The "Sugarocracy" Strikes Back
A fateful meeting at the White House in 1907
The following is an excerpt from p. 102-104 of Chapter 2, “Sugar is the Knife: The World’s Favorite Drug” from my book, Drugism (2022):
[Note: this excerpt picks up where “Sugar + the Pure Food and Drugs Act” left off.]
The meeting happened at the request of a couple processed food manufacturers. They wanted President Theodore Roosevelt to dial back the power of the Bureau of Chemistry. The issue revolved around the use of saccharin, a coal-derived sucrose analogue, and similar additives. After personally inviting the executives to spend the night at the White House, Roosevelt requested a follow-up meeting the next morning to be joined by Wiley, who as head of the Bureau of Chemistry was to be involved in such matters.
At the meeting, Wiley evidently made two mistakes. The first: on the matter of saccharin, he spoke before he was spoken to. Around presidents, this is apparently taboo. The second: Wiley strongly objected to the use of saccharin in processed food, only to learn that Roosevelt himself was a devoted saccharin user.
According to Wiley’s own recollection, the conversation was as follows. One of the representatives of the processed food manufacturers at the meeting happened to be James Sherman, who himself would be elected Vice President in the following administration. Sherman explained to Roosevelt and Wiley, “My firm last year saved $4,000 by sweetening canned corn with saccharin instead of sugar. We want a decision from you on this question”—the question being whether or not they would be allowed to continue.[i] Wiley’s regulations would have stopped the use of saccharin as a food additive. Saccharin has all the harmful effects of refined sugar and more, being a synthetic coal derivative.
Instead of waiting for Roosevelt to speak and ask Wiley what he thought, Wiley just went ahead and shared his opinion. It was a hot topic for him. “Everyone who ate that sweet corn was deceived,” Wiley blurted. The customers of the corn thought it was sweetened with cane sugar, “when in point of fact [they were] eating a coal tar product totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health.”[ii]
“You tell me that saccharin is injurious to health?” Roosevelt asked angrily. “Dr. Rixley [Roosevelt’s doctor] gives it to me every day” he continued.
Wiley responded, “Mr. President, he probably thinks you may be threatened with diabetes.”
Roosevelt bluntly replied, “Anybody who says saccharin is injurious to health is an idiot.”[iii]
And with that the meeting ended. The following day, Roosevelt set up a new advisory board. The new board would “revise the findings of the Bureau of Chemistry,” undoing much of the work Wiley had done to protect consumers.[iv] Dubbed the Referee Board of Consulting Scientific Experts, the group was led by Ira Remsen, the co-discoverer of saccharin.[v] [Note: Remsen was the president of Johns Hopkins University at the time; he’d been handpicked as Daniel Coit Gilman’s successor.] With Remsen installed as chairman of the board, Roosevelt never had to worry about anyone taking his dear saccharin from him again. According to Dufty, “Wiley never saw the President again.”[vi]
Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal,” of which Wiley’s Pure Food and Drugs Act was purportedly a part, was pitched to the public as something that would help common people. Its true effect was something different. Foreshadowing the later rise of neoliberal politics, Roosevelt was a master of pandering to populist ideology while actually increasing the powers of the private sector and the military. The sugar-centric drugism of the Roosevelt administration was no accident. It was by design, preceding Roosevelt and continuing long after him.
Roosevelt himself was originally elected into the office of Vice President under William McKinley. As a senator McKinley had authored the McKinley Act, which was a contributing factor to Hawaii’s annexation (and the sugar that came with it). As president, McKinley launched the Spanish-American War for control of Cuba (and the sugar that came with it).
It was not until after McKinley was assassinated in 1901 that Roosevelt took the seat of president. The succession of rule from McKinley, to Roosevelt, then to William Taft and James Sherman (the above-mentioned champion of saccharin) was, to use Eduardo Galeano’s language, a “sugarocracy.”[vii] And the sugarocracy continued through the next administration, that of Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, the US itself could be thought of as a sugarocracy. We will find that sugar’s influence in the federal government runs astonishingly deep even to this day.
Within a year of the US’s entrance into World War I, it had “created severe sugar shortages” by interfering with international trade routes.[viii] President Wilson would not stand for this—the US needed its sugar. In response, he authorized the federal government to create a sugar corporation, which he then “empowered to import sugar and control the profits on the handling and sale of sugar.”[ix] It was given a dull, bureaucratic name—US Sugar Equalization Board, Inc.—and was responsible for negotiating US-Cuban sugar deals during World War I.[x]Because of the war, sugar in the US was rationed in this time period. People could buy no more than an ounce a day and, as Walvin writes, “open sugar bowls were banned in restaurants.”[xi]