In almost the same breath, after describing the new, modern safety features he was planning, including spacious hallways and doorways for easier access and exits, call-bells for patients in the event of an emergency, and a safer electrical system, Dr. Kellogg made an even stranger statement of ambiguous culpability: “Deep down in my heart I am glad the building is burned, because now, we will build a better one, and I have been longing for a better building—but I assure you that I didn’t set the old building on fire.”43
—
IN 1993, the best-selling author T. Coraghessan Boyle proffered the most outlandish theory about the San fire in his brilliant satirical novel The Road to Wellville, which was adapted into a major Hollywood motion picture in 1994.44 Ironically, Boyle takes his novel’s title from an advertising phrase coined by Will Kellogg’s archrival, C. W. Post.45 The writer uses the San fire as a plot centerpiece and depicts one of John’s adopted sons, George, as starting the flames out of some form of misguided revenge. Boyle’s George can be best described as a mentally challenged, drunken rogue, partially based on reality and artfully embellished by the author. The real George was the illegitimate child of a Chicago prostitute named Hulda, and the Kelloggs adopted him sometime in 1897 or 1898.46 In 1901, John wrote a long essay for the New York Sunday Recorder telling the story of how he rescued George from the slums of Chicago,
He was then only four years old, and had been running wild in the streets for a year, receiving practically no care whatever. He picked his living from the garbage boxes and in the gutter, occasionally receiving a crust from some friendly saloon keeper….His heredity was as bad as it could possibly be, and his environment had been up to that time, worse than a savage….He had so little attention that he had not even learned how to talk. He had no ideas. He was covered with vermin. He had practically no hair upon his head, the scalp being one great sore, caused by parasite diseases.47
Dr. Kellogg was so moved by the little boy’s sorry state that he petitioned a “kind-hearted judge” to let him adopt the tyke. Once the papers were signed, the doctor and “Hulda’s Kid” boarded a train for Battle Creek. The doctor brought him home, bathed him in kerosene to kill the vermin, burned his tattered clothing, and nursed his bloody scalp. Within six months, John claimed, the boy, now known as George, was flourishing and sporting a thick crop of curly hair. Enhancing the story even further, Dr. Kellogg concluded, “In three years, he has developed into one of the finest boys of his age that I ever saw—bright, sharp, witty, full of life and energy, rides a bicycle with remarkable skill, swims like a duck, and is an exceedingly promising lad.”48
The real story was not nearly as wholesome. For years, even after declaring allegiance to the half-baked theories of eugenics, John firmly believed that children could overcome the worst of predestined “natures” by being “nurtured” in an environment of supportive love, healthy routines and diets, Christian faith, and, if needed, discipline.49 Despite Dr. Kellogg’s glowing public descriptions, George was an especially difficult boy to rear. As one Kellogg contemporary recalled, “George Kellogg was one of [John’s] adopted kids who didn’t pan out. [He was] a drifter and general[ly] no good. [George] later contested [John’s] will [and] wanted more from the estate.”50 Poor George’s inner demons led him down a path of dissolution, drinking, unemployment, and the constant cadging of loans off his famous father’s bankroll.51
In the Boyle novel, George’s stubborn rebelliousness is nicely captured in a scene where the little boy refuses to hang up his coat on one of the coat hooks in the entry foyer of the Kellogg Residence. Instead, he throws the coat on the floor, much to his adoptive father’s chagrin.52 Each time this occurs, the doctor sternly orders the boy to climb up and down the stairs, reentering the front door each time and hanging up his coat until he correctly completes the required routine. That specific episode, if it happened at all, probably involved a different adopted boy. To be sure, George displayed a definite propensity toward bad behavior and, given his horribly impoverished early childhood, probably exhibited many real, deep-seated psychological issues as well as a plethora of neurological or neurodevelopmental disabilities. The story Dr. Kellogg’s colleagues most commonly recounted about George involves the doctor’s decree that since the boy was acting like an animal, he would have to sleep in the barn with the animals. George would be allowed to return to the Residence after learning to behave more appropriately. After a few nights, “the little fellow got within a few feet of the doctor, he fairly jumped into his arms and said: ‘I don’t want to be an animal anymore. I want to be a little boy.’ ”53
Upon the briefest investigation of the 1902 fire, however, the dates of George’s adulthood do not at all coincide with Boyle’s fictional chronology. In the novel, which mostly takes place during the years 1907 to 1908, George confesses to burning the San down twice, the first time when he would have been about thirteen and, again, as an adult. The motive, Boyle imagines, was out of hatred for his father. In 1902, the real George was still a boy of about eight years old and, of course, the San burned down only once, not twice. Blaming poor George makes for an excellent subplot in a superbly crafted novel but his involvement in the actual fire is most likely fictional.54 In the end, who or what started the fire, ranging from a deranged Adventist to faulty electrical wiring or a chemical explosion or even John himself, is inescapably lost to the prying eyes of historians and literary rakes alike.
