On January 4, 1921, only two weeks after the State Supreme Court decision, Will decreed that his versions of John’s constipation-busting bran cereal were now bona fide W. K. Kellogg Company products. In a memorandum to his sales staff and food brokers, Will could barely contain his glee as he announced, “Dr. Kellogg and the Kellogg Food Co., cannot use the word ‘Kellogg’ as a trademark or trade name on any articles manufactured by them…my company will now start a vigorous Bran campaign and we feel sure of receiving your co-operation in our effort to increase the sale of our Bran product, to the consuming public.”91
The greatest casualty, of course, was the bond between two brothers. Bitter rivals, they rarely spoke to one another for the remainder of their lives. When they did, Will usually made sure to have someone with him to insure a third party heard exactly what was discussed rather than the version the doctor would later alter in his favor. After the trial, the quiet Will often chastised others who criticized the doctor in his presence but he rarely missed an opportunity to do so himself. Years later, Will met a man who had recently resigned his post at the San and he wryly observed, “Your happiness is just beginning.”92
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The Doctor’s Crusade Against Race Degeneracy
CONVINCED OF THE righteousness of his cause, Dr. Kellogg was one of America’s great health crusaders. Yet there was an unseemly side to John’s enthusiasm and constant attention seeking. Much to Will’s distaste, John long exhibited impatience with the slow pace of scientific inquiry and a too ready acceptance (and, at times, exaggeration) of data that served his medical theories, biases, and prejudices. In many cases, such as the diet he recommended, the avoidance of meat, sugar, alcohol, tobacco, and gluttony, and with the health foods he created, the doctor turned out to be stunningly correct, even if the scientific reasoning behind them was not. In other instances, however, he could be just plain wrong and it was those circumstances that have contributed most heavily to his persona non grata status in the pantheon of American medicine.
No single medical misadventure better represents Dr. Kellogg’s legacy of being on the wrong side of history than his dauntless support of one of the most popular scientific and social theories of his day. For decades, he subscribed to a prejudiced set of ideas, which were ultimately demonstrated to be a worthless, if not outright racist and harmful, pseudoscience. From the late nineteenth century until his death during World War II, he sounded the alarm over the degeneracy of the white race. In fact, John Harvey Kellogg was one of the most vocal proponents, facilitators, and major financial backers of the American eugenics movement.1
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BEGINNING IN THE LATE 1890s and reaching its zenith during the first three decades of the next century, a great many “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” upper-class men (as well as their wives and children) grew increasingly obsessed with the future of the American gene pool.2 Supporting these fears was a theoretical framework called eugenics, first proposed in 1883 by the British naturalist Sir Francis Galton. The word “eugenics” is taken from the Greek root “eugenes, namely good in stock or hereditarily endowed with noble qualities.” He used the term to propose the means to improve population health by “giv[ing] to the more suitable races…a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”3 Before long, Sir Francis’s social theories on who was eugenically worthy and who was not spread like wildfire among white intellectuals in almost every Western nation.
In the United States, during what historians now call the Progressive Era (1900–1920), a generation of reformers sought to confront a number of social problems of the day, including urban poverty, assimilating the huge number of immigrants coming to American shores, public health crises ranging from epidemics to alarmingly high infant mortality rates, cultural confusion, and explosive population growth. Many of these reformers applied inappropriate eugenic explanations to their management of those deemed to be socially undesirable: so-called mental defectives (whom doctors and psychologists labeled with newly created clinical terms like “imbeciles,” “idiots,” and “morons”), the blind, deaf, mentally ill, and “crippled,” orphans, unwed mothers, epileptics, Native Americans, African Americans, foreigners, poor residents in the mountains and hollows of Appalachia, and many other outsider groups. All these “inferior races,” eugenic theorists concluded, were a drain on the economic, political, and moral health of American life.
