Harvey Washington Wiley

• Harvey Wiley
• Born: October 18, 1844
• Died: June 30, 1930

Food and drug reformer, chemist, author, and lecturer was born at Kent, Indiana, in a log cabin, the sixth of seven children of Preston Pritchard Wiley and Lucinda Weir (Maxwell) Wiley, both of whose ancestors were Scotch-Irish and had fought for American independence. Harvey Wiley began his education in a log schoolhouse and continued it in neighborhood district schools and at home. He received his A.B. in 1867 from Hanover College, after interrupting his studies for a year in 1864 to serve as corporal in the Union Army.

Wiley stayed briefly in 1868 in Milton, Kentucky, with a friend, Dr. S. E. Hampton, becoming acquainted with and fascinated by “practical medicine,” applied in everyday life. This experience, compared with a year of teaching, also in 1868, led him to enter the Medical College of Indiana, which granted him his M.D. in 1871; he did not, however, lose his liking for the classroom. While studying medicine he taught Latin and Greek at Northwestern Christian University (later Butler College).

In 1871 Wiley felt the impact of a speech by Henry Allison that stressed the importance of the autonomy of science. At Harvard, where he received his B.S. in 1873, he listened to Louis Agassiz, who talked of bringing “order out of confusion, building up heaps of specimens into scientific peace and beauty” in the Museum of Natural History. Bringing order out of disarray seemed important to Wiley. After Harvard he taught chemistry briefly at Butler and at the Medical College of Indiana, then suffered a brief emotional breakdown. Perhaps a need for order attracted him to the military, for, while professor of chemistry at Purdue from 1874 to 1883 (he served too as state chemist of Indiana), he taught military science. He was also attracted to the international character of scientific endeavor and in 1878 studied chemistry, pathology, and physics in Germany, where he began to deal seriously with food adulteration.

Wiley rejected corporate employment partly because he believed that publication of his scientific work would be inhibited. Instead, he chose public service, and in 1883 accepted an appointment as chief chemist of the United States Department of Agriculture; he remained with the department until 1912. Though he was sometimes at odds with his superiors, particularly James Wilson, President William McKinley’s Secretary of Agriculture, he was a friend of McKinley and had many congressional supporters for his programs, including conservative Republican advocates of cautious reform. Wiley launched a chemical investigation of sugar production in the United States. He studied the application of diffusion to the extraction of sugar from sugarcane and delineated some of the climatic conditions for the best growth of the sugar beet. He also developed methods of chemical analysis and technology for agriculture.

Reaching beyond pure scientific inquiry, Wiley accelerated the campaign against food adulteration, the extent of which appeared shocking when he first began to investigate it in the 1880s. He made this issue central to his concerns, pressing for a food and drugs law and finally, with the aid of congressional friends, seeing one enacted in 1906. Enforcing the act, though, seemed even more difficult than achieving its passage: his reports on the deleterious effects of benzoate of soda and other preservatives stirred controversy and criticism; President Theodore Roosevelt appointed the Remsen Referee Board to evaluate Wiley’s conclusions and it did so negatively. But over time, Wiley’s views, supported by wider public understanding, became accepted. Later, Wiley vindicated himself against charges of corruption. After doing so, he resigned, in March 1912, having constructed a bureau of more than five hundred employees from a tiny agency and having developed scientific study of soils, road construction, and milk products.

For two years Wiley maintained his position as professor of agricultural chemistry at George Washington University, to which he had been appointed in 1899. As he faced retirement, he had the company of his wife, Anna Campbell (Kelton) Wiley, daughter of General John C. Kelton. They were married in 1911, having met ten years previously; during that decade he carried her picture in his wallet, certain of his interest but reluctant to tell her. They had two sons.

His retirement was active. From 1912 to 1930 he was director of the bureau of foods, sanitation, and health of Good Housekeeping magazine, to which he regularly contributed. He also derived pleasure and gained success from hundreds of lectures on the lyceum and Chautauqua circuits. He had already written The Sugar Beet Industry (1890), Principles and Practice of Agricultural Analysis, 3 vols. (1894-97), and Foods and Their Adulteration (1907). In later years he wrote Not by Bread Alone (1915), The Lure of the Land (1915), Health Reader (1916), Beverages and their Adulteration (1919), History of a Crime Against the Food Law (1929), and Harvey W. Wiley-An Autobiography (1930). He wrote, throughout his life, many articles for journals.

Wiley spent his last few years enjoying the bucolic pleasures of his Virginia farm. He had been honored by being asked to serve on award-granting juries at international expositions and by his induction as a chevalier of the Legion of Honor (he had helped revised the French pure food law in 1907). He died in Washington at the age of eighty-five.

Wiley was a moderate reformer who bridged the gap between the scientific and technical communities on the one hand and political life on the other; he did so with a desire, after the fashion of Agassiz, to introduce enlightened order into governmental scientific activities in the progressive reform period. As a government official he never lost his ties to the independent scientific scholarly community or to the pragmatic human side of medical and scientific work. His stress on the relation of science to government accorded well with varied aspects of progressive reform temperament, including its positivist view of knowledge based on natural phenomena as verified by science.

Biographical sources include the autobiography noted above; Who Was Who in America, vol. 1, 1943; and The Dictionary of American Biography (1936). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, July 1, 1930.