The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

As Blum attests throughout the text, Dr. Wiley’s influence on food safety in the United States cannot be underestimated. The Poison Squad is as much a biography of Harvey Washington Wiley as it is a scientific history, because without his influence this facet of American history would not be the same. Dr. Wiley’s tenacity and willingness to compromise neither his moral devotion to the protection of the public, nor his dedication to scientific precision, earned him the admiration and allegiance of those he respected most. Dr. Wiley also had exceptional and unyielding authenticity; his views and values were not subject to change or influence. Although this quality attracted admiration, it also made him a target of his enemies. Had he been open to concessions, compromise, pressure, or bribery, he would likely have found himself offered glamourous opportunities for power or influence based in nepotism or reciprocal favors. His insistence on preserving his beliefs and maintaining his integrity alienated him from those who could not appreciate his dedication to his values.

Dr. Wiley was uniquely suited to conducting the experiments he designed. As both an accomplished chemist and trained physician, he had the ability to evaluate the data on his human subjects in a way someone with experience in chemistry alone did not. His understanding of the human body enriched his insight into the true impacts of chemical adulteration. Dr. Wiley was also unique in the training he acquired in Europe and at Purdue University. There was no one else in the United States as qualified to conduct experiments in food chemistry as Dr. Wiley, and his continued advancements in the field kept him at the undisputed pinnacle of the field.

Unlike many men of his generation, Dr. Wiley held women in high esteem—not because he attributed to them any of the fictionalized notions of angelic femininity common to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but because he believed them to be intelligent, capable, and moral. His progressive, egalitarian opinion of women inspired him to collaborate with them as peers, and their response to him, particularly their willingness to trust and defend him, facilitated a relationship which was conducive to reform. Dr. Wiley had many female colleagues with whom he developed a positive, reciprocal rapport. His appreciation for women was genuine, and his sincerity was palpable to the women he encountered in his activist efforts. All of them appreciated that a highly educated expert and government official was supporting their work, when so many men were dismissing and working against their efforts to attain equality.

Dr. Wiley also found that he was a particularly talented orator, as he expanded his reach across the United States with his increasing number of speaking engagements. Like his father, he had a gift for speaking from a pulpit. The strength of Wiley’s message came in large part from his genuine, gentlemanly personality and comportment. He also wholeheartedly believed in all of the changes for which he advocated, and his statements were grounded in scientific truth. As Wiley became even more vocal, food companies began their attacks on him in earnest. They painted him as a zealot and extremist, challenging his rationale but also claiming that he was anti-business. They said that he was motivated by notoriety and fame, that he enjoyed shocking the members of the women’s groups he spoke to when he relayed the horrors of food adulteration, and that by exaggerating the prevalence of food adulteration he was preventing Americans from enjoying the pleasures of eating. He may have been hated nearly as much as he was loved, but Dr. Wiley would not have become a target had his enemies found him irrelevant or unthreatening.