Mr. HELVERING. I had in mind a statement by Gov. Lind for 5 or 10 minutes, as to what would be the position of those opposing the bill, so that the men who do not understand what that opposition to the bill would be, might be advised.

Mr. SMITH. All that Mr. Hamilton cares to do is to be permitted to either file his statement with the committee or to make a verbal statement. Of course he prefers to make his statement some time this atfernoon.

Mr. FORDNEY. I would a great deal rather hear him make his statemént orally.

Mr. SMITH. He is ready at the pleasure of the committee, but we do not want to interfere with Gov. Lind making any statement, because he is on the same subject.

The CHAIRMAN. We will hear from Gov. Lind now.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN LIND, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN., IN OPPOSITION TO H. R. NO. 9409.

Mr. LIND. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I do not propose to occupy to exceed five minutes, nor to attempt to make an_argument.

The CHAIRMAN. Take all the time you like, Governor.

Mr. LIND. I shall not take any time now beyond stating what we deem is of interest.

The first-class industry which, with my friend Rogers, I have the honor to represent, is the oldest and largest industry in our country. The millers of our Nation manufacture some six to eight hundred million bushels of wheat every year, feed all of our own people, and, besides, last year we exported $100,000,000 worth of wheat flour.

Until within my memory the corn miller and the wheat miller had dwelt in peace, and most of them do now. Each occupies a field. peculiarly his own, and ministers with equal benefit to the welfare of the Nation.

Some 25 years ago the chemical art was applied to the manufacturing of cereals. The glucose industry was established in the United States. Corn products for the first time in our history were made by chemical processes instead of by mechanical processes. There is no quarrel to-day between the mechanical corn miller and the wheat miller. When you have sifted all the evidence you will find that the only controversy here is between the corn-product companies, the glucose manufacturers, who produce cornstarch chemically, for which they want a new and extensive market as an adulterant of wheat flour. There is the only controversy. This last witness testified that he makes corn flour. As a matter of fact, there is no such term in our language. Corn flour has only been known-I mean the expression-very recently. The product of corn is corn meal. Corn flour was never known until after the introduction of this chemical process which I will refer to in a moment. Starch was used as an adulterant of wheat flour. They could not call it meal, because it was not meal. It was starch. So they called it corn flour-or flourine. The corn flour that this last witness referred to is usually a by-product. Corn-meal manufacturers make hominy, grits for the breweries, and in the process of making those products the dust is

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collected, which, while it is a corn product, can not be consistently called corn meal. It is a by-product. It is a corn dust, largely starch, but not wholly starch. It contains some of the protein. It contains some of the valuable food product of the corn. Of course, it is a very convenient medium for adulterating flour. It is almost white. He speaks of it as corn flour, but there is in reality no such thing as corn flour; and that is the objection that the Secretary of Agriculture made to this proposed amendment.

We say this. I am speaking, as you will see, for corn millers as well as for wheat millers.

The CHAIRMAN. Where did you get your information about the statement that the Secretary made about that?

Mr. L'&4. I got my information from the reading of the Secretary's letter, as I understood my friend Fordney.

The CHAIRMAN. You must not get too much information from Mr. Fordney.

Mr. LIND. He may have changed very badly since I used to be a colleague of his.

The CHAIRMAN. I think you will find that statement you just made is not correct, Mr. Lind.

Mr. LIND. I had hoped that the Secretary had made the statement, for if he had made it it would be true. Here is the situation. The gentlemen who go on the stand representing the glucose industry will explain to you, if they go into the facts fully, and I presume that they will, that this very large amount of corn which they testify to using, they first subject to a process of sulphurous acid and heating for a period of one or two days. That loosens the germ, loosens the shell, and those parts are separated, and, by further process of manufacture, the corn is manufactured into various products and this starch is deposited. That starch is, as they testified-we have the evidence here which may be adduced later-is almost pure starch, 98 or 99 per cent starch.

Mr. FORDNEY. Will you permit me to interrupt you just there? In the letter addressed to Mr. Rainey by the Secretary of Agriculture, dated January 20, 1916, it is stated:

In reply you are advised that it was not intended to keep off the market a compound consisting of wheat flour and pure starch, but to prevent the designation of such a mixture as flour.

