America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Read online

  In an effort to extend his global reach, Heinz kept mounting bigger and more elaborate exhibits at international expositions in both Europe and America, racking up a staggering total of fifty-five gold medals by 1904. At the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Heinz booth attracted such a flood of visitors that, as the New York Times reported, at the conclusion of this World’s Fair, “it was… discovered that the gallery floor… sagged…where the pickle display of the H. J. Heinz Company stood.”

  But were it not for the quick thinker’s quick thinking, the exquisite Heinz Pavilion in Chicago, which was made out of hand-carved oak and staffed by four beautiful women from different corners of the world, would have been a huge dud. In June 1893, a few weeks after the fair’s official opening, Heinz took the family to Chicago (where their week’s stay in sumptuous quarters, as he recorded in his diary, came to “$112 without food”). Heading over to the Agricultural Building, Heinz was stunned to see that almost nobody was at his exhibit. Taking an evening to diagnose the problem, Heinz realized that visitors were unwilling to hike up the forty-four steps to the second floor. As with his moment of genius on the Manhattan elevated train a few years later, Heinz concluded that the nearest lithography shop could provide a solution. He ordered small white cards that promised the bearer a free souvenir when presented at the Heinz Pavilion. These cards, which resembled baggage checks, were passed out all over the fair by a squadron of young boys. Thousands of people were now eager to parade up the stairs, where they picked up a one-and-a-quarter-inch green pickle pin, tasted his samples, and viewed his array of curios and antiquities. “A great hit,” Heinz later wrote in his diary. “We hear it from all sources.” By November, when fair officials noticed that the gallery had almost collapsed, despite their efforts to strengthen its foundation over the summer, Heinz had distributed a million pickle pins, causing the Saturday Evening Post to describe this marketing bonanza “as one of the most famous giveaways in merchandising history.” It was the gift that kept on giving something back to the giver, as the potential customers who pinned the distinctive gutta-percha pickles on their shirts and blouses all became walking Heinz billboards.

  The following year, in late January, a “very tired and worn” Heinz tried to soothe his “nervous stomach and head ache” by embarking on a grueling five-and-a-half-month trek across the Middle East and Europe. Accompanying the forty-nine-year-old entrepreneur were his two eldest children, Clarence and Irene, as well as Irene’s close friend Myra Boyd; bothered by rheumatism, the now 205-pound Sallie wasn’t feeling up to all the exertion. Heinz took his new Kodak camera, but his tape measure captured the moments that meant the most to him. “Measures over 13 feet at the base,” he wrote of the Pillar of Pompey in Alexandria. After riding his camel to the Great Sphinx at Giza, he noted, “Measured some blocks 18 feet long, 6 feet thick, all in perfect condition.” Of the statue of Ramesses II, the largest in Egypt, Heinz determined that the “ear measures 3 ½ feet” and “the first finger 3 feet in diameter.” The Vatican provided him with lots of juicy factoids to keep track of—22 courtyards, 11,000 rooms, 23,000 windows, 10,000 statues, and 1,000 employees. “We are delighted,” the serial counter wrote of his visit to St. Peter’s Church, “with our climb to the top of the Dome, 715 steps.” His only disappointment in Rome was his failure to gain an audience with the Pope—the rector of the American College, to whom he had written for help, couldn’t pull it off. In July 1894, the curio collector and his many purchases—“six shipments and a mummy”—sailed back on the City of Paris, where he fraternized with Mark Twain (“medium height, say 5 feet 7 inches,” Heinz noted, checking the impulse to whip out his favorite implement and record the author’s exact dimensions).

