One of the doctor’s most famous consultations was with the eminent playwright George Bernard Shaw. While on a voyage around the world, Shaw made a special stop at Miami Springs for a vegetable-and-fruit-laden meal with the doctor, followed by an extensive medical examination. “I want to see Dr. Kellogg,” he told his host, A. D. H. Fossey, the part-time mayor of Miami and a full-time furniture and upholstery man, “such an opportunity may not come again.”13 At the luncheon table, the two men did their best to ignore the questioning reporters and photographers with their flashing cameras as they sipped freshly squeezed orange juice. Unable to censor his thoughts, Shaw declared Franklin Roosevelt to be a communist even if the president had yet to admit it. Eventually the gaggle of reporters became too annoying for the Irishman. Brandishing his cane at them, Shaw yelled, “I’d like to kill the whole lot of you.” Sensing the doctor’s distress over such a violent threat, Shaw gently confided to John, sotto voce, “It’s all for effect. I have to put on a show. They expect it of me.”14
The following day, Dr. Kellogg reported Shaw’s blood pressure was “remarkably low (106/60 mm Hg)…the same which I found in a vigorous North American Indian in Arizona.”15 Shaw’s electrocardiogram did show signs of slight muscle deterioration but this was to be expected in a man of his age and not serious. Nevertheless, he advised Shaw to “avoid any violent straining, such as lifting or doing anything that will embarrass your breathing, or, to use a common phrase, put you out of breath,” and to avoid contact with anyone with either influenza or pneumonia, either of which could make him quite ill. The doctor was most concerned about Shaw’s low red blood cell count (3,000,000, 40 percent deficient from the normal of 5,000,000) and hemoglobin (71 g/dl, 30 percent deficient from the normal of 100) and his resultant anemia.
George Bernard Shaw and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, February 1936 Credit 130
These findings, Dr. Kellogg explained, were the result of the writer’s not consuming enough iron in his diet. Shaw, a committed vegetarian, simply needed to consume more green leafy vegetables to achieve a normal red blood cell balance and feel better. Shaw’s iron deficit was so severe, however, that this prescription translated into his munching of “nearly a pound of spinach” per day. The doctor, of course, had “a better way” to achieve those ends. He prescribed his Food Ferrin, an iron-rich extract of spinach. Three tablespoons equaled Shaw’s daily requirement for iron.16 “I am sending you a bottle of this,” Dr. Kellogg wrote Shaw after their visit, “and if you think worth while to make use of it, I will gladly see that you have a larger supply. It can be put aboard your ship at San Francisco when you reach that port or at Honolulu.”17
Shaw’s Miami-San visit was reported in publications ranging from The New York Times to the popular magazine Literary Digest. In these articles, the doctor stroked Shaw’s ego with the prediction that the playwright would easily live to be a hundred. John was off by only a few years; Shaw died in 1950 at the age of ninety-four. John also noted he had no intention of billing Shaw for his medical services. His reward was that his “suggestions may prove of some service to the most distinguished of living Englishmen.”18 Perhaps so, but Dr. Kellogg was equally interested in proving “of some service” to his own celebrity.