The solution of the day was to quarantine, cordon off, and prevent them from contaminating the “superior,” dominant white, native-born citizens.4 Moreover, racial groups deemed “eugenically superior,” specifically White Anglo Saxon Protestants, were encouraged to reproduce at greater rates, a concept often referred to as “positive eugenics.” Those adjudged to have “inferior genes,” however, were to be discouraged from reproducing through the establishment of “negative eugenics” programs, such as state-mandated sterilization for mental defectives, restrictions against who could marry whom in the form of racial or miscegenation laws, and mandatory blood tests for sexually transmitted diseases, birth control policies, harsh adoption laws, and loud nativist calls for laws restricting the entry of swarthy, unkempt, and inassimilable immigrants. In essence, eugenics offered Americans in the majority and in positions of power a seemingly authoritative scientific language to substantiate their biases against those they feared as dangerous.5
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THE EPICENTER OF THIS MOVEMENT was the Station for Experimental Evolution and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, which was directed by Charles Benedict Davenport, an ambitious, indefatigable, Harvard-trained biologist and member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.6 The ERO was founded in 1910, thanks to a huge bequest from Mary Harriman, the wife of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman, as well as beneficent donations from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.
Left to right, Harry H. Laughlin, assistant director, and Charles Davenport, director, of the Eugenics Record Office, circa 1913 Credit 98
The ERO zealously promoted the observations of Gregor Mendel, a German-speaking Moravian cleric and scientist who in 1865 studied the breeding of pea plants. Most scientists rightly acclaim Mendel for developing the basic scientific foundation of modern genetics. Among other things, Mendel was the first to formally describe recessive and dominant hereditary genes. Yet in a quirk of history, his 1865 paper on this work went largely unnoticed until 1900.7 In the years following the rediscovery of Mendel, however, his theories generated a maelstrom of discussion, debate, and elaboration. The fruit flies in the proverbial ointment were the eugenicists who incorrectly applied Mendel’s basic observations of pea plants to tackling a number of complex human social problems.
Leading this charge was Dr. Davenport, who declared open war on any and all groups he considered a threat to the purity of the American gene pool.8 At a 1910 meeting of the Committee on Eugenics of the American Breeders Association, he bellowed, “Society must protect itself; as it claims the right to deprive the murderer of his life so also it may annihilate the hideous serpent of the hopelessly vicious protoplasm.”9 At the ERO, he directed an army of social workers, fieldworkers, sociologists, and biologists. This team of “experts” collated thick compendiums of faulty yet highly influential pedigree analyses asserting the hereditary basis for all sorts of behaviors, including lust and criminality, which Davenport claimed were especially common among Italians; the “distinctly Jewish traits” of penuriousness and craftiness in business dealings, neurasthenia, and tuberculosis; feeblemindedness among those living in poverty-stricken Appalachia; nomadism among Gypsies and “hoboes”; and even a love of the sea, or thalassophilia, among sailors.
In Davenport’s mind, Jews posed an especially grave threat to America. In a starkly candid letter he wrote to his colleague Madison Grant on April 7, 1925, Davenport fulminated: “Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island but we have no place to drive the Je
ws to. Also they burned witches but it seems to be against the mores to burn any considerable part of our population.”10 Indeed, few of Davenport’s social eugenics policies had a greater impact than his advocacy for the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which blocked the entry of the millions of Jewish, Eastern and Southern European, and Asian immigrants seeking refuge on our shores for the following forty years.11
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ONE OF THE DIRTIEST REALITIES of the American eugenics movement is that, with relatively few prominent exceptions, it is difficult to find an Anglo-Saxon Protestant man (or woman) of means who did not endorse such theories. As the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer famously opined, it was a matter of the “survival of the fittest.”12 “Race suicide,” a term introduced in 1901 by the University of Wisconsin sociologist and best-selling author Edward A. Ross, was a concern that captured the American conversation all the way up to the White House.13 Behind his bully pulpit, President Theodore Roosevelt repeatedly wrung his hands over the issue.14
Other influential eugenicists who fretted over the American protoplasm included grant makers from both the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations; U.S. president Calvin Coolidge; David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University; psychologist Henry H. Goddard; Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA); Henry Ford; Alexander Graham Bell; Luther Burbank; associate U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.; Nobel laureate in physics Robert A. Millikan; novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald, Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis; economist William Z. Ripley; birth control advocate Margaret Sanger; and, oddly, Helen Keller and W. E. B. Dubois,15 to name but a few.16 Dr. Kellogg, too, had long worried about the degeneration of the white race and actively campaigned to join the ranks of these eugenics movers and shakers.
