By Sharon Oliver
Contributing Writer
REGION – No Thanksgiving, and for some, Christmas dinner is complete without a scoop of cranberry sauce. Of course, a tall refreshing glass of cranberry juice or a slice of cranberry tart tastes good all year-long but in 1959, Americans turned their noses on the beloved holiday fruit thanks to one government bureaucrat.
Government warning
Just a few weeks before Thanksgiving, a warning was issued stating cranberries could be contaminated by a chemical weed killer, amino triazole, which caused cancer in the thyroids of rats. On November 9, 1959, “Black Monday” in cranberry history, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Arthur Flemming held a press conference in Washington, D.C. and said, “The Food and Drug Administration today urged that no further sales be made of cranberries and cranberry products produced in Washington and Oregon in 1958 and 1959.” In 1959, cancer amounted to a death sentence.
The news could not come at a worse time for cranberry growers, especially in Massachusetts where the berries thrived in the bogs, peatlands and sandy soil in the southeastern part of the state, Cape Cod and Nantucket. Black Monday is the time when growers are in the midst of harvesting, sorting and warehousing more than half of their crop. As a result of the announcement, processing was halted because supermarket chains canceled their orders.
By 1959, some of these bogs had been in families for centuries and Massachusetts growers cultivated 12,800 acres of cranberry bogs, 60 percent of the national total. Two Wareham packers were forced to shut down.
Nationwide panic
People across the nation panicked. However, there were those in the industry who decided to fight back. Ambrose Stevens, general manager of the Ocean Spray cooperative in Plymouth County stated in a press release that cranberries were “pure and wholesome and untainted by any dangerous substance.” Plymouth radio station WPLM held a party for 5,000 children and served cranberry juice.
Oddly enough, the industry had sort of a forewarning in 1957 when the FDA seized three million pounds of contaminated cranberries in Oregon and the agency did not test the fruit in 1958 because they felt growers knew to use the weed killer only after the cranberry harvest. The Ocean Spray cooperative had warned of the dangers of their zero-tolerance policy, knowing the industry could not afford even one violation and sent a letter to its members banning the use of amino triazole in cranberry bogs on September 18, 1959.
Two presidential candidates took the cranberry industry’s side. U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts drank a full glass of cranberry juice in front of reporters and asked for more. Vice President Richard Nixon downed four helpings of cranberry sauce at a campaign stop in Wisconsin.
First Lady Mamie Eisenhower claimed she had served cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, but her story came into question when actress Rosalind Russell, a guest at the presidential table, let slip that she had actually been served applesauce instead of the tainted relish.
Plummeting sales
The damage has now been done. Cranberry sales fell to 20 percent of normal and government assistance was needed to maintain the industry until things settled down. In the spring of 1960, Ocean Spray announced it would lay off a third of its workers due to government interference. One thing of note is that Flemming failed to mention that a person would have to eat 15,000 pounds of cranberries each day for several years to get cancer, which scientists testified about before Congress.
In the aftermath of the cranberry scare, some newspaper editorials lauded Arthur Flemming as candidate for vice president while others asked President Eisenhower to fire him. The government ultimately helped the cranberry industry recover and indemnified growers for their losses to the tune of $10 million.
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