—
JOHN MAY HAVE OUTWITTED the church elders with the 1897 reincorporation of the San as nondenominational but the Church had its leverage, too. Most of the money invested in the Sanitarium came from Adventist pioneers, including John’s father, John Preston. Moreover, a good part of its annual operating budget still came from Adventist coffers. John’s lust for expansion had already put the San in debt to the tune of $250,000 (about $7.1 million in 2016). The final estimates on the worth of the destroyed buildings were more than $350,000 (roughly $9.93 million in 2016).55 The doctor’s new plans would easily run more than a full million dollars (a whopping $28.4 million in 2016). This dismal news was not well received by Ellen White, who insisted that no more than $250,000 of Adventist funds would go into the new construction and that this amount was to be generated only by the insurance money and donations, as opposed to new bank loans.
John would have none of that and used the Adventists’ monetary rebuke as an opportunity to go directly to the town burghers for the necessary funds. Five weeks later, on March 17, he presented his best case to the right audience. W. R. Wooden, a prize-winning chicken and duck farmer, chaired the second mass meeting, this time at Hamblin’s Opera House on West Michigan Avenue.56 The two-story, red-brick Georgian opera house was not nearly as big as the Tabernacle. There were only 1,200 seats in the down-on-its-heels auditorium and fewer than a quarter of them were filled that night.
The doctor requested a $50,000 bond (or $1.42 million in 2016), an array of tax breaks, and the promise of better fire protection from the city, including a dedicated fire station and water pump directly across the street from the San. In a very different mood from the pep rally held at the Adventist Tabernacle the day after the fire, several of the Battle Creekers present balked and hurled barbed questions at John as to why they should foot the bill for what appeared to be a very profitable medical empire.
Like a well-trained actor responding to his audience, John theatrically took out a huge ledger and, literally, opened the San’s books to demonstrate that it was, indeed, a nonprofit organization operating under the laws of the State of Michigan. Fees generated by patients, lodging, dining, and medical treatments went directly into the operating funds needed to run the place, he explained. Any extra money earned was applied to either improving the facility for the next batch of patients seeking help or for charity cases needing medical attention. Dr. Kellogg emphasized that he took no salary for his medical direction of the Sanitarium, save room and board, and that he earned the bulk of his income from the proceeds of his book
s, public lectures, surgical and medical fees, and burgeoning health food businesses, much of which he also funneled back to the San.
