishizing of nostalgia in a given culture or nation. Kammen, Michael, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 295Google Scholar.

4 For example, Clayton Coppin and Jack High frame their argument around the economic theory of regulation, and view the introduction of pure food and drug laws as “the result of regulating competition in the food industry.” They also focus heavily on the work of USDA chief chemist Harvey Washington Wiley, whom they consider “the central figure in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.” James Harvey Young's work shares a similar institutional approach, and places the bulk of its attention on the law as a piece of Progressive Era regulatory legislation intended to benefit the public interest. Lorine Swainston Goodwin emphasizes the grassroots roles of women and consumer activist groups in the fight for pure food. Like Young, she lauds the Pure Food and Drug Act for being one of the first pieces of legislation to “promote the welfare of the general public in the United States,” and remarks that it is often cited by scholars as one of the landmark achievements of Theodore Roosevelt's administration and the Progressive Era as a whole. See Coppin, Clayton A. and High, Jack, The Politics of Purity: Harvey Washington Wiley and the Origins of Federal Food Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, James Harvey, Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goodwin, Lorine Swainston, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 1879–1914 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999)Google Scholar.

5 Koehn, Nancy F., “Henry Heinz and Brand Creation in the Late Nineteenth Century: Making Markets for Processed Food,” The Business History Review 73:3 (Autumn 1999): 361–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 375. Koehn notes, however, that Heinz himself would have never used a quintessentially twentieth- and twenty-first-century term like “brand creation” to describe his efforts.

6 Heinz—1906 Records, collection no. 59, box no. 248, book 447, N.W. Ayer & Son Advertising Agency Records.

7 Heinz tomato soup advertisement, 1906, N.W. Ayer & Son Advertising Agency Records.

8 Wood, Donna, “The Strategic Use of Public Policy: Business Support for the 1906 Food and Drug Act,” Business History Review 59:3 (Autumn 1985): 403–32CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. As the article's title suggests, Wood describes business's involvement in the fight for regulation as “the strategic use of public policy” and argues that it was central to the passage of the new law.

9 Wood raises a number of important arguments about the relationship between business and the pure food cause, but her article does not look specifically at the role played by the advertising industry. Her analysis fits in with one of the New Left's key critiques on progressivism's “corporate liberalism,” including Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963)Google Scholar; Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

10 In a narrative that has been well documented by historians writing since the 1980s, innovations in manufacturing and transportation coupled with rapid urban growth profoundly altered the American diet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A broad middle-class “revolution at the table” changed how many Americans produced, consumed, and thought about their food. From mass-produced food products to the influential domestic science movement, this was noticeably not a top-down or bottom-up revolution. Instead, change was propelled outward from the middle. Middle-class dietary reformers expressed concern about both the decadent eating habits of the American upper class who wanted to emulate European aristocrats, and the apparently unhygienic food practices of the urban working class, who at this point were often recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. See Levenstein, Harvey, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. See also Gabaccia, Donna, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Haley, Andrew, Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

11 Victorian ideals that hygiene was linked to respectability and morality had taken hold among Britain's and America's middle classes during the nineteenth century. See Levenstein, Harvey, Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tomes, Nancy, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; DuPuis, E. Melane, Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink (New York: New York University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

12 Levenstein, Fear of Food, 6.

13 Ibid., 6–12.

14 Between 1880 and 1900, most states had enacted pure food laws. More about the state pure food laws that preceded the federal Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 can be found in Law, Marc T., “The Origins of State Pure Food Regulation,” The Journal of Economic History 63:4 (December 2003): 1103–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bigelow, W.D. and Wiley, H.W., Food Legislation in the United States Reprinted from the Report of the Vth International Congress of Applied Chemistry, Berlin 1903 (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag, 1904)Google Scholar, box 189, folder 1904, Harvey Washington Wiley Papers, 1854–1954, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter referred to as Harvey Washington Wiley Papers).

15 Law, “The Origins of State Pure Food Regulation,” 1107–09. Law also notes the punishments that violators of some of these state laws could face. For example, in Massachusetts, offenders could be taken to court and fined up to $500 for producing adulterated food, and in Minnesota, violators could face fines up to $500, prison sentences of up to one year, or both.

