By Morris Bealle
Summary: Morris Bealle’s newsletter American Capsule News reports on the conviction, fine, and jailing of the great American naturalist Victor Earl Irons for the crime of informing the American people of what was happening to their food supply. “It is obvious that Mr. Irons has committed two ‘unpardonable sins’,” writes Bealle. “The first is distributing vitamins that keep people well and away from drug stores. The second is exposing some of the crimes of the Food and Drug Administration who, as Dr. [Harvey] Wiley said, are lynching, raping and murdering the laws passed by Congress to protect the public from poisoned and adulterated foods.” Irons, like his friend Dr. Royal Lee, warned the public of the depletion of America’s soil, the refining and processing of the basic food supply, and the cause-and effect-relationship of these practices to health. In the case, the FDA marched out five “health authorities” from Harvard, including the infamous Dr. Frederick Stare, to testify to the “fraudulent” nature of Irons’s statements. Irons was convicted on federal charges and served a year in jail. As this report reveals, those pioneers at the vanguard of nutritional knowledge paid dearly for the right to speak out about what was happening to America’s food supply, health, and freedom. From American Capsule News, 1956. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.
The Irons Frame-up (Its Whys and Wherefores)
From American Capsule News, October 27, 1956
V. Earl Irons, New England’s leading distributor of natural vitamins, is the latest victim of a frame-up by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA] and a gullible but none-too-bright federal judge. Mr. Irons was convicted by a jury of morons in Boston federal court two weeks ago. Last Monday he was sentenced to a year in jail. His company was fined $6,000.
These frame-ups are always with the end in view of putting the victim out of business, [thus] reducing the sale of natural vitamins so that the profits of the Drug Trust may not suffer so much. Natural vitamins help keep people well and away from drugstores.
[In the end] Mr. Irons was confronted with an offer to “recommend” a suspended sentence if he would go out of business. He declined and will appeal the whole un-American proceeding to the U.S. Court of Appeals. When this happens, Judge Ford is going to look very bad indeed for his deliberate act in prejudicing the jury during an off-the-record conference.[spacer height=”20px”]Your editor sat in on a part of the trial. He was not surprised when the judge—as is usual in cases where the Food and Drug Banditti are prosecuting someone for benefit of the Drug Trust—reversed the usual rules of evidence. He refused to let satisfied customers testify to facts but permitted quacks (swivel chair doctors who never practiced medicine a day in their lives) to “testify” to their bilious, bought-and-paid-for opinions.
Even with that, there was no evidence brought out that connected Mr. Irons or his corporation with any law violation. There was the general accusation that he misbranded and mislabeled, but only opinions of swivel chair “doctors” that vitamins are no good [were submitted].
The one thing the “prosecution” brought out and harped on was an article from a book written by Dr. John P. Sutherland, MD, professor of anatomy for 20 years at Boston University and for 14 years editor of the New England Medical Gazette. Mr. Irons had reprinted two paragraphs from this book and distributed them to interested parties two years or more ago. The words that infuriated the Food and Drug bandits—well-known, established facts of life never disputed by those who know nutrition—were:
“If the removal of a vitamin from rice or the demineralization or otherwise tampering with nature’s food products can wreak such havoc as beriberi has during the past 60 years, why not [would] the removal of vitamins from other foods or the demineralization of other foods be a definite causative factor in the production of many diseases, such as tuberculosis, cancer, pernicious anemia, etc.? This question is certainly deserving of most earnest study.
“At present many conditions are considered essentially deficiency diseases and are associated in one respect [or another] with the classic [frank deficiency diseases] beriberi, pellagra, rickets, and scurvy. Such conditions are infantile scorbutus, marasmus, and dentition difficulties in children and, in adults, dyspepsia, indigestion, diarrhea, constipation, obesity, inability to nurse children, diabetes, neurosis, polio, certain myalgias, dementia praecox, and even turberculosis and cancer.”
The prosecution brought in five Harvard professors claiming they were “experts,” when their own words indicated they knew no more about nutrition than some baboon at the Boston Zoo. Probably not as much [in fact], because animals eat sensibly when they are away from humans.