John’s flamboyant unfurling of this privileged information infuriated the Adventist leadership. A few months later, at eight o’clock in the morning, on October 19, 1902, the Adventist coterie met at Ellen White’s winter home, “Elmshaven,” in St. Helena, California. Their discussion centered on the doctor’s rebuilding effort and the imperative for him not to “incur large debts.” With respect to the money raised at the Hamblin Opera House, Mrs. White was wrong on the figure raised but she, nevertheless, groused, “Twice thirty thousand dollars would have been but a small sum, in comparison with the harm that has been done by allowing this examination [of the San’s books] to be made.”57
Keeping her far-flung Adventist empire solvent, if not profitable, was a concern that weighed heavily upon Ellen’s mind, especially after the doctor refused to fully tithe the income he earned from his many health ventures directly to her. John insisted that the money he generated stay in the San’s coffers rather than go toward building a church, orphanage, or some other Adventist project Ellen wanted, far from the confines of Battle Creek. Only a few years earlier, on January 25, 1899, Ellen delivered a financially envious sermon and all-points bulletin entitled “To Our Brethren in All Lands.” In it, she chastised the Kellogg brothers’ nascent health food company as a waste of “precious time.” More ominous, she warned that John’s avarice presented “great injury to our cause.” Offering to resign from the church, John apologetically wrote Mrs. White: “My work has been full of mistakes but I have not been an ambitious schemer. I have been ready to help you, if you had only said the word [at] any moment and with all my might…your letter struck me like a thunderbolt and I cannot recover from it….I have gone through the agonies of death over this matter, I have wept until my eyes are dry.” He continued the missive by describing his own apparition where he was offered a bicycle to ride across a “very narrow bridge [across a] gulf; it was covered with snow and ice as smooth as glass and arched in the middle.” John lost the dream’s ending but ultimately interpreted it as a message from God to back away from the Church he had known his entire life.58
—
THE MOST CONVINCING SPEAKER at the second mass meeting was the evening’s chairman, W. R. Wooden. The chicken farmer reminded his fellow townsmen that they all profited by the river of misery, illness, and commerce flowing into the San. Moreover, several other communities, stretching from Benton Harbor, Michigan, on the southern shores of Lake Michigan, all the way to Atlantic City, New Jersey, were eager to resettle the San within their city limits. The nearby town of Niles, Michigan, tendered the most serious offer: $200,000 (or $5.68 million in 2016) in cash and forty-five acres of land “beautifully situated on the banks of the St. Joe’s River.”59 Charley Post, Wooden declared, was also considering investing some of his many millions into building a competing sanitarium.60
The scare tactics worked. Within a week, the Battle Creek bond was fully funded and delivered to the doctor. Unimpressed by this new revenue stream, the San’s board and the Adventist Elders urged Dr. Kellogg to stick to their imposed $200,000 limit even though they knew the good doctor would ignore their economic edicts. With each new report detailing how both the bills and plans for building John’s new Sanitarium had grown exponentially, Ellen White and her acolytes grumbled and glowered all the more.
Indeed, the fire was the Fort Sumter of the increasingly uncivil war between Dr. Kellogg and the Adventists. Now that the old San was history, the doctor was more determined than ever to strike out on his own and make his lasting mark on the American medical profession. He had outgrown Ellen White’s strictures, even if his religious faith and socialization prevented him from actually saying it. And deep down, in the recesses of each of their minds, both John and Ellen knew change was coming.
8
The New San
ON MAY 11, 1902, John Harvey Kellogg hosted a cornerstone-laying ceremony and announced to all who came that the new San would not be a “monument” to one man, group of people, or religious creed, but instead was “a temple to be dedicated to mercy and truth; an institution, the spirit of which shall be all that is noble, sweet, pure, and true, a practical illustration of good will, beneficence, kindliness, fraternity, and brotherly helpfulness toward all men.”1 A year later, on May 31, 1903, the doctor cut a ceremonial red ribbon and gave an even more rousing speech as he opened the doors to the reconstructed San. The press lauded his “temple of health” as “great and magnificent.”2
The new building cost more than a million dollars (or $28.4 million in 2016) to complete. The Kellogg brothers financed most of it with the profits earned from the doctor’s various book royalties; lecture, medical, and surgical fees; his food businesses; and a wide network of donations and loans from the Battle Creek business community, coreligionists, and former patients across the United States. All of the checks sent by donors or lenders went directly to Will’s accounting office.3 To each donor, Will dutifully sent back letters of receipt and news of the fund-raising and construction process.4
—
