SYMHC Classics: Swill Milk

This 2021 episode covers a period of time when the milk supply in New York was anything but appetizing and wholesome – it was often deadly. But efforts to address the problem were blocked by corrupt officials.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. After this week's episode on typhoid, we are
continuing our food safety theme with our episode on the
swill milk scandal of 1858, which was also mentioned in
last week's classic on NASA's role in food safety. This
originally came out on July 21st, 2021. We would say enjoy,
but this one's pretty gross. Welcome to Stuff You Missed

(00:30):
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Okay,
here is sort of an obvious heads up if you
saw the title of today's podcast. The topic that we

(00:51):
are talking about today involves really unsanitary practices that that
took place when there were not really laws regarding food
safety and quality the way we think about it today.
So it is kind of gross. That's an understatement. And
there is also mistreatment of animals. So it is also
upsetting on that front. Just know that going in and

(01:11):
maybe it may be a little too intense for you.
We are covering a period of time where the milk
supply in New York was anything but appetizing. So it
actually been going on for quite some time, but there's
one kind of very, pivotal moment in the middle of it,
and that's really where we're focusing. And then we'll talk
about the way that problem was brought to the public's
attention and how it was handled after that. But first,

(01:34):
we're just going to talk a little bit about why
milk became known as an essential item in U.S. kitchens,
particularly for families with children. So if you grew up
in the U.S., even if you don't drink milk yourself,
you've almost certainly become accustomed to this idea of that
people think of milk as a staple food. I know

(01:56):
when I was a kid, I loved milk and I
drank it all the time. My brother was allergic, so
it was kind of a division in our household. This
is one of the things that just flies off of
supermarket dairy case shelves anytime there's a heavy storm coming
and people will joke about like, what are people doing
with all this milk and bread? Is it French toast
time during the snowstorm? Milk is treated like a cornerstone

(02:22):
of every meal in a lot of families, and it
is really popular. We have talked about cheese and butter
on the show before, which are, of course, also dairy items.
But those are made with the idea of longevity. So
a food that you can have on hand for at
least a little while. Milk does not have that long
shelf life, especially in the era before artificial refrigeration. So

(02:47):
it's kind of an impractical thing to just have on
hand all the time. The concept of a lot of
heavy milk consumption is pretty new if you plot it
out on the timeline of human history. Yeah. For a
long time, dairy milk as a human consumable was primarily

(03:08):
used just as a means to feed babies. This is
also tied up with a very passionate and centuries-long debate
about human milk versus the milk from other animals and
what is appropriate for children. Even famed Puritan Cotton Mather
had opinions about breastfeeding being the only suitable way to
feed a child. And he intimated in his writing that

(03:30):
God would take whether a mother breastfed or not into
account when her day of judgment came. And then during
the 19th century, there were plenty of people willing to
voice their opinion that breastfeeding was downright uncivilized. Obviously, those
are two extremes to illustrate the vast range of positions
people had on the issue. That debate continues. You will

(03:52):
still find people probably who feel both of those ways.
That debate is thankfully way out of our scope here.
Tracy and I are not moms, so we don't have
quite the same stake in that conversation that other people
might have. So the key thing that we need to
focus on is that in cases where a mother's or
a wet nurse's milk were not an option for whatever reason,

(04:15):
over time, people started turning to other milk sources for infants.
And because cows are fairly docile and pretty easy to
work with and produce milk in quantity, They emerged over
time as the most popular non-human milk source. There were
people who studied the mortality rates of babies in regard

(04:36):
to being fed animal milk. This was called artificial feeding.
They were comparing that to people who were fed milk
from their mother or a wet nurse all the way
back to the 1700s. And germ theory as we know
it today was not really in the mix with this yet.
So there were some stabs in the dark regarding cause
and effect of illnesses that seemed like they were linked

(04:58):
to milk. One idea, which was conceived by French doctor
Alphonse Leroy in the 1770s, was for children to suckle
directly from an animal to get the freshest possible milk.
So he was onto the idea that spoilage could be
a problem. but he didn't really know that bacteria was

(05:19):
the culprit for that spoilage. But keeping live animals on
hand for that purpose was not exactly realistic. For a
lot of places, especially places like orphanages or hospitals. Right.
And even like anybody that lived in a more metropolitan area,
it's not like go to the goat room or the

