In 1915, hundreds of sailors on the German battleship Kronprinz Wilhelm nearly died of fatigue and heart failure after 255 days at sea eating plentiful rations of white flour, white potatoes, white sugar, and red meat. When the ship sought refuge at Newport News, Virginia, McCann offered his services as a health expert, insisting that the source of the sailors’ affliction lay in their highly refined diet. As McCann told the story, the ship’s surgeon and U.S. medical authorities quickly rejected his theory. The Kronprinz Wilhelm sailed under the steam of a classic American diet—nutrition couldn’t be the cause of its affliction. Eventually, though, McCann’s theories were confirmed, and he crowed that the Kronprinz Wilhelm incident proved conclusively “the inadequacies of the very foods on which America relies for the protection of her troops, as well as the protection of her so-called middle and lower class civilians.”35
These were compelling just-so stories, and during the 1920s, white bread critics invoked them so frequently that they didn’t have to rehash the details. Just referring to their legendary names—“the Madeira-Mamore case,” “the Kronprinz Wilhelm incident”—sufficed to strike terror in the stomachs of health-minded bread eaters.
Today these tragedies would likely be diagnosed as the result of severe thiamin deficiency (which causes loss of muscle control, confusion, and eventually heart failure), but for McCann, malnutrition had more complex pathways. It resulted not from absolute deficiencies, but rather from imbalances between “base-forming” and “acid-forming” foods, leading to dangerous “acidosis.” Refined sugar and “bread bled white” were acid-forming foods eaten in such large quantities by Americans that they skewed the country’s metabolic balance toward acidosis, sapping national vitality while triggering cancer, kidney disease, early childhood mortality, tuberculosis, and heart disease. As McCann argued in a best-selling book reprinted by newspapers across the country, “Millers will never know how many babies they have handicapped … from their commercial disregard of the laws of Nature [and] interfer[ence] with the inexorable laws which the Creator has ordained.”36
By the time Alfred McCann himself died young of a heart attack in 1931, shortly after delivering a two-hour radio tirade, fear of acidosis had become a national obsession—much like early twenty-first-century concerns about gluten. A 1932 survey of new health and dietary advice books, for example, reported skeptically on the overwhelming consensus: “Nearly every disease in the world [seems] not to be the result of eating improper food, but also of eating proper foods in improper combinations. … If a person is so ignorant as to permit [white bread and sugar] to pass his lips, he is doomed.”37
WEAKNESS IS A CRIME
Alfred W. McCann instilled Graham’s Christian physiology with a Progressive distaste for bread trusts and food oligopolies. Refined white flour was the product of greedy industrialists whose violations of “the provisions of the Creator” accelerated the country’s moral decline. America must defy these “Moneybags,” he argued, and return its eating practices to the basic laws of God.38 Nevertheless, by the 1920s, a decidedly more pecuniary philosophy of health would outshine McCann’s ideas. The real prophet of 1920s amylophobia was Bernarr MacFadden, a sinewy entrepreneur with a genius for self-promotion and a love of big business. MacFadden adapted Christian physiology to preach a more optimistic and secular creed—the gospel of personal improvement.
