THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Probably the proximity of the Sylvanian Theater to the Department of Agriculture where they played Alice in Wonderland brought the thought for the preparation and introduction of this bill.

— H. B. THOMPSON, COUNSEL FOR THE PROPRIETARY ASSOCIATION, DECEMBER 1933

WALTER CAMPBELL, Chief of the Food and Drug Administration, was irritated. It was a winter day in 1933, and he was on his way across the street to see the new Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, Rexford Tugwell. Tugwell had returned to the FDA office a routine letter, prepared there for his signature, on tolerance levels of fruit spray residue. Attached was a curt penciled comment to the effect that if lead arsenate was a poison why didn't FDA prohibit its use altogether. Campbell's assistant Paul Dunbar was in the office when his chief read Tugwell's notation. The terse comment, Dunbar later recalled, was like "a kick in the teeth" after so many long years of fighting a lone battle against spray residues. So now Campbell was irritated, and he was on his way to tell the Assistant Secretary "a thing or two."

Certainly Campbell would prohibit lead arsenate residue, if he could. No one seemed to understand. There were many things he would do, if only the law allowed, but it did not. His bureau operated under the provisions of a legal statute now twenty-seven years old with very little having been done to update it. Granted that the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act had been a good law. Perhaps that was half the problem. Too many people thought it was too good. Even Harvey Wiley who had fought the battle for the first statute came to insist that it was little short of perfect. Wiley, as principal enforcement officer for five years, had waged constant warfare with Presidents Roosevelt and Taft. He had ultimately resigned in 1912, having never converted his superiors to his own militant views on administration of the law. But Wiley argued that the problems in law enforcement were administrative tangles. As late as 1928 he could still say that "there is absolutely no need of any further legislation in addition to what is now on the statute books."

Walter Campbell certainly knew better. There were now serious shortcomings in the old statute. For one thing it did not cover cosmetics, which was a booming business, legitimate and otherwise. A bill before Congress in 1897 had included cosmetics within the definition of drugs, but this language had been dropped in 1900 as partial payment for support of industry groups in a National Pure Food and Drug Congress, organized to develop pressure for enacting a law. It did not seem much of a loss at the time; the great growth of the cosmetic industry was to come after 1906.

Nor did the old law provide adequate control over patent medicines. The Wiley statute was far outdated in its definition of dangerous drugs, for many new products, such as barbiturates, had since been developed or come into wider use. In 19