Ford prided himself as an outdoorsman who loved nature, exercise, fresh air, and sunshine. He spent each summer from 1915 to 1924 with his fellow self-proclaimed “Vagabonds,” Thomas Alva Edison, the tire manufacturer Harvey Firestone, and their guide, the best-selling author and “naturalist” John Burroughs. The first year of their deluxe Ford motor-carriage caravan, the Vagabonds made their way to San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 where John Harvey Kellogg was hosting a conference on eugenics and race betterment. A stop on their subsequent summer sojourns was a week or two at the Battle Creek Sanitarium as John’s personal guests.34
Like his hero, Thomas Edison, Mr. Ford was so opposed to cigarettes that he forbade smoking in all his plants, an edict held uncontestable at all the Ford plants long after his death.35 In 1916, Ford published a popular book entitled The Case Against the Little White Slaver, which was widely distributed for free in schools and youth clubs, especially for the “boy who expects to make good.” It remains an impressive compendium of much of the extant medical and moral evidence on why not to smoke tobacco.36 In 1918, Ford worked closely with Dr. Kellogg to form the “Committee of Fifty to Study the Tobacco Problem,” a consortium of scientists, doctors, philanthropists, and successful businessmen focused on the social damages and economic costs of cigarette smoking to society.37
Left to Right: Thomas Edison, naturalist John Burroughs, and Henry Ford. The self-named “Vagabonds” began many a summer cross-country trip with a stay at the San. Circa 1914, at Edison’s winter home in Fort Myers, Florida. Credit 75
When it came to the evils of cigarettes, Ford found a good teacher in John Harvey Kellogg. An opponent of tobacco dating back to his most pious days as a Seventh-day Adventist, John lectured loudly and clearly on tobacco’s harms to the body and mind. He was diligent in following the steadily accumulating medical evidence on how smoking was associated with increased incidences of heart disease, lung disease, digestive disorders, infections, and neurological problems.38 No pun intended but it is breathtaking to review John’s grasp of the diseases caused by tobacco and its addictive nature. His prescient thinking on this topic occurred decades before the medical profession and the public came to accepting these facts in the late twentieth century. In 1922, the doctor published a successful book entitled Tobaccoism, or How Tobacco Kills.39 Thousands of copies of Tobaccoism were sold and, along with Henry Ford’s White Slaver books, was an important weapon in a spirited and, ultimately, failed anti-smoking crusade during the Progressive Era.40
One reader who took both Henry Ford’s and John’s anti-smoking warnings especially to heart was Will Kellogg. Will was said to have so despised the habit that when he discovered it in one of his workers, he would either demand they quit or he would discharge them from his employ. Will believed smoking had no place in a food factory dedicated to making nutritious breakfast cereals and that the habit was more dangerous than drinking.41
Long before the medical profession took to warning about the dangers of smoking tobacco, Dr. Kellogg was sounding the alarm, circa 1922. Credit 76
The auto king’s and the doctor’s favorite topic of conversation, however, revolved around the soybean. Ford made all sorts of plastic parts and knobs for his automobiles out of soybeans. He even took to wearing articles of clothing that came from soy. But it was the nutritional value of soybeans as a food source that most fascinated the doctor. Historians have argued as to which historical figure introduced whom to the soybean and the answer often depends on who is telling the story, “Battle Freaks” or Ford fans. The point is that both these men had the vision to see the industrial and culinary capacities of this legume and persevered, using sound scientific method, in finding more uses for the soybean long before the rest of American society caught on to its importance.