Like all good diet gurus of his time, MacFadden was born a sickly child. And, of course, like all good diet gurus, MacFadden overcame his weakness through strict physical discipline—his version marked by relentless exercise, heroic fasts, and a Graham-influenced diet. By 1899, at age thirty-one, his muscles rippling and constitution brimming with vitality, he founded a secular church called “Physical Culture” and began to preach. “Weakness is a crime; don’t be a criminal” was his worldly commandment.39
Half social movement, half business empire, Physical Culture would eventually come to include a health and diet publishing conglomerate, the country’s most popular lineup of pulp fiction magazines and books, newspapers throughout the country, a Physical Culture restaurant chain, several Physical Culture spa resorts, a model for Physical Culture schools, and a planned residential community in New Jersey based on MacFadden’s principles. When he died in 1955 (a respectable eighty-seven, but still a bit shy of the 150 birthdays he had vowed to celebrate), the unabashed egomaniac had been a popular-culture icon for four decades, unsuccessful Republican politician, advisor to presidents, the subject of countless scandals, and a guru to Hollywood celebrities. He had taken on patent medicine makers, a nation’s sexual prudery, and the American Medical Association. He had denounced constrictive clothing, shoes, alcohol, cigarettes, Communists, Jews—and, of course, white bread, “the greatest humbug ever foisted upon a civilized people.”40
MacFadden inspired many imitators, some of whom, like Charles Atlas (groomed by MacFadden) and Jack LaLanne (taught by MacFadden’s star pupil), would eventually eclipse his memory. But Bernarr MacFadden was the original. With his high brow, aquiline nose, and muscular physique posed nearly naked on thousands of posters and magazine covers, he was the early twentieth-century’s image of what health should look like—and how to achieve it.
Although MacFadden presented himself as a real-life Superman, he insisted that anyone could achieve the same results. Powerful physique, sexual virility, worldly success, and long life were all within the reach of the average American. His prescription was rigorous but relatively simple: all disease arose from blood impurities caused by poor diet and metabolic imbalance. Strenuous exercise and regular fasting cleansed the blood and sculpted a successful-looking body, while good diet prevented the buildup of blood impurities and unattractive fat. Maintaining outward appearance was just as important as inward harmony, he argued, because it gave visual testimony of one’s virtue and vigor.
MacFadden’s specific dietary advice changed over the years, with certain steadfast exceptions: “As nearly as possible foods should be used in their natural condition,” uncooked, whole, and with as little variety as possible.41 Nuts, fruits, and water made the best meals. One should eat little meat and avoid alcohol, caffeine, and white bread. When he was a youth, MacFadden claimed, white bread had sickened him horribly, so the cause of its elimination was close to his heart. For forty years, he would fight a personal, passionate battle against the nation’s bakers and millers. A few bites of what he called “the staff of death” might not actually kill the strong, but it weakened them. People with sickly constitutions were to avoid all bread. For the rest, whole wheat was best.
This was, if you will, a testosterone-charged Grahamism. But it was also a decidedly profane Grahamism. The “crime of weakness and the sin of sickness” MacFadden railed against were not offenses against God’s commandments. They reflected a new kind of moral imperative emerging in the early twentieth century. The physical labor of maintaining perpetual vigor had become intertwined with the social labor of demonstrating one’s privileged place in the hierarchies of cutthroat capitalism.
In Physical Culture we see contemporary obsessions with externally displayed and internally honed perfect health at a formative moment. To the extent that the quest for the perfect, enduring body has emerged as one of the governing ideals of our age, early twentieth-century gurus like MacFadden, enthralling audiences in his leopard-skin tunic, laid the foundation for our obsessions. Physical Culture was, as R. Marie Griffith argues in her history of Christian health movements, the perfect marriage of Protestant moral obligation and consumer capitalist vanity.42 Its lasting power speaks to something fundamental and enduring about the United States, but in order to really understand the social implications of this seductive dream of food and health, we must understand the unpleasant context of racial thinking out of which it emerged.
SAVING THE RACE THROUGH DIET
During the first decades of the twentieth century, visceral fear of racial decline gripped northern European Americans. America’s genetic heritage—ass
umed, of course, to be pure northern European, and the pinnacle of human evolution—appeared threatened from all sides. With declining birth rates among the country’s upper classes and large influxes of darker-skinned immigrants, the country seemed headed toward what pundits of the day ominously labeled “race suicide.” Failure to confront this peril would, as Albert Edward Wiggam, a regular contributor to the magazine Physical Culture and champion of white supremacist pseudo-science, warned, “silently and slowly wreck the race that built [civilization].”43 In a time marked by rapid urbanization and demographic change, the doctrines of racial eugenics took on enormous appeal, even to many of the country’s most progressive reformers.