One of them said he was a medical doctor, head of the Department of Nutrition, Harvard Medical College (name of Stare). He and his five buddies answered every loaded question about the value of vitamins and minerals in food with the stereotyped answer “No.” Then Mr. Stare was questioned as to his knowledge of nutrition. He flunked the very first question. He was asked the definition of food. He said he didn’t know but guessed it was in the dictionary. He admitted he didn’t know what causes obesity or that vitamin B12 is [organically bound] cobalt.
The piece of Irons literature that most infuriated the FDA was this:
“Of one thing we are firmly convinced. Neither GreenLife [a whole food supplement developed by Dr. Irons] nor any item or combination of items can overcome the deleterious effect of 1) commercial glucose, which is largely synthetic and has been outlawed in Canada 2) bleaches used in flour, which were outlawed by the Supreme Court, and 3) chemical emulsifiers used in a large percentage of our bread.”
This is one thing the Food and Drug people are trying to keep Congress and the public from finding out, because they are violating the law every day for the benefit of Big Business. If Congress ever does take cognizance of this criminal situation, some people now getting their mail in Washington will get it at Alcatraz or Atlanta.
The witness who apparently knew most about the vitamin question was Dr. William A. Albrecht, soil specialist at the University of Missouri. Dr. Albrecht testified that farmers can’t even raise hogs and cattle nowadays without food supplements. He said they are all buying trace minerals to add to the salt and are adding cottonseed meal, wheat middlings, wheat germ oil, and similar products to improve the protein content of feed—necessary because of soil depletion. For example, he said, the protein content of corn has dropped 50 percent in the last 25 years. He said chemicals make the yields bigger, but they destroy the protein and cause an excess of carbohydrates, which causes obesity.
The five phonies from Harvard disagreed with him, which recalled one of Huey Long’s famous bon mots, “Harvard educates the sense out of some people.” Dr. Albrecht did establish, however, the fact that we treat our cattle better than our children.
One thing the FDA has been suppressing for 27 years is a book written by Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, father of the law they are malenforcing, titled The History of a Crime Against the Food Law. Dr. Wiley minced no words. He said the Pure Food Law that he fathered had been “lynched, raped, and murdered” by those faithless public servants who were paid to enforce it. The malenforcement is even worse today because Big Business is better entrenched, and each unit is trying to emulate General Motors and its billion dollar net for 1955.
The book cannot be suppressed much longer because the Lee Foundation, 2023 West Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is having thousands of copies printed for sale and distribution. And Capsule News is going to continue exposing the crimes of the Food and Drug Banditti, under our title “The Mess in Washington,” until and unless the Supreme Court declares the First Amendment to the Constitution (freedom of the press) null and void.
It is obvious that Mr. Irons has committed two “unpardonable sins.” The first is distributing vitamins that keep people well and away from drugstores. The second is exposing some of the crimes of the Food and Drug Administration, which, as Dr. Wiley said, is lynching, raping, and murdering the laws passed by Congress to protect the public from poisoned and adulterated foods.
On the day of sentencing, the judge called in the press—all part of the FDA smear system. The Boston Globe, in a biased, one-sided “article,” said: “Judge Ford labeled Irons a fraud and a fake who had clipped customers for $800,000 over a 3-year period. It was testified that door-to-door salesmen had peddled vitamin pills that, according to the labels, would cure cancer, hay fever, varicose veins, heart trouble, multiple sclerosis, and sundry other ailments.”
The part about the labels telling this story was pure figment of the judge’s elastic imagination. One witness who testified to what the salesman was supposed to have told him was proven a perjurer when the defense counsel showed him a written statement, which he admitted was his, saying exactly the opposite.
A Massachusetts citizen, Richard Townsend of Georgetown, who has been using the Irons vitamins for a year with excellent results, wanted to know what the Irons trial was about, so he sat in on it. When it was over, he wrote Capsule News:
“What on Earth can be done to stop those dirty servants of Satan from continuing their filthy, damnable, stinking, lying, murdering manner of serving their money masters. The Russians or the Gestapo have nothing on Uncle Sam.”
By Morris Bealle. Reprinted from American Capsule News: The All American News Digest for All American People, October 27, 1956, by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.