  Not long after Heinz’s return, Sallie became gravely ill with typhoid pneumonia. On Thursday, November, 29, 1894—Thanksgiving—she died at Greenlawn, the thirty-room chateaulike estate in Pittsburgh’s East End, which Heinz had recently bought and remodeled. She was fifty-one. To his eldest son, Clarence, then in Munich, a devastated Heinz could barely describe “the awfulness of what has befallen us.” For obsessives, who have great difficulty connecting with others, the death of a trusted (that is, subservient) longtime spouse is particularly disorienting; the experience is akin to that of a preadolescent losing his or her mother. As he slowly recovered, Heinz was forced to rearrange his priorities. While he would never stop overseeing his company, in 1895 he handed over many management responsibilities to Sebastian Mueller. He also began immersing himself in the activities of the World Sunday School Association. “Sunday School,” he later wrote, “is the world’s greatest living force for character building and good citizenship.” To cope with his grief, like Jefferson after the loss of his beloved Martha, Heinz stepped up his collecting and organizing. “Well, how is the Royal Kingdom?” Howard wrote to his father in the summer of 1896. “I hope you did not get any curios, but I suppose you got some, you couldn’t help it.” When the fourth floor of his Greenlawn mansion could no longer contain his thousands of impressive tchotchkes—among his timepieces were Lord Horatio Nelson’s personal watch—he erected a private museum next to the garage and opened it to the public.

  According to one Heinz hagiographer, Sallie was “the first, last and only love of his existence,” a hypothesis that has rarely been questioned. But while Heinz never found a permanent replacement for Sallie, he may well have found several short-term substitutes. The devout Methodist had no stomach for adultery, which he considered grounds for dismissal from the company, but he took a thoroughly secular approach toward romance for the unattached. In 1905, in a letter to a busy and anxious Howard, then a dashing bachelor in his late twenties, Heinz asked rhetorically, “Then why not be systematic in your eating as well as your work when you are in good condition and when you are feeling poorly, let the young ladies drive away the blues?” In Pittsburgh, after fellow churchgoers noticed that he was “getting sweet on Widow L.,” an anonymous friend issued the following warning, “She is a very nice lady…but I know her designs on you are for money only, etc., etc.” “Widow L.” was not the only woman with whom Heinz was romantically linked. A few months before his death, while vacationing in Miami Beach, Heinz received a series of billets-doux from a Florida resident, Gussie Streeter. “I would give my life,” she wrote to her “darling Mr. Heinz” after running into him briefly in the lobby of a hotel “if you would only come and talk to me as you used to.… The love I have for you will last as long as I live.”

  Heinz didn’t respond, but a staff member soon dropped Miss Streeter, about whom little else is known, a brief note, “Mr H. earnestly requests that you do not write any more letters. He is leaving Miami and will probably go to California.”

  Heinz didn’t make it anywhere near California that year, and it appears unlikely that he ever had any intention of reviving that romance.

  “There is Heinz and, far behind, Hunt’s and Del Monte and a handful of private-label brands.” Thus reported Malcolm Gladwell in his classic 2004 New Yorker article, “The Ketchup Conundrum,” which explored why ketchup—in contrast to mustard, which comes in dozens of varieties—still comes primarily in one (“57 Varieties”). For Gladwell, the reason for this anomalous state of affairs is simple. A century ago, argues the bestselling author (as do Heinz’s string of hagiographers), the founder led “a renegade band of ketchup manufacturers” that upended the establishment by making “a superior ketchup; safer, purer and better tasting.” According to this conventional wisdom, Heinz, in tandem with the new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) established in 1906, worked courageously on behalf of consumers to rid the market of toxic-preservative-laced ketchup. But the full story is more complex. Far from a rebel, Heinz was already the market leader when he made the famous tweaks to his product. And he ran roughshod over the competition partly by engaging in lots of marketing flim-flam; in fact, to establish his virtual monopoly, Heinz ended up relying less on “the application of culinary science,” as Gladwell mainta
ins, than on its deliberate misapplication.

