In spite of such outward signs of bravado, John was emotionally devastated by the Church’s attempts to contain his genius and belittle his industry. His “crimes” against the Church included heresy, disloyalty, slander against the Whites, favoring science over the teachings of the Creator, misappropriation of funds, fraud, and a number of other trumped-up charges. In late 1905, he warned his friend George Butler:
Don’t think I am a screeching fire-eater. If I am wrong in my prognostics I shall be happy, but the experience I have had the last six years has taught me a few things. I do not care anything about position. The only thing I am interested in is that I do not want to see you driven out by the same harassing boycotting policy by which they are seeking to drive me out. They have failed in their campaign against me only because they could not do it…as far as I am concerned, they have done me all the harm they can; and sizing it all up, it seems they have done me good instead of harm.”11
The Church’s campaign against John reached its zenith in November 10, 1907, when he was unanimously “disfellowshipped” and thrown out of the faith in which he had been reared since birth.12
A month later, on December 16, 1907, he wrote “for years I have seen it coming” in an essay entitled “My First and Last Word.” John went on to castigate the Church (and especially William C. White) for its attempt to “cripple and destroy the Battle Creek Sanitarium and every work with which I am connected,” and defiantly denied the Adventists’ charges against him as “whimsical and false.”13 On reflection, John’s forced expulsion from the Adventist Church may have been the best thing that happened to his medical career. It freed him to become an independent king of wellness, unshackled by a minority Christian denomination in a world where science was increasingly trumping faith. With respect to his religious beliefs, John remained a Christian in outlook, even if he rarely practiced all its rites or toed the strict line of Adventist theology. His true religion was, and always would be, “biologic living.” Nothing, Dr. Kellogg pledged, would get in the way of that crusade. The scriptures he followed most closely now were the articles and books he wrote and the scientific news of the day supporting those writings. The church where he preached his health gospel was the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
The gentlemen’s nurses Credit 50
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FOR A FULL WEEK BEFORE its grand reopening on May 31, 1903, dozens of powerful locomotives and special “excursion trains” arrived at the Battle Creek train station, a Romanesque structure built of rough-hewn Indiana granite and Lake Superior iron-rich brick and topped by a three-story clock tower. A multitude of well-heeled, health-seeking pilgrims exited the trains. They came from all over the world to celebrate the town’s new, luxurious Sanitarium. No matter what time of day or night the train arrived, the travelers were greeted by a gaggle of porters, cabbies, and hacks of all shapes and sizes.14
On the morning of the opening ceremonies, Dr. Kellogg and Will were warned about a potential dynamite attack on the sparkling new Italian Renaissance building designed by the prominent Dayton, Ohio, architect Frank M. Andrews and erected by the John McMichaels construction firm of Chicago. Fortunately, these threats turned out to be a hoax anonymously sent to a Detroit reporter, who circulated what he thought to be a “scoop” on the Associated Press wire service. Prank or not, some attendees were frightened enough that Will requested and received an extra large presence of the Battle Creek police force to stand guard during the festivities. By noon, a crowd had congregated on the two-acre front lawn of the San, filling rows of freshly whitewashed seats set up by dozens of staff carpenters earlier that morning. From 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., the building was open for all to tour and promptly closed when the ceremony began “so that the noise of people entering the front doors might not disturb the speakers.”15
The ladies’ nurses Credit 51
The speakers’ platform was “festooned and ablaze with flags and bunting, while upon the flagstaff over the front center [of the building] ‘Old Glory’ floated proudly in the breeze.”16 A contingent of nurses and distinguished guests began the exercises, led by the redoubtable Dr. Kellogg, to the rousing beat of the Germania Orchestra. As the musicians played marches by John Philip Sousa and W. C. Handy, the speakers and nurses “appeared as well drilled as a body of soldiers. The immense audience gave them a cheer of approval as they took their seats.”17 Patiently standing backstage, Will made sure everyone was in their proper place and that the event unrolled exactly as planned.
