“Old Methods Not Up to New Ways”: The Strategic Use of Advertising in the Fight for Pure Food After 1906

Abstract

This article considers how American food manufacturers used advertising and outreach to sway public opinion in the immediate years after the 1906 passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Although this federal legislation has long been heralded as a landmark victory for consumer protection, the new law was not a watershed moment for progressivism. Food production and consumption in the United States remained deeply fraught. In the absence of a clearly defined apparatus to enforce the new law and much contestation among policy-makers, business interests, and reformers, the food industry's co-option of reform ideals and rhetoric exemplifies the increasing power of big business over both public policy and mainstream cultural discourse in the United States during the early twentieth century and beyond. While scholars have often framed the push to introduce federal food policy as a fairly linear institutional or political narrative, a cultural historical approach gives new insight into how unresolved questions about purity in food production and consumption have vexed Americans and stymied business interests and policy-makers in ways that have continued to reverberate into the present day.