—
WHEN IT CAME TO HIS ENTRÉE into the American eugenics movement, John’s personal tour guide was a prominent political economist from Yale named Irving Fisher.32 The Ivy Leaguer and Dr. Kellogg first met a few days after Christmas of 1904. Professor Fisher was in Chicago to speak at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association. On the way back home to New Haven, an exhausted and dyspeptic Fisher stepped off the train at the Battle Creek station, with the intention of spending a week at the Sanitarium. The doctor, acutely aware of Professor Fisher’s prestige and professional connections, insisted on personally taking on the economist’s case. Conversely, the professor coveted John’s medical credentials, wide public following, and financial resources.33
Fisher found relief for his many health problems by strictly adhering to Dr. Kellogg’s principles of biologic living. A few years into his vegetarian regime, he conducted a study on the influence of flesh eating on endurance. He enrolled forty-nine subjects and divided them into three groups: 1) athletes who ate high-protein meat diets; 2) athletes who consumed low-protein, “flesh-abstaining” diets (but which still included animal products such as milk and eggs); and 3) sedentary “flesh-abstainers.” Most of the vegetarians were San employees who had abstained from meat for a period of four to twenty years (the exception being Fisher, who became a vegetarian “two years earlier” but entered himself into the study nonetheless). The athletes were mostly Yale undergraduates. When comparing the two athlete groups, the meatless ones fared far better and even the sedentary group beat out the meat-eating sportsmen for holding one’s arms out “horizontally for as long as possible.” Ever the careful scholar, Fisher added several “ifs, ands or buts” to the discussion section of his published report and warned against the tendency for those with “vegetarian fanaticism” to overstate the data. That said, he concluded, “there is strong evidence that a low-protein, non-flesh, or nearly non-flesh diet is conducive to endurance.”34 John was thrilled by this study—at least the parts that supported his allegiance to a meatless way of life—and recounted and exaggerated Fisher’s conclusions for decades in his lectures and on the pages of his best-selling books.35
More germane, Professor Fisher was one of the most powerful intellectual forces in the eugenics crusade. Long before he became the founding president of the American Eugenics Society from 1922 to 1926, he was a committed general in the war to develop a eugenically pure society and “[redeem] the human race.”36 At John’s request, Fisher introduced the Battle Creek physician to Charles B. Davenport. The two struck up a correspondence and in 1916 John asked Davenport to deliver the keynote address at the San’s grand “Golden (50th) Jubilee Anniversary Celebration.” He spoke on “Eugenics as a Religion” and warned the audience, as if he were Moses speaking to the Chosen People:
From Mount Sinai, God is thundering his commandment against bowing down to idols….God speaks to us again, this time through the microscope, or through the statistics of the notorious Jukes family, thundering again that the iniquity of the fathers rushes on in the blood into the generations following, and curses the children before they ever see the light of day.37
After his sermon, Davenport supped on vegetables and grain concoctions with the assembled “Battle Freaks.” During the entire meal, however, the ex–Harvard professor sniffed and snickered over the doctor’s allegiance to frequent bowel movements and his insistence that inferior traits dissipated with rounds of sit-ups. Like many of the prominent eugenicists in the United States, Davenport was all too happy to take the doctor’s money to advance his cause and “research,” even as he ridiculed him behind his back.
Madison Grant, author of the eugenics bestseller The Passing of the Great Race Credit 102
Professor Fisher also facilitated John’s meeting Madison Grant, whose best-selling and now shockingly racist 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, was employed as a textbook by a legion of American eugenics enthusiasts. Grant concluded that at least 10 percent of the American public was unfit to reproduce and called for their forced sterilization. The book had an even more sinister impact in Europe, where Adolf Hitler often referred to it as “my bible” all the while he was planning his “master race.”38
Dr. Kellogg admired Grant’s work, too, and eventually became the author’s physician. In 1936, for example, the doctor was so worried about Grant’s worsening arthritis and sedentary lifestyle that he demanded Grant return immediately to the San for some biologic nurturing. John bluntly admonished the New York socialite, attorney, national park devotee, and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History:
What your weak muscles need is exercise. If you will dance half an hour every day and chop wood for another half hour, your muscles will grow apace. But you have been pampered and coddled for so many decades that I have no hope you can be persuaded either to dance or chop wood.39
The doctor’s advice hardly helped. Madison Grant died the following year, 1937, of kidney disease. Oddly for a man obsessed about the future of his “race,” he left no offspring.