There were addresses made by all the usual professional blowhards including Michigan’s twenty-fifth governor, the Republican Aaron T. Bliss; Republican congressman Washington Gardner; and a long line of eminent doctors, academics, bankers, and Battle Creek Babbits. The main event, of course, was Dr. Kellogg’s keynote address. He did not fail to impress. The new San was dedicated, as Dr. Kellogg asserted that afternoon, “Not as our work, but as God’s work, and we ask you to accept it as such.”18 Before closing the ceremony with a benediction by the Reverend Lycurgus McCoy, the longtime Sanitarium chaplain, an army of ushers distributed attractive pamphlets containing congratulatory telegrams from President Theodore Roosevelt, Secretary of War Elihu Root, U.S. Attorney General Philander Knox, and “scores of other high government officials.” Later, an evening prayer service, accompanied by an orchestra and a choir singing hymns, was held in the chapel. In the gym, musclemen performed acrobatic drills, and in the parlor the medical staff hosted a “reunion ceremony” for former patients.
The new San’s dining room Credit 52
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DR. KELLOGG WAS ESPECIALLY PROUD of the new dining room, “the ceiling and walls of which are adorned with floral designs, fruit pieces, and landscapes.”19 The room’s vaulted ceiling and numerous windows were designed to maximize sunlight. A small orchestra played softly in the background during each meal. Prominently painted on the wall on one end of the room, in twelve-inch-high, golden raised letters on a matte black background so everyone could see was the word “FLETCHERIZE.” The sign was the perfect cue for a ritual that would begin every meal there in the years to come. Dr. Kellogg, or his designate, would lead the diners in the “Chewing Song,” memorializing the work of Horace Fletcher, the health advocate who urged his patients to chew each morsel of food forty or more times before swallowing in order to thoroughly mix it with salivary amylase and gently introduce a pre-digested bolus to the stomach and physiological points south. “Chew, chew, chew, that is the thing to do,” the song’s chorus began, followed by many more verses of musical warnings including, “You may smile when you chew but don’t try to talk, too./For perhaps you will choke, and be sorry that you spoke.” Ironically, singing the “Chewing Song” probably took longer than the actual “fletcherizing” of the meal itself.20 Dr. Kellogg was a great admirer of Horace Fletcher’s communication skills and often described him as “a natural born salesman, and when he has a good idea he knows how to present it in such a way that people will accept it and try it.”21
Horace Fletcher, circa 1908, a health food faddist, nicknamed “The Great Masticator.” He advised people to chew their food forty or more times before swallowing. Credit 53
Although the new dining room had a capacity for eight hundred guests for one meal, even it was too small to house the thousands attending the “grand health banquet” capping the opening day’s events.22 Instead, this meal, the first of many bountiful banquets the San hosted, was held in the gargantuan gymnasium. In the years that followed, scores of medical societies, temperance groups, conventions for teachers, professors, and missionaries, “congresses of nations,” Rotarian meetings, and all types of other groups dined there. Six long tables dominated the room to seat the diners, with little alleys between the tables for waiters to scurry back and forth. Dr. Kellogg announced to his guests that all of the food they were about to consume was grown or produced in the San’s vegetable greenhouse, farms, dairy, and granary.23 The subsequent statistics of food consumption at the new San are truly stag
gering. In 1910, the patients ate “41,319 dozen eggs, 40,282 loaves of bread, 51,206 pounds of butter, 1,600 barrels of apples, 6,000 bushels of potatoes, 1,249 cases of oranges, 1,429 bunches of bananas, and 424 cases of grapefruit,” washed down with 19,174 gallons of milk and 27,928 gallons of cream. A decade later, in 1920, “63,816 dozen eggs and 130,814 loaves of bread” were consumed.24
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FULLY OPEN FOR BUSINESS the following day, a veritable army of health soldiers—twenty attentive physicians, three hundred nurses and bath attendants, and hundreds more masseuses, bakers, waiters, cooks, bellhops, orderlies, and security guards—welcomed guests along the San’s stately portico. Upon entering the main doors of the new Sanitarium, the first thing a guest was likely to notice was the clear, fresh air enveloping the place. Air was constantly recirculated with even fresher air from outside by means of an elaborate system of pipes, flues, and fans. On any given day, regardless of the season, the San’s ambient temperature was a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit by day and a brisk 55 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit by night.
