The Kelloggs

by Howard Markel

  Dr. Kellogg (center, in white) on the stage as William Howard Taft delivers a campaign speech in Battle Creek. Shortly after Taft’s stump speech, the doctor examined the president at the San and told him to lose weight. September 21, 1911. Credit 80

  Dr. Kellogg crossed to the other side of the presidential aspirant aisle on October 3, 1916, when he had his man drive him down to the train station to meet the thrice-failed Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. The Great Commoner was invited to be a keynote speaker at the San’s Golden Jubilee, 50th Anniversary Celebration. As soon as Bryan entered his automobile, John’s sensitive nose detected his extremely foul-smelling breath and told him that he was suffering from autointoxication. Bryan reputedly asked, “Is that something that one gets from driving too rapidly in an automobile?”68 For the remainder of the car trip, Dr. Kellogg proceeded to give his invited lecturer a private oration on the “harm, which results from food residues and body wastes stagnating in the colon.” Famously hearty eater that Bryan was (he was especially fond of heaping plates of fried chicken and rare beefsteaks), one can only hope he found something suitably appetizing when he sat down in the San’s famous dining room for the meatless Kellogg bill of fare.69

  Dr. Kellogg diagnosed Warren Harding, then an Ohio state senator, with neurasthenia, twenty-one years before Harding became the 29th president of the United States. Credit 81

  Dr. Kellogg treated Warren G. Harding at least five times. Referred to the San by his physician father and Adventist mother, Harding’s first consultation occurred in 1889, when he was twenty-four, and the final visit in 1901, at age thirty-six.70 On one visit, John diagnosed the then Ohio state senator as a neurasthenic and warned him that his philandering and alcohol consumption might injure his delicate and already damaged heart. Once ensconced in the White House, President Harding took to consulting his wife’s homeopathic physician and completely ignored the medical entreaties of Dr. Kellogg, who, no doubt, was offended by the swirling rumors of Harding’s sexual proclivities. On August 2, 1923, while resting in a San Francisco hotel during a long campaign trip, President Harding keeled over, fell on his bed, and dropped dead. The cause was a massive heart attack. He was only fifty-eight years of age.71

  Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, was more amenable to the doctor’s views on health. Upon assuming the presidency, the athletic and lean Coolidge installed one of Dr. Kellogg’s mechanical horses in the White House. “Silent Cal” uncharacteristically boasted about the machine’s excellence, a commendation quickly picked up by the White House press corps.72 John returned the favor of Coolidge’s endorsement by sending him several cases of his health foods and natural laxatives. Writing to Clarence Barron on June 17, 1927, he declared, “the President…is of a deeply philosophical mind….It is a great satisfaction to have in the presidential chair such a fine character as Coolidge, especially as a successor to Harding, a man of the very opposite type.”73

  In late 1932, Herbert Hoover invited Dr. Kellogg to the White House for a reception held on February 2, 1933, in the final days of that president’s administration. John accepted with alacrity, telling Hoover’s chief military advisor, Lieutenant Colonel Campbell Hodges, “I highly appreciate the honor of meeting the President personally. I have felt and still feel that he is the ablest man who has ever filled the Presidential chair since Washington.”74

  A few months after Franklin Roosevelt assumed office, John revised his long-held Republican allegiance and courted the new president. Roosevelt was so impressed by the doctor that he invited him to his polio retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. John promised to do just that the following winter during his annual drive from Michigan down to Florida.

  Always promoting his health products, on July 27, 1933, John sent Franklin Roosevelt and his trusted secretary, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, four portable, lumbar-vertebrae-supporting seat backs, or “posture panels.” He invented them to ease the discomfort of automobile seats. “The panel,” Dr. Kellogg explained, “permits complete relaxation while the body is held in a physiologic position. It thus prevents weariness….I think Mrs. Roosevelt might also be interested.” No response appears to have come from the White House. Only two years earlier, the doctor tried to sell Henry Ford on using the posture panels for his fleet of automobiles. This, too, fell on deaf ears.75

  The same day John pitched the president’s secretary with his new invention, he wrote a cloying tribute to the president about his New Deal:

  May I take this opportunity to express my deep appreciation of the marvelous things you have already done for America and for the world and the still greater things, which the new forces you have set in operation are going to accomplish in the future. This is the first time in all history that science has been so fully summoned to the aid of government and in such a masterly way….I say to you frankly and sincerely that in my opinion your administration marks indelibly the beginning of a third chapter of this great republic, an era which will see greater improving changes in our national life, industrial, civic and social than our most optimistic prophets have envisioned and will develop new standards and methods in government and create a model for the world.76

  Eleanor Roosevelt visits the San’s world-famous kitchen, circa 1933. Credit 82

  Eleanor Roosevelt visited Battle Creek in 1933 and again in 1940 (she was especially impressed by the San’s kitchen and the gymnasium’s vast array of exercise machines). The correspondence between the doctor and the president trails off by the end of 1934.77 There were no more invitations to the Roosevelt White House or Warm Springs. Nor were there any requests for presidential endorsements of John’s latest invention. By 1936, John was back in the arms of his father’s Grand Old Party. That fall, at a Republican rally in Battle Creek, Dr. Kellogg introduced “the next President of the United States,” Alf Landon. On November 3, Roosevelt humiliated Landon. The doctor’s candidate carried only Vermont and Maine.78

  11

  Will’s Place

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE Thanksgiving 1912, Will Kellogg strolled up New York City’s Broadway with a sense of purpose and pride. Still embroiled in a bitter fight with his older brother and grieving the premature death of his wife, Puss, on September 2, Will chose to focus on the one prize within his grasp: proving to the world that he was every bit the Titan his brother John purported to be. Bankers without imagination laughed at Will’s notion of “cold cereal” and told him he was bound for failure.1 John Preston Kellogg’s youngest son simply found his capital elsewhere. He proved all his naysayers wrong, and within six short years he was America’s undisputed “Corn Flake King.”

  New York City may have been intimidating to most people visiting from small towns like Battle Creek, but not for Will. Walking at a quick clip block after block, he ignored the cacophony of trolley cars clanging and dozens of newspaper boys entreating him to “read all about it.” As he crossed 47th Street, he could see inside the lobby of the Palace Theatre, which was being readied for its grand opening as the nation’s premier vaudeville Mecca.2 If he, indeed, looked in that direction, it is safe to assume it was a brief glance, and of minor interest to the determined businessman from Battle Creek. On this afternoon, Will was looking for a different mecca: the Mecca Building, at 1600 Broadway, to be precise.

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  ERECTED IN 1902 by the Studebaker Brothers to serve as both a showroom and factory for their fleet of all-electric automobiles, the Mecca Building was triangular in shape. It, therefore, fronted three streets: Seventh Avenue, 48th Street, and Broadway. This lattice of skyscrapers and pavement forms the head of what was once known as Longacre Square, an oddly shaped quadrilateral that extends a full six city blocks. On April 4, 1904, after Adolph Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times, moved his operation uptown to the opposite end of the “square,” at Broadway and 42nd Street, it was renamed “Times Square.” Within a few months, the first of many electric signs was erected, although the famed Times “Zipper,” the news ticker illuminating br
eaking headlines to passersby below, would not be built until 1928.3 Hyperbolically called the “Crossroads of the World,” Times Square was home to “80% of the city’s theatres, surrounded by the best hotels the world affords…the most frequented restaurants in New York,” and “the most advertised section of New York City.”4

  The Mecca Building may well have been the most famous building in the world’s most famous neighborhood, even if few who worked outside of its ten stories knew its name. From 1902 until 2004, when it was demolished, almost every recorded image of the “Great White Way,” from postcards and photographs to films and television shows, pictured the Mecca Building—even if you could see little of its elaborate red-brick and terra-cotta facade. For decades, the building was covered by a wall of neon and electric light bulb signs featuring animated and brightly colored advertisements, such as the “Good to the Last Drop Cup of Maxwell House Coffee” sign and the “White Rock Soda Water” clock.5

  In the spring of 1912, Will made the bright blanket of billboards even brighter by signing a five-year lease, at $15,000 per annum (or $378,000 in 2016), giving him the rights to the Mecca Building’s rooftop. All summer and through much of the fall of 1912, eighteen construction workers erected an iron scaffold supporting the “largest electric sign ever built.” The eighty-ton structure included six “mammoth trusses” to distribute the 106-foot-wide and 80-foot-high sign’s weight and the wind stress evenly.6 The price tag amounted to more than $40,000 (about $1.01 million in 2016). Will was confident that the construction costs and the monthly rental fees were worth every penny.

