Rethinking Our Relationship to Nature, 1920–1959 95
DOCUMENT 79: Arthur Kallet and F. J. Schlink on the Dangers of
Manufactured Products (1932)One of the early alarmist books about the dangers of commercial products, Arthur Kallet and F.J. Schlink’s
100,000,000 Guinea Pigs created a public outcry that led to the passage of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act
of 1938 and resulted in major changes in food and drug policies.In the magazines, in the newspapers, over the
radio, a terrific verbal barrage has been laid down
on a hundred million Americans, first, to set in
motion a host of fears about their health, their
stomachs, their bowels, their teeth, their throats,
their looks; second, to persuade them that only
be eating, drinking, gargling, brushing, or smear-
ing with Smith’s Whole Vitamin Breakfast Food,
Jones’ Yeast Cubes, Blue Giant Apples, Prussian
Salts, Listroboris Mouthwash, Grandpa’s Wonder
Toothpaste, and a thousand and one other foods,
drinks, gargles and pastes, can they either post-
pone the onset of disease, of social ostracism, of
business failure, or recover from ailments, physi-
cal or social, already contracted.
If these foods and medicines were—to most
of the people who use them—merely worth-
less; if there were no other charge to be made
than that the manufacturers’, sales managers’,
and advertising agents’ claims for them were
false, [100,000,000 Guinea Pigs] would not have
been written. But many of them, including some
of the most widely advertised and sold, are not
only worthless, but are actually dangerous. That
All-Bran you eat every morning—do you know
that it may cause serious and perhaps irreparable
intestinal trouble? That big, juicy apple you have at
lunch—do you know that indifferent Government
officials let it come to your table coated with arse-
nic, one of the deadliest of poisons? The Pebeco
Toothpaste with which you brush your teeth twice
every day—do you know that a tube of it contains
enough poison, if eaten, to kill three people; that,
in fact a German army officer committed suicide
by eating a tubeful of this particular tooth paste?
The Bromo-Seltzer that you take for headaches—
do you know that it contains a poisonous drug
which has been responsible for many deaths and,
the American Medical Association says, at least
one case of sexual impotence?
Using the feeble and ineffective pure food and
drug laws as a smoke-screen, the food and drug
industries have been systematically bombarding
us with falsehoods about the purity, healthful-
ness, and safety of their products, while they have
been making profits by experimenting on us with
poisons, irritants, harmful chemical preservatives,
and dangerous drugs.... [W]e consumers are being forced into the
role of laboratory guinea pigs through huge loop-
holes in obviously weak and ineffective laws.
Source: Arthur Kallet and F. J. Schlink 100,000,000 Guinea
Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics
(New York: Vanguard Press, 1932), pp. 3-4.
DOCUMENT 80: Luther Standing Bear on Native Americans and the
Rights of Other Living Things (1933)A Sioux chieftain and staunch advocate of Native American rights, Luther Standing Bear offers us a view of Native
Americans as conservationists. Although his statement that the Indian “destroyed nothing” is not completely
accurate [see, for example, Document 27], Standing Bear’s analysis of the Indians’ perception of their relationship
to other living things vividly depicts a mind-set at variance with the ideas of most other Americans of his time.
The Indian was a natural conservationist.
He destroyed nothing, great or small. Destruc-
tion was not a part of Indian thought and action;
if it had been, and had the man been the ruthless
savage he has been accredited with being, he
would have long ago preceded the European in
the labor of destroying the natural life of this
continent. The Indian was frugal in the midst