16 Alice Lakey, “A Letter to the Delegates—Annual Meeting, National Consumers League, March 7, 1905, Philadelphia,” container A4-A6, reel 3, National Consumers League Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter referred to as National Consumers League Records).

17 McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 160Google Scholar.

18 As McGerr observes, successful campaigns for regulation required “not only a powerful sense of urgency, but a broad, cross-class coalition.” McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 160–63. See also Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 152 on how efforts by various reform organizations helped create a “unified consumer front” behind the common cause of federal pure food legislation.

19 “Gen. Miles on the Stand: Tells His Views to the War Investigating Commission,” New York Times, December 22, 1898; Keuchel, Edward F., “Chemicals and Meat: The Embalmed Beef Scandal of the Spanish-American War,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48:2 (Summer 1974): 249–64Google ScholarPubMed.

20 A comprehensive list of commonly adulterated food products can be found in the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce's The Adulteration, Misbranding, and Imitation of Foods, Etc., in the District of Columbia, Etc., report no. 56-1426, May 10, 1900, 11–12.

21 Wood, “The Strategic Use of Public Policy,” 408.

22 Lears, No Place of Grace, xiv-xv. According to Lears, this class of men were “some of the most educated and cosmopolitan products of an urbanizing, secularizing society.” He describes them as “the ‘point men’ of cultural change” who “experienced and articulated moral and psychic dilemmas which later became common in the wider society.”

23 Marchand, Roland, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 1Google Scholar. Pamela Walker Laird has similarly described advertisers as “the new prophets of modernity,” explaining that advertisers widely adopted the era's “prevailing progress discourse” in order to assert their legitimacy. Laird, Pamela Walker, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 6Google Scholar, 9.

24 In his study of the advertising industry, Lears notes that by the early 1910s, the biggest and most influential agencies were staffed by a homogenous group of college-educated (usually at prestigious Northeastern schools) white, native-born men: “They were the sons (only 3 percent were women) of the late-nineteenth-century liberal Protestant elite, and they clung to a secularized version of their parents’ worldview: a faith in inevitable progress, unfolding as if in accordance with some divine plan.” Lears, T.J. Jackson, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 154, 220–21Google Scholar. Lears also argues that practitioners of advertising used their social position to construct “the category of ‘knowledge’” according to their “particular ideological agendas” and tended “to cast themselves in a key redemptive role.”

25 According to Lears, “the rationalization of the kitchen” undertaken by advertisers and advocates of scientific cookery alike “expressed the ethnocentrism of Northeastern WASP elites.” Ibid., 184.

26 “The food question” is a term that appeared regularly in American periodicals referring to the complex relationship(s) between diet, health, and nutrition. One writer, Emma Ewing, opined in an 1894 issue of New England Kitchen Magazine, “as yet, we know comparatively little of either the art of cookery or the science of nutrition.” Until these gaps could be filled in, Ewing argued, “we will lack the information necessary to enable us to supply the missing link on the food questions.” Ewing, Emma P., “The Missing Link in the Food Question,” New England Kitchen Magazine 1:4 (August 1894): 220Google Scholar. See also “Some Hints on the Food Question,” The Healthy Home Quarterly 4:4 (February–April 1905): 17–21, collection no. 60, box 28, Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC (hereafter referred to as Warshaw Collection).

27 Much has been written on the rise of domestic science and scientific cookery in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study of home economics and domestic science has and continues to be an important part of American women's and gender history. See, for example, Motz, Marilyn Ferris and Browne, Pat, eds., Making the American Home: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–1940 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983)Google Scholar; Elias, Megan J., Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

28 Fannie Farmer is best known for her 1896 culinary text The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, which was one of the first texts to recommend the use of standardized and level measurements when cooking. Mary J. Lincoln was also a cookbook author associated with the Boston Cooking School; she also endorsed products and edited New England Kitchen Magazine. Sarah Tyson Rorer founded the Philadelphia Cooking School and edited Table Talk and Household News before becoming a staff writer for the Ladies’ Home Journal. These writers were informed by what Levenstein refers to as the “New Nutrition”—the emerging idea that food was made up of nutrients like fat, protein, and carbohydrates and that each performed specific physiological functions. See Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 46; see also Kiyoshi Shintani, “Cooking Up Modernity: Culinary Reformers and the Making of Consumer Culture, 1876–1916” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2008) for a discussion of how scientific cookery helped modernize American cooking and eating habits.