—
AS JOHN HARVEY KELLOGG BECAME ever more enmeshed in the net cast by the Eugenics Record Office during the first few decades of the twentieth century, his euthenics creed veered off the rails and merged directly with some of its most restrictive negative eugenics policies. As early as 1903, he wrote, “Heredity is God’s method of book-keeping.”40 Seven years later, April 25, 1911, during a highly publicized lecture he delivered to the Connecticut State Conference of Charities and Corrections, the doctor presented reams of evidence on the rise of “degenerative diseases” among twentieth-century Americans, such as vision and hearing defects, mental health maladies, and the rising death rates from cancer, diabetes, alcoholism, tobacco, caffeine, and opium consumption, and “overeating.” He cautioned his audience, “The degeneracy and ultimate extinction of the human race is a catastrophe too appalling to consider calmly.” On the euthenics side of the equation, the doctor advocated for a national commitment to better (biologic) living to avert such a devastating and downward spiral.41 After winding down this portion of his lecture, Dr. Kellogg segued and sang the entire eugenics score. His aria climaxed with a call to prevent “the unfit” from reproducing: “We must cultivate clean blood, instead of blue blood. Society must establish laws and sanctions, which will check the operation of heredity in the multiplication of the unfit.”42
During John’s second stint as a member of the Michigan State Board of Health, from 1911 to 1917, he advised Governor Woodbridge Ferris on state-ordered eugenic controls and, especially, the passage of a 1913 state law “mandating the sterilization of mentally defective persons.” The greater good had to be protected, Dr. Kellogg urged his fellow Michiganders, even as he acknowledged these hardly benign, and often permanent, surgical procedures were typically performed against the subjects’ will and personal liberties.43
Such so-called victories in the name of racial purity afforded John many more opportunities to engage the American eugenics elite. Abandoned by the religious faith to which he had devoted much of his working life and still fuming over the ongoing legal contretemps with Will, John seized the opportunity for medical relevance by financially supporting eugenics research with the river of book royalties, magazine subscriptions, surgical fees, health food sales, and Corn Flakes dividends coming his way. In 1914, John closed the accounts of his nonprofit, quasi-religious American Medical Missionary Board, which he had earlier named the “owner” and beneficiary of most of the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes shares he extracted from Will in their various business deals. He then redirected these riches by founding and legally incorporating his Race Betterment Foundation.44 Most famously, the doctor devoted huge sums to support the production of three well-attended and widely publicized national conferences on Race Betterment and eugenics. A glance at the programs of these convocations documents a who’s who of many of the most prominent intellectuals, politicos, and social reformers during the Progressive Era.
&nbs
p; —
HUNDREDS OF VESTED, suited, and buttoned-down scientists, physicians, educators, social workers, ministers, insurance company executives, teetotalers, college presidents, et alia attended the first National Conference on Race Betterment in Battle Creek. They were all guests of the doctor, and their transportation, first-class accommodations, and bountiful meals, à la Kellogg, were on the house. Of course, John was no fool. He hosted the conference from January 8 to 12, 1914, which coincided with the San’s slowest business period because of the arctic blast of cold that descends upon Battle Creek every New Year’s Day and lasts until well after the groundhog does or does not see his shadow. At a fraction of the price of the San’s high season, John cordoned off the best suites usually reserved for his most monied patients, much to the delight of his Race Betterment conferees.
