The most popular attraction of the Race Betterment booth, however, had little to do with eugenics. Dr. Kellogg brought all the way to San Francisco “two batteries of vibrating chairs,” which he had invented for his patients at the San. The vibrating chairs “were in constant operation….These chairs,” the doctor crowed, “have the faculty of soothing and resting tired, fatigued people and because of this quality they were generously patronized by the visitors who had grown tired through long, weary tramping from building to building.”65 Restful seats aside, and, much to Dr. Kellogg’s delight, the second Race Betterment Conference was a stunning success. On its final day, the Panama-Pacific Exposition managers awarded the Race Betterment Foundation a bronze medal of appreciation. Even better, Dr. Kellogg’s production garnered a “million words” in newspaper articles and editorials, the majority of which were overwhelmingly positive.66
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THE THIRD NATIONAL RACE BETTERMENT CONFERENCE of 1928 took somewhat longer to organize because of John’s personal health problems, the San’s ailing economic health, and World War I. Like the first national conference, it was held at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, again in early January (the 2nd to 6th), when the paying guest census was almost nonexistent. At the opening ceremony, John explained that the conference’s purpose was to bring “together a group of leading scientists, educators and others for the purpose of discussing ways and means of applying science to human living in the same thoroughgoing way in which it is now applied to industry—in the promotion of longer life, increased efficiency, and well-being and of race improvement.”67 Afterward, the doctor handed out awards to several Battle Creek residents who won the “Fitter Families Contest.” With a great sense of occasion, the white-suited Dr. Kellogg stood on a platform decorated with festive bunting as he congratulated the fit parents and their “well-born” children. They were now members, he told them, of a real “aristocracy, that in this little town of ours, the beginnings of a Better Race are being developed.” He also reminded the winning families of the “responsibilities of those who are fit” to maintain their health with regular medical examinations, good diet, and healthful living.68
Far less charitable were racist rants by Clarence Cook Little, who was president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor from 1925 to 1929 and chairman of the 1928 conference. Professor Little echoed the views he expressed in Battle Creek four years later, in 1932, in an interview he gave on mandatory sterilization laws to The New York Times: “When a sink is stopped up, we shut off the faucet. We favor legislation to restrict the reproduction of the misfit. We should treat them as kindly and humanely as possible, but we must segregate them so that they do not perpetuate their kind.”69 Equally offensive was Congressman Albert Johnson, the cosponsor of the eugenics-based Immigration Act of 1924, who spoke on “The Menace of the Melting Pot.”70
A far less controversial figure on the dais was Fielding Yost, the legendary coach of the University of Michigan football team. Coach Yost, whose “Point a Minute” Wolverines won six national championships (1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1918, and 1923), knew from what he spoke when he discussed the importance of “Man Building.”71 The gridiron guru’s presence was especially ironic because in 1925 Dr. Kellogg promoted a football team at the Battle Creek College. John had hoped the team would become a shining example of successful athletes who followed his principles of diet and biologic living. The college administrators dismantled the football program after one season, however, because they deemed the sport “too violent to be healthful” and worried that the games might “attract undesirable students.” Some locals gossiped that the real reason behind the team’s demise was its inability to win games.72
The conference’s star attraction was Dr. Alexis Carrel, the 1912 Nobel laureate, distinguished scientist, and surgeon of New York City’s Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. One biographer called Dr. Carrel’s appearance at the 1928 Race Betterment Conference “the closest he’d [Carrel] yet come to making a public link between his research at the Rockefeller Institute and eugenics.” For Carrel, it was a cause that became louder in the years to come, especially with respect to the social burdens of so-called defective individuals, the insane, and criminals. His 1935 book, Man, the Unknown, which sold over two million copies, asked, “Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings?”73
Henry Ford (left of center, with back to the camera, facing a woman in a black hat) leading a square dance in the Sanitarium Union hall, during Dr. Kellogg’s Third National Race Betterment Conference, January 1928 Credit 105
Throughout the week, a great many more presentations were centered on the biologic living topics the doctor had long promoted at the San.74 After dining on several courses of Battle Creek fare served up by smiling Adventist waiters each evening, the guests partook in wholesome, healthy pursuits. On one night, the guests were led in square dancing by the automobile manufacturer and San patient Henry Ford; on another a team of seven children billed as “The Seven Vivacious Vegetarians” entertained them.75