29 Shintani, “Cooking Up Modernity,” iv–v.

30 Both of these examples are from product cookbooks found in the Product Cookbooks Collection, collection no. 396, box 4, N.W. Ayer & Son Advertising Agency Records.

31 It hardly needs to be repeated that consumerism—particularly as it pertains to food—has long been gendered female. In the words of two noted historians of consumer culture, “[s]ince Eve reached for the apple, and so led Adam astray, Western women have been seen as more covetous than men. Classical philosophers and Christian moralists have long associated men with the rational world and women with the material.” John Styles and Amanda Vickery, introduction to Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830, eds. John Styles and Amanda Vickery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 2.

32 “Women in Advertising,” J. Walter Thompson Company (New York), 1918, “Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850–1920” collection, Duke University Libraries Digital Repository, Durham, NC.

33 Gross, J. Ellsworth, “The Woman Buyer and the Photograph,” Ad Sense 20:5 (May 1906): 395–96Google Scholar, collection no. 60, box 5, Warshaw Collection.

34 Leach, William, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 42Google Scholar. See also Norris, James D., Advertising and the Transformation of American Society, 1865–1920 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

35 Leach, Land of Desire, 42–43. This growth was caused in large part by the rise of mass circulation print media.

36 Parkin, Katherine, Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Barbara Welter's seminal 1966 article delineates this ideal. It is important to note that this domestic ideology had begun to erode as the nineteenth century came to a close; ironically, women's participation in social reform causes like the campaign for pure food would ultimately play a significant role in the formation of the so-called “first wave” of feminism and in the suffrage movement of the early twentieth century. Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Kerber, Linda, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,” Journal of American History 75:1 (June 1988): 9–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 The National Consumers League was founded in 1899 by a group that included notable Progressives Jane Addams and Florence Kelley and initially focused on protecting women and children in the garment trades from exploitation and unsafe working conditions. The organization turned to the pure food cause after receiving support from the General Federation of Women's Clubs for its work on labor. As Lorine Goodwin notes, the NCL was happy to reciprocate when the Federation sought its help on pure food in return: The pure food cause “expanded [the NCL's] base of operation and was a logical companion cause to [its] work in the garment industries.” Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 156.

39 Alice Lakey, Federation Bulletin, November 1906, 87, quoted in Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 48.

40 Shapiro, Laura, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), 196Google Scholar.

41 “Constitution,” National Consumers League Tenth Annual Report for Two Years Ending March 2, 1909, 5, container A4–A6, reel 3, National Consumers League Records; Mary Sherman, “Manufacture of Food in Tenements,” National Consumers League Seventh Annual Report Year Ending March 1, 1906, 35, container A4–A6, reel 3, National Consumers League Records. The NCL believed that foods like these were purchased mainly by the poor and those with poor judgment: “Those who can afford to buy food in the cleaner and better stores feel safe when buying nuts in glass jars, peanut butter from a health food bureau, cakes on Fifth Avenue, and candies wrapped in paper and apparently spotless.” There were also distinct racial and class-driven elements behind such warnings, since the venues that so offended reformers were located in working-class neighborhoods and the manufacturing processes were often carried out by recent immigrants to the United States. Mary Sherman, “Manufacture of Food in Tenements,” National Consumers League Seventh Annual Report Year Ending March 1, 1906, 35, container A4–A6, reel 3, National Consumers League Records.

42 Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 155–56.