As early as 1881, he was complaining, “the human race is growing steadily weaker year by year. The boys of today would be no match in physical strength for the sturdy youths of a century ago who are now their grandparents.” Dr. Kellogg’s initial diagnosis, however, was that race degeneracy was caused not by inherited traits but instead by lazy, inactive boys and girls who rarely exercised or engaged in physical labor and sapped their strength by indulging in “the secret sin and the kindred vices,” of masturbation.17
Beginning in the 1890s, he publicly espoused a mishmash theory combining elements of Lamarckism, Darwinism, biologic living, and Christian faith. John claimed it was possible to “save” the white race, or at least improve it, by “fixing” the bodies of broken, unhealthy, or behaviorally aberrant individuals by means of biologic living. In 1910, the social reformer, sanitary chemist, and home economist Ellen Richards characterized Dr. Kellogg’s approach as euthenics, which was, in some sense, an echo of what Francis Galton meant by “nurture” as opposed to nature.18 Euthenics theorists held that a committed individual (and, thus, the population at large) could acquire a superior set of inheritable traits through healthy living, improved hygiene, and better living conditions. These individuals would then pass their improved traits on to successive generations. Such hereditary plasticity, however, was not widely accepted by the leading lights of the eugenics movement. They insisted vociferously that the expressions of inferior and socially damaging traits were caused by fixed, inherited, Mendelian genes, which would only, to perversely borrow the well-known biblical phrase in Genesis 1:28, “be fruitful and multiply.” In order to accommodate the eugenics crowd, John realized he would have to alter and reshape his theories, but he never really let go of the concept of euthenics, a clinical construct that meshed perfectly with his overarching theory of biologic living.19
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ASIDE FROM HIS predilection for adopting dozens of children whom he hoped to improve by environment and biologic living rather than genetic breeding, Dr. Kellogg’s most extended experiments in euthenics occurred at his Chicago Mission.20 From 1893 until 1913, when he was forced to close the mission down because of insufficient financial support, the doctor devoted his Sundays to offering free medical care for Chicago’s great unwashed as well as teaching hundreds of medical students attending his Sanitarium and Chicago-based, biologic living–centered, American Medical Missionary College.21 Opened to coincide with the heavy traffic generated by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Dr. Kellogg founded the mission on behalf of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.22 The mission of the mission was to improve, if not save, the spirits, lives, and biological substrate of the downtrodden, indigent, and despondent all crowded into the worst neighborhoods of Chicago and preyed upon by hucksters, criminals, and other unsavory types inhabiting the seamy borders of the “White City.”23
Every other Saturday, the doctor boarded the evening train bound for Chicago. If he was late because he was operating on a patient or conducting an experiment in the San’s kitchen laboratory, one of his assistants ran to the telephone, called the Michigan Central switchboard operator, and ordered her to hold either the Wolverine Special or, if it was later in the evening, the Twilight Limited. The obedient operator and the conductors she informed always did exactly as they were told and delayed the train’s departure until the doctor arrived. On one occasion, Dr. Kellogg got to the train station too late and the stationmaster told him, “I’ll call ahead, stop the train, and hold it for you. My mother has charge of your linen room and I’m glad to help.”24
Once ensconced on the train, surrounded by his entourage of secretaries and a full basket of Sanitarium foods, the doctor invariably asked the porter to bring him a few Pullman pillows and a writing table. The conductor would then call out, “The Doctor is on board.” Once certain that all were, in fact, aboard, the engineer opened the throttle and began the journey.25 Four hours later, Dr. Kellogg detrained at the nine-story Romanesque Illinois Central Station. From there, he made his way on foot for the five-minute walk to reach his living euthenics laboratory, the Chicago Medical Mission. It was located at 98–100 Van Buren Street, in the city’s skid row on the south end of the Loop, or as Dr. Kellogg described it, “the dirtiest and wickedest place” in the city.26
Dr. Kellogg was one of many physicians, social workers, and other reformers hoping to improve the lot of the urban poor. During this period, an ambitious, well-educated cadre of young white professionals created dozens of settlement houses, wherein university students and graduates lived and worked alongside the poor. They were fortified by deeply held political convictions and the nineteenth-century sensibility of noblesse oblige. Many of its participants were simultaneously potent advocates of eugenics and the Social Gospel movement, which held that Christ’s teachings were aligned with the aims of socialism and social welfare.27 The settlement houses and missions they founded and staffed served as social policy incubators spawning new ideas, methods, and approaches to counteract the corrosive changes brought on by the “Modern Age.”