The San’s kitchen Credit 54
Beyond the heavy brass entry doors was a richly appointed Grand Lobby, anchored by an ornately carved registration desk and topped by a ceiling decorated “by a world-renowned artist as a token of appreciation.” The elaborate ceiling featured geometrical designs in an interlocking fashion and a continuous, molded-plaster chain of wreaths and was held up by a series of majestic columns spiraled by vines of holly.25 While waiting for their room, newcomers were encouraged to pad around the lobby, arrange for a tour of the place with the friendly concierge, or to take a seat and relax in the finest quarter-sawn oak chairs and sofas available from the Stickley and Sons of Grand Rapids, Michigan, catalog. In the back of the lobby was a fragrant flower balcony featuring ferns, rhododendrons, and hanging plants, atop a brass balustrade, showered by an abundance of light “flooding softly in through the great art-glass windows.”26 One of the windows proclaimed a dictum from Deuteronomy 30:20: “He is Thy Life.”27
Midwinter vegetables straight from the soil to the San’s dining room Credit 55
The San’s vegetable greenhouse Credit 56
The lobby opened up at its southern end into the Main Parlor where the walls and ceiling were tastefully painted with hues of fresh “cream, and pastel green with touches of gold.” Flanked by two smaller private parlors, the focal point of this restive salon was a “big rustic fireplace,” where, during the winter, there burned “a real log fire…stimulating good cheer and sociability.”28 The main parlor was a welcoming place where “hardly a day or evening passes without a party or entertainment of some kind—a musicale or recital, stereopticon or motion picture, an address, a pleasant travel talk, a question box lecture by one of the Sanitarium physicians, a concert by the band or orchestra.”29 The wing jutting off the north end of the lobby housed a warren of physicians’ offices to examine the male patients and, to the south, several more cubicles and examination rooms for women.
The new San’s main lobby Credit 57
The new Sanitarium’s most distinctive feature, however, was a year-round indoor palm garden, topped by a semicircular cone of glass where patients were soothed by sunbeams and “a profusion of growing palms, fruiting bananas and rare exotic plants spread[ing] their luxuriant foliage…[and] half hidden by ferns and vines, a gurgling little waterfall find[ing] its way to a limpid pool below.”30 Conveniently placed along the walking paths of this “tropical garden” were benches and chairs, which served as an inviting place of rest and contemplation amid the foliage and the doctor’s growing collection of exotic birds and colorful butterflies. In many of the San’s advertisements during this period, invalids were invited “to enjoy the restorative rays of Helios” in the Palm Garden while wintering in cold, gray Battle Creek.31
Paving the facility’s five acres of flooring was an indestructible layer of marble and terrazzo mosaic, in which “germs and vermin can never find a lodging.” A stratum of “artificial stone,” as concrete was often called at this time, rested directly beneath this impermeable surface, reinforced by iron cables. Equally important for an institution that had experienced a total decimation by flames only a year before, Will made certain that every single wall of this fireproof and frost-proof complex was entirely constructed of brick, iron, stone, and Portland cement.32 There were neither wood floors nor wooden partitions. What partitions that did exist were made of Mackolite, a chemically treated building material, available in wall form, tiles, and even ceiling beams, composed of ground gypsum and widely advertised to be “non-combustible” and “vermin proof.”33 The only wood to be found in the San was the decorative red birch trim for the windows and doorframes, stained to appear as if it was mahogany, and golden oak trim in the Grand Parlor. The stairwells were constructed of iron, slate, and marble; the supporting pillars were constructed of cement and iron. In all of its promotional brochures, the new San was heralded as “the only absolutely fire-proof institution of this sort in the world.”34
The spectacular Palm Garden, where tropical plants grew and the sun shined bright, all year round
Six steam-operated elevators were at the ready to whisk guests up to the floors numbered 2 through 5, where four hundred well-appointed bedrooms and suites were located. Roughly half of these rooms had their own bathrooms attached, complete with porcelain bathtubs, lavatories, and the most modern conveniences of plumbing. Those rooms without private bathrooms offered washstands, basins of water, and ready access to nearby communal toilets, showers, and bathtubs. Each room was furnished with a dresser, mirror, and desk along with a brass bed, which was easier to keep clean than a wooden bed stand. The floors were bare of carpeting. The only exception was a harem of Persian rugs situated around the San’s public spaces, but the housekeepers regularly smacked them with rug-beaters to ensure they were dust-free and, thus, harmless to the patients’ respiratory health.
