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IN THE LATE summer of 1909, a dairy farmer near Portland started getting worried. His barn cats kept dying, and after a few days he’d figured out what was killing them: The milk from his cows.
This whole time, of course, he’d been shipping gallons of the same milk off to Portland to be fed to babies and young children.
So he went to the state dairy and food commissioner and asked what he should do.
The commissioner’s advice, in essence, was, “It’s just tuberculosis; don’t worry about it.”
A Hillcrest Jersey Stock Farm delivery truck parked on the side of a
street in a residential neighborhood in the early 1920s, some time after
Portland’s milk supply had become among the cleanest and safest in
the world. (Image: UO Special Collections)
“Tuberculosis milk may kill cats,” the commish reassured the worried farmer, “but it will fatten babies.”
That didn’t sit right with the dairy man, so he stopped by the offices of the Portland Journal on his way home.
And that was how the great Portland “pure milk crusade” was launched.
Investigation starts with a fistfight
Two Journal reporters immediately set out for the offices of the dairy commissioner to learn the truth. When they got there, the older of the two, John Wilson, set the tone for the interview by calling the commissioner a “baby killer.”
The commissioner backpedaled, explained, denied, and finally demanded to know what business of the newspaper’s it was, anyway.
“You’re a liar,” Wilson shot back, and somebody threw a punch, and the fight was on. The other reporter — Marshall Dana, who was at the time brand-new on the job — had to physically separate the two before somebody got hurt.
The next day, Wilson quit his job at the newspaper. It’s not clear whether this was prompted by the scene in the commissioner’s office; getting into a fistfight with an interviewee would get a reporter canned in a heartbeat today, but 100 years ago the life of a newspaper guy was somewhat less circumscribed.
In any case, editor Jack Travis told Marshall Dana to get on the story — and get on it he did.
Cub reporter gets an eyeful
The young reporter embarked on a tour of the dairy farms of northwest Oregon, and it was quite an eye-opener.
“Out on the Columbia Slough road there was a dairy operated by a dairyman named Mike,” Dana wrote, 40 years later, in his book. “The door of the dairy barn stood open. When (we) got a little closer the disturbed flies flew up in a cloud. In front of the barn lay a dead calf. Evidently it had been there quite a while.”
The condition of the cows at the farm left little doubt in Dana’s mind as to why the calf had died. There was filth everywhere. One of the dairy cows, he could see, had an open and oozing sore on its udder in a spot that would almost certainly have contaminated milk from that cow during milking.
Mike freely admitted he had a bad reputation with the state regulators — but that wasn’t because of the filth.
“I get arrested for puttin’ water in the milk,” he told Dana cheerfully. “I pay a fine. Then I put enough more water in the milk to pay the fine.”
But then, given the apparent quality of this farmer’s milk, watering it down might have saved someone’s life.
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A lantern slide from around the turn of the last century, depicting an
unidentified “modern dairy farm.” (Image: OSU Archives)
Garbage and milk together
Dana found another dairy on Canyon Road at which the owner made a practice of bringing his milk to town in big cans and then, after delivering the milk, using the empty cans to transport garbage back to his farm, where presumably he fed it to pigs or something like that. After emptying the garbage out of his milk cans, he’d rinse them out, fill them back up with milk and repeat the process. Dana learned that one of this fellow’s customers over in east Portland had given some of this milk to a child, who subsequently died in convulsions — an event that may have been entirely unrelated to the garbage-milk, but probably wasn’t.
“BAD MILK KILLS PORTLAND BABIES. Details at 11.”
Dana soon learned that Portland had one of the highest rates of baby deaths from gastrointestinal complaints — a statistic that was clearly related to its cavalier attitude toward its milk supply.
Dana filed story after story, and they ran under banner headlines that shouted from the top of Page One. The paper kicked off the campaign with a massive banner headline, in red type, that read, “BAD MILK KILLS PORTLAND BABIES,” and while they didn’t all rise to that level of drama and impact, they remained on Page One for weeks and they had a considerable impact. Meanwhile, editorial writers fulminated and denounced the various players who were, as they saw it, conspiring to kill babies for a fatter profit.
The public exploded with outrage.
Portland citizens spring into action
Civic and social clubs adopted resolutions. The Chamber of Commerce weighed in on the issue, pointing out that bad milk was bad for business — nobody wants to make a home and grow a business in a town where babies die.
City and state officials responded to the pressure immediately, too. In fact, support came from every quarter save the dairy farmers — who, naturally, felt a bit singled out.
Although he had a job to do, Dana was sympathetic. “There was so much censure and condemnation that it was no longer respectable to be a dairyman,” he wrote. “The Page-One stories and the big headlines hit the good dairymen as well as the bad.”
Dairy farmers rally to solve problem
Among the dairy farmers, there was a good deal of resentment at the prospect of government interference with their business — at first. They came around quickly, though, when they realized what was really going on: The government was stepping in to protect the good farmers from the bad ones — to keep them from having to compete with men who undercut their prices by taking dangerous shortcuts.
By the following year, the statistical situation was completely turned around, and Portland’s milk supply was among the safest in the country.
That still didn’t do reporter Marshall Dana much good, though. It would be years before he could touch a drop of milk again without retching.
(Sources: Dana, Marshall N. Newspaper Story: Fifty Years of the Oregon Journal, 1902-1952. Portland: Binfords, 1951; Klooster, Karl. Round the Roses II (collection of Karl’s columns from This Week magazine). Portland: Klooster Promotions, 1992)