Mr. LIND. Exactly. That is what I mean to say. Perhaps the members of the committee did not understand me. This pure starch is the article that is knocking at the doors for admission as an adulterant. It will not travel under its own name. It is carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and nothing else. The carbon, of course, is, in the form of carbohydrates, a useful food in conjunction with other foods; not sufficient to sustain life, because, as you will observe, they simply claim for it that it is an energizer. It is the fuel of the body. It is not like the wheat berry which has been man's food for 5,000 years where there has been any culture and civilization. The virtue of the wheat berry is the fact that it is meat and bread at the same time. It is approximately 70 per cent of starch, 12, 14, even as high as 16 per cent gluten. Starch is the fuel; gluten is the portion of our food that builds tissue and repairs the waste, builds and maintains the muscle. It carries phosphates and mineral constituents that

are necessary to build up and maintain the bones of the body. The greatest wars of the world have been fought for the possession of wheat lands. Japan had starch; it had rice, which is almost pure starch; but when she aspired to become a part of modern civilization she saw and felt the necessity of having a food product that would equalize her people physically, intellectually, and potentially with the white races, and she had to have wheat, and she was willing to fight and to die for it, and she got it in Manchuria.

They tell you that starch is a good food. Surely it is, but starch alone will not maintain life. You have got to have the staff of life. This is not a one-sided affair. The millers are only interested because they have a record which no other manufacturer in the United States has, for commercial probity, for avoiding adulterations at home and abroad. They want to protect and maintain the fair name that they have gained. The bakers are opposed to this because they want, when they buy flour, flour that will produce results, and if they have any mixing they want to do their own mixing. Some of us have a failing in that respect in other directions. [Laughter.]

I shall ask during the progress of this hearing one or two of the millers to give you a physical, ocular demonstration of the difference between wheat flour, of any make, produced anywhere in the Union, the best and the poorest, and the best starch that the glucose manufacturers can make. They will take a handful of flour, trickle a little stream of water over it and wash out the starch, and they will have left from 10 to 15 per cent of the original content in the form of gluten. You have already heard about gluten. It is albumen, the same substance essentially as the white of an egg. As I said a moment ago, it repairs the tissues, builds the muscles, and sustains the power and the activity of the body. Starch furnishes the fuel. Take an equal quantity of starch, wash it with the same little trickling stream, and it will all disappear, because there is no gluten in it. When you bear in mind that beefsteak has only 20 per cent of gluten and that wheat flour has from 10 to 14 per cent gluten, you can see how it approximates beefsteak in food value, so far as the muscle sustaining element is concerned.

Wheat

Just one word more. I have talked more than I intended. produces the only flour that furnishes the balanced bread food. The reason that they can not make bread from all-corn flour is because it will not raise. The only way you can produce any rising in corn flour or corn-flour mixtures at all, is by using chemicals. That is, alum, or baking powder, or something of that kind, and then you can only do it to a small extent, because the starch contains no binder. The gluten, being somewhat like the white of an egg, forms a sort of binder in the flour, so that when dough is developed either by the yeast plant or by a chemical, it keeps together and it rises up and up, and when it is subjected to heat in the oven it makes the gas expand more, and when baked makes the fine loaf of bread that we see on the table.

Mr. GREEN. I would like you to say something about the weight of the loaf, if you can.

Mr. LIND. Pardon me just a moment.

If you take out 20 per cent of the wheat flour of the batch for bread baking, and substitute 20 per cent of corn starch, you reduce

the gluten content by one-fifth. Instead of a gluten content of 10 or 12 per cent you reduce it to, say, 8 per cent or less.

Mr. GREEN. It affects the nutrition, of course?

Mr. LIND. It affects the nutrition. You can not perform efficient physical labor on starch. It is an impossibility. The less gluten there is the less nutrition value the bread has. For every particle of gluten that you remove from the loaf the less nutrition it has.

Mr. GREEN. If you are right as to that, then the consumer of the loaf gets less and the manufacturer of the mixed flour gets more? Mr. LIND. Certainly.

Mr. GREEN. If you are right about it.

Mr. LIND. We will demonstrate it, if our time permits, so conclusively that you will see there is but one side to it.

Just one word in regard to the weight of the loaf.