John welcomed hundreds of distinguished guests into a large assembly room filled with rows of chairs, each with a beautifully printed conference program placed on the seat portion, bearing the foundation’s guiding motto on the title page, Mens sana in corpore sano. (“A healthy mind in a healthy body”).45 The doctor welcomed his guests with an introductory address, “Needed—a New Human Race,” that advocated both his euthenics theories and the ERO’s stricter, negative eugenics programs.46 Over the next four days, he told them, they would listen to lectures on topics ranging from the use of motion pictures, physical education, and classroom techniques to spread the gospel of eugenics, to warnings against the evils of tobacco, alcohol, and “the secret vice” of masturbation.
Despite the grandiloquent speeches and deluxe accommodations, not everyone in attendance was pleased by the conference’s message. For example, Jacob A. Riis, the journalist, best-selling author, and photographer of How the Other Half Lives, was so offended by several speakers’ insistence on improving the heredity of the “children of the slums,” rather than arresting the social conditions in which they lived, he stormed off the stage and out of the Sanitarium. Before packing his bags and beating his path back to the train station, Riis gave an interview to the editor, eugenicist, and marriage counselor Paul Popenoe:
We have heard friends here talk about heredity. The word has rung in my ears until I am sick of it. Heredity, heredity! There is just one heredity in all the world that is ours—we are the children of God, and there is nothing in the whole big world that we cannot do service with it.47
Equally uncomfortable was the African American educator Booker T. Washington, who, although a friend of Dr. Kellogg’s and a frequent visitor to the San, was forced to sit on the dais while listening to lectures bemoaning the “white man’s burden.”48 In his address on “The Negro Race,” Dr. Washington thanked Dr. Kellogg for helping to advance his personal health but firmly countered eugenic claims of “Negro inferiority.” In measured but emphatic tones, Washington stated:
These people are worth saving, are worth making a strong, helpful part of the American body politic. The American negro is practically the only race with a dark skin that has ever undergone the test of living side by side of the Anglo-Saxon, looking him in the face and really surviving.49
Not surprisingly, Dr. Kellogg’s attitudes about and relations with African Americans were complicated. For example, he took into his home seven African American girls from a Chattanooga, Tennessee, orphanage that was having financial difficulties. He later helped that same institution place thirty other African American orphans. He was well regarded among Battle Creek’s African American community for the humane, albeit paternalistic, medical treatment he freely offered to many of them. Moreover, John firmly rejected any exclusionary measures or color lines in terms of lodging, medical treatment, athletic activities, and dining arrangements for African Americans at the Sanitarium, admission to his medical school, or visits to his home.50
On the other hand, Dr. Kellogg often articulated offensive opinions on the “Negro’s fitness as a race.” In his 1881 book, Plain Facts for Old and Young, he advised against “mixed marriages” between African Americans and whites because “it has been proven beyond room for questions that mulattoes are not so long-lived as either blacks or whites.”51 Two years later, in 1883, in his book Ladies’ Guide in Health and Disease, he acknowledged that the weights of African American and European male brains were essentially equivalent but he, nevertheless, repeated the then popular trope, “The intellectual inferiority of the negro male to the European male is universally acknowledged.”52 Such racist comments went entirely unchanged in the many reprint editions of these books published well into the first decades of the twentieth century. He also ran numerous squibs and articles detailing the “degeneration of the Negro” in his magazine, Good Health.53
From the program alone, it is difficult to assess if there were any Jews present at the conference. If there were, they, too, would resent many of the pronouncements made on the unfitness of their “race,” especially by the king and prince of the Eugenics Record Office, Charles Davenport and his assistant, Harry Laughlin, who lobbied the U.S. Congress to pass the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. When it came to “the Chosen people,” however, Dr. Kellogg assiduously veered away from the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the eugenics establishment. His philo-Semitism may have emerged out of an admiration many Christians articulate for Judaism as an important source of their own religious faith. John also had a great appreciation for Jewish dietary (kosher) and personal hygiene rituals, which mirrored some of his principles of biologic living. In the years that followed, the doctor was an early voice in defense of Eastern European and German Jews suffering the consequences of Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies. In a 1935 editorial in Good Health, he criticized Germany’s attempts at race betterment by ejecting “a people (the Jews) whose blood is far superior to their own as indicated by all racial tests.”54 Five years later, in 1940, and long before most Americans acknowledged Hitler’s atrocities, John described Der Fuehrer, to his surgical colleague Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, as a “monster.”55
