Walter G. Campbell
7/16/1921 - 6/30/1924;
7/1/1927 - 4/30/1944
Walter G. Campbell was born in Knox County, Kentucky and attended
the University of Kentucky, where he received his B.A. in 1902.
In 1906, he secured a law degree from the University of Louisville
(1905) and began practicing law. He was retained by the Kentucky
Experiment Station to help enforce that state's food and drug law.
In 1907, Campbell took the first Civil Service examination for inspectors
to enforce the federal Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. Wiley personally
selected Campbell as the agency's Chief Inspector over others who
scored higher on the analyst exam because he discerned Campbell's
great skills as a leader. During the earliest days of enforcement
under the new law, Campbell determined to take an action against
rectified whiskey, which he deemed adulterated, and when the district
attorney did not know how to proceed, Campbell prepared the first
libel for seizure under the law. He also drafted the first inspectors'
manual. Because Wiley was enmeshed in other controversies, Campbell
was left to establish the Bureau's inspectional force on a sound
basis. During the first decade and a half under the law, some sixty
food products warranted special investigations, including milk,
eggs, vinegar, oysters, olive oil, and tomato products. Many outrageous
patent medicines were removed from the marketplace, and crises involving
canned salmon and ripe olives contaminated with a toxin causing
botulism were resolved.
Following Wiley's retirement, Campbell refused appointment as
chief of the bureau, believing that a chemist should hold this post
and arguing that law enforcement and chemical research did not belong
in the same organization. When the district system was established
in 1914 by Carl Alsberg, Campbell was appointed Chief of the Eastern
District. Campbell developed a project system for handling regulatory
work that enabled the Bureau to prioritize the many demands on its
meager resources. Three years later, Campbell was asked to become
Assistant Chief under Alsberg. Alsberg and Browne, primarily interested
in scientific research, gave Campbell wide authority to direct enforcement
operations. In 1927, when Browne moved to the Bureau of Chemistry
and Soils, Campbell became Chief of the Food, Drug, and Insecticide
Administration. He also continued as director of regulatory work
for the Department of Agriculture from 1923-1933. In 1930, the FDIA
became the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and in 1940 was transferred
from Agriculture to the Federal Security Agency. Campbell then became
Commissioner of Food and Drugs.
Campbell was considered a consummate administrator who "commanded
the respect of all who knew him." Campbell recognized inadequacies
in the 1906 law from the beginning of his career in the Bureau of
Chemistry, and during the 1920s fought off many attempts to weaken
it further. With the arrival of the New Deal, Campbell directed
the strategy in the five year campaign for a more adequate statute,
leading to the ultimate passage of the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic
Act. Campbell's greatest disappointment in the new law was the provision
granting jurisdiction over food and drug advertising and labeling
to the Federal Trade Commission. Nonetheless, the new law was a
vast improvement over the outdated Wiley Act, and as one observer
expressed it, "Mr. Campbell was to the Federal Food, Drug,
and Cosmetic Act of 1938 what Dr. Wiley was to the 1906 law."
He worked closely with Congress and was an especially effective
committee witness, presenting convincing testimony that finally
resulted in a better consumer protection law.
Campbell devised enforcement plans under the new law and trained
the three commissioners who followed him. Upon announcing his retirement,
Business Week noted that Campbell's greatest achievement
seemed to be "the amount of public protection he could squeeze
out of the small appropriations which Congress gave him." Agency
appropriations had stalled at about two million dollars annually.
Although Campbell himself retired in 1944, it can be said with accuracy
that it was Campbell's concepts which governed federal regulation
under food and drug statutes from 1906 to 1966.