  By the end of the 1880s, Heinz had designed the key accoutrements of his iconic sauce—the keystone label, the neck band, and the screw-top bottle—but the product bore little resemblance to anything we might recognize today. At its inception in 1888, the H. J. Heinz Company sold four different classes of tomato ketchup—from the luxury brand, Keystone, to the nameless “Home-Made Catsup”—in several different quantities, ranging from half-pint bottles to forty-five-gallon barrels. Price corresponded to quality and varied from about twenty-five to sixty cents a gallon. Back then, Heinz threw a lot of spices such as cayenne pepper and mace into his ketchups, all of which were thin and watery. The 1890s was both the decade that ketchup came into its own—by 1896, both the New York Tribune and Scientific American were dubbing it America’s “national condiment”—and H. J. Heinz became its biggest producer. Of the total of about 150 brands, according to a 1904 survey, most had only a local or regional reach. Heinz, one of just a handful of national brands, led the market with a 20 percent share.

  By 1900, food products accounted for nearly a third of all finished commodities manufactured in the United States, and calls came from consumer advocates and Congress for regulation of the industry. This “pure food movement,” which Heinz soon joined, would turn the ketchup biz upside down. Its leader was Harvey W. Wiley, a charismatic chemist at the United States Department of Agriculture who in 1902 got a grant from Congress to investigate food additives and their impact on health. While corporate excesses were legion—mislabeling was common, as was the use of dangerous fillers such as sawdust—so too were Wiley’s. A publicity hound, he was a zealot who vilified his enemies as “the hosts of Satan.” Often loose with facts, Wiley drew press attention to his cause by devising a “Poison Squad,” a group of twelve young men who served as his guinea pigs. In 1904, Wiley had his minions try sodium benzoate, a mold inhibitor then used by all ketchup manufacturers, including the H. J. Heinz Company. After several volunteers came down with various symptoms, including weight loss, fever, and a decrease in red blood cells, Wiley stopped the experiment, convinced that he had confirmed his hypothesis. Even though his study was far from scientific—Wiley used no control group, nor did he take into account whether any preexisting condition or previous test might have influenced his findings—he concluded that sodium benzoate was so harmful that it should be outlawed.

  In 1905, a committee of six of Wiley’s lieutenants including Sebastian Mueller, who represented the H. J. Heinz Company, went to the White House to lobby President Theodore Roosevelt. The result was the passage of the Federal Food and Drug Act a year later, which set up the FDA. In June 1907, based on the Poison Squad’s test, Wiley issued a directive requiring manufacturers to limit the use of sodium benzoate to one-tenth of 1 percent and to include this information on the label. Wiley also declared his intention to impose a ban in the near future. Well aware that this was the direction in which Wiley was headed, Heinz had already been tinkering with his formula. Even though only a few years earlier at the St. Louis World’s Fair, Sebastian Mueller had publicly stated that sodium benzoate was not an objectionable preservative because it was “present naturally in some fruits, and particularly our cranberry,” by the fall of 1904, the H. J. Heinz Company produced one-fourth of its ketchup without preservatives, and by the end of 1905, one-half. In early 1907, Sebastian Mueller wrote to Wiley, “We have finally and fully satisfied ourselves through the results of our experiments in putting up Ketchup without a preservative, that our Ketchup may safely be sent in bottles…and will keep perfectly for a period of not less than four weeks under ordinary conditions.” Thus was born the incarnation of America’s national sauce that millions of people around the world have come to know and love—the thick and slow-out-of-the-bottle (or packet) ooze that we put on our favorite comfort foods.