(05:42):
certainly not a cow in the house. There have been
also various types of formula over the years, which can
include any number of ingredients such as flowers or even
cane sugar mixed with water or milk or some combination
of the two. And sometimes that was used as a
way to stretch milk where that supply was not as,
you know, constantly available. But over time, there were doctors

(06:05):
that started to recommend milk with various added ingredients as
something that could pretty effectively replicate the nutrition an infant
would get from breastfeeding. So with doctors touting its benefits,
milk really started to take on an image as a
nutritious and health bolstering beverage. This was not a universally
held opinion, though, and there were still plenty of instances

(06:27):
where milk caused people to get sick. This included episodes
when multiple people in communities got milk sickness after milk
from cows that had ingested some poisonous plants was introduced
into the food supply. But the trend of feeding infants
and children milk continued upward in the U.S. and in

(06:49):
other parts of the world as cities got bigger and
populations boomed. So that just led to more and more
demand for cow's milk specifically. So naturally, that growing population
of metro areas that needed and wanted milk led to
a boom in the dairy industry. But in many cases,
the dairies that emerged to meet those demands were not

(07:10):
exactly hygienic. And the cows... that were used were not
fed the best diet. Feeding more cows meant far greater
overhead for milk producers, so some of them worked out
what seemed like a cost-effective solution, and they moved next
to breweries and distilleries. And in a lot of instances,
distilleries started dairies of their own as a way to

(07:32):
get a piece of the ever-increasing demand. So a lot
of alcohols start out with grain that's combined with water
to give the yeast something to work with, But this
spent grain is not part of the finished beverage. It's
a waste product. And dairy producers made deals with alcohol
producers to take their runoff to feed their animals. Or

(07:54):
in the cases of these combo businesses, the distillers didn't
really bother to source any other food for their animals.
They were just feeding them the runoff from their distilleries.
So we should mention here that there are cases where
this is okay. If someone is soaking their grains and
then straining them out before fermentation, these grains can be

(08:16):
and are fed to livestock. Like, there are a lot
of breweries today that are feeding their spent grain to
farm animals, and this is really just... The grain that
has been used to make the wort to make the beer,
not like runoff that also contains alcohol and other waste products. Right.

(08:38):
The brewery that brewed the beer for our wedding had
a deal with farmers. Lots of places do this and
it is perfectly fine. So we are not. coming down
on those people. If you know someone who does that
or is part of one of those, we're not dogging
on them. What we are about to tell you will
explain the problem. Yeah, yeah. So what we are talking
about here is dairy cows being fed this watery spent

(09:03):
swill of mash that had been through the fermentation process
and boiled without being strained. And this runoff swill was
not only kind of gross, it really didn't have a
lot of nutritional value anymore. It could also go bad
really quickly. Unlike just the spent grain that is used today,

(09:23):
this was not a good food source for animals or anyone, really.
And as a consequence, the quality of the milk being
produced by animals being fed this swill was poor. At best,
that's a very kind way to put it. That milk
was often watery, it did not have the normal fat
content of a whole milk, and also it was often

(09:43):
blue in color. So to make that milk appear more
wholesome than it was, dairies that used the swill runoff
to feed their cows started adding all kinds of things
to the milk. Food colorings and molasses were added to
make it look and taste good. and in instances where
the dairy watered down the already watery milk to stretch profits,

(10:06):
chalk and sometimes even plaster of Paris was also added
to improve the texture. This sounds like it would be
really bad for babies, and it was. And infant mortality
was really high. Some estimates are that nearly half of
the babies in Manhattan died pretty routinely. And because there

(10:26):
were innumerable issues developing as the city became more and
more crowded, it actually took a while for people to
realize that the milk supply had become poisonous. Yeah, there
were lots of lots of efforts at attribution about like, oh,
crowding is making disease spread more quickly. Yes, that's part
of it. You know, there were lots of other things

(10:47):
that they could point to and go, I think this
might be the problem. It just it took a bit.
And in just a moment, we will talk about the
journalists who started to write about this problem with adulterated
milk being fed to babies. But first, we are going
to pause for a sponsor break. Frank Leslie is usually

(11:13):
credited with breaking the swill milk scandal open in his paper,
and we will talk about that expose in a moment.
But activist Robert Millam Hartley, who is known for his
work in the temperance movement, was an early criticizer of
the subpar milk supply. Well before most other writers, in 1842,
Hartley published a book titled An Historic, Scientific, and Practical

(11:35):
Essay on Milk as an article of human sustenance with
a consideration of the effects consequent upon the present unnatural
methods of producing it for the supply of large cities.
Hartley believed that milk produced in a wholesome way was
a perfect food, and he traced its history and the
animals that produce it in this book to support his stance.