During the periods between the Fords’ visits to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, John maintained a steady correspondence with Henry’s wife, Clara, and, because Henry rarely put pen to paper, Ford’s executive secretary E. G. Liebold.42 For example, on July 16, 1920, Liebold wrote a letter of introduction for Mr. Ford’s cook, Mr. Thomas Satow: “He is very much interested in obtaining information from you as to your methods of preparing food and any courtesies shown will be very much appreciated.”43 On July 20, Dr. Kellogg replied: “I have put [Satow] in the charge of our expert cook and dieticians….He seems a very pleasant young man and we are very glad to help him to increase his efficiency of service to you. Hoping you and Mrs. Ford are in good health and trusting we may sometime have the pleasure of having you with us long enough to be of some service to you.”44
Ironically, the doctor was a terrible driver who indulged in driving his car very fast through the Battle Creek Sanitarium grounds and was prone to jumping curbs, bouncing into the wrong lane, and ignoring stop signs.45
—
FORD WAS HARDLY the only plutocrat committed to Dr. Kellogg’s principles of biologic living. Dyspeptic, constipated, and nervous John D. Rockefeller Jr. came to Battle Creek after a series of disastrous events occurring from September 1913 to December 1914 in Ludlow, Colorado. It was there that the Colorado National Guard and the Rockefeller family–owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company ended a labor strike by attacking a tent colony of 1,200 coal miners and their families. Referred to as the “Ludlow Massacre,” it was a bloody travesty that resulted in the death of between nineteen and twenty-six people, some of them women and children. John D. Rockefeller Jr., who owned 40 percent of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company’s stock, received most of the public’s blame for the event.46
To calm his jangled nerves and soothe his gurgling stomach, John D. Jr. made several visits to the San. The doctor and “Junior” had much in common, from a hatred of cigarettes to a deep concern about their bowel movements.47 Writing to another patient, Dr. Kellogg came perilously close to violating his Hippocratic Oath by gossiping about the famous son of the even more famous oil tycoon: “I have often been with young Rockefeller at banquets. He usually sits beside me and I notice he sticks to the biological idea and does not vary a hair.”48
John D. Rockefeller Jr. soothed his nervous stomach with visits to the San and by adhering to Dr. Kellogg’s principles of “biologic living.” Credit 77
John D. Rockefeller Jr. was a fan of Dr. Kellogg’s soy acidophilus milk and LD-Lax (a concoction of ground plantago psyllium seeds, lactose, and dextrin designed to gently move the bowels).49 The regimen, apparently, did the trick. John D. Jr. could be heard boasting to his friends sitting in the posh parlor of the Union Club on New York City’s Park Avenue that he was as regular as a clock. For nearly three decades, Dr. Kellogg monitored the tycoon’s fragile gastrointestinal health and went as far as to discuss laboratory analyses of Mr. Rockefeller Jr.’s stools.50 One can only imagine the response of the postmen transporting stool samples from John D. Jr.’s office on the fifty-sixth floor of 30 Rockefeller Center to the gastrointestinal laboratories of the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
Another prominent Battle Creek patient was Samuel S. McClure, the bombastic and muckraking editor of McClure’s Magazine. McClure first came to Battle Creek in 1909 and made annual pilgrimages thereafter hoping to settle his neurasthenic jitters and unleash the dam of constipation and autointoxication ruining both his mood and health. During one visit, McClure gleefully wrote his wife, “For the last two weeks I’ve been clean inside, not the slightest odor to my faeces, and I am growing strong.”51 Mr. McClure urged that all the intrepid journalists writing for his pathbreaking periodical take the trip to Battle Creek. Indeed, Sam McClure’s vociferous advocacy of John’s constipation cures brings new meaning to the term “muckraking.”