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DURING THE LATE 1930s, John wrote several bitter letters to Irving Fisher about Charles Davenport’s obsessive focus on the inheritance of deleterious traits and flaws. The doctor was especially upset at how Davenport dismissed his euthenics theories on improving “inferior” humans by means of diet, exercise, and a healthy lifestyle. Fisher diplomatically tried to allay the doctor’s angst on May 22, 1936, by reporting, “I see that [Davenport] does not deny your contention but he does not admit that within the meaning of ‘acquired’ as used by biologists you can say that acquired characteristics are inherited.” Fisher advised the doctor to stay within the good graces of the powerful ERO director: “Probably it will be better not to use that phrase if something else can be found. Possibly you can make the distinction between characteristics acquired by use and characteristics acquired by trauma or other external, extraneous, sporadic, or whatever else will describe it, causes.”76 Dr. Kellogg held his ground but remained disgruntled. On May 18, 1937, John wrote Fisher insisting, “for complete success in a popular way, eugenics and euthenics or individual hygiene and race hygiene must be pushed together.” A week later, Irving Fisher promptly put him down as a relic by replying “I note that you say [the] hereditary influence of habits and environment acting slowly through many generations is now no longer questioned. I do not find this to be the case. I find it is not only questioned but denied.” In the end, the two old race warriors had to simply agree to disagree.77
In sympathetic accounts of his life, Dr. Kellogg’s role in the eugenics movement has been downplayed, especially in light of his milder theories of euthenics; in other versions, they have simply been ignored. The reality is that Dr. Kellogg never completely abandoned many of his most racist beliefs. Like Lady Macbeth’s hands, it was a bloody stain on the immaculate white suits he favored, one that can never really be washed clean. In early December of 1941, John began planning a fourth Race Betterment Conference for the late spring of 1942, in commemoration of his ninetieth birthday. That is, he was planning a conference until the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything and the United States entered the Second World War. On December 19, Harry Laughlin, the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, wrote Dr. Kellogg a consolation note over the decision to postpone the conference. Laughlin praised John as one of the leading lights of the American eugenics movement, but he could not conclude without refuting the ninety-year-old physician’s beloved euthenics: “The basic half [of an individual’s character and achievements] which can not be changed in a generation or so is supplied by heredity.”78
Harry Laughlin’s emphasis on nature over nurture must have pained Dr. Kellogg but from a distance it is difficult to offer much sympathy. The rest of the story regarding the fall of the harmful work of Davenport, Laughlin, and others is well documented and need not be repeated here. By the 1930s, a growing cadre of bona fide geneticists, statisticians, and population biologists began devel
oping reproducible laboratory and field methods of study, which formed the basis of a true scientific inquiry on genetics.79 The ERO was finally closed in 1939.80 After World War II, when the world discovered the role eugenics played in Hitler’s “Final Solution” to cleanse the Third Reich of its unfit, the final nail was hammered into the coffin of the pseudoscience and eugenics became a topic of interest only to a handful of medical historians in search of tenure.
There is one more eugenics tale involving Laughlin and Dr. Kellogg that demands recounting. The great hypocrisy of Harry Laughlin’s eugenics policies was his work to create mandatory “eugenical sterilization laws” in the United States for “mental defectives” and the “feeble-minded,” a category that included people suffering from insanity, behavioral problems, intellectual disabilities, and epilepsy.81 Less well known is that Mr. Laughlin long suffered from epilepsy, with frequent grand mal seizures. In 1941, Laughlin wrote Dr. Kellogg that his “local doctor” suggested dosing him with a drug called phenytoin, which was just beginning to be prescribed as an antiseizure drug even though it caused many unpleasant side effects.82 Falling into the role of patient, Laughlin complained to John about the new medication, “It seemed to stay off attacks but seemed also to pile up trouble at the end rather than cure it.” Instead, Laughlin opted for Dr. Kellogg’s prescriptions of “good diet, sound exercise and habits” to help prevent his debilitating seizures.83 Although Laughlin died in January of 1943 and had no children, there exists no evidence that he consented to undergo a surgical sterilization procedure, in contradiction to the policies and laws he long advocated for other epileptics.
To his dying days, the doctor agonized over the decline of the white race. On November 1, 1943, John wrote to Reginald Atwater, the president of the American Public Health Association, beseeching the organization to take up the cause of Race Betterment: “If the American Public Health Association is indifferent to this matter or lacks the moral courage to give it consideration, it will miss a great opportunity for undertaking a work which may help to solve the world’s greatest problem, how to save the human race, or at least the white portion of it.”84 Twenty days later, only a few weeks before he died, John wrote a rambling four-page letter to Henry F. Vaughan, the dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, emphasizing that the adoption of his approach to race betterment was “the only hope there is for saving the human race.”85
In his last will and testament, John Harvey Kellogg left his entire estate to his Race Betterment Foundation. For nearly a quarter of a century, the organization continued under the haphazard direction of several of the doctor’s former yes-men, including his loyal amanuensis August Bloese. In 1947, four years after the doctor’s death, the Race Betterment Foundation’s bankbook bulged with over $687,000 in assets; by 1967, that account had dwindled to a mere $492.87. In April of 1967, Frank J. Kelley, the State of Michigan’s attorney general, indicted the trustees for having “completely squandered” the foundation’s funds. Attorney General Kelley ordered the foundation into receivership. Although there were attempts by some Seventh-day Adventists to reorganize it under the direction of Kelley’s staff, the Race Betterment Foundation, the once loud and proud grand marshal of the American eugenics movement, ultimately closed its books and, finally, its doors.86 Both the foundation and the spurious cause of Race Betterment, to which Dr. Kellogg devoted so much of his time, reputation, talent, and fortune are dead, gone, and, hopefully, never to be resurrected.