(11:58):
He includes a testimonial from a doctor in the book
that reads, quote, I live in the country, but occasionally
go to the city, and while there, I make a
practice of securing, if possible, my accustomed glass of milk
morning and evening instead of coffee and tea, which for
some years I have laid aside altogether. Three years ago
last winter, I took lodgings at a respectable house near

(12:21):
Broadway and bespoke, as usual, my glass of milk. I
observed that the taste of this milk was unnatural, unsavory,
and I had no relish for it. In fact, it
soon became loathsome, and at the end of one week
I found myself greatly enfeebled with loss of appetite, a
feverish heat of the hands, and a slightly furred tongue

(12:44):
with other indications of disorder. The milk, I was informed,
came from a dairy supplied with swill from a distillery.
I left the boarding house and took lodgings at the
Clinton Hotel where I found a well-flavored glass of milk
morning and evening, and in three days I was well. Mr. H.,

(13:04):
the landlord, assured me that he was supplied with milk
from Harlem by a farmer who fed his cows on
wholesome food. So that doctor's account goes on to warn
parents that if they are going to buy milk for
their children... they should inspect the dairy the supply comes
from themselves to see the horrible conditions the animals live
in and how their teeth are in abysmal condition from

(13:27):
bad food and how all of this smells anything but wholesome.
Hartley's write-up, which is credited with coining the term swill milk,
includes a number of other accounts, and they're horrifying. This
includes abysmal conditions regarding animal welfare and Instances of dying
cows too weak to stand still being milked. Hartley then

(13:51):
lays out his own proof that the milk these poorly
fed cows produce is bad. He had conducted a number
of experiments with it and found that it couldn't be
made into butter. And his words, quote, the nutrient properties
of milk we have shown consist chiefly of oil and albumin,
but so deficient is slop milk of these essential attributes

(14:14):
that it is incapable of producing butter or cheese. The
author proclaims, quote, there is not a more certain poison
in the form of food than this swill milk. And
his strongest case in terms of connecting swill milk to
public health is the statistics that he cites. In 1815, 33%

(14:34):
of the deaths in Boston were children younger than five
years old. By the end of the 1930s, that number
had grown to 43%. And he includes similar numbers for
New York and Philadelphia. And then he goes on to
name 500 dairies in New York that were actively producing
swill milk. You would think this information would be explosive,

(14:55):
but it took a long time for the issues identified
by Hartley to be investigated. Some of this was because
of Hartley's association with the temperance movement, which was not
popular in New York. There was a common perception that
Hartley was attacking distillery dairies in an effort to hurt
the distilleries themselves. This was all part of his temperance activism.

(15:17):
Swill milk wasn't studied by the New York Academy of
Medicine for another six years, and that study, of course,
found it nutritionally deficient. But the practice of producing swill
milk continued, and by the mid-1850s, an estimated two-thirds of
New York's $ 6 million annual spend on milk went to

(15:38):
swill milk. Slowly, though, the information in Hartley's book became
more and more commonly known. People started to question where
their milk was coming from and whether that was the
source of child deaths from malnutrition. Finally, in 1857, an
investigation was launched by city officials of Brooklyn. You'll recall

(15:58):
at this time Brooklyn and New York were kind of
two different entities. The resulting report was horrifying, detailing a
seemingly endless array of animal mistreatment and the handling of
the milk those animals produced. Those animals were crowded so
tightly together that they never moved, and their stalls were
rarely mucked out. Life expectancy for a cow at a

(16:19):
swill milk dairy was only about six months. This report,
which was documented through the official investigation, also had a
weight that skeptics may have found lacking in Hartley's anonymous
eyewitness accounts. The swill milk issue at this point was
at last getting very wide-scale exposure. While the report compiled

(16:39):
by Brooklyn authorities was really damning, it wasn't as though
everyone was reading municipal documents. The story really broke open
on the pages of Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper on May 8, 1858,
with the first installment in a series about swill milk.
In a 5,000-word expose, Leslie shared all of the grisly

(17:01):
details that had been part of the city's findings and
more details. Leslie said that he had been spurred into
investigation when a bottle of milk delivered to his door
had obviously contained, heads up, this is gross, pus floating
in the milk. And the details his reporters had uncovered
were accompanied with equally unsettling illustrations. These articles alerted the