THROUGHOUT THE REBUILDING of the new San, the doctor endured the constant sniping of Ellen White and her increasingly insecure son William. The real issue, of course, was one of control. The Whites wanted to control the San as a subsidiary of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, guided by the precepts of the New Testament as they interpreted them. To John, it was inconceivable that churchmen without a scintilla of medical training would dare tell him how to run his hospital. Fiercely ambitious to join the trailblazers in American medicine, John knew that the San had to be independent of the Adventist Church, even as it remained Christian in spirit. Medical science, he insisted, was to be the authority guiding his empire and practice. Suggesting otherwise meant being disdained, or worse, ignored, by his secular peers making their own great strides in the healing arts. And because he was the San’s undisputed star attraction, John insisted on reaping the economic rewards and deciding, without interference, where those riches would be spent. To achieve these ends, John consistently outwitted and circumvented the Adventist leadership’s claims of authority, much to their increasing anger. Ellen White, in turn, was not prepared to accept John’s haughty claims without a nasty fight replete with complaints, criticisms, and accusations of sinful behavior. The doctor perfectly described his deteriorating relationship with the Whites, on March 30, 1903, when he confided to his friend the Adventist evangelist Stephen Haskell, not without some pride, “I am like a burr in their throats which they can neither swallow nor spew out. They do not like the taste of me a bit and make wry faces whenever I am around. I seem to be a constant grief to them.”5
May 31, 1903. The New San’s “Grand Opening” ceremony with John Harvey Kellogg (right of center) delivering the inaugural speech Credit 49
The most serious allegation the Adventist leaders raised against John was supposedly found on the pages of his latest book, The Living Temple. He wrote the tome as a vehicle to help fund the construction. In reading this book, buttressed by both the distance of time and objectivity, it appears to be a familiar (if not wholly repetitive) Kelloggian discussion of the structure, function, and care of the body. The book blends his long-held health theories backed by scientific explanations of the day. At several points, the text seems more religious in its tone than his other works but the principal reason for this angle was that the book was addressed to the Adventist faithful willing to pay a dollar a copy, as a donation for rebuilding the San. Throughout The Living Temple, Dr. Kellogg emphasized how the human body was a divine creation, which, as Ellen White stated many times, worked in harmony “with the fundamental teachings of both nature and the Holy Writ.” The book’s title page gives a clearer view of this perspective by quoting Corinthians, Book I (6:19): “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?”6
Elsewhere in the book, the doctor extended this metaphor to
all living things. In other words, Dr. Kellogg explained, the Creator was everywhere and in every living being, extending all the way to the microscopic. This, according to various Adventist theologians, is where John went one step too far. Such a belief, they claimed, iterated that God’s will was neither intentional nor providential, that the universe and all of nature was equivalent to the divine, rather than a singular, anthropomorphic deity. Within a few weeks of the book’s publication, John’s critics charged that it espoused pantheism and, hence, professed the heretical belief there was no singular God in charge of the whole realm of life.7
John denied any such claims of being a pantheist. No, no, no, he vehemently protested to Mrs. White and her angry followers. He remained firmly in the camp of the Judeo-Christian monotheists and even offered to remove any passage that offended Sister White or the church Elders. On November 12, 1903, he wrote Ellen an impassioned letter asking forgiveness for his selfish behavior and the promise “to do anything I can to aid in establishing harmony, unity, and peace so that the work may go forward.”8 Disinclined to accept his generous offer, the Adventist leadership declared The Living Temple to be as inflammatory as the mysterious spark that began the Sanitarium’s fire. The book and its author, Sister White commanded, must be extinguished.
Ellen and William White further alleged that the doctor “has united with the arch deceiver in using a hypnotic influence upon souls to deceive them” and that he was inciting “wickedness in Battle Creek.”9 Many Adventists followed suit and took on the task of spreading malicious rumors about John’s character both within and widely outside Battle Creek. Others joined in deriding John as a dangerous heretic who was using his position to cast doubt on the veracity of Mrs. White’s visions and testimonies. Years later, after the battle finally died down, the doctor would, in fact, question Sister White’s claims of being a true prophet, but as late as 1906 he continued to deny such allegations: “I have never denounced Sister White, and never shall. I believe her to be the servant of the Lord, and that the Lord has made her the leader of the Seventh-day Adventist people and movement, and has especially enlightened her mind.” On the other hand, even when denying the accusations of his infidelity, he could not help rubbing something caustic into the wound by mentioning in the same breath, “I don’t believe her to be infallible.”10
The Kelloggs Page 20