  More a triumph of marketing than of science, Heinz’s new signature product would benefit his company’s health much more than the consumer’s. While Heinz draped himself in the mantel of purity—as he insisted, his company now used nothing but fresh tomatoes, sanitary preparation methods, and secure bottles—all was not as it appeared. As the British food writer Bee Wilson asserts in her book, Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee, “There are considerable ironies in the way that Heinz ketchup built its empire on its status as ‘pure food.’” The first involved a secret switcheroo. Despite Heinz’s claims, his new manufacturing processes were not sufficient to ensure purity; he also had to substitute something for sodium benzoate. What he ended up doing was doubling the amount of both vinegar and sugar (the sweetener, which today comes in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, was necessary to avoid a bitter taste). As a result, Wilson wonders whether the “nonbezoated but sugary Heinz ketchup should qualify as a health-giving product.” In the old paradigm, tomato ketchup was much more closely tied to “the thing-in-itself” (to use philosopher Immanuel Kant’s term for an object’s intrinsic nature)—the condiment had the consistency of a real tomato and tasted more like one, too. Another sleight of hand was Heinz’s attack on his competitors, which aimed to deflect attention away from his own deceptive sales practices. While he vilified other manufacturers for using preservatives solely to keep their costs down, H. J. Heinz took to price gouging. In contrast to the benzoate users that charged from ten to twelve cents a bottle, Heinz began charging twenty-five to thirty cents a bottle. Heinz insisted that purity cost big bucks, but his added expenses actually amounted to only three or four cents a bottle. “The cost of living to the consumer for the very necessities of life,” noted a contemporary critic of Heinz in the American Food Journal, “has been generously and directly increased, without probably the least benefit.” With ketchup sales going up from 3.6 million bottles in 1904 to 6 million in 1906 and profits doubling between 1901 and 1906, Heinz was suddenly awash in cash, which he plowed back into print advertisements.

  To achieve his next goal, which was to obliterate the competition, Heinz would have to take on the president. Unconvinced that benzoate was dangerous, in 1907, Theodore Roosevelt appointed a board of scientific experts, chaired by Ira Remsen, a leading chemist who headed Johns Hopkins University, to conduct further studies and render a definitive verdict. In the meantime, at the suggestion of his son Howard, then the firm’s advertising manager, Heinz made a massive investment in print advertising. With his signs, Heinz had emphasized brand recognition; in his new magazine spreads, he would provide bits of information (and misinformation) designed to scare both grocers and consumers away from his competitors. “This became a national debate and the Heinz advertising aimed to influence food officials to ban benzoate,” asserted historian Clayton Coppin, coauthor of The Politics of Purity: Harvey Washington Wiley and the Origins of Federal Food Policy. “It is far easier,” Coppin explained to me, “to make your product the only legal product than it is to outcompete your rivals.” Even though Heinz had no idea what the feds would eventually decide, his ads in food industry journals urged grocers to remove all benzoate ketchups from the shelves because it was “only a question of time before their sale will be prohibited.” In his advertising blitz in consumer magazines such as Collier’s and Woman’s Home Companion, Heinz asked the rhetorical question, “Why should you use a product that has to be doctored with drugs to make it keep, when you can get food that is really pure?” As he reminded readers, their mothers never used sodium benzoate to make ketchup (but Anna Heinz and her cohorts did not have to worry about shelf life).

  In January 1909, Heinz faced a major setback when the Remsen board overturned Wiley’s findings. While Remsen and his four distinguished academic colleagues also did not use a control group, their testing was much more extensive than Wiley’s. On his last day in office, President Roosevelt issued a food inspection decision stating that sodium benzoate is not harmful, particularly in small amounts, and this has been the law of the land ever since. But Heinz, like Wiley, was not ready to g
ive up. Unwilling to go after the team of éminences grises directly, he came up with reasons to get rid of benzoate besides its inherent toxicity. A new Heinz ad that ran in both Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post claimed that benzoate “allows a cheapening…of a product through the reduction of food value, employment of loose methods and too often of unfit raw materials.” (In this war of words, the pro-benzoate forces countered that vinegar and sugar were actually more effective in masking unsavory ingredients than most additives.) The H. J. Heinz Company, along with other key members of “Big Food” such as Beech-Nut and Borden’s, also formed a lobbying arm, the Association for the Promotion of Purity in Food Products. In its initial 1909 meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan, the organization vowed to combat “the reactionary interests…[that] have been able…to nullify some of the most important provisions of the [pure food] law.” So devoted was Heinz to his purity crusade that the teetotaler looked the other way when the new group hired the controversial publicist “Poker Bill” Smith, who had recently worked for the National Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association, to fire off its press releases. Determined to deal a fatal blow to benzoate, the H. J. Heinz Company also pressured incoming president William Howard Taft to appoint Wiley secretary of agriculture; but Taft, like Roosevelt before him, remained suspicious of Wiley.