When that bill proved ineffective, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt revised it into the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1937.
[4] However, after a hearing, a slaughterhouse owner refused to clean up his property and this caused the women to pursue the execution of the penalty and continue a "constant vigilance" to keep it from happening again.
In Louisiana, Mrs. Richard Bloor took individual action and visited a packinghouse and afterwards "sent a description of the conditions to Upton Sinclair to use in his exposés of the meat industry".
[6] The Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was borne out of a need to protect communities from alcohol abuse and worked mostly on the local level.
Many club women were heavily involved in the temperance movement and began to associate adulterated foods as having the same consequences as alcohol abuse.
[8] Members of the WCTU, the Ladies Health Protective Association, and women's clubs laid the foundation for further "pure food, drink, and drug campaigns in the early 1880s, while their activities centered around study, self-improvement, and philanthropy".
He also created the "Poison Squad" experiments, in which young, healthy men volunteered to ingest food additive chemicals to determine their impact on human health.
[9] Wiley unified many different concerned groups, including state inspectors, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, journalists, reform wing of business, congress members and associations of physicians and pharmacists.
[16] Chemical additives were used to "heighten color, modify flavor, soften texture, deter spoilage, and even transform ... apple scraps, glucose, coal-tar dye, and timothy seed" into a "strawberry jam".
[9] Farmers felt threatened by unfair competition as shady producers adulterated "fertilizers, deodorized rotten eggs, revived rancid butter, and substituted glucose for honey".
[16] The first court case involving "adulterated" products was in 1886, in which farmers pitted quote “the reigning champion, butter, against a challenger, oleomargarine.
[13] "Adulterated" products often used chemicals or additives to mask poor quality wheat, sour milk, or meat gone bad.
[9] The Division of Chemistry started looking into the adulteration of agricultural commodities around 1867, and in 1883 Harvey Washington Wiley was appointed chief chemist.
Launched in 1933 with the book 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs by Arthur Kallet and Frederick J. Schlink, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) put on an exhibit to illustrate the need for a new law.
[22] Also legal under the old law was Radithor, a “radium-containing tonic that sentenced users to a slow and painful death.” This, along with the above court cases, caused the FDA to focus on replacing the now outdated “Wiley Act” of 1906.
[23] Spurred by public outcry from the Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster (in which 100 people were killed because under the 1906 law, “premarketing toxicity testing was not required”), congress rushed to enact a new bill.