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JOHN WAS NEVER ABLE to completely sever his connection to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, no matter how angry he was at the men running it. Even though he had predicted the San’s financial woes and warned against its expansion, the doctor did everything he could to save the place. He attended humiliating meetings with bankers. He sent desperate letters requesting money from his wealthy patients. He gave public lectures for which admission was charged, all in a futile attempt to raise the necessary capital for putting the San back on a sound and profitable footing.19
Perhaps John’s most spectacular “Hail Mary” play occurred on May 3, 1937, when he telegrammed Henry Ford requesting a meeting to discuss “a very important matter in which I am sure you will be interested.” Two days later, May 5, John received a letter from Ford’s general secretary, E. G. Liebold, explaining that Ford was unable to see him. Dr. Kellogg wrote Liebold on May 8 about the dire financial situation of the San and the need to pay off its crushing debt. “I will not surrender control or submit to any changes or ideals or principles of the Sanitarium. The bondholders can take the buildings, but they cannot take the business,” he told Liebold. “I am prepared to surrender the property to them and move out and start again.” John’s entreaties for an appointment with Ford were for naught. The conversation effectively ended on May 12, 1937, when Liebold informed the doctor that “Mr. Ford has been away almost continuously during the last two weeks and for that reason it has been impossible to arrange an appointment for you.” Despite Ford’s financial brushoff, Dr. Kellogg remained a loyal admirer.20
“Hello! Merry Christmas 1932.” The doctor on the telephone. Credit 131
John subsequently offered to pay off the bankers holding the San’s promissory notes or bonds, at 55 cents on the dollar and backed by shares of his food company as collateral. This plan failed, too, because the San’s creditors demanded far more money than what John could possibly raise.21 By mid-1938, all the options had evaporated and the Sanitarium was rapidly approaching bankruptcy. The directors, instead, ended its receivership status and reorganized so that the “new San” had no connection to the man who created it. Losing his monument to biologic living was a harsh blow to John’s monumental ego. Making his loss even more painful, John learned that some of the new doctors at the San were now smoking cigarettes and eating meat.22
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AS JOHN REACHED his tenth decade of life, he became less inhibited and more eccentric. He steadily gained weight to the point of becoming rotund, thanks to consuming two enormous meals a day, each of them lasting an “hour and a half at a time.”23 Always proud of his regular bowel movements, he loved bragging how his biologic diet left his stools smelling “as sweet as those of a nursing baby.” In the middle of conversations, John would excuse himself to go to the bathroom and emerge with a container of his most recent fecal specimen. He then proudly placed it under the noses of his companions to demonstrate its odorless quality. By 1941, the doctor took to sunbathing and exercising clad only in a thin swath of cotton barely covering his genitalia and bottom. Will was so offended by his brother’s erratic behavior that he threatened to file a lawsuit forcing John to dress more appropriately. Fortunately, Will’s lawyers convinced him to sit down, take a deep breath, and avoid any legal motions that would only succeed in showering the cereal magnate with far worse publicity than whatever eccentricities his brother could conjure.24
In August 1942, the San’s main buildings and expansive campus were sold to the U.S. government for $2.25 million (roughly $32.7 million in 2016) and converted into a military (and later a veterans) hospital. Known as the Percy Jones Hospital, it treated soldiers whose bodies were irrevocably damaged by World War II, including three men who would go on to distinguished careers in the United States Senate, Philip Hart (D-MI), Robert Dole (R-KS), and Daniel Inouye (D-HI). The staff of the Percy Jones Hospital treated more than 95,000 soldiers injured during World War II and the Korean War until its closure in 1953 and subsequent conversion into a federal office building in 1954.
After the retirement of the San’s debt of $1,519,525 (or $22.1 million in 2016), there remained a profit of roughly $750,000 (or $10.9 million in 2016). John combined his share of this sum with $275,000 (about $3.99 million in 2016) he earned from dissolving his Sanitarium Food Company. The windfall was enough to resume his Sanitarium activities in two smaller buildings he still owned and that housed Dr. Kellogg’s Race Betterment Foundation and the Battle Creek College.25 Despite the reduced circumstances, John told one local businessman in December of 1942: “With the San directly across from the Race Betterment Foundation buildings, we will run there until world affairs have settled down. Then later, I am going out east of town where there is a square mile of lakes and woods and
will rebuild the San along the original design.” Although John was over ninety years old when he made this pledge and the projected cost of such an ambitious venture was in the many millions of dollars, the businessman later recalled “the uncanny thing was that you did not doubt for a moment that he fully intended to do this thing and that, if his health permitted and he lived a while, it would be done.”26
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THE TWO BROTHERS had their last face-to-face meeting on October 3, 1942, a little more than a year after John wrote the conciliatory letter that never elicited a response. Will had his chauffeur drive him to John’s home. Ever at odds, John hoped to extract a loan from his millionaire brother while Will wanted to convince his brother to let go of the San’s reins. During their five-hour conversation, Will recalled, the doctor admitted the toxicity of his overbearing ways, “I talk too much. I have to overcome it. I talk too much.”27
Will tried tact and then guile by suggesting if John really wanted to see his work continued, the best plan was to let the Seventh-day Adventist Elders resume the cause. John, who could nurture a resentment even longer than his younger brother, could not, would not, forget the agonizing psychic torture the Adventist Church had put him through nearly forty years earlier as it sought control of his operation and kicked him out of their fold. Suspicious of anything Will suggested or the Church proposed, Dr. Kellogg turned the tables and accused the Seventh-day Adventists of inappropriately trying to seize the money from the sale of the Sanitarium buildings. There was no room for agreement, let alone compromise. The conversation began with both men wary of the other; it was only a matter of time until it became mean and dreadful.
