The FDA's Colorful History - 1906-2006

On June 30, 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt led the Senate and House in a unified decision to enact the Food and Drug Act. The 1906 law’s relevant background in America starts with a colorful past of conflicts, competition, and a disaster that led to colonial food statutes concerned with bread and meat.

The first prolonged and impassioned controversy in the Congress involving a pure food issue took place in 1886, pitting the reigning champion; butter, against a challenger, oleomargarine. Advocates for butter cited health hazards including adulterated fertilizers, deodorized rotten eggs, revived rancid butter, and glucose substitutes for honey. Butter won the competitive war and oleomargarine was taxed and placed under other restraints that persisted on the Federal level until 1950.

The debate in 1886 between the defenders of a natural food and those of its alleged artificial substitute centered not only on matters of vested interest, but also pondered concerns about the public health, issues of governmental authority, and the myths in which were enshrined the complexities of American enterprise.

James Harvey Young, Emory University history professor and author of many books and articles on food and drug regulatory history, traces the conditions that led to the 1906 Food and Drug act in his article The Long Struggle for the 1906 Law. “One way to structure the intricate pure food story is to consider seven “C’s.”: change, complexity, competition, crusading, coalescence, compromise, and catastrophe.”

Young’s captivating article details years of conflicts, competitive bantering, and fraud justified in the name of “medicine and modern chemistry”. Business groups appealed to Congress for protection from individuals and companies engaged in unfair trade practice. But it was ultimately a catastrophe involving spoiled meat that initiated the final enactment of the 1906 Food and Drug Act. The law sought to protect the public from being deceived or harmed and gave the government power to intervene in interstate commerce and to restrict distribution of adulterated and misbranded foods and drugs.

In 1906, cosmetics weren’t a consideration, as the focus at that time was a catastrophe related to epidemics of trichinosis, a food-borne disease caused by parasites in undercooked meat. From 1906 – 1938 several catastrophes had occurred in the cosmetic arena, but it was the Lash-Lure disaster that precipitated the passage of the Cosmetic Act of 1938. Lash-Lure Eye Lash Dye was an aniline eyelash formula that resulted in severe allergic reactions.

The 1938 Cosmetic Act defines cosmetics, how they should be regulated and provides the government the right to regulate adulterated or misbranded products. It required colors to be certified as harmless and suitable by the FDA for their use in cosmetics. In 1960, color amendments strengthened the safety requirement for color additives, necessitating additional testing for many existing cosmetics to meet the new safety standards.

Changes in the work of the FDA have been shaped at least in part by political pressure, consumer activism, and industry involvement. Numerous Congressional investigations, external and internal committee reports, independent fact-finding missions, and other venues of inquiry have studied the agency’s mission and needs through much of the past century: precisely what one would expect for one of the oldest consumer regulatory agencies in the government, with such a broad responsibility for the public health, sometimes covering issues that have polarized large segments of American society. Such issued included sodium benzoate, sulfur dioxide, and other food preservatives during the 1920s; Banbar in the 1930s; aminotriazole-tainted cranberries in the 1950s; vitamins in the 1970s; and breast implants in the 1990s.
But these and other high visibility cases were just a small fraction of the agency’s work, unknown to most of the public, but nevertheless a key ingredient in 20th century U.S. history.

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