The Kelloggs
Page 19
By afternoon, the enormity of the devastation was clear. All that stood were a few partial walls here and there, none “larger than ten or twelve feet wide,” amid the blackened piles of toppled bricks.21 Every building of Dr. Kellogg’s beautiful Sanitarium was destroyed. Refusing to close down operations, the San’s staff opened their homes to house those patients wishing to stay in Battle Creek. In the weeks that followed, the nurses, doctors, attendants, and orderlies worked tirelessly, often without pay, helping the invalids recover and serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner to more than one thousand people. As one employee later recalled: “Houses were mortgaged, savings accounts withdrawn from banks, and every piggy bank emptied, in a magnificent effort to save the Sanitarium.”22
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WHEN THE FIRE BROKE OUT, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was nowhere near Battle Creek. He was returning home by train after a lecture tour in California. Around midnight, his train made a stop in Chicago’s Central Station. Eager to stretch his weary body before completing his journey to Battle Creek, he was “met by a newspaper reporter who said ‘Dr. Kellogg, are you going to rebuild?’ ” To which John replied, “Rebuild what?” The reporter was incredulous that the doctor was still in the dark and asked “Don’t you know that the Sanitarium burned down last night?” Always confident on the exterior, John honestly replied, “No, this is the first that I have heard about it. Of course we are going to rebuild.” When told that the hospital, too, had burned to the ground, he added with a flourish, “We will rebuild everything.” His assistant August Bloese later recalled, “As soon as Dr. Kellogg entered the train, he called for a table and immediately started to work planning a new building and just before arriving at Battle Creek was putting the finishing touches on rough plans for a modern, fireproof sanitarium.”23
What was left of the Sanitarium the day after the fire, February 19, 1902 Credit 47
It was just like John to put on a brave front and assume command in the face of a disaster or emergency. Behind that facade, however, he struggled to repress overwhelming grief and panic. A few weeks later, the doctor confessed that immediately upon settling back into his seat in the train speeding him home:
My heart collapsed as I went back, in thought, over the past history of this Institution and thought of the toil of building up this Institution step by step, and felt that my life had been built into every brick and nail of this institution and I tell you, my friends I felt that something had gone out of my life; I felt as though my best friend had died, and I could not keep back the tears for a moment, and a big lump came into my throat.24
Ever resolute, John converted his grief into a swell of excitement and energy. While the embers of the old wooden Sanitarium were still hot and smoking, John realized that the fire was the perfect opportunity to pursue even grander medical dreams. A new San would have to be rebuilt, he reasoned, so why not transform the calamity into a sterling opportunity for constructing the most modern, attractive, and advanced medical center and health resort in the United States? By the time John’s train chugged into the Battle Creek station before dawn on February 19, he knew precisely how to proceed. Head held high, he marched off, clutching his sheaf of papers and plans. Meeting him on the platform was the dutiful Will. Before even saying hello or exchanging sympathies over the disaster, John barked at his younger brother to gather together an emergency “mass meeting” of the Sanitarium board and Adventist church Elders, the mayor of Battle Creek and his City Council, clergy from all the other churches in town, and Battle Creek’s most prominent and prosperous businessmen and merchants.
A reporter overhearing him cheekily asked the doctor if it would be even possible to rebuild the San given that it “was a great work.” The indomitable doctor quickly countered, “I know it is, but in Chicago they build bigger buildings than these will be in sixty days, and if they can do it there we can do it here with the right men.” The new San, he insisted, would be ready by the “latter part of the summer.”25 Decades later, Charles MacIvor, another of John’s secretaries and, later, food company managers, recalled Dr. Kellogg’s enthusiasm that morning as electrifying. The doctor declared to all who would listen:
We have had a fire, all the cockroaches are burned up and now we can have just such a building as we have been dreaming about and planning for so many years. It will be a new modern structure built on the same foundation worthy of the glorious work that is being done here.26
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THE MASS MEETING Will organized began at 7:00 p.m. in the Seventh-day Adventist Tabernacle, a sprawling red-brick edifice with an ornately arched 108-foot-tall clock tower, topped by a spindly spire. Before the clock struck half-past six, the shellacked oak pews were filled and the auditorium was abuzz.27 The congregants called it the “Dime Tabernacle” because the entire Battle Creek Adventist community saved and donated their spare dimes toward the church’s erection in 1878. When the Tabernacle opened in 1879, at a cost of more than $26,000 (about $637,000 in 2016), the main auditorium seated nine hundred and the gallery accommodated another 1,450. The church also housed a Sunday school with six large classrooms separated by a glass partition, which could be pulled back to seat eight hundred more of the faithful.
The Seventh-day Adventist “Dime Tabernacle,” Battle Creek Credit 48
The meeting began with a cavalcade of clergymen offering blessings and prayers followed by the Church Quartette Choir’s rousing rendition of Samuel Francis Smith’s ode to America, “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” One by one, local politicians and prominent citizens ascended the steps leading up to the octagonal stage, framed by two semicircular staircases to the church’s gallery. Each man offered his solemn promise to help resurrect Battle Creek’s most important economic engine. One was an aged, muttonchopped physician named S. S. French, who regaled the audience with how he had known the San’s medical director since his school days. This windbag of a “doc” recited John’s impressive medical credentials and boasted about his upright, Christian moral code.