Nine days later, on October 12, Will told Dr. George Thomason, a longtime San physician who was conspiring with the Adventists to take over the San, that his meeting with John was “the most rambling conversation I ever had with anybody in my life.” Will also denigrated the doctor’s state of mind as “unheard of, unreasonable, and nonsensical” and reported giving his older brother “a tongue chastisement,” more severe than any other he had given to anyone “during my rather long life.” Most astounding, at least in Will’s version, “the Doctor did not resent some of the cutting things I said to him [indicating] very plainly to me that he, in a way, admitted the truthfulness of my remarks.”28
True to John’s allegations, the Adventist Elders did hope to reclaim what they still considered to be one of the Church’s most valuable assets. Such enmity was to be expected from his former coreligionists who had long resented John’s one-upmanship and knack for goading them into embarrassing situations. What remains appalling, if not outright ugly, was the financial help the Adventists received from the eighty-three-year-old Will Keith Kellogg in order to pick over the last vestiges of the Sanitarium. Will not only gave them large sums of money to subsidize their mounting legal bills, he also offered the Adventist leaders strategic advice on how to humiliate his ninety-one-year-old brother.29 For example, on October 18, 1943, Will wrote one of John’s most vociferous detractors, Adventist Elder W. H. Branson, about publicly exposing the fetid conditions at the once spotless, hygienic San. After inspecting the premises, Will reported, “the odors in the basement and the elevator shaft are terrific and I am sure that the place is not sanitary.”30
Some have hypothesized that Will led this attempted coup because he believed his long service to the Sanitarium entitled him to help determine the allocation of its remaining assets. Others have suggested it was out of loyalty to the Seventh-day Adventists, even though it had been many decades since he had actively participated in the Church. Neither explanation seems wholly plausible. More likely, Will seized the opportunity to revise history by obliterating the physical representation of his brother’s lifelong work. This was strictly business for Will and, just as he did with the cereal manufacturers, grain producers, grocery chains, railroad executives, and relatives who crossed him, he aggressively used his power to insure that the fight ended in his favor. As he wrote Dr. George Thomason in early 1943, “In view of the fact that the patronage of the Battle Creek Sanitarium…has nearly reached the vanishing point, it does not occur to me that it would be desirable to try and perpetuate the institution at this time.”31
There were more low-grade quarrels between the brothers, as well as backbiting episodes between John and the Seventh-day Adventists. Lawsuits were filed and courtroom tactics implemented but time was clearly running out for the man who created the institution all these other men wanted to control. John knew full well of his brother’s treacherous actions to help destroy his legacy but he was too ill and tired to fight back. In the late fall of 1943, he was stricken with Bell’s palsy, a viral-induced paralysis of the nerve that controls the facial muscles. The palsy paralyzed the entire left side of his face, causing an unattractive drooping, difficulty in blinking, and severe dryness of the eye’s cornea. John also lost his senses of taste and hearing and the ability to swallow his saliva, leading to a great deal of drooling. The illness forced the once proud and extroverted doctor to closet himself in his home, lest others see him in such a debilitated state.32
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ON DECEMBER 14, 1943, only thirty minutes before midnight, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg drew his final breath. He was ninety-one and nine months old. A few days earlier, he developed a severe bronchial cough, shortness of breath, and a decided heaviness to his chest thanks to a worsening pneumonia. In the hours before he died, John said his final goodbye to his adopted son Richard, who originally hailed from Guadalajara, Mexico. The devoted son, now a successful dentist, was about to leave for service in the war effort.33 Dr. Kellogg rarely spoke of dying. He was all about living life and the ways to enhance and prolong it. As he labored for breath, John worried about the long docket of new patients waiting