He focused in particular on the harmful effects of boric acid, borax, salicylic acid, sulphates, benzoates, and formaldehyde. Despite two decades of efforts by Wiley in Washington, the United States still lacked federal laws regulating food and drugs. Without warning, Czolgosz drew a revolver and fired two bullets into McKinley. Roosevelt came from a classically pro-business, Republican background.
Roosevelt began his political career as a staunch conservative, and a foe of those who would use the federal government to regulate the private sector. But at the turn of the century, Roosevelt became began to rethink his views on the appropriate role of the federal government in the daily life of ordinary Americans.
During the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt served with distinction as a combat officer in command of the famous Rough Riders. Roosevelt and his fellow soldiers seized the island of Cuba from the Spanish, and began occupying the island in the summer of To feed the troops, the army ordered the shipment of thousands of pounds of canned meat from the meat producers in the United States.
Tragically, the meat turned out to be spoiled. Before the problem was discovered, thousands of American troops had fallen sick, and several hundred died. In fact, more American troops died from spoiled meat than died in battle. The episode appalled and enraged Roosevelt. It would not be the last time the behavior of the meat-packing industry would appall him. Wiley feared that exempting Cuban sugar from the tariff would grievously harm domestic sugar manufacturers.
Determined to keep a talented administrator in the Agriculture Department, Wilson persuaded Roosevelt not to fire Wiley. Roosevelt was not quite ready to let the matter drop, however. After his meeting with Wilson, Roosevelt sent a personal note to Wiley. Nevertheless, Wiley and Roosevelt soon found themselves working together to pass the pure food and drug act.
The battle began in earnest in when Senator Weldon Heyburn of Idaho sponsored the most ambitious pure food and drug bill ever proposed in Washington. Wiley worked closely with Heyburn in drafting the bill and supplying mountains of evidence and data to support its findings. For 16 years such bills had gone down to defeat after defeat, but the tide finally seemed to be turning. When opponents blocked his bill from leaving committee, Senator P.
Nevertheless, one year later, Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island still refused to allow the bill to come out of committee. Wiley himself even became the target of such attacks. But the most important supporter of the bill was President Theodore Roosevelt himself, a fact which undermined efforts to portray reformers as wild-eyed radicals. In his December message to Congress, Roosevelt made Congressional passage of the Pure Food Bill as one of the major priorities of his second term.
Traffic in foodstuffs which have been debased or adulterated so as to injure health or to deceive purchasers should be forbidden. Suddenly, on February 6, , the battle over the bill changed dramatically. Aldrich, for reasons he never explained, allowed the bill out of committee.
Adding further momentum behind the forces of reform, the American Medical Association took a public stand calling for federal regulation of food and drugs. Senator Porter J. The last witness to appear before the committee was none other than Harvey Wiley himself. Wiley testified for several hours, enduring relentlessly cross-questioning but never giving an inch. During the executive session, Wiley participated in the final drafting of the bill before it went to the Senate floor.
After weeks of hearings and debate, the bill finally passed the Senate on February 12, It passed by such a wide margin that only four senators voted against it. The timing proved extremely fortuitous for Wiley and his allies. Sinclair came from an unusual background for a muckraking journalist. A twenty-eight-year old writer from a riches-to-rags Baltimore family, Sinclair had an obsessive fear of alcohol, sex, and impurities of any kind. After converting to socialism while a graduate student at Columbia University, Sinclair accepted an assignment from the editor of a left-wing magazine to investigate labor unrest in the Chicago stockyards.
The horrendous working conditions of stockyard laborers appalled Sinclair, and he decided to write a novel dramatizing their plight. Sinclair devoted over 90 percent of his novel to describing the plight of immigrant workers and to calling for a socialist revolution in the United States. In those few pages Sinclair had catalogued a horrifying litany of industry misdeeds, including workers falling into processing vats, children drinking milk tainted with formaldehyde, and spoiled meat routinely concealed through chemical adulteration.
The public reacted with a ferocity that bordered on mass hysteria. Roosevelt had a passionate reaction. In a letter to F. Such a development, Roosevelt warned, would lead to mass starvation and chaos, not to freedom and equality. As a astute observer of public opinion, Roosevelt knew how dominant the issue of food safety and sanitation had become in the public mind.
This fact persuaded Roosevelt to take aggressive action, as Sinclair had personally recommended in his letter to the president. Even as Roosevelt authorized a full-fledged investigation, he remained wary of the investigative journalism that had exposed the meat-packing scandal. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muckrake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed.
But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save his feats with the muckrake, speedily becomes not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil. Roosevelt had good reason to fear social disorder. After all, he had inherited the White House as the result of an assassination, a fact that heightened his fear of public disorder and social chaos. He worried that if the public lost faith in the capitalist institutions that undergirded American society—corporations, banks, even the federal government itself—then the United States would experience social turmoil similar to that which embroiled Europe during much of the early twentieth century.
When Roosevelt received and read the full text of the Neill-Reynolds report, he was more appalled than ever. Roosevelt knew that when the public learned of the full scope of the wrong-doing, any politician standing on the wrong side of the issue would soon be out of a job. Reynolds, of the situation in Chicago packing houses. It is hideous, and it must be remedied at once.
But, at the same rate, Roosevelt feared that if the report became public, it would have devastating economic ramifications, particularly for American exporters. Roosevelt decided therefore to use behind-the-scenes pressure to coerce the meat packing industry into compliance. Advanced Placement U. Log in. Call Us. Business Skills. LOG IN. Accelerate Your Career with Wiley. From test prep to professional exam review courses, our personalized career tools help you grow no matter where you are on your career path.
Business Skills Blockchain Blockchain Courses. Partner With Us. Universities Provide students the professional jump-start they need to succeed. The Wiley Difference. Higher Pass Rates Up to nine out of ten people pass their exams with Wiley. Abstract Background: Optimal methods of mortality risk stratification in patients in the cardiac intensive care unit CICU remain uncertain. Publication types Comparative Study Observational Study. The gallery has a complete collection of presidential portraits.
A different set of portraits of the former first couple will eventually hang in the White House. Barack Obama spoke of his choice of Wiley, saying the two men shared multiple parallels in their upbringing; both had African fathers who were largely absent from their lives and American mothers who raised them. Obama said he found the process of sitting for the portrait to be a frustrating experience.
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