43 Regarding the NCL's increasingly central role in the movement, the secretary's report in 1907 boasted of how the NCL had helped transform the campaign for pure food from an interstate to a national effort. “Report of the Secretary,” National Consumers League Eighth Annual Report Year Ending March 5, 1907, 14, container A4–A6, reel 3, National Consumers League Records.

44 Alice Lakey, “The Committee on Food Investigation,” National Consumers League Eighth Annual Report Year Ending March 5, 1907, 46–48, container A4–A6, reel 3, National Consumers League Records.

45 “To Save Pure Food Law: Consumers League Making Efforts to Kill Tawney Amendment,” New York Times, February 12, 1907.

46 Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 276–77; “To Save Pure Food Law.”

47 “To Save Pure Food Law.”

48 In the twelfth chapter of her book, Goodwin discusses some of these efforts in more detail. Goodwin, “‘The Augean Stables Are Still Unclean,’” The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 266–88.

49 “Hobble the Pure Food Law: Special Interests Do as They Please, Consumers’ League is Told,” New York Times, February 9, 1911; “Wants Pure Food Law Enforced,” New York Times, May 27, 1911. Wiley took an even more strident view. In his 1929 book looking back at the pure food fight, Wiley declared that the “perverting” of the Pure Food and Drug Act was an “amazing crime.” In his words, there was “no need” to educate consumers or try and persuade food manufacturers to follow the law after 1906. Rather, officials needed “to brush away all the illegal restrictions which were fastened around the Bureau of Chemistry, and to execute the law as it was written, and as it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court.” Wiley, Harvey Washington, The History of a Crime Against the Food Law—The Amazing Story of the National Food and Drugs Law Intended to Protect the Health of the People, Perverted to Protect Adulteration of Foods and Drugs (Washington: Harvey W. Wiley, 1929), 396–97Google Scholar. See also Courtney Thomas, I.P., In Food We Trust: The Politics of Purity in American Food Regulation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Thomas, In Food We Trust, 21.

51 This “unresolved … polarity in our thinking” has links to deeply rooted religious and cultural beliefs across various societies and time periods. As Mintz writes, “every religious system must deal in some way or another with the problems posed by the issue of purity in the process of defining itself.” Mintz, Sidney, “Color, Taste, and Purity” in Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions Into Eating, Culture, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996): 85–86Google Scholar. Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote about similar ideas. In her classic 1966 study Purity and Danger, Douglas notes that almost all cultures have conceptions of what is considered pure and what is considered impure, and argues that humans have long had a need to categorize, maintain, and police the environment around us, which is manifested by labeling certain things as clean and others as taboo and then regulating and ritualizing people's interactions with them. Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Purity and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966)Google Scholar.

52 Thomas, In Food We Trust, 12.

53 Bonaparte quoted in Henry Beach Needham, “The People's Lobby and its Pure-Food Work,” minutes of the Eleventh Annual Convention of the Association of State and National Food and Dairy Departments held at Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, July 16–19, 1907 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1908), 249.

54 This refers to the subtitle of his book, cited in endnote 49.

55 Wiley quoted in Pendergrast, Mark, For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Unauthorized History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It (New York: Scribner, 1993), 111Google Scholar.

56 Ibid.

57 According to his biographer, Henry Heinz was “one of the few leaders in the canning and preserving industries who openly supported” the pure food cause. Alberts, Robert C., The Good Provider: H.J. Heinz and his 57 Varieties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1973), 171Google Scholar.

58 Ibid. Most businesses that were affected by the possibility of federal pure food legislation “expressed support for the idea of a federal law but opposed various particulars in the many bills that were presented to Congress. Support, opposition, and ad hoc objections alike arose from businesspeople's perceptions of how the law would affect their own operations.” Emphasis is in original. See also Donna Wood, “The Strategic Use of Public Policy,” 413.

59 Heinz, “Wide-Open Kitchens” advertisement, collection no. 59, box 248, book 447, N.W. Ayer & Son Advertising Agency Records.

60 Heinz, “An Impartial Statement on the Grave Importance to The Public Health” advertisement, collection no. 59, box 248, book 447, N.W. Ayer & Son Advertising Agency Records. Capitalization is in original.