14
A Full Plate
DR. KELLOGG’S FAR MORE enduring and palatable crusade was dietary in nature. To be sure, flaked cereals were his most lasting contribution to the modern breakfast menu but that was just one of the many grain-, vegetable-, fruit-, and nut-based foods John developed over the years.1 Unfortunately for the doctor’s coffers, he was not nearly as good at promoting his food products as his younger brother. Most of his customer base was drawn from current or former San patients, the Adventist faithful, graduates of his cooking school, and his legion of readers, but that hardly approached the millions of people who bought and consumed Will Kellogg’s Corn Flakes each day. As John told a large gathering of his Adventist coreligionists in 1897: “You may say that I am destroying the health food business here by giving these recipes. But I am not after the business; I am after the reform; that is what I want to see.”2 As a result of his commercial complacency, however, most of John’s “health foods” have been either lost to history or altered, reformulated, reshaped, and repackaged so many times as to obscure their true parentage.
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JOHN’S LOUDEST DETRACTORS derided him as a “nut,” to which the doctor gleefully countered that he loved nuts of all kinds—from the “true nuts” (a hard-shelled pod containing both the fruit and the seed of the plant but the fruit does not open to release that seed) to legumes and beans—as superb sources of healthy protein, fat, and fiber. Indeed, the doctor often urged, “Every highway should be lined with nut trees.”3
Sanitas Nut Food advertisement, circa 1890s Credit 106
During the late 1880s, John was most enthusiastic about peanuts and, as a result, he introduced dishes of them to the San’s dining room menu. One problem he did not predict was that many of his invalided patients had difficulty chewing the roasted peanuts. In 1893, he began experimenting with industrial grinders to crush the nuts into a thick paste that was somewhat easier to swallow but still rather sticky. Later in his life, John often claimed to have invented peanut butter. As with the source of many great ideas, this story is much more complicated.4 The experimentation of several other historical actors was required before the U.S. National Peanut Board could boast in 2016 that the average American child devours 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches between kindergarten and the end of high school.5
Sanitas Nut Butter label, circa 1900 Credit 107
Dr. Kellogg’s earliest peanut butter recipes used roasted peanuts but, much to his consternation, the fat content in the nuts quickly broke down into a rancid, gloppy, oily mess, which both irritated dyspeptic stomachs and tasted awful. By 1897, he discarded the roasting process and, instead, boiled the peanuts at a range of 213 to 230 degrees Fahrenheit (any higher caused them to taste acrid). John’s peanut butter was served in the San’s dining room and used as a shortening in the kitchen for a variety of baked goods. In the years that followed, John cooked up many tasty nut butters out of almonds, hazelnuts, cashews, and once even used a shipment of macadamia nuts sent to him from a colleague in Hawaii for a more exotic spread.
Family lore claims John never patented this now ubiquitous food product. In 1917, Dr. Kellogg went as far as to assert this claim under courtroom oath that he “let everybody that wants it, have it, and make the best use of it.”6 But between 1894 and 1898, he did apply for and received three U.S. patents for his version of peanut butter.7 John’s methods were later supplanted by other food chemists who used the far tastier roasted peanuts, developed better grinding machinery to make smoother, more spreadable varieties of the stuff, and solved the problems of the peanut butter’s solids separating out from the peanut fat with the introduction of partially hydrogenated oils.8
Will Kellogg predictably had a very different recollection of how peanut butter was created. In his version, the doctor asked him to “secure a quantity of peanuts, remove the hulls, and put them through the Granose rolls.” Left to his own devices in the kitchen, Will claimed to have figured out the best way to roast the nuts and make the “first peanut butter.” As the story goes, the doctor again overruled Will by deciding, “roasted peanuts were not wholesome” and ordered the nuts be steamed instead. Decades later, Will recalled that the boiled peanut butter tasted terrible and what “little trade that was developed was lost.”9 Will’s grandson Norman Williamson Jr. recounted a similar version in his memoirs, an echo that provides a flavor of how the two brothers’ grudge match was handed down to subsequent generations: “Had J.H. climbed on the peanut butter bandwagon,” William
son wrote, “he might have gained a substantial portion of the market, but he simply wouldn’t have a younger brother second guess him.10
Around the same time he was playing with peanut butter, John created another healthy food he called “Malted Nuts.” Malting grains or nuts (a process of germinating grain by soaking it in water and then heating it) converts starches into simple sugars, which makes them easier to digest.11 Dr. Kellogg’s Malted Nuts consisted of a pulverized mixture of peanuts and almonds, which when combined with water became a palatable “substitute milk” drink. He initially developed this product in 1896 for babies whose delicate digestive systems refused to tolerate cow’s-milk-based formulae (a problem that many parents and babies contend with to this very day). For example, a full-page advertisement in the July 1901 issue of his Good Health magazine boldly declared “Cow’s Milk Kills Babies” and, instead, suggested they slurp up bottles of his Malted Nuts. The doctor subsequently prescribed it to adults with dyspepsia, stomach ulcers, and lactose intolerance. Malted Nuts provided these patients with nutritious calories that they could easily digest.12
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