While we often associate eugenics with Nazi Germany, the prewar United States served as a crucial proving ground for campaigns to “improve the race.” The American eugenics movement’s most infamous achievements came in the form of large-scale government policy—widespread state laws mandating forced sterilization of “dysgenic” groups and new federal immigration policies seeking to limit the taint of inferior blood. But eugenics was also a bottom-up movement lived out in everyday popular culture—in the world of pulp fiction and dietary fads.44 Bernarr MacFadden’s career followed eugenics’ arc through popular culture perfectly.
During the 1920s and 1930s, eugenic ideals circulated through Hollywood movies, self-help manuals, novels, museum exhibits, and newspaper advice columns. Chic pageants, many sponsored directly by Physical Culture, pitted individuals and even families against each other in eugenic fitness competitions. And across the country, state fair displays informed visitors what they could do to improve the race, offering helpful advice on how to observe and assess the genetic vigor of family and neighbors.45
In eugenics-obsessed America, straying from what was deemed the “standard” path had serious, earthly consequences. As B. G. Jeffries, a popular health book author, admonished, it was wrong to regard bodily weakness caused by “disobedience to nature’s dictates” as mere “grievances.” Taking MacFadden’s dictum that “weakness is a crime” quite literally, Jeffries argued that physical infirmity should be seen as a willful act of criminal conduct. “Though the evil consequences inflicted on their descendants and on future generation are often as great as those caused by crime, [people with poor bodily discipline] do not think themselves in any degree criminal.”46 Given the urgency of the problem, Jeffries argued not just for forced sterilization of people who dragged down the nation’s stock, but also criminal punishments for officials who allowed marriages between people of inferior stock.
But what about people of “normal” genetic makeup who failed to do their best to maintain perfect health? Did Aryans need to strive for improvement, too? Conversely, could people with inferior genes improve themselves through discipline and hard work?
These were tricky questions for eugenicists, and a key place where Physical Culture supplemented pessimistic ideas about racial predestination. Although MacFadden was deeply committed to the principles of eugenics and regularly directed his readers toward race-betterment manuals, he inclined toward a different interpretation of evolution. In this view, more Lamarckian than Darwinian, vigorous effort could offset the curse of bad genes. Indeed, as the son of a drunken Ozarks farmer of Irish descent, MacFadden should not have been allowed to be born, according to eugenic principles—yet he had achieved superhuman vitality. So MacFadden offered a compromise between eugenics and Physical Culture, nature and nurture: “No matter how strong the hereditary influence may be toward vigorous bodies, if people do nothing on their own initiative, through the idea that they are so well born that they do not need to make any effort toward obtaining or maintaining health, much that has been gained by inheritance will be lost.”47
In one sense, MacFadden’s emphasis on the power of effort was libratory, granting “inferior” peoples a chance to overcome genetic predestination. At the same time, it extended the coercive power of eugenics to everyone: even affluent white Aryans needed to demonstrate their worthiness. In this context, what food people chose and how it affected their bodies mattered. In an era when politicians openly advocated letting weaker people die out in the name of the greater good, conforming oneself to dominant ideals of beauty and vigor mattered.
