In a Toxic City Beautiful: Harvey Washington Wiley, the Model City, and the Authenticity of Science in the Nation’s Capital

Abstract

Surrounding the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, government chemist Harvey Washington Wiley and the Bureau of Chemistry at the Department of Agriculture conducted experiments in Washington, D.C., on food adulteration. Contributing to new urban histories of science and focusing on how Wiley saw adulteration as an urban conundrum, this article shows how D.C.’s longstanding status as a “model city” allowed Wiley and the Bureau to use the city, somewhat paradoxically, as both a laboratory for studying toxic urbanity and as a representation of a healthy urban ideal. As D.C.’s population grew dramatically at the turn of the century, Wiley’s science mirrored the unease he associated with urban growth, deception, and food adulteration. Wiley promoted an ethic of authenticity as part of an antimodernist or nostalgic modernist science that sought to quell the epidemic of deception that ravaged food production, science, and the American city.