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MEMORANDUM REGARDING THE RAINEY MIXED-FLOUR BILL (H. R. 9409). Present law (internal-revenue act of June 13, 1898, No. 35-40, amended March 2, 1901, April 12, 1902).-Provides for a practically prohibitive internal-revenue tax on "mixed flour," and for a printed statement of ingredients and their percentages on the containers.

Proposed law (H. R. 9409).-Provides for a repeal of the tax. Retains the printed statement of the ingredients and percentages on the containers.

All regulations of the business removed except as is covered by the pure food and drugs act, applying to flour.

Reason for enactment of present law.-The present law was enacted because of intolerable conditions in the flour business of the country growing out of extensive adulteration of wheat flour with corn flour and other by-products of cornstarch manufacture, principally by mills in the Middle West and South, whose clientele was large in the Southern States.

The evil grew to such proportions that American flour was discredited in foreign markets, and large buyers in the eastern markets could not safely op erate without first subjecting offerings of flour to analytical tests for the pres ence of corn products.

Reason for the proposed repeal.-There has been no change in the flour business anywhere in the world creating a demand for wheat flour adulterated with corn. The only possible motive for the proposed repeal of the present law is that corn products manufacturers may dispose of their by-products of corn flour at a higher price than is possible except when masking as wheat flour. There are no restrictions at present on the sale of corn flour or any other entire corn product. There are no restrictions imposed on any baker to prevent his buying corn flour and mixing it with wheat flour in his own bakery. The markets of the world are open to the unrestricted sale of corn flour, sold honestly as such.

The proposed repeal of the present law is for no other purpose than to make a market for corn flour as an adulterant of wheat flour.

Fallacy of the proposed protection of consumers by retaining the requirement for a printed statement of ingredients and percentages on the containers.— One of the largest and most profitable markets for adulterated flour before the enactment of the present law was among the illiterate people of the South, who are very large consumers of flour. The printed statement of contents on the package would be no protection to such consumers as many of them can not read. A very large proportion of the educated consumers of flour, particularly in households, would not read the statement on the package of flour, either from lack of opportunity or lack of interest. They should no less, however, be protected from imposition. Moreover, a great deal of flour is not sold in its original container but undergoes repacking somewhere between miller and consumer. How could the repetition of the statement of contents on the original package be certainly enforced on the new package?

Reasons for opposing the proposed Raincy bill (H. R. 9409).—All flour milling organizations are opposed to it.

All honest individual millers are opposed to it.

All bakers are opposed to it.

All consumers who know anything about it are opposed to it.

It is manifestly in the interest solely of a few manufacturers of corn proucts, to whom all legitimate markets are already open, but who seek to corrupt the flour trade by promoting adulteration of wheat flour.

If the present law was a necessity in 1898, its maintenance is equally necessary now, as there has been no change in underlying conditions except in the widening of the flour markets, affording increased opportunities for disposal of an adulterated product.

It aims to nullify, so far as the most important food product in the world is concerned, the present efforts for enforcing and maintaining by Federal statute and supervision an inviolable standard of purity.

The effect of its passage would be to discredit and bring under suspicion American flour in every market in the world.

It will open the door wide to adulteration and bring about a competition between a pure and an adulterated product, which will inevitably coerce many manufacturers into an unwilling participation in marketing the adulterated product until the same intolerable conditions are reached which compelled the enactment of the present law.

Mr. FORDNEY. You stated a few minutes ago that 300 loaves of bread could be made from a barrel of flour.

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. Yes, sir; 301.

Mr. FORDNEY. Did you have reference to a loaf of 16 ounces?
Mr. FAIRCLOTH. Sixteen ounces.

Mr. FORDNEY. Three hundred loaves of bread from 196 pounds of flour, 1-pound loaves, would contain 10.45 ounces of flour, and the balance is moisture?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. About that. It is not all moisture. We use milk and sugar.

Mr. FORDNEY. Potatoes?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. No; we use shortening, sugar, malt, and yeast. Some use lard. All of those are higher priced than flour.

Mr. FORDNEY. The bakeshop men use potatoes, and the housewife dces, too?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. I imagine they do. But the making of the bread, the 12-ounce leaf that the gentleman told you about, that might apply where they live; but we have baked all through this war in Europe, you understand, all through it, and right up to the present time, and we were making a 14-ounce loaf of bread and sending it out, you understand, to the trade when the war broke out, and we are making it yet, and we have made it every day since, and we have not increased the price of bread to anybody a single sou; and if there was mixed corn flour in there, naturally it would be heavy flour, and I would feel I was perfectly justified in sticking to that little price of 33 cents that we get for that loaf of bread; and I don't care how much corn they have in it, we have not robbed them. We have never raised the price at all, and did not reduce the weight of it during all this trouble and every minute of the time, and we lost a whole lot of money, and I believe it is coming to me to get a good price for it; I don't care what they make it of.

