Pure Food Man

When a personage dies, as did Harvey Washington Wiley last week (age, 85; of heart failure), people tell anecdotes about him showing the kind of man he was. Some Wiley stories:

P: Dressed in silk hat and long-tailed coat he approached Girard College, Philadelphia, to give an address. Explained the watchman, barring Dr. Wiley: "Stephen Girard laid down in his will that no minister of the Gospel be permitted to enter these grounds." Dr. Wiley: "The hell you say!" Watchman: "Walk right in."

P: He advised a seminary graduating class to marry and thus avoid domestic discord: "Take my case for instance. My wife handles the minor problems and I the major ones. No trouble ever breaks out; not a major problem ever arises."

P: One of seven children of an Indiana farmer-schoolmaster, he had ambitions to become a doctor. He studied Greek, borrowed a collar & tie to graduate respectably from Hanover College (Hanover, Ind.), taught Greek and Latin to put himself through Indiana Medical School. He secured his M.D.* then entered Harvard as a freshman, took examinations for 17 days, graduated a B.S. in five months. Next year (1874) he became professor of chemistry at newly opened Purdue University.

With the chemistry chair at Purdue went the job of chemist for the State of Indiana. To the Indiana Board of Health, Dr. Harvey Wiley made the first reports of food adulteration ever made to a U. S. state board. He agitated vigorously. He left Purdue in 1883 to become chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture.

Manufacturers of foodstuffs fought him bitterly. As chief U. S. chemist he fought with every bludgeon and ruse he could for the passage of Federal pure food laws. In 1906 Congress passed such laws. In the administrations of Presidents Roosevelt and Taft the opposition became climactic. Both Presidents sustained Dr. Wiley. He resigned in 1912, after downing hecklers.

Dr. Wiley's most brilliant counterattack against the manufacturers was the formation of his "Poison Squad," twelve young men from his staff who at his command ate only adulterated foods. Their sufferings he reported with dramatic detail. The "Poison Squad" won him general public support. As a result unscrupulous manufacturers must be skillfully stealthy to put into their products boric acid, borax, salicylic acid, salicylates, sulphurous acid, sulphites, benzoic acid, benzoates (except traces), formaldehyde, copper sulphate, saltpeter.

After Dr. Wiley left the Department of Agriculture he kept a jealous eye on the Food, Drug & Insecticide Administration, continually charged it with lax enforcement. When last month he appeared before a Senate Committee investigating that Administration (see p. 34), Senators grieved to see him decrepit. They remembered him as Mark Sullivan in Our Times describes him: "His large head capping the pedestal of broad shoulders and immense chest, his salient nose shaped like the bow of an icebreaker, and his piercing eyes. . . ."

Dr. Wiley's last public appearance was at the request of his old friend Dr. Henry Kurd Rusby of Columbia University.* He testified in confirmation of a technical point in Dr. Rusby's charges that the pure drug laws are not now being properly enforced (TIME, June 16, and p. 34). That day in the committee room he was heard to say: "I'd just as soon draw my last breath right here."

Only Mrs. Wiley, the Anna Campbell Kelton who married him in 1911 when he was 66 after aiding him for years at the Department of Agriculture, who bore him two sons and to whom he dedicated his Autobiography, realized last month that Dr. Wiley was sick unto death, and in no fit condition to testify.

Last fortnight, without Dr. Wiley's knowledge, she went before the Senate Committee and explained that his testimony was not a criticism of the present (Walter Gilbert Campbell's) administration of the pure drug laws. He was doing the best he could.

Two years ago Dr. Wiley remarked: "I am not sitting down and moping over methods of postponing my funeral; I am just forgetting it." But last April he made his will devising virtually all his property --farm lands in Virginia and Maryland, fruit groves in Florida,/- scientific books, periodicals, medals, decorations, jewelry, paintings, savings--to Mrs. Wiley. He asked her to see that he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, to which he was eligible as a one-year veteran of the Civil War.

Last week the War Department forbade the sort of interment that Mrs. Wiley wanted. She wished to erect a great monument. Regulations forbid any grave marker for enlisted men other than a plain stone of standard design. So Mrs. Wiley picked Rock Creek Cemetery near Washington for the burial. Then the War Department changed its Arlington rules for her. In the section called "Field of the Dead" she last week buried her husband with full military honors. On the plot she will put a large memorial, engraved: "Father of the Pure Food Laws."

*His sister Elizabeth Jane also became a doctor, married a doctor, bore Harvey Wiley Corbett, famed Manhattan architect.

* One of the points brought against Dr. Wiley in 1912 was his informally paying Dr. Rusby $2 a day as Bureau of Chemistry consultant.

/- He bought them "believing a revival in agriculture was approaching." In his biography he says: "I ought to have been enough of a philosopher to recognize that revivals of agriculture have never been known."

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