Nor were there likely many Asians present but Dr. Kellogg had conflicted views about people from that part of the world as well, and often articulated them in public settings. For example, Dr. Kellogg frequently wrote of his admiration of the dietary habits of the Chinese and Japanese people. Yet he frequently referred to the Japanese, especially during World War II, with the then common pejorative “Jap,” and as his age advanced he became increasingly concerned about the “yellow peril” ruling the world.56
—
JOHN HARVEY KELLOGG’S second national conference on Race Betterment was based at the far splashier Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which opened in San Francisco on February 20, 1915. The fairgrounds, known as “the Jewel City,” was a collection of majestic buildings, exhibits, pavilions, playgrounds, parks, sculptures, and artwork commemorating both the completion of the incredible engineering feat known as the Panama Canal and San Francisco’s rebirth after the devastating earthquake of 1906.57
John loved visiting world’s fairs especially when he could mix such visits with medical business. As a newly graduated medical student he had distributed temperance brochures to fairgoers and marveled at the wonders of the 1876 Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. As a Christian missionary doctor, he founded his mission to help some of Chicago’s poorest citizens crowded out by the sprawl of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. And in 1904 he traveled to St. Louis to staff the Hygienic Reform and Battle Creek Sanitarium exhibits at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Not surprisingly, in 1915 he decided that the sparkling Panama-Pacific International Exposition was the perfect place to hold his second national Race Betterment conference during the first week of August.
Again, John assembled an enviable list of speakers including David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University,58 botanist Luther Burbank,59 and Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, the Prudential Insurance Company’s legendary statistician, actuary, and author of a book describing African Americans as especially prone to illness.60 Some o
f the lectures supported Dr. Kellogg’s euthenics theories; many others were harsher diatribes declaring the eugenics agenda set out by the ERO to protect the “white race” from ruin.
On August 6, a “playground pentathalon” was held at the exposition’s marina between teams of boys from San Francisco, Alameda, and Oakland. The youngsters demonstrated their physical fitness by running hurdles, high jumps and broad jumps, doing push-ups, baseball throwing, and swimming. The event attracted a large and enthusiastic crowd who cheered on the winning team from Oakland.61
Perhaps the conference’s most dramatic event was, in fact, a drama. On the evening of August 8, the curtain was rung up on a play entitled Redemption, a Masque of Race Betterment, written by Sheldon Cheney, directed by Samuel J. Hume, and featuring a cast of over two hundred University of California students. It was presented at the new, “million dollar Civic Auditorium” in Oakland to an audience of over five thousand. The turgid two-act play was billed as an allegory of humankind’s struggle with its enemies, disease and war, as it advanced the race “through the ministrations of science and religion.”62
The Race Betterment Foundation’s Eugenics exhibit at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco Credit 103
Vibratory Chair advertisement, circa 1915, one of many “health products” John Harvey Kellogg invented and sold Credit 104
Dr. Kellogg and Professor Fisher also introduced a eugenics registry designed to help create “a new and superior race.”63 Although several observers criticized the collection of such data, thousands of fairgoers did sign up for the registry after visiting one of the most popular features of the exposition: John Harvey Kellogg’s Race Betterment exhibit. The display was a large and attractive walk-in booth, given pride of place in the exposition’s fabulous “Palace of Education.” It featured photographs, charts, and visual aids detailing the threat of race suicide, crimes committed by inferior races in America, and statistics on cancer, “mental defectives,” and other degenerative diseases. Also on hand was a helpful staff offering recommendations on avoiding race degeneracy through personal hygiene and biologic living (euthenics) and racial hygiene (eugenics).64
The Kelloggs Page 35