(17:27):
public to the fact that even cows with bovine tuberculosis
were being used to produce the milk they might buy
from a vendor cart right on their own street. It
was reported that in some cases, meat from the sick
cows that had died in these distillery dairies had been
sold at markets in poor neighborhoods. And this milk was
being sold to the public with the assurance that it

(17:49):
was good and wholesome. Often, the bottles were labeled with
things like pure Orange County milk or some similar nomenclature
to suggest that this was wholesome milk from presumably healthy cows.
Keep in mind, too, that all of this predated routine pasteurization.
Louis Pasteur was working on his idea that there were
germs in play in the spoilage of liquids intended for

(18:12):
consumption as the swill milk scandal was playing out. But
commercial milk pasteurizers weren't even produced until the late 1880s.
And that meant that every minute that even wholesome milk
was on a street cart, it was inching towards spoilage
because it had never been sterilized. But swill milk started
out dirty and just got worse. And milk wasn't yet

(18:33):
being bottled at this time. It was often doled out
of pails into smaller pails, and that meant that it
was also on these carts open to debris falling in
it at any time. The images in Leslie's, which were drawings,
of course, included sick cows being held up with straps
so they could be milked, cows with sores on their

(18:53):
bodies from malnutrition and really filthy conditions. Leslie took out
ads and other newspapers to advertise the expose series on
swill milk. He sent his staff artists to try to
sneak into dairies and get material for their renderings. According
to Leslie's, quote, swill milk should be branded with the
word poison, just as narcotics are. So Frank Leslie was

(19:17):
genuinely exposing some truly gnarly things going on in these dairies, but...
he was also definitely doing so in a very sensationalist manner.
It's worth noting that he had worked with P.T. Barnum
on his publishing endeavors prior to going out on his
own as a publisher. Leslie not only reported the news,

(19:38):
but he did so in a way that he knew
would incense readers. And he also published illustrations in his
articles that stereotyped Irish immigrants who worked in the dairies.
So while his exposé series was raising important issues to
public awareness... It came with its own problems and in
some ways that led him to be discredited by people.

(19:58):
He was also very clearly on the side of the
temperance movement. In the third installment of the Leslie's Illustrated
story about swill milk, this was evident in writing that
mentions the evil of drink in the same sentence as
the dangers of swill milk. Quote, wherever large masses of
people congregate, thus creating a great demand for milk, A

(20:19):
distillery springs up at once, and while this furnishes the
fiery alcohol which makes the fathers and husbands drunkers, loafers,
and perhaps murderers, the filthy cow stables, which hang around
it like bloated parasites, dispense the poison that deals death
to the mothers and children. And the public did get

(20:40):
angry when they learned that they had been feeding their
babies milk that was purposely filled with things like chalk.
Because Frank Leslie had published the names and addresses of
dairies that were making swill milk and passing it off
as fresh milk from country dairies, many of those dairies
soon found angry mobs at their doors. For people and
reporters who had been talking about the obviously gross milk

(21:03):
for a while, it seemed like there was finally some hope.
A May 13, 1858 article titled How We Poison Our
Children that appeared in the New York Times read, quote,
Swill milk is no new thing in our city. Wherever
there is a distillery, there is a temptation to manufacture.

(21:23):
That particular write-up walked through all the investigations, the completely
gross things that had been found in milk, the stench
associated with the dairies that had become more and more
of a concern as cities grew and the neighborhoods were
built adjacent to the stables. There's a tone in this
piece that lauds Leslie as sort of a savior figure

(21:45):
and encourages every head of a household to examine their
own milk for contaminants, while the city manages punitive measures
for the people involved in producing swill milk. On May 22nd,
an article appeared in the New York Times titled Swill
Milk and Infant Mortality. The lead of the story stated
that the health commissioners agreed with Mayor Tiemann that the

(22:06):
problem of swill milk had to be addressed, and that they, quote,
promised to enter upon the performance of a long-neglected duty. Essentially, yes,
we should have been on top of this sooner, but
we're doing it now, okay? So the plan for the
health commission was to, quote, operate with energy and firmness
to purify the stables where the disgusting stuff is manufactured.