One of his star reporters, the pioneering investigative journalist Ida Tarbell, took McClure’s advice and was a frequent guest at the Sanitarium. It is fascinating to speculate whether or not she or Sam McClure were ever in residence at the same time as John D. Rockefeller Jr. Between 1902 and 1904, Tarbell exposed the monopolistic business tactics of John D. Rocke
feller Sr. and the Standard Oil Company in a spectacular nineteen-part series of articles that first ran in the pages of McClure’s Magazine. Apparently, Tarbell stuck with Dr. Kellogg’s prescriptions for the rest of her life. In 1939, for example, she wrote several letters thanking him for food packages and advice on her Parkinson’s disease.52
Clarence W. Barron, the president of the Dow Jones Company and guiding light of The Wall Street Journal, could not lose weight despite Dr. Kellogg’s best efforts. Credit 78
—
LESS SUCCESSFUL, but a superb example of John’s hands-on clinical care for obesity, was the journalist, editor, and publisher Clarence W. Barron. Portly does not begin to describe Barron’s girth and weight. The editor’s single greatest contribution to American society was to create the modern enterprise of business reporting. He founded the Boston News Bureau in 1887. Soon after, he organized a news exchange with the Dow Jones News Service, which had recently introduced a publication called The Wall Street Journal. In 1901, with the financial success of these enterprises and after starting up a similar business news service in Philadelphia, Barron acquired control of Dow Jones and Company. A scrupulously honest journalist, Barron’s life mission was to inform stockholders about the soundness of their investments. Over the next twenty years, he transformed The Wall Street Journal from a tiny paper focused on publishing the New York Stock Exchange’s daily stock quotes with a subscription of a few thousand into the international powerhouse of commerce and money it has remained ever since.53
Weighing in at three hundred pounds, there was not a fine eating establishment in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia he had not frequented or asked for second helpings. Always properly dressed in a frock coat and wing collar shirt, with his hair, walrus mustache, and bushy beard combed and freshly barbered, he could easily have been confused with Thomas Nast’s famous caricature of the Tammany Hall boss, William Marcy Tweed.
Barron struggled with weight issues for most of his adult life. He was an annual visitor to the Battle Creek Sanitarium where he booked a suite of rooms with a sunny southern exposure and the goal of “whittling” himself down to an “ideal” 250 pounds.54 Dr. Kellogg took Barron’s case on as a special project because of the newspaperman’s brilliance, fame, and his enthusiastic ability to send dozens of wealthy patients to the San.55 They became good friends and enjoyed many a long “motoring” trip together through the Michigan countryside. On one such automobile ride, they passed a peach orchard and bought a bushel of the ripe fruit directly from the farmer. Barron took to eating the peaches, throwing the pits out the window each time he finished with one. By the time they returned from their journey, the bushel was half empty.56
Their relationship resulted in a great deal of positive press and fresh “clinical material” for Dr. Kellogg’s practice. But there was little that John could do about the editor’s morbid obesity beyond scolding him when he “backslid” and cheering him on during those rare occasions when he did not. Barron simply could not stick to the diet he was prescribed, even while in residence at the San. On too many nights in Battle Creek, Mr. Barron ambled across the road from the Sanitarium to a little bar and grill called the Red Onion Tavern. There, he inhaled Cuban cigars, chewed on gargantuan sirloin steaks and pork chops drowned in gravy and onions, and drank tumblers of whiskey before waddling back to his suite to make the San’s 11:00 p.m. curfew.
Dr. Kellogg loved taking his family and friends on automobile rides even though he was a terrible driver, circa 1910. Credit 79
When Barron was not in residence at the San, he and the doctor kept up a steady written correspondence. Sometimes they gossiped about mutual friends, politics, and the character of American presidents. Other times, they discussed financial matters. Barron often chastised the doctor for failing to become one of the richest men in the United States and told one of the doctor’s associates, “Think of the millions that Dr. Kellogg has permitted to slip through his fingers too easily.” Informed of Barron’s observations, Dr. Kellogg explained the difference between him and his capitalistic crony:
I have been interested in human service, not in piling up money. It requires a great deal of time and effort to make a large amount of money, and in doing so one misses many of the beautiful things in life. That is only the beginning. After one gets it, it is necessary to shut out many more beautiful things because of the effort and time it takes required in taking care of it. During my lifetime I have done many things that I really wanted to do, so I am glad that I have never had millions to bother with.57