Treatment rooms, with space to serve one thousand people in a single day, were located on the fifth and the sixth floors. Surgical patients recuperated on the fifth floor while the operating room suites were on the north end of the sixth floor.35 At Will’s suggestion, the Sanitarium kitchen and dining room were on the sixth floor to prevent the smells of food, which floated upward in the air, from wafting into the guestrooms on the floors below.
Jutting off from the rear of the Sanitarium’s main building, like the spokes of a wheel, were three magnificent athletic buildings. The center building housed a fully equipped gymnasium for weight training, volleyball, badminton, calisthenics, ring and horse gymnastics, and marching drills. The gym also boasted a bank of mechanized exercise contraptions. For example, convinced of the health effects of vibratory movements on both the body organs and circulation, Dr. Kellogg invented a vibrating machine that connected a jackhammer-like device to a heavy canvas belt to be placed around the waist and buttocks. The theory was that this passive form of vibration (“the machine does all the work,” the doctor crowed) melted away unsightly “love handles” plaguing the middle-aged. The machine became a common staple in the “weight reducing” industry of the 1920s and 1930s.
Gymnasium drill
Some of the doctor’s other popular exercise devices included vibrating chairs, which were designed to improve circulation to the digestive organs and remove buttocks fat; mechanical kneading machines to stimulate what he called “the crippled colon,”36 machines that lightly pounded on the back muscles and spine to simulate a “Swedish massage,”37 tilt tables that ascended and descended eight times a minute to relieve pressure on herniated vertebral discs, revolving ribbed cylinders to stimulate and soothe one’s tired feet, a complex series of weights and pulleys,38 and dynamometers to measure muscle strength.39 Dr. Kellogg’s exercise machines were widely advertised and endorsed by the famous, such as a 1927 advertisement featuring a svelte Barbara Stanwyck, then starring in the Broadway play Burlesque, enjoying the benefits of an oscillating “Health Builder” that allowed her t
o keep fit with only fifteen minutes of “massage-vibratory treatments.”40
The two other “spokes” housed white-tiled indoor pools and baths of all kinds from Turkish to Russian—and even more attendants and changing rooms; one of the three-story buildings was for men, the other for women.41 These bathhouses would have made the ancient Romans jealous. Down the hall from the bathrooms was the San’s sanctum sanctorum, the enema room, stuffed with gleaming “enema machines” that could pointedly deliver fifteen quarts of water per minute into a human colon. Dr. Kellogg advised his patients to produce four or more bowel movements a day, just like the healthy apes he observed while visiting zoos in Chicago, Detroit, and New York.42 If the water enemas were not enough (a ritual he was said to have engaged in each morning), John ordered his patients to consume a pint of yogurt each day, followed by a yogurt enema, both containing loads of lactobacilli, in order to repopulate the bacterial flora of the gut colon with healthy bacteria—a therapeutic aim known today as probiotics and the microbiome of the gastrointestinal tract.43
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