(22:29):
The article stated clearly that if the Board of Health
functioned at all, this should be something it addressed. And
it called for wide-sweeping condemnation and punishments to everyone in
the supply chain, stating, quote, we take it that the
city inspector is prepared to serve his three days' notice
upon the distillers who furnish the swill at wholesale, upon

(22:52):
the proprietors of the stables, and upon the milkmen who
hawk the purulent stuff at the doors of citizens that
they all and severally show cause before the board why
their work of death should not be discontinued. That same
article gets a jab in at politicians who feign to
be virtuous and care about their constituents, but then do

(23:12):
nothing once they're in office. And it entreats the administrators
involved to act not like that, but do proceed intelligently
and remember that the public health is at stake. The
writer also compares the milk crisis to the yellow fever
outbreak in 1856, so just a couple years prior, during
which the Board of Health convened daily and took action,

(23:32):
comparing the relatively low number of deaths from yellow fever
in the city to the 8,000 children they calculated had
died in 1857 from swill milk consumption. What came of
all this information being shared and the calls to action
in the press? We will get into that in just
a moment, but first, we will hear about the sponsors
that keep the show going. The New York City alderman

(24:03):
assigned to the Swillmilt case did inspect the dairies. A
team was formed made up of Tammany Hall politician and
newly elected alderman Michael Twomey, who led the effort, and
Alderman E. Harrison Reed and William Tucker, with two additional
investigators assigned. But the team gave the accused dairies a
heads-up that they were coming. There were reports of diseased

(24:27):
cows being moved in the night and replaced with healthy
ones brought in from the country farms, and also of
stables being hastily cleaned. There was also a five-day hearing
in which testimony was heard regarding the whole matter. In
an unusual turn, the defense was heard first. Edwin P. Smith,
who was the superintendent of the Johnson & Sons stable

(24:49):
on 16th Street, which was one of the dairy stables
called out in numerous articles about swill milk, was the
first to testify. He stated that there were about 500
cows in the stable, although there had been as many
as 800 earlier in the year. He said there had
been sick cows there at various times, but very few.

(25:09):
And he claimed that the facility was running as normal
as it always had, including before the expose, and that
his family always drank milk from the swill-fed cows and
were in fine health. The next witness was the stable's
feeding manager, James Atchison, who corroborated Smith's story. Yeah, I
never found a very clear reason why they went with

(25:30):
the defense first, other than the fact that all of
the accusations had kind of been leveled in the press
for a while before this started, so... For some reason,
they wanted to get first in. Atchison also added that
some of the cows who may have appeared sick were
just reacting to routine inoculations and that he had never
seen any of his animals lose their teeth from eating swill.

(25:52):
He gave hard numbers, whether they're true or not, regarding
the proportion of sick cows. He said that three of
the 500 they had at the time of the hearing
were sick. And he also stated that cows only very rarely, quote,
lost the use of their limbs from standing in the stable.
That is according to coverage of the hearing by the
New York Times. There were several other witnesses called on

(26:14):
behalf of the swill milk stables. A Dr. Wells, who
was Superintendent Smith's family doctor, testified that he cared for
the entire Smith family and had never seen any of
them ill from drinking swill milk. Animal keeper Lewis Thomas
testified that he had cared for a large number of
the Johnson dairy cows and that they did not milk

(26:35):
sick cows. Even a butcher who purchased cows from the
Johnson & Sons dairy testified that the stock was good
and the meat he had sold was high quality. On
the following day, the hearing was delayed. It was supposed
to start at 2 p.m., but the aldermen showed up late,
and then they went to a private office instead of
the hearing room. And eventually they emerged into the packed

(26:56):
city hall room and announced that Alderman Tucker was sick,
but that they were going to carry on. They called Dr. J.W.
Francis to testify. Dr. Francis, who had been studying the
issue of swill milk for years at that point and
had studied dairy practices both in the U.S. and abroad,
was very open in his opinion that swill milk was

(27:17):
terrible for children, that cows fed distillery swill were in
a continuous state of inflammation and He also said that
their livers and stomachs were diseased, their tails and hoofs
often fell off. That was something that had also been
shown in some of the illustrations that had appeared in
the press, and that they were certain to become ill
due to their diet. Twomey kept asking if Dr. Francis

(27:41):
had chemically analyzed any of the milk himself. And the
doctor replied that he had not, but had read many
reports on the matter and had treated children that had
become seriously ill from a diet of swill milk. Dr.
Francis also cited the fact the issue of swill milk's
danger had been well-known and well-documented in the medical community