Among the notable social reformers working in Chicago at the time were Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House and winner of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize; Dr. Alice Hamilton, who ran Hull House’s “well baby” clinic and later founded the medical specialty of industrial medicine; and Florence Kelley, who fought against sweatshops and child labor and helped institute the eight-hour workday.28 According to one of John’s favorite students and junior physicians, William Sadler, the doctor approached Jane Addams in 1893 about joining the formidable forces of Hull House with his Seventh-day Adventist–sponsored Chicago Mission. The conversation, apparently, went nowhere because “[she] refused to have anything to do with religion in mission work.”29
The Chicago Mission’s “Penny Lunch” counter Credit 99
Beyond spiritual nourishment and medical attention, every Sunday at noon the mission fed all comers a nourishing lunch—a hot bowl of bean soup and a hunk of graham bread or a piece of zwieback all for a penny. John insisted on charging this nominal fee in order to preserve his charges’ dignity, but if he found someone who did not have a “copper,” he gladly reached into his pocket to provide one. Later, he took to printing up books containing “100 penny cou
pons” for businessmen to distribute to panhandlers knowing that a coupon could be redeemed only at the mission for food as opposed to the handout of a coin, which might be used, instead, for a drink of whiskey. So many poor men came knocking on the mission’s doors for food that within a few months the Sunday “Penny Lunch Counter” was opened daily. On a typical day the mission served between five to six hundred men; on busy days it was as high as 1,500.
Equally impressive, during its first three years of operation 38,000 baths were taken (the men could take their ablutions daily, if they desired; women and children could only do so three days a week) and 26,000 medical treatments were provided, from massage and hydrotherapy to mild electrotherapeutics. The mission facilitated 9,000 nurses’ home visits and 17,000 penny meals. By 1897, more than 200,000 people used their laundry facilities and 75,000 men and women were given new suits and dresses, thanks to the donations from Adventist church congregations.30 More than 13,500 gospel tracts were distributed and the Adventist Church expanded the mission to include a dispensary, a lodging house called the Workingman’s Home, a larger bathhouse, an employment bureau, and classrooms for teaching carpet weaving and broom making to the destitute men as well as facilities for teaching the students enrolled at John’s American Medical Missionary College.31 It is impossible to determine if the doctor’s work had long-term effects but, at the very least, his missionary work did help feed, clothe, and house many poor Chicagoans, rather than merely casting them aside as biologically inferior.
Children’s clinic at the Chicago Mission dispensary Credit 100
The planning committee for the first national Race Betterment conference, 1914. Left, above, Horace Plunkett, the Irish politician and reformer; left, below, S. S. McClure, the muckraking publisher of McClure’s Magazine; right, above, Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service and, later, governor of Pennsylvania; and right, below, Irving Fisher, professor of economics at Yale; with John Harvey Kellogg (center). Credit 101
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