Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T07:33:51.465Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Policy Tragedy and the Emergence of Regulation: The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2007

Daniel Carpenter
Affiliation:
Department of GovernmentHarvard University
Gisela Sin
Affiliation:
Department of Political ScienceUniversity of Illinois

Extract

It is now a commonplace assertion among scholars of regulation to say that new regulatory statutes follow “crises,” “tragedies,” or “scandals.” The content and form of these critical events varies considerably. They include acts of journalism or research such as the publication of the Nader Report (which purportedly led to new federal automobile safety regulations) or Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (which eased the path for the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906). They include instantaneous disasters such as the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India, as well as slowly materializing epidemics like the thousands of horrific birth defects that resulted from widespread use of the sedative thalidomide in Europe and Australia in the late 1950s. As Lawrence Rothenberg describes this argument, it amounts to a meta-narrative of the origins of regulation, an alternative to capture theory. In the tragedy narrative of regulation, “public opinion becomes energized by some dramatic event or condition illustrating the pitfalls of a market's unobstructed operation; the outcry spurs elected officials to promulgate governmental regulation.” This story, as he notes, is at least as old as the work of Marver Bernstein and Anthony Downs.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY: SELECTED PRIMARY SOURCE

Records of the American Civil Liberties Union, Seeley Mudd Special Collections Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.

Records of the American Medical Association Council on Drugs, Archives of the American Medical Association, Chicago, Illinois.

Royal Copeland Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Records of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives, RG 233, National Archives I

Records of the Committee on Manufactures, U.S. Senate, RG 46, National Archives I

Records of the Committee on Commerce, U.S. Senate, RG 46, National Archives I

Morris Fishbein Papers, University of Chicago Archives and Special Collections Library, Chicago, Illinois.

Records of the Food and Drug Administration, RG 88, National Archives II

Historical Health Fraud and Alternative Medicine Collection, Archives of the American Medical Association, Chicago, Illinois.

Mayo Authors Publications Series, Mayo Foundation History of Medicine Library, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota

Records of the Secretary of Agriculture, RG 16, National Archives II

Harvey Washington Wiley Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Food, Drugs and Cosmetics. Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, 73rd Congress, Second Session, on S. 1944. 7–8 December 1933. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office).

Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics. Hearings before the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, 73rd Congress, Second Session, on S. 2800. 27 February–3 March 1934. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office).

Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics. Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, 74th Congress, First Session, on S. 5. March 2, 8, and 9, 1935. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office).

Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics. Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, United States House of Representatives, 74rh Congress, First Session, on H.R. 6906, H.R. 8805, H.R. 8941, and S. 5. 22, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31 July, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 August 1935. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office).