(28:03):
for years already. Throughout the hearing, Alderman Twomey was hostile
to witnesses who testified against the Swilderys, starting with Dr. Francis,
who he interrupted repeatedly and accused of spreading rumors. The
alderman also let the Johnson Derry's medical expert question Dr. Francis.
The next doctor called was a Dr. Griscom, who reiterated

(28:26):
a lot of Dr. Francis's points. Yeah, if you read
through the word-by-word accounts printed in the paper, it sounds
like Twomey was just constantly going, are you done? Are
you done? Are you done? Like, while they were in
the middle of discussing things. He was not cool. A
farmer named Norman Van Nostrand testified that, yes, there were

(28:47):
cows that were so ill in the 16th Street dairy
that they had to be suspended from straps, but that
he was under the impression that their milk was given
to the hogs and never sold to the public. But
after those first two days, a lot of testimony backed
up all the stories of horrible animal treatment and adulterated milk.
Before the Saturday session of the hearings could even begin,

(29:09):
there was a lot of back and forth about whether
legal counsel should be on hand and whether the hearing
was considered a legal investigation. All present were assured that
it was not a legal matter, but merely an inquiry
by a committee of the Board of Health with a
narrow focus of determining whether swill milk was detrimental to health.

(29:31):
The next witness called was the city inspector, a Mr. Morton,
and his testimony was quite damning. He spoke of having
the stables watched years before and seeing diseased cows dressed
for market after they died there. He spoke of his
employees that were sent to watch the swill stables being
driven away by dairy employees. He also noted that he

(29:52):
had visited some of the stables to find cows being
kept in stalls too small to allow them to move
around at all or even to lie down. Health Warren
Louis J. Kirk also testified. He had performed post-mortem examinations
of some of the swill milk cows and described them
as being, quote, very much diseased. When asked about the

(30:14):
conditions of the stables, he stated, quote, it is not
just the place for a cow if you want to
keep her healthy. He was quickly dismissed. The rest of
the hearing played out in a similar way, with witnesses
who spoke well of the swill milk stables being asked
the same sorts of softball questions repeatedly, reiterating the health
of the animals and the suitability of the milk for consumption.

(30:37):
Witnesses who were critical of the swill milk dairies were
often cut off or interrupted or had their credibility undermined
by the committee. Frank Leslie became so frustrated that he
stopped attending midway through the five-day hearing. As the newspapers
reported on the daily events and testimonies, these accounts often
ran alongside expert opinions in the paper. The June 1st,

(31:02):
1858 New York Times included a statement that opened with,
now that the public mind is aroused to the horrible
evils of the slop milk trade and its destructive effects
on infant life, the time appears opportune to present the
testimony of physicians on the subject. For however indisputable and
conclusive may be the language of facts and experience in

(31:25):
reference to the evil, yet from its very nature the
demonstration might appear incomplete in some minds without the testimony
of medical men. That statement was signed by more than
four dozen doctors. They included death statistics of infants and
their belief that swill milk was contributing to many of
the infant fatalities in New York and Brooklyn. At the

(31:47):
end of the investigation, the aldermen took several weeks to
review the material, and then they issued their opinion. And
that was that swill milk was not dangerous to the
health of infants or adults. The only criticisms they made
were that the ventilation in the stables could be better
and that the stalls could be widened, but that they
saw healthy animals in good condition and well-kept facilities when

(32:11):
they visited. So we should mention that there was one
vocal dissenter on the city council, and that was Councilman
Charles H. Haswell, who was one of the investigators assigned
to the team. He wrote his own minority report as
the hearing's conclusion. He believed that the stables had been
cleaned only for the committee's visit and that swill milk was,

(32:31):
in fact, quote, injurious to health. One journalist called this
a manly and sensible minority report. That turn of phrase
made me laugh a little bit. That majority report of
the council caused outrage, of course. In the July 16th
edition of the New York Tribune, a commentary on the
situation started with, quote, Upon printing the second day's proceedings

(32:54):
of the Committee on the Swill Milk Business on the
3rd of June, we foresaw that the affair was to
be a mere farce, that the report would be made
as favorable as possible to the swill men. But when
the highest medical talent in the city came forward to
denounce the business, as little short of licensed infanticide, when
the health officers showed that the rotten carcasses of cows

(33:16):
were surreptitiously sold for human food, even in the best markets,
when citizens of high standing added their personal knowledge of
the filthy nature of the business and the offensive character
of the stables, when not a voice was raised in
favor of the nuisance, except from persons immediately interested therein,
we could not believe that could have induced any three

