I. Illness in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Americans were sickly. Water was dangerous to drink. Food (especially meat and dairy) were dangerous to eat. And, medicine was completely unregulated meaning medicine tended to be based on heroin or opiates. Diseases ravished communities. And some civic leaders responded better than others. Look at disease, sickness, or illness at anytime between 1877 and 1912. What accounted for the issue you are investigating? What were the causes and results? How did people respond? Be specific! Do not cover the entire period. Rather find a specific, focused event or issue and examine that. Use evidence from: JSTOR (two sources); academic internet sources (2-3) Draft a 500 word essay. Cite in accordance with Chicago Manual of Style and include footnotes and a Bibliography. USE AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was the first act of its kind in the United States, requiring food and drug manufacturers to adhere to regulations and safety standards. Learn how to define the Pure Food and Drug Act, explore a summary of its history, then discover the roles of the Muckrakers, scientists, and the president in creating this landmark legislation. Updated: 10/14/2021
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906
Is your baby keeping you up at night? Calm him down with this soothing syrup laced with moderate amounts of opium! Do you have a problem with your heart, kidney, or stomach? Why not just take this remedy that will cure you like magic. Are you balding or losing hair? Wipe on some of this special potion and just like that you will be cured. Would you like to see what is being put inside your food? Too bad, because we are not going to share our secret. But wait, it gets better. Would you like to try this bottle of ketchup preserved with formaldehyde (the same chemical used to treat warts)?
All of these scenarios seem ridiculous, even absurd by today’s standards. But prior to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, all of these products and practices were in place. The Pure Food and Drug Act was the first legislation in the country that sought to regulate pharmaceuticals and food products by requiring truth-in-labeling on products, creating inspectors of the drug and food manufacturing process, and creating a list of 10 dangerous drugs that had to be labeled at all times.
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 came about during the Progressive Era of American history. During this era, reformers sought to improve the moral and social fabric of America through prohibition, improving public services for the immigrant poor, cleaning up corruption in politics, and improving public health and sanitation.
The Role of the Muckrakers
A large part of the progressive movement was spurred on by muckraking journalists. Muckrakers were known for investigative journalism that exposed the serious deficiencies of America’s food and drug industries. A particular focus of Muckrakers was the quality of food being distributed in America. One Muckraker, Upton Sinclair, wrote a book called The Jungle, which documented the dirty conditions of rat-infested meat factories. Due to Sinclair’s work, the Meat Inspection Act was signed into law on the same day as the Pure Food and Drug Act.
However, the Muckraking journalist most credited with exposing the flaws in the pharmaceutical industry was Samuel Hopkins Adams. Adams wrote 11 articles for Collier’s Weekly in which he thoroughly documented how the pharmaceutical industry often put the general public’s health at risk. In his book, ‘The Great American Fraud,’ Adams wrote:
‘Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this sum, it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.’
Adams thus played a central role in bringing the flaws of the pharmaceutical industry to light.
The Role of Scientific Pioneers
However, Muckrakers were not the only people to have an influence on the development of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Scientists and their research also contributed to the creation of new legislation by providing some of the evidence of the harmful effects of certain products and practices.
One of the big scientific pioneers that paved the way for the Pure Food and Drug Act was Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley. Wiley investigated the effects of common preservatives used at the time by conducting live tests on human volunteers. His subjects would eat food laced with borax, formaldehyde, and benzoate. Such dangerous human tests would be banned by today’s standards of medicine and ethics, to say the least. But Dr. Wiley’s research helped provide scientific proof that greater regulation was needed in the pharmaceutical industry.