Bourbon Empire (17 page)

Duffy’s ads worked and the brand grew huge. As the company expanded, it invested in changes at Stagg’s facilities as Stagg slowly removed himself from the operation. By the turn of the century, Duffy controlled the distillery, which still associated itself with Taylor’s name. It made upgrades to produce “cheaper” whiskey and supply “a large demand for goods of a lower grade,” Taylor complained. It was putting out lesser-grade contract whiskey and organizing other distilleries in the region into a trust resembling Peoria’s larger Whiskey Trust.

Taylor immediately issued statements that he had nothing to do with Duffy’s or with the trust. But fight as he might, he still only represented one small side of a whiskey industry divided into two camps. The other side, comprosed of rectifiers making inferior whiskey, continued to spread.

Taylor’s problems were a symptom of Gilded Age corruption. Fraudulent imitators like Duffy were making fortunes in an unregulated system that failed to protect the efforts of those doing the best work. Writing in muckraking publications like
Collier’s
and
McClure’s,
journalists like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell reported on how the exact same problems affected many industries besides just whiskey. Americans were growing increasingly angry and wary, a reaction that the economist Henry George had warned of back in 1879 in his book
Progress and Poverty,
which claimed that the Industrial Revolution’s advancements in wealth and comfort had come at the expense of the working class. The Gilded Age, as George described it, was an elaborate banquet of opportunity and potential, waited on by poverty and corruption. He feared revolution.

In 1896, Congress was eventually moved to action and launched an investigation to determine exactly what kind of whiskey was being served at the grand American banquet Henry George had described. An investigation committee later declared that scarcely 2 million gallons of whiskey in America were being sold “in its original integrity,” whereas 105 million gallons were mixed with rectified spirits and a myriad of other dangerous adulterants in a proportion, if the drinker was lucky, of about one to seven. A thin crust of society was drinking well, while everybody else was taking their chances with whiskey that was slowly killing them.

But in the year
Progress and Poverty
was published, the reform-minded Teddy Roosevelt was getting ready to graduate from college. His future deputy in the battle to establish food purity laws, Dr. Harvey Wiley, who would eventually team with Edmund Taylor, was also readying to climb his way up through the government bureaucracy. As Henry George had warned, revolution was around the corner, but it wasn’t quite the revolution he had anticipated.

 • • • 

One of the first things Theodore Roosevelt did as president was deliver a twenty-thousand-word speech to Congress about curbing the power of trusts and the need to protect consumers. His voice boomed through the chambers, falling on the ears of lobbyists and fixers crowding the adjacent hallways.

Roosevelt had suddenly inherited the presidency after the assassination of William McKinley, and most were surprised to see him in this powerful position. On the surface, Roosevelt wasn’t a likely reformer. He came from the kind of wealthy and privileged family that the status quo generally favors—classically pro-business Republicans who went on safaris for vacation, and his grandfather had founded the Bank of New York. In fact, Roosevelt began his career as a staunch conservative, arguing against the government’s role to regulate the private sector. He even once joked that members of the Populist Party should be lined up and shot.

But Roosevelt wasn’t blind to reality. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but his attitude toward adulterated whiskey and the federal government’s role in public safety was guided by his experience with other tainted foods. While commanding the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War in 1898, his soldiers had stockpiled thousands of pounds of canned meat from U.S. slaughterhouses. After seizing Cuba, Roosevelt’s soldiers devoured the canned meat before realizing it was spoiled. Many fell sick and some even died, more from the meat than from battle, according to some sources.

The incident made an impression on Roosevelt. Now that he was president reform-minded members of his administration were no longer on the sidelines. Chief among the reformers was Dr. Harvey Wiley, the Agriculture Department’s chief chemist. He was also a connoisseur of fine bourbon—he personally curated the bar at Washington, D.C.’s Cosmos Club, a prestigious private social organization—and had become a household name for his efforts during the previous decade to pass food purity laws. An eccentric man with an enormous wit and even bigger ego, he teamed with Edmund Taylor to ensure quality regulations for whiskey as he battled for passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, which also helped establish rules around whiskey. During the early years of the twentieth century, the whiskey lobby, largely controlled by rectifiers, had delayed the bill’s passage by prolonging debate over how whiskey should be defined and regulated.