Mr. MOORE. Your discussion in opposition to the bill is largely ethical.

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. No, sir; it is right down to a concrete business basis.

Mr. MOORE. I know it is; but you are objecting to mixing flourMr. FAIRCLOTH (interposing). I do not think it is on the level. Mr. MOORE. Is this a fair statement, Mr. Faircloth, as to the conditions: If high-grade flour is used as a basis, it is not so much a question of how much sugar, flour, and other ingredients are used as it is how they are used?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. Well, I am not a baker at all; but we bake to a formula. We have a formula, and we stick to it as closely as we can, our conditions being taken into consideration, you understand. Mr. MOORE. But it is all in the baking of the bread?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. It is all in knowing how to work it up and have all the proper machines. We have all that, and that is all done by machinery.

Mr. MOORE. Would there be any advantage in the making of bread, mixing cornstarch with it, if you had some process different from that existing to-day?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. I do not know what that process could be. I do not think you could improve wheat bread with a corn product at any time.

Mr. FORDNEY. Really it adulterates the flour, does it not?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. That is my opinion. There have been some criticisms by the chairman for speaking of it as an adulteration; but that is what I would call it.

Mr. FORDNEY. Anything that lessens the value is adulteration, is it not?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. I should think so. I do not believe that corn flour has the same food value for a human being that wheat flour has.

Mr. DIXON. Do you wholesale your bread to merchants around the State or ship it away?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. Yes, sir; we do both of those.

Mr. DIXON. You do not retail it?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. We have two little stores in town, but they sell more pastry than bread.

Mr. DIXON. Do you mean that you sell it at 34 cents per loaf? Mr. FAIRCLOTH. 3.7 cents a loaf. We sell 28 loaves of bread for a dollar.

Mr. DIXON. That is wholesale?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. Yes, sir.

Mr. DIXON. That is all.

Mr. LANNEN. Mr. Chairman, may I ask the witness a question? Mr. RAINEY. Yes, sir.

Mr. LANNEN. You said that there was some corn flour on the market in those days that you were talking about containing about 90 per cent corn flour?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. No; I did not say they were corn flours. I said they were flours that were represented to be flours.

Mr. LANNEN. You said in your opinion that there was as much as 90 per cent corn flour.

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. Yes; I said that.

Mr. LANNEN. Don't you know that you could not make bread out of that much corn flour?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. They did not make it. That is the trouble with it. Mr. LANNEN. What did they do with it?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. I don't know. They brought it back and reblended it and put some more flour in it, I suppose, and let it go out again. There was one man told me-and he is a miller in Chattanooga-when they were talking at a meeting one day about how well they had succeeded with this in the South, he said, "I have never been able to get more than 65 per cent dope in it." His flour was such that he had not been able to get that in satisfactorily. He is a big miller, and that went out as wheat flour. That is a fine wheat flour, isn't it-65 per cent corn?

Mr. LONGWORTH. But this would not be called wheat flour.

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. No: this would not be called wheat flour, but the result would be the same.

Mr. LANNEN. Did you say, Mr. Faircloth, that you know that this stamp on mixed flour is looked upon with suspicion?

Mr. FAIRCLOTH. I believe in what you say, that there is odium attached to it when there is a stamp attached to it, but it would not be there if it was not affiliated with the wheat. Corn is a good thing by itself.

Mr. LANNEN. Do you believe it retards the use of mixed flour? Mr. FAIRCLOTH. I think the stamp does; yes. I know it does.

Mr. FORDNEY. It wants to get into society and wear better clothes? Mr. FAIRLOTH. It is like two little boys when the circus came to town. They wanted to go to the circus and didn't have any money. It was in the days when hoopskirts were the fashion, and a kindly disposed woman came along, and they said, "Won't you help us get in, madam?" She said, "I'll tell you what to do, you slip right in under my skirts," and they did so, and she toddled along in there, you know, and when she got in there she let them out. That is what they want to do, get under Miss Wheat's skirts, and get in decent society, and see the circus.

Is that all, Mr. Chairman?

Mr. RAINEY. Yes.