(33:38):
members of the committee to make a report so utterly
opposed to the evidence as that which they finally produced.
Frank Leslie's newspaper skewered the committee members on July 10th, writing, quote,
the committee of the Board of Health selected by Mayor Tymon,
having ended their labors, have handed in their report. Everyone
predicted the nature of the report, not, however, from the

(34:01):
character of the evidence brought forward, but from the character
of certain men composing the committee. They have subscribed their
names to a series of deliberate lies. They have distorted facts.
They have become false witnesses. At the same time being
corrupt judges, they have trifled with and periled the health
of the city. They have taken counsel with the owners

(34:23):
of the nuisance they were looked to abate. They have
betrayed the trust reposed in them by their constituents and
the Board of Health. They have proved themselves every way
immeasurably false, incapable, and corrupt. This article excludes Haswell as a, quote,
gentleman and consequently an honest man for his dissenting report.

(34:45):
In an effort to prove that Tuomi had possibly taken
a bribe to find in favor of the Swillmote producers...
An affidavit that had been sworn to Robert Stribbig, Commissioner
of Deeds, was printed in Leslie's. A person, not named
by the paper, although they said they would provide that
information to the appropriate authorities, said that they witnessed the
alderman visiting Bradish Johnson, the owner of the 16th Street Dairy,

(35:09):
on May 26th, two days before the committee visited the facility.
That same person also saw Twomey return to Johnson's home
later that evening, staying three hours from 7.30 to 10.30 p.m.
Michael Twomey, along with Reed and Tucker, were also featured
in a cartoon in Frank Leslie's Illustrated showing the three

(35:30):
men whitewashing sick cows, their pockets stuffed with money. Twomey
and Reed filed libel suits against Frank Leslie, although those
suits seemed to fizzle out, they were abandoned, maybe in
an effort on the parts of these aldermen to distance
themselves from this whole thing. And of course, this entire
episode had the effect of scaring a lot of people

(35:53):
away from all milk so that legitimate dairy farmers found
themselves worried about their futures. A write-up titled The Milk
Business of Long Island appeared in the Brooklyn Evening Star
on June 11, 1858, while the committee was still prepping
its report. And in the Evening Star, the case was
made that only about 10,000 of the 100,000 quarts of

(36:15):
milk consumed in Brooklyn each day came via railroad from
wholesome dairies. It described the farmers producing this wholesome milk
as quote, well-conditioned Quakers owning their own farms and conducting
their affairs with industry and conscientiousness. It was just a
matter of getting consumers on board with this higher quality

(36:36):
of milk, which could be gotten in much greater amounts,
according to this placed article. There was also a list
of the dairies of Long Island that had been certified
for their quality, touting that they had full grazing pastures
filled with healthy cows and that their farms were open
for anyone to visit for inspection. Michael Twomey ran for
Congress later that year, but was soundly beaten. He did

(37:00):
continue a political career, but the swill milk scandal stuck
to his reputation for decades. In 1878, 20 years after
the worst of the New York milk crisis, this was
still used to skewer him in the press. When he
ran for coroner that year, a long article came out
that rehashed his part in the events of 1858 and

(37:21):
reiterated the commonly held belief that corruption had been at
the center of the committee's handling of this matter. Although
the 1858 committee's findings were a disappointment to New York
and Brooklyn activists and residents who hoped that this swill
milk problem would be addressed, the issue did not end there.
Calls for reform to save the city's children continued to

(37:43):
be made of local and state government. Concurrently, issues of
adulterated milk and protests over it developed in other U.S.
cities as well. And as train transport and preservation science advanced,
it became easier to supply the growing needs of heavily
populated area with healthy milk from trustworthy dairies. On April 23, 1862,

(38:06):
an act to prevent the adulteration of milk and prevent
the traffic in impure and unwholesome milk was passed into
law in New York. This was one of many steps
toward the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act
of 1906 at the federal level. So, uh... That's pretty,

(38:28):
pretty gross. It's horrifying. Yeah. And I mean, a lot
of newspapers from that time were really sensationalized in how
they covered things. But even taking that into account, still horrifying. Yeah.
I mean, a lot of them were running like the
word for word testimonies from the hearing. And so it
becomes pretty obvious like how that was playing out and

(38:51):
how utterly horrible it was. Yeah. Yeah. Super gross. Thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd
like to send us a note, our email address is
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(39:14):
to your favorite shows.