Following Dr. French’s oration was the far more entertaining gospel singer and preacher, Ira D. Sankey. The composer of hundreds of hymns and gospel songs, Sankey was nationally known as the “Sweet Singer of Methodism.” He was in the middle of a tour of the state of Michigan’s Young Men’s Christian Association chapters and was spending ten days at the San for rest and relaxation. The gospel singer modestly told the audience tales of his bravery that morning: “The hallway was so full of smoke that I saw it would be risky to attempt to go through it and so I and my wife came down the fire escape. I got her to a place of safety and then went back and helped to get others out of the building.” While saving others from the flames, Sankey recounted, “this is only the brick and the pine that is being destroyed, the Institution will arise again and from the ashes I expect to see a more magnificent building than has ever yet stood on this hill.”28 The audience cheered and the Quartette Choir sang, as if on cue, the hymn “It Shall Arise from Its Ashes.”29
Following this musical interlude, Charles Austin, the program chairman and proprietor of the town’s leading produce and grocery store, took the stage and finally introduced the main speaker.30 Austin’s introductory promise for the eagerly awaited comments of Dr. Kellogg was no mere hyperbole: “The more he talks, the more you will want to hear him.”
On cue, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg bounded up from his leather-upholstered chair, one of five situated in a semicircle at the center of the Tabernacle’s stage, beneath a triptych of stained-glass windows depicting the Ten Commandments. Bouncing off his white suit was the flickering illumination of electric arc lamps suspended from the ceiling two stories above. The dignitaries seated onstage watched with admiration as the doctor slowly and dramatically walked down the stage’s orange and brown, diamond-patterned carpet. As he grasped the sides of the ornately carved wooden podium holding his notes, the audience greeted him with a deafening roar of applause and hoorahs. They were articulating the profound empathy they felt for him as a man and t
heir admiration for his important work. Even today, when reading the fading transcript of this “mass meeting,” the community’s genuine love for Dr. Kellogg during his hour of greatest need remains unmistakable.
The doctor’s impassioned speech lasted more than an hour. He reiterated his medical philosophy of biologic living and then spun grand designs for the new San he intended to build. It was to be a modern medical facility rivaling the greatest hospitals of Europe and North America. The new complex would house and heal more patients, generate more curative discoveries, and, because it would attract so many people to the town, accrue mountains of profit for Battle Creek’s shopkeepers, merchants, and businessmen. The task would not be easy, Dr. Kellogg warned, the Sanitarium’s insurance policy covered only $151,000 ($4.29 million in 2016) in damages. Building the new facility would cost, at least, an additional $100,000 ($2.84 million in 2016) if they were to approach the comprehensive reconstruction he just described. Yet John’s confidence, his eagerness to rebuild, and his predictions of success were so infectious that there was not a person in the room who doubted these dreams would come true, no matter what the expense. If John could not raise the capital himself, the audience murmured among themselves, they would find the means to help him and, in so doing, the economic future of Battle Creek.
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THE HAUNTING QUESTION THAT LINGERS and refuses to be irrefutably answered is, What started the fire in the first place? Was it merely a random act of chemical combustion and electrical disorder or was the fire sparked on purpose? Over the years, several theories have been suggested, none of them based on much evidence. High on the list, however, is that the blaze was initiated by one or more Adventists acting on the agency of the Whites, or, at least, someone taking too seriously Ellen’s ominous sermons of a fire being sent down from heaven to smite the community of Battle Creek.
Long before the San’s fire, Ellen White had soured on Battle Creek as the center of all things Adventist. She worried that Battle Creek was in jeopardy of becoming “the Vatican City” of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. It was a purposeful allusion to Catholicism, still a rather suspect religion in the minds of many Americans, and a connection that she wanted to avoid at all costs. As early as 1882, she recounted a sleepless night in Cooranbong, Australia, during which the Lord advised her to tell her flock to “scatter.” She elaborated further, “I have spent hours in agonizing with God over this matter. We need to get ready. It is not God’s plan for our people to crowd into Battle Creek.”31
To bolster her warnings, Mrs. White publicly admonished Dr. Kellogg’s imperial ways as a symptom of the greater “Battle Creek problem.” For example, in 1897, after learning about the San’s new incorporation papers and its state-sanctioned status as a nondenominational institution, Ellen preached that she “not infrequently reminded the Doctor that God had given him the success, which had come to him.”32 Mrs. White again denounced the doctor in March of 1901. Addressing the annual Adventist General Conference in Battle Creek, she offered apocalyptic predictions about the town and its more headstrong inhabitants. Ellen had good reason to be concerned. By this point, John was firmly in control of the most prosperous and famous arm of the entire Adventist movement: the Battle Creek Sanitarium and by extension its nearly fifty San “branches” that had sprouted up in the Midwest, extending to the Rockies and California, all the way to New Zealand, Australia, Egypt, Palestine, India, South Africa, and Japan.33
The Whites were equally worried about the rising power of its Battle Creek–based publishing house, the Review and Herald Publishing Association. This enterprise employed more than three hundred people and was sequestering the profits it was generating from publishing popular, secular works, which the Elders deemed to be either sacrilegious or inappropriate. Weirdly, on December 30, 1902, ten months after the Sanitarium burned, the Review and Herald building mysteriously erupted in flames. This building, too, was only partially insured and the losses amounted to more than $300,000 (or $8.5 million in 2016).34 Electrical wiring was blamed as the cause but many, including John, had their doubts. Writing Ellen White on December 31, 1902, the doctor slyly insinuated, “Last night the main building of the Review and Herald office was burned to the ground and everything in it burned up, an experience exactly parallel to that of the Sanitarium.”35
Less than a week later, on January 5, 1903, Sister White wrote a letter to “the brethren in Battle Creek” from her winter home in St. Helena, California. In it, she expressed her sympathy for those working at the Review and Herald. Nevertheless, she confessed, she was not surprised by the disaster, just as she was not surprised by the San’s fire. She went on to describe a recent vision she had, communicating the Lord’s dissatisfaction with the goings-on in Michigan:
I have seen an angel standing with a sword as of fire stretched over Battle Creek. Once, in the daytime, I lost consciousness, and it seemed as if this sword of flame were turning first in one direction and then another. Disaster seemed to follow disaster because God was dishonored by the devising of men to exalt and glorify themselves.36
When it came to which Battle Creeker was dishonoring God by glorifying himself, there can be little doubt that Ellen was referring to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.