But even though Roosevelt’s political support was key to Wiley’s success, the two men could hardly stand one another personally—Roosevelt once described Wiley as “nagging, vexatious, and foolish.” Nevertheless, their poor relationship still didn’t prevent Roosevelt from eventually allowing Wiley to briefly convert the White House Cabinet Room into a distillery so the two could share a drink.

 • • • 

Harvey Wiley’s entry into the battle over whiskey labeling regulations began, oddly enough, after the controversial purchase of his first bicycle. Wiley had bought the bicycle at Purdue University, where he had
accepted a job teaching chemistry in 1874 after a previous stint in Germany studying sugar chemistry. There he learned the many ways that sugar manufacturers adulterated their product using harmful chemicals as preservatives.

The bicycle was one of those ridiculous old-timey contraptions with an enormous front wheel and a tiny back wheel. The conservative old stalwarts on Purdue’s board of trustees, never having seen a bicycle before, thought it both odd and improper for a faculty member to be seen on one of those things. Even though the trustees were generally pleased with Wiley’s academic abilities, they were nonetheless skeptical that he was “too young and too jovial,” nor did they like how he fraternized with his students in the school’s athletic programs.

But it was the bicycle that really bothered them. One faculty member wrote in one of Wiley’s reviews, “Imagine my feelings and those of the other members of the board on seeing one of our professors dressed up like a monkey and astride a cartwheel riding along our streets.”

Fortunately for Wiley, he had caught the attention of U.S. agriculture commissioner George Loring, who in 1883 offered him the post of chief chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Soon thereafter, Wiley was embroiled in the raging debate about the use of chemical preservatives and adulterants like those used in many whiskey brands. In his 1899 annual report, Wiley claimed the mislabeling of food and drugs was a national epidemic threatening the health of millions of Americans.

With no truth-in-advertising laws in place, food labeling was a rampant problem. The “pure honey” sold in some stores was nothing more than flavored glucose with a dead bee placed in each jar for “authenticity.” And even though states could impose their own quality control laws, the growth of interstate trade lacking corresponding federal laws made them useless. Many whiskey sellers lied outright about what was in the bottle. Producers in Ohio could churn out “Pure Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey, Aged 10 Years,” although no word on that label was true—it could be one-day-old whiskey doctored with burnt sugar, carbolic acid, and prune juice for color. Even if a producer made
a quality product, corrupt distributors undermined their efforts. During one congressional hearing on the matter, Joseph Greenhut, still the world’s biggest distiller and the source of many rectifiers’ blending spirits, even admitted that his powerful trust had no control over the matter. Distributors could label their products with “any fancy name they want,” he told lawmakers.

The pure food and drug bill was essentially a labeling regulation, and Wiley strenuously argued before Congress that whiskey and other food producers should simply “tell the truth on the label.” This stance earned Wiley powerful enemies among politicians working on behalf of specific interests in their states. Massachusetts’s senators lobbied for the codfish industry, which used boric acid as a preservative; Maine fought for the herring industry, which boosted its profits by mislabeling herring as “Imported French sardines”; and New Jersey politicians protected canning factories in their state, which relied on benzoate of soda to preserve foods. Rectifiers, who controlled somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of the whiskey market, likewise began lobbying. They were in the same position as the rest of the food industry, and cheap whiskey passed off as an expensive straight whiskey, now having to be labeled accurately, would no longer be as lucrative. Whiskey’s hired guns were Ohio senator Joseph Foraker and Kentucky representative Joseph Sherley, both sensitive to rectifying interests in Cincinnati and Louisville.

Wiley’s enemies hired investigators to comb through his trash looking for anything that could discredit him. The reformer responded publicly by claiming he was the “target of a veritable fusillade of poisoned arrows from every track journal, newspaper and magazine which the adulterating interests could control.” Then he put the crusade in simpler terms: “I have stood always for food that is food.” Wiley was good at the clean sound bites. He announced that it was a “sin to be sick,” and that adulterated foods were cheating people from achieving sound mind and body. He called his critics “the hosts of Satan” and said that his own efforts were “a struggle for human rights as much as the Revolution or the Civil War. A battle for the privilege of going free of robbery and with a guarantee of health. It has been and is a fight for
the individual right against the vested interest, of the man against the dollar.”