Mr. LIND. I will call Mr. Plant, of St. Louis. I desire to call quite a number of these men that have been here a long time, and I think it will really expedite matters if they are permitted to make their statement in the first instance without interruption, and then subject themselves to such questions as occur to any of the gentlemen present.

Mr. RAINEY. The committee agrees with that proposition, and Mr. Plant will be permitted to proceed until he gets through without interruption, and then questions will be asked by the committee or counsel.

STATEMENT OF MR. SAMUEL PLANT, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE GEORGE P. PLANT MILLING CO., 501 CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, ST. LOUIS, MO.

Mr. PLANT. My name is Samuel Plant. I come from St. Louis, Mo. My address is 501 Chamber of Commerce.

I am vice president of the George P. Plant Milling Co., of St. Louis, and I represent the St. Louis Millers' Club, which is an organization composed of about 25 or 30 millers in and around St. Louis, part of them in Missouri and part of them in Illinois.

The mills in the St. Louis Millers' Club have a capacity of, I should say, about 20.000 barrels of flour a day, and they grind, or have a capacity for grinding, during the year the crop season-I should say, between 20,000,000 and 25,000,000 bushels of wheat.

This question was discussed in a meeting of the St. Louis Millers' Club, and the following resolution was passed expressing their views on the subject:

At the meeting of the St. Louis Millers' Club held October 29, at the Mercantile Club, on which occasion the Hon. Lawrence Y. Sherman, United States Senator from Illinois, was the guest, the following resolution was presented by Samuel Plant, and was unanimously adopted:

Be it moved, That the St. Louis Millers' Club go on record as opposed to any change or modification in or repeal of the mixed-flour law, as passed by Congress in 1898.

Since that meeting our millers' club had another meeting to discuss this question of the repeal of the mixed-flour law, and at this last meeting two millers were selected from the membership of the club to appear here before your committee-Mr. Kauffman and myself, I being the alternate. Mr. Kauffman was not able to be here on account of his father's serious illness, and I came to present the St. Louis Millers' Club's views to the committee.

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Speaking for the millers of St. Louis, I am authorized to say that they are unanimously opposed to all of the provisions of H. Ř. No. 9409. This bill strikes at the very heart of and the long-established integrity of the great milling industry of this country.

We millers are opposed to any authority that permits the mixing of any products of other grains or any other material with the pure wheat product. Flour has always been considered the pure product of wheat, and the permission of the mixing of the meals of any other grains with flour and allowing the resultant product to be called flour, even with a qualifying adjective, is a deception and is misleading to the public.

Where two or more pure products are mixed together and offered to the public for sale, the mixture should not carry the name of any one of the pure ingredients used, but the laws should provide that these mixed products bear a different and distinctive name from any of the materials used in the mixture, so that the buyer may be fully protected in the purchase of them. When the word "flour appears on the package let the contents be the pure product of wheat. This measure seeks to place the control of the mixed or adulterated product in the hands of the Agricultural Department under the present pure-food laws. The pure-food law is a good law, and the administration of it is working out well, but the work is great; in fact. so great that it can not all be accomplished, and for this reason we millers believe that control of the mixed products of grains be left with the internal-revenue department, as provided in the present law, that now controls the situation, by policing the mixed product at its source, and consequently regulates the sale in any State or any part of these United States. The pure-food law would only allow control in interstate trade, which would permit untold and unfair competition when the product was manufactured and sold in the same State, and would cause the word "flour" when coupled with grain products to be only a trade byword and not a distinctive name for the pure product of wheat.

The present law has provided relief for the consuming public in case the selling price of wheat should for a time be relatively higher than other grains by excluding control of the mixed product when it is composed of more than 50 per cent of other grains than wheat.

The present law has worked out well. It has accomplished its purpose that is, to maintain the integrity of the barrel of flour and make it pure.

There is no request or suggestion for a change in the laws excepting from those who want to merchandise on another man's longestablished and inherent livelihood. Let these others establish their wares commercially, and then pass laws to protect them, but don't tear down a completed and serviceable structure and replace it with one that will prove uninhabitable in the end, for the proposed law will ruin the legitimate industry and force many wheat millers to the adulteration of their product.

The ultimate purpose of this bill suggests a rather incongruous situation to the miller. It seeks to repeal a law which has undoubtedly proven satisfactory in the purpose for which it was passed and has stopped the adulteration of flour and seeks to amend another statute by a qualifying clause that defeats the very purpose for which this other statute was enacted and practically licenses the

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