A muckraking exposé triggered the 1906 Food and Drugs Act

Evidence

Coming in a more trusting age, when such revelations had greater power to shock, Adams’s article caused an astonishing outcry. A variety of actors, including various women’s organizations, and a crusading physician named Harvey Washington Wiley, began to push for legislation, long stalled in Congress, to impose basic labeling rules for foods and medicines. In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle encouraged demands for industry reform generally, with its depiction of nauseating and immoral practices in the meat industry. By that time President Theodore Roosevelt had joined the campaign; he’d later give a speech praising Collier’s Weekly for having “hit the patent medicine concerns very hard and greatly reduced the amount they spent in advertising.” Roosevelt added his weight to the assault on Congress, and the Food and Drugs Act was finally passed that year, despite strong congressional reluctance amid fierce industry lobbying. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 116

Categorization

• XREF: Harvey Washington Wiley recurs in food-history scholarship; connects to later chapters on Progressive-era reform and advertising’s role in it. — connects to: Only export-protecting food bills passed before 1906 — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2645