The debate over how best to label whiskey delayed passage of the pure food and drug bill by as much as two years. Other reformers thought the bill would pass more quickly if the sections on whiskey were removed, but Wiley insisted they should remain. The votes of temperance advocates were needed to pass the bill, he argued, a powerful contingent that would surely oppose the measure if it didn’t address the whiskey question.

Much of the debate over whiskey hinged on the definition of “purity,” a word that many brands centered their advertising around (McKenna was “Pure and Straight,” Kentucky Dew was “The Standard of Purity”). Straight whiskey sellers, such as Edmund Taylor, contended that only straight bourbon or straight rye should be called whiskey. Rectified products, he argued, were so heavily adulterated that they should carry a label, such as “imitation whiskey.” Rectifiers, understanding that nobody wants something called imitation whiskey, disagreed. They countered that straight whiskies should be called “fusel oil whiskeys,” alluding to the kind of chemical compounds that, in minimal doses, give whiskey their flavor and complexity, but are harmful in larger amounts.

On this, the rectifiers had a point. Grain neutral spirits are technically more pure than aged whiskey because they are stripped of everything. Of course, the real argument here wasn’t over rectified spirits in a simple, higher-proof form. It was over the harmful adulterants that some, though not all, added to their whiskey. It was also over producers lying about what they were selling.

The battle between straight and rectified whiskey quickly turned populist, with both sides attempting to utilize whiskey’s humble everyman reputation. In one congressional hearing, an attorney for the rectifiers argued that straight whiskey wanted nothing more than to “put on airs” and seem fancy (he also claimed that fusel oils attacked the brain). Edmund Taylor, who was also at the hearing, shot back that rectifiers were trying to destroy the ancient ritual of making “honest” whiskey.

This last argument by Taylor was largely philosophical, but was nonetheless adopted by Wiley, despite his training as a chemist. He didn’t support rectifiers because their product didn’t live up to his own personal standards of connoisseurship. He argued that rectifiers didn’t make real whiskey, simply because it didn’t taste as good as the straight version. He admitted that while some “blenders are most honorable men,” their whiskies were “like one of those beautiful painted forms that the milliner puts up and puts a gown on compared with a real girl,” he told members of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. He backed his argument by making “fourteen-year-old” bourbon right there in the chamber. It only took minutes as he added a dash of this and a dash of that to a base of rectified spirits that he then passed among the lawmakers. The congressmen who took sips scrunched their faces and gasped. It was horrid.

The Pure Food and Drug Act passed in 1906, more because of public fury over recent scandals involving meatpacking than because of the whiskey question. Thus the whiskey provisions were pushed through before the whiskey debate was fully settled. Rectifiers were required to start calling their product “imitation whiskey,” “compound whiskey,” or “blended whiskey.” They quickly complained that these unpalatable new labeling regulations were a scheme by straight whiskey producers to steal their sales and pled with Agriculture Secretary Wilson to modify the rules. Wilson was willing, but a zealous Wiley quickly sabotaged the effort by appealing to the president. Roosevelt allowed Wiley to set up a small still in the Cabinet Room, and there he made insta-whiskey just as he had done for Congress. After tasting it, Roosevelt declared that the law should stand. Still outraged, rectifiers continued lobbying the White House to reverse the decision, but the president had already given his final say.

Blenders and rectifiers remained convinced that the bill was biased against them. Then, in 1909, they were given another chance to change the law. William Howard Taft was now president, and rectifiers petitioned him for another hearing. Taft offered a compromise. He declared that anything distilled from grain was whiskey, and that both
blends and straights could therefore call themselves whiskey, so long as the type of whiskey was further clarified somewhere on the bottle. Nobody was required to use the term “imitation whiskey,” and nobody was allowed to use the phrase “pure whiskey.” The terms “straight whiskey” and “blended whiskey” were adopted as the two basic types, and are still in use today.
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