Ellen made her warnings about the sins of Battle Creek even more explicit at the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventists meeting in Oakland, California, on April 3, 1903:
The Lord is not very well pleased with Battle Creek…and when the Sanitarium there was burned, our people should have studied the messages of reproof and warning sent them in former years and taken heed. That the lives of patients and helpers were spared was a providence for which every one of us should praise God from heart and soul and voice. He gave them an opportunity to live, and to study what these things mean.37
Willful as he was, John still considered himself to be a devout Adventist. He could hardly have been pleased to be so soundly denounced in front of the denomination’s membership. Ellen White and her son escalated the contretemps by isolating John Harvey in Battle Creek and convincing the General Conference to relocate the Review and Herald publishing house and the church’s world headquarters to Takoma Park, Maryland, a suburb six miles from Washington’s Capitol Hill.
Perhaps the most troubling speck of evidence suggesting the church Elders were behind the blazes can be found in a letter George Butler wrote to John on January 2, 1905. Long one of the doctor’s allies in his many fights against Ellen White, Butler was the director of the Southern Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, based in Tennessee. Elder Butler let loose a bomb that is difficult to validate but remains intriguing nonetheless: “I have the testimony of those who heard her say beforehand that she had clearly and plainly stated that those buildings [the San and the Review and Herald] would burn, and they did burn in a most wonderfully rapid way too.”38 That same year, A. G. Daniells, the president of the General Conference and one of John’s most virulent foes, groused, “Dr. Kellogg has an imperious will which needs to be broken.”39
Yet it is precisely this torturous dynamic that has led some retrospective observers to suggest an unstable Adventist congregant interpreted Mrs. White’s incendiary testimonies as a message from God to set fire to the San. On the day of the disaster, that rumor took temporary flight when an Adventist bellboy confessed to setting the fire, only to recant an hour later.40 No solid evidence has yet appeared to corroborate this “confession” or to identify another Ellen White follower as the culprit who burned down the Battle Creek Sanitarium; still, the story—a good one at that—lingers.
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IF NOT STRIKING THE MATCH, the doctor fanned the flames of arson allegations during his nonstop spieling in the days after the fire. For example, at the mass meeting on February 19, 1902, John unleashed a stream of consciousness that, in retrospect, can only be described as a kind of Freudian slip:
I want to tell you, my friends, that when we decided to put up that tinder-box twenty-four years ago thi
s spring, I felt a good many pangs about my heart. You cannot imagine how I wish that I was rich; I wished I had money enough to erect a fire-proof building. I knew what the results might be, of putting so many patients into that building, but, as I have told you, I did the best I could. Some of you wonder why the patients got out of that building safely. We have been educating certain persons whose duty it was to carry out people from the building when it was burning—for we expected it would be burned, and we have been getting ready for it, because…such a building must burn soon or later, and ever since that building has been erected, I have been haunted night and day with the expectation that it would be burned, and that some people burned with it; this thought has been a perfect nightmare to me.41
A few days later, February 22, Dr. Kellogg held a “support group” meeting for the patients who refused to leave Battle Creek after the fire. They moved to a smaller building across the street, West Hall, which over the years would house classrooms of the Battle Creek College and the American Medical Missionary Medical College, and, later still, his eugenics-based enterprise, the Race Betterment Foundation. Calling the event an “Experience Meeting,” John returned to the topic of the fire’s inevitability:
And now we have got a chance to put up a new, safe building, and I am glad—I don’t dare say what I think, for fear you will think I set the building on fire,—but I didn’t. But I have never doubted but that that [sic] building would burn down at some time, and that it would burn before long, for it has been standing about as long as such buildings do stand.42