I will speak now of mixed flour, 80 per cent wheat flour and 20 per cent starch, because that is the only thing that is to be discussed to-day, substantially, and you will notice in the circular that has been sent around that they have been frank enough to say "cornstarch," and not corn flour." I venture to say, and it will be substantiated, that pure wheat flour will make four to five loaves more of bread than the mixed flour. The weight will be substantially the same. There will be this difference, that the nutritious value of the loaf of wheat bread will be infinitely greater than it will be in the mixedflour bread. It will be better digested.

The object of all baking is to drive off the surplus moisture in a measure and to convert the starch into dextrine. Dextrine is more amenable to the digestive juices of the stomach. If you have a loaf that is thoroughly raised, where the rising has been perfect, it is permeated with cavities which were occupied by gas at one time, throughout the loaf, and in the process of baking every particle of the loaf will be affected by the baking process, and the starch dextrinized, and thereby made available for the stomach as food. In the starchy loaf that process will not be so thorough. It can not be so thorough. I have occupied more time, Mr. Chairman, than I intended.

Mr. LONGWORTH. Before you take your seat, will you please explain what you think is the effect of this bill?

Mr. LIND. The effect of this bill will be to reinstate the most pernicious commercial experience that this country ever underwent. Our millers have since the time of Chaucer had the reputation of being good-natured and fairly honest, very good business men, and they prefer to do an honest business. But after this type of chemically prepared cornstarch was offered as an adulterant a few of the business men commenced to use it. It gave them an advantage. The competition in milling is very intense. The margin of profit on a barrel of flour does not exceed, possibly, 10 cents per barrel; often only 5, 6, 7, and 8 cents. This cornstarch is white, it is pretty; in fact, it will improve the looks of your flour, and you can sell it at full price. They tumbled to that. By and by others who saw their competitors gaining in business and prosperity subdued conscience, and they tumbled, until the American millers as a class were driven by force of necessity to be adulterators of the staff of life.

That was the condition that compelled the legislation now sought to be repealed. Congress listened; it was interested. The worst feature of the adulteration was that it ruined our sales of flour

abroad. So, as a first step, before they went to Congress with the legislation, all the self-respecting millers of the United States formed an antiadulteration association, issued labels which each one pasted on every package guaranteeing that it was not adulterated; and the foreigners, before they would take a single sack of American flour, demanded that the flour should bear the label of the American NonAdulteration Association of Millers. Clients of mine, who have been clients of mine for 20 years, yes, 40 years, had to guarantee that they had not adulterated their flour.

It is not alone the injury to the ignorant, the people who can not read, that we should guard against. It is the great menace to this, our greatest industry, which gives us in part our balance of trade abroad, that we should safeguard. You allow one shipment of American flour that is doped with glucose starch to go abroad and the product is doomed where it lands for years to come.

The foreigners make starch. They mix other food products with the American flour, but they want to do their own mixing; and the reason they want American flour at all is because it is so strong in gluten, so certain to stand up under chemical and other tests, that they can use such adulterants as they choose.

Mr. GREEN. Will you describe just how this bill would restore the former conditions?

Mr. LIND. In the first place, there is this difference between the pure-food law and this bill. The present law, operating as it does under the excise or taxing power of the Government, operates within every State, everywhere, of its own right, irrespective of any State legislation. The pure-food law operates only through interstate commerce. In a State, if there is no State law to the contrary, you can violate the pure-food act as much as you choose, so long as you do not send the product in interstate commerce. I think you all understand that, without my going any further.

Mr. GREEN. You mean, then, that it would be a feature of this bill which eliminates Government inspectorship at the factory itself? Mr. LIND. Well, yes. No reports would be required. There would be an inspector around and, if he saw an adulterated commodity in interstate commerce there might be a prosecution; that is all there is to it. But the present law, as it now stands, operates in the State, because it is under the exercise of the taxing power of the Government, which is equally operative in State as well as in interstate

commerce.

What these people want is to appropriate the name of flour for their starch. That is all they want. The American milling industry has built up a name for flour, that means wheat flour, the best in the world; and these people want to appropriate that word "flour" for their starch.

Mr. GREEN. How could they do that under this bill?

Mr. LIND. Because the bill authorizes them to use the name "mixed flour," although it is not mixed flour; it is a mixture of flour and starch.

The CHAIRMAN. Can they not use it now under the present mixedflour law?

Mr. LIND. They can and are doing it; but for the reasons I have explained, and as these millers have explained, that legislation has stopped the adulteration. It has not been found profitable.