The so-called normal white American might not fear the worst manifestations of eugenics, but there were smaller, quiet consequences to every bodily choice. Paul Popenoe, in his popular 1925 handbook of advice for young men, even warned that no eugenically minded girl would choose a constipated man because one’s innards didn’t lie. They inevitably revealed the soundness of one’s character and the intelligence of one’s choices.48 In this context, a person’s bread selection mattered. And, as readers’ letters to Physical Culture revealed, switching from white bread to brown bread, or no bread at all, demonstrated fitness. One previously feeble man wrote that by substituting whole wheat for white bread, he was able to hike eighty miles in two days through California hills “without the slightest stiffness of joints or soreness of muscle.”49
Seen through the lens of eugenics, we can now appreciate MacFadden’s macho antics a little better. As R. Marie Griffith suggests, whereas earlier reformers saw dietary discipline and fasting as gateways to spiritual virtue, “MacFadden took for granted that [its] … real appeal … was the experience of absolute power evoked by a fast. Through fasting, MacFadden promised, a person could exercise unqualified control over virtually all forms of disease, while revealing a degree of strength and stamina such as would put others to shame. In short, fasting was a stunning weapon of mastery, an instrument with which to prove one’s superiority over menacing perils ranging from microbes to men.”50
RED MEAT, WHITE BREAD, AND BLUE BLOOD
Of course, defenders of white bread could wield the exact same language of racial vigor. Dr. Woods Hutchinson, for example, a widely read New York health writer, directed eugenics-infused vitriol at nearly every aspect of claims that white bread destroyed the white race. Touting the “triumphant vindication of white bread” by science, he argued that “all this torrent of denunciation and prophecy of evil, to the effect that we are undermining the constitution of the race and devitalizing our tissues by the use of this attractive and toothsome but nutritious pale ghost of real bread, is pretty nearly moonshine.”51
To the contrary, Hutchinson reasoned, one need only compare strapping, tall Americans with specimens from any rice- or brown bread-eating nation. In strength, valor, and intelligence, the American surpassed them all. So eat what you want, Hutchinson intoned; “white flour, red meat, and blue blood” are the emblems of global conquest. To not eat them would threaten America’s place in the pantheon of nations. Indeed, as one of Hutchinson’s fans quoted him in the Los Angeles Times, brown bread and vegetables were “the diet of the enslaved, stagnant and conquered races.” A cartoon advertisement for Whitmer bakeries appearing around the same time drove this point home visually. In it an American doughboy towers over a rice-eating Asian. “Bread eaters lead the world,” it affirmed, and among them, “the most progressive” eat white wheat bread.52
Thus, as memoirs and novels of Jewish life in 1920s America confirm, consuming dark rye bread marked one as racially inferior, and eating white bread represented a key step toward “Americanization.”53 It wasn’t just that white bread was culturally associated with white civilization—a symbol of progress or Americanness. White bread was believed to have made white American civilization possible. Superior men required superior fuel.
This raised an important question: how could consumers be sure that white bread offered the best foundation for racial fitness? Hutchinson willingly conceded whole wheat bread’s superior endowment of vitamins and minerals. So how could he, and so many like him, argue for the nutritional superiority of white bread? On one level, Hutchinson simply rejected what he viewed as “food faddists’ ” misreading of nature. Flipping Graham on his head, Hutchinson argued that “the unconquerable preference of the human stomach for white
bread” was entirely natural. “Never was [there] a better or more convincing illustration of the sound common sense of unregenerate humanity than the irresistible way in which wheat bread has swept the board as the staple bread-stuff of civilized man.”54 To shill for rough brown bread was to rebel against human instinct.
On another level, Hutchinson helped popularize a key scientific argument against whole wheat bread. While whole wheat bread contained more nutrients than white, many early twentieth-century scientists believed that they could not be absorbed as well by the body. As Hutchinson explained, whole wheat bread’s nutrients came “in an utterly indigestible and unutilizable form, namely bran and husks. So weight for weight, white bread is more nutritious than brown as well as free from the irritating effects of the husks upon the food tube.”55 From the vantage of early twentieth-century medicine, whole wheat backers’ logic seemed flawed. “What the faddists apparently do not see at all,” popular health author Dr. Logan Glendening charged, “is that the two parts of their argument are self-contradictory. The roughage is valuable because it contains vitamins, but the only reason it is valuable as roughage is because it goes through the intestinal tract undissolved or undigested. If the bran does any good as roughage it does no good as vitamin container.”56 This concept did not stand the test of time—or new understandings of nutrient absorption—but it made intuitive sense to many people and became something of an early twentieth-century health axiom. Nevertheless, by the mid-1920s, a growing field of food gurus and dietary advisors had begun to sow serious doubts among ordinary consumers about the damaging effects of industrial white bread.
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