61 Heinz, “The Food YOU Eat!” advertisement, collection no. 59, box 248, book 447, N.W. Ayer & Son Advertising Agency Records. Emphasis is in original.

62 Heinz, “An Impartial Statement on the Grave Importance to The Public Health” advertisement.

63 Clayton Coppin, “James Wilson and Harvey Wiley: The Dilemma of Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship,” Agricultural History (Spring 1990): 177–78.

64 Ibid., 178. James Harvey Young also discusses this contentious relationship and notes that Wiley's dealings with President Taft were “scarcely less difficult.” James Harvey Young, “Food and Drug Regulation under the USDA, 1906–1940,” Agricultural History (Spring 1990): 137–38.

65 Coppin, “James Wilson and Harvey Wiley,” 178–79.

66 Ibid., 179. According to McClure's Magazine, LaDow was a “dapper old man” who had “been around politics in one way or another since he was private secretary to the first Secretary of Agriculture. George Kibbe Turner, “Getting Allyn: A Record of Truth,” McClure's Magazine 48 (November 1916) 87.

67 “The Reactionaries are Exuberant,” National Food Magazine, December 1909.

68 “Dooming the Food Poisoners,” The North American, September 5, 1910. The publication also wrote about the “lowering by the national government of the high pure food standards set up by Dr. Wiley.” Beginning in 1909, The North American also hired an independent chemist to test supposedly pure food products. If a product passed their test, it would then be listed in the newspaper's thrice-weekly “Honest Foods” column. See, for example, “Food Products of Tested Purity Are Put on Honor List,” The North American, December 7, 1909.

69 Samuel Hopkins Adams, “What Has Become of Our Pure Food Law?” Hampton's Magazine, February 1910, 234–35.

70 “The Poisoners’ Latest Insolence,” The North American, October 7, 1910; Alfred W. McCann, “Why Is Doctor Wiley Hated?” The North American, November 20, 1910.

71 “Credit to Whom Credit Is Due,” National Food Magazine, December 1909.

72 According to The North American, “the great questions” of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909 and conservation of resources like timber, coal, and water power had overshadowed the pure food cause. “Dooming the Food Poisoners.”

73 “Dooming the Food Poisoners”; “Only Honest Foods Will Be Shown at This Big Exhibition,” The North American, September 5, 1910; “A Year's Fight for Honest Food,” The North American, December 15, 1910.

74 “Dooming the Food Poisoners”; “Throng Cheers as Expert Denounces Benzoate as Fraud,” The North American, September 22, 1910.

75 “Big Firms to Incorporate in Great Pure Food Fight,” The North American, November 9, 1910.

76 American Association for the Promotion of Purity in Food Products, “Platform Subscribed to By Members” (1909), Purity in Food Products, collection no. 59, box 411, series 02, N.W. Ayer & Son Advertising Agency Records.

77 Several newspaper and magazine articles lauded the AAPPFP for the “renewed energy” it lent to the “fighters” for pure food. See “Credit to Whom Credit Is Due.” See also “Big Firms to Incorporate in Great Pure Food Fight”; “The Association for the Promotion of Purity in Food Products,” National Food Magazine, August 1910. The former discussed how the association called for resolutions, including the establishment of a federal department of public health dealing with food issues, and the latter fawned over the association, proclaiming that “the consumers of food in the United States [owed] a lasting debt of gratitude” to its “honorable” and “honest” corporate members.

78 “Pure Food Makers Uphold New Laws; Issue a New Warning,” The North American, January 2, 1910.

79 “Credit to Whom Credit Is Due.”

80 Premier Food Products advertisement, October 11, 1912, Evening World, box 207, Harvey Washington Wiley Papers.

81 Orvell, Miles, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xvGoogle Scholar.

82 Though the term “pure food” is not used as frequently as a marketing tool today as it was at the turn of the twentieth century, the same sentiments remain, albeit with slightly different terminology. For example, words found in contemporary food advertising such as “natural,” “wholesome,” and “goodness” can be considered synonymous with the Progressive Era's “purity” and “pure.”