  Electrically rendered on the sign’s scaffolding was a boy’s smiling face and a box of Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes. Both the boy’s face and the box measured some forty feet in height. In between them was the now familiar red script “Kellogg’s.” The “K,” alone, was sixty-six feet high. A mechanical device changed the boy’s smile into a crying frown. At that point, electric letters beamed “I Want Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes.” When the boy’s cry reversed back to a smile, the letters changed to read “I Got Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes.” A national magazine and newspaper advertisement campaign proudly announced “the sign portrays a true story in millions of homes daily.”7 The Mecca Building’s display may have been the largest Kellogg’s sign but it was hardly the company’s only glitzy billboard. Between 1906 and 1914, Will erected thousands more like it across the nation, costing as much as $30,000 (or $756,000 in 2016) each.8

  The World’s Largest Electric Sign: “I Want Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes,” on the rooftop of the Mecca Building, at the head of Times Square, New York City, August 17, 1912 Credit 83

  WILL’S SUCCESS AT SELLING so many boxes of Corn Flakes was directly tied to the vast changes simultaneously occurring in the United States in the early twentieth century. To begin, his Battle Creek operation was transformed by the rise of the modern mechanized factory, which operated twenty-four hours a day on new forms of power—volts of electricity and the controlled explosion of gasoline, either of which could be started or stopped at the push of a button.9 The extensive (and competitively priced) railway lines insured both a steady volume of raw grain and other ingredients arriving daily to his Battle Creek factory and his ability to send out carloads of finished product to the far reaches of the nation. His well-cultivated network of food jobbers and brokers made sure the cereal was prominently placed in grocery stores for purchase. The telegram and the telephone further facilitated Will’s direct communication with regional markets far away from his Battle Creek headquarters and allowed him to plan and produce accordingly, with close control of his costs. All of these new technologies allowed for “maximum throughput” on a scale of production that both satisfied the hunger of the entire continent and Will’s bottom line.10

  In 1962, Everett Rogers published a seminal book called Diffusion of Innovations.11 Building on the work of several late-nineteenth-century sociologists, Rogers studied why and how new ideas or technologies spread, grew, and became accepted in different cultures and nations. Integral to the process, of course, were the innovators who developed entirely new products and the technologies needed to produce them. Equally important were the early adopters who quickly grasped the importance of what the innovators were coming up with, and extended and magnified their inventions on a grand scale, which was then followed by the diffusion of these methods and products to those who, so to speak, came late to the party and, finally, to the rest of us, the consumers.

  To be sure, both Will and John Harvey Kellogg were “ground-floor” innovators in the flaked cereal industry, but Will was also an “early adopter.” One example of this adoption process was Will’s love of “business systems,” such as the ledger and accounting methods he purchased from Arch Shaw while still managing the Sanitarium. Later, at his own company, Will instituted many more improvements both to keep track of his firm’s ever-expanding commerce and organizational structure.

  Will’s most instrumental early adoption, however, was his recognition of the need to create a constant demand for his product. He achieved this goal through the medium of newspapers and magazines and with the sophisticated application of a relatively new profession known as advertising. In concert with the new means of manufacturing and distribution, advertising in the best media outlets of the early twentieth century transformed the Battle Creek–based Kellogg Company into a national, and ultimately a global, brand.