The most common topic the two men discussed, however, was Barron’s poor health. In early 1923, Dr. Kellogg ominously warned, “You are short-breathed and your lips are blue and you must take time to pull the fat away from your heart or you will find yourself still further pinched in. You should have 350 to 400 cubic inches for expansion of breath in your lungs. (On test found it 200).”58 On October 31, 1924, he wrote: “You must get down to 250 [pounds]. The record shows that every fat man is predestined to be a diabetic. Avoid candies as you would poison. You can live on dates, nuts and apples.”59
Barron only succeeded in worsening his precarious health. In March of 1925, the doctor treated the editor for pneumonia.60 A few years later, on January 21, 1927, Dr. Kellogg demanded better compliance from his famous patient: “We expect you back in a month or six weeks and to stay long enough to get your weight down 40 or 50 pounds.”61 Only a week later, the doctor admonished that while Barron’s systolic blood pressure dropped to 175 (still considered to be rather high by modern medical standards), “I am willing to admit that you have an extraordinary mind, almost a super mind, but your body is made of just common, ordinary flesh just like that of the rest of us folks, and there is no way of dodging the things that happen to other people except by removing the cause, and this can only be done by scientific physiologic living.”62 Seven months later, in July of 1927, after still another unsuccessful attempt to right Clarence’s weight at the San, Dr. Kellogg wrote a nagging letter that Barron surely ignored. Instead of shoveling fatty food into his mouth, neglecting his health, and allowing the booming stock market to occupy his every waking moment, John begged Barron to “keep walking the straight and narrow road while you are gone and get back without losing any ground.”63
Unfortunately, neither the treatments nor the cajoling had much effect. In early September of 1928, Barron cut his vacation on Cape Cod short and returned to New York because of a rapidly worsening sense of abdominal discomfort and a loss of his prodigious appetite. When he did eat, he experienced nausea, flatulence, vomiting, and a sharp pain in the right upper quadrant of his abdomen. His stools were a bland gray in color and his urine mirrored the hue of Coca-Cola. His breath began to stink and he had a dry, scaly coating on his tongue. On September 10, his skin and the whites of his eyes had turned neon-yellow and his family put him on the next train to Battle Creek.
Upon Mr. Barron’s arrival, Dr. Kellogg ran down the staircase to welcome and examine his old friend. He was shocked to see the editor’s debilitated state and quickly diagnosed catarrhal jaundice, a now antiquated term for ascending cholangitis, the formation of gallstones with inflammation of the bile ducts so severe that it obstructs the free flow of bile and often progresses into a raging (and deadly) infection. Many cases of this era were the result of consuming way too much food and alcohol.64 Such causal descriptions fit Clarence Barron’s health profile as tightly as one of his frock coats. Dr. Kellogg recognized that Barron’s only chance at survival was an immediate trip to the operating room to resolve the biliary obstruction. John was also astute enough to know that Barron was too weak to withstand the assault of his scalpel and, instead, prescribed a liquid diet of vegetable broth and water in the hope of Barron gaining enough strength to allow for an operation. Despite three weeks of intensive nursing, it was of no use. Barron fell into a coma, most likely from liver failure, on September 30, 1928. His last words before this descent into death was an almost predictable que
ry, “What’s the news?” On October 2, at 7:30 p.m., Dr. Kellogg had the unpleasant task of declaring his old friend dead. Barron was seventy-three.65 It was one of the most painful medical battles that the doctor ever lost.
—
WHEN IT CAME TO American presidents and presidential candidates, Dr. Kellogg was a physician of choice.66 In the fall of 1911, he hosted the three-hundred-pound William Howard Taft. President Taft came to Battle Creek to campaign for his failed bid for reelection, thanks to his former boss Theodore Roosevelt’s vote-splitting run on the Progressive, or “Bull Moose,” Party ticket. After the rally, the doctor coaxed the rotund leader to the Sanitarium and, behind closed doors, diagnosed a number of problems including obstructive sleep apnea (with somnolence so great that Taft fell asleep at state dinners, in the middle of conversations, and, on occasion, while simply standing up). President Taft also suffered from an alarmingly high blood pressure, with a systolic pressure of more than 200 mm Hg, and evidence of atherosclerosis. Dr. Kellogg counseled him on a number of ways to lose weight and predicted early death if the portly Taft ignored his advice. After Taft lost his presidency that November, he finally had the time to pay attention to his ailing body rather than the body politic. Unlike Barron of Wall Street, however, Mr. Taft, formerly of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, shed eighty pounds of his famous girth and lowered his blood pressure by a respectable 50 mm Hg. Taft ultimately became the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1921 but his long life of obesity caught up with him; after a series of heart attacks and cerebrovascular strokes affecting his mental faculties, he succumbed at seventy-three, to congestive heart failure in 1930.67
The Kelloggs Page 26