Fair Play in the Marketplace: The First Battle for Pure Food and Drugs by Mitchell Okun

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 315 Fair Play in the Marketplace: The First Battlefor Pure Food and Drugs. By Mitchell Okun. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986. pP· xv+ 345; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $27.50. This book, based on Mitchell Okun’s 1983 doctoral dissertation in history at the City University of New York, explores federal and state efforts to regulate the quality of food and drugs in the decades pre­ ceding the passage of the landmark Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. It focuses on the enactment and enforcement of regulatory laws be­ tween 1848, when Congress first passed such legislation, prohibiting the importation of adulterated drugs, and 1886, when the same body voted for the first time to regulate a domestic food product, oleo­ margarine. Although three states—New York, New Jersey, and Mas­ sachusetts—enacted food-and-drug legislation during this period, Okun devotes most of his attention to events occurring between the mid-1860s and the mid-1880s in New York, where a mixed bag of reformers sought in the name of public health to enhance their own professional and economic well-being. No doubt because the regu­ lation of drugs has been treated in such works as James Harvey Young’s The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (1961), Okun looks most carefully at the pre­ viously neglected debates over the manufacture and sale of foodstuffs, from sugar and spices to coffee and mustard. Efforts to prevent the adulteration of milk, regarded by reformers as “the most central of all foods,” and to restrict the production of oleomargarine, which generated the most “acrimony and excitement,” receive special attention. In passages scattered throughout his book, Okun attributes the heightened concern about pure food and drugs to technological de­ velopments that led to the rapid expansion of the pharmaceutical and food-processing industries and placed the production and distribution ofthese commodities in the hands of strangers. He notes, for example, that “The sudden ubiquity of canned and packaged foods, ‘the ready sale of myriad food products brought from all parts of the world by means of ever swifter transportation and improved methods of re­ frigeration,’ was a revolutionary change for the city dweller” (p. 88), who became increasingly suspicious about the possibility of adulter­ ation. But Okun never spells out the connection between fear of technological development and support for antiadulteration laws, and he cites little direct evidence to support his claim. What he does very well is to expose the mixed motives behind the agitation for food-and-drug legislation and the often questionable ethics of those most actively involved. Despite all the rhetoric about protecting the public health, support for legislation came in large part from businessmen who wished to “regularize the market, quash neg­ 316 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ative publicity, improve their public image, eliminate ‘unfair’ com­ petition, and in general, increase sales” (p. 289). Like so many other “reformers,” they turned to the government to ensure “fair play in the marketplace.” Ronald L. Numbers Dr. Numbers is professor of the history of medicine and the history of science at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. His publications include Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History ofMedicine and Public Health (2d ed.; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), coedited with Judith Walzer Leavitt, and Medicine in the New World: New Spain, New France, and New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Ar­ chitecture. By Reyner Banham. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 266; illustrations, notes, index. $25.00. Reyner Banham’s A Concrete Atlantis entices the reader with the promise of a fascinating tour through early-20th-century American industrial architecture. His purpose is not simply to examine the his­ tory of industrial buildings but to lead us eventually to the beginnings of European modern architecture. To European architects, suggests the author, American factories and grain elevators represented a new society based on scientific rationality. Banham compares the new in­ dustrial society to Bacon’s “New Atlantis”; hence the book’s title. He argues that “there is a...