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  THE MEANS FOR PRINTING newspapers and magazines underwent a technological revolution beginning in the 1880s, thanks to the advent of the linotype machine, which was invented by the German printer Ottmar Mergenthaler and first used by the New York Tribune on July 3, 1886. Before this mechanical advancement, printers practiced labor-intensive methods of using lead type and setting each letter of each word into place by hand. Such onerous tasks mandated short issues of newspapers, rarely more than a few pages. With the linotype machine, the printer now entered the letters, words, and sentences of a story onto a keyboard as the machine lined up a “type matrix,” in other words, a “line o’ type.” He then pressed a lever that released molten lead into the casting portions of the type matrix. After it cooled, the type was placed on massive rolling, printing machines. At every stage of these preparations, the printers read each line and proofed the entire article.12 Consequently, the linotype opened up the newspapers, increased their page count, and thus created enormous amounts of space both for news stories and advertisements. Thomas Edison, the greatest “techie” of the day, described the linotype machine as “the eighth wonder of the world.”13

  Concurrently, newsprint was cheap and plentiful, as paper producers developed far better organized production and distribution methods. Information, the life’s blood of any newspaper, also began to flow more freely. The clatter and ring of the rapid, new “typewriter” signaled its dominant role in newsrooms across the nation as the device truly became mightier than the pen. Telephones added to the immediacy of news, reporting, and reach. Information not only traveled long distances at the speed of sound, it was now accessible to everyone whether you knew Morse code or not.

  Another simultaneous advancement called half-tone printing freed newspapers and magazines from using only occasional illustrations in the form of woodcuts. The new method, which simulates an image through the elaborate use of dots varying in size and spacing, allowed the presses to rapidly duplicate photographic images, drawings, and graphics, first in black and white and, later, in bright, bold colors. The ability to present beautiful enticing images that captured the public’s eye revolutionized the newspaper, magazine, and advertising businesses.

  National mechanisms of media distribution advanced during this period as well. In 1863, the U.S. Congress recognized how important mail order subscriptions were to maintaining a “free press” throughout the country, leading them to create a second, and cheaper, postage rate expressly for periodicals. This subvention helped balance a publication’s bottom line and
stay in print.

  Perhaps the most important change was how mass advertising revenues disrupted the subscription-only income model. The economic health of these mass audience publications now became a factor of the number of lines or pages of advertising it sold per issue. Circulation remained a dominant measure both in terms of influence and because the number of readers a magazine or newspaper commanded was directly connected to how much they could charge for advertising space.14 Regardless of the financial formulae, magazines were devoured by the American public and served as a major form of entertainment and leisure reading, especially in the days before radio and television. The beautifully illustrated advertisements slipped in between the magazine stories influenced millions of people to buy things they might need for daily life and achieve the idealized American dream and lifestyle.15

  Unfortunately, as national magazines and their advertising content gained ground, a wide variety of abuses developed, too. The industry most notable for false advertising and chicanery was the patent medicines and health products business. Both out of self-interest and to protect their readers, “the caveat emptor rule was abandoned by the better class of periodicals.” In 1904, The Ladies’ Home Journal made the first major inroad in exposing the most egregious manipulations. The magazine launched a campaign against “Lydia Pinkham’s Cure,” a popular tonic of herbs and way too much alcohol. At the time, bottles of Lydia Pinkham’s were sold by the carload to unsuspecting women, supposedly to allay their menstrual and menopausal complaints and, in reality, leave them in a haze of inebriation.16 The following year, 1905, Collier’s magazine published a series of muckraking articles by Samuel Hopkins Adams about the dangerous frauds committed by other American tonic and drug manufacturers. At the same time, Dr. Morris Fishbein, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, perhaps the most influential medical publication in the United States, exposed quack cures at a relentless rate. And, of course, in 1906, Americans were simultaneously disgusted and fascinated by Upton Sinclair’s exposé of the Chicago stockyards and the meat industry in The Jungle, which, in turn, inspired enormous political pressure to do something about the health risks of consuming meat. The same year that Sinclair’s muckraking novel was published, Theodore Roosevelt led a presidential charge to protect Americans from the fraudulent and dangerous ways employed by the food and pharmaceutical industries in its advertisements and with respect to the purity of the ingredients they used in their goods. The result was the passage of the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.17 Yet even after this landmark regulatory action, there remained an entertaining and exaggerative component to American advertising, especially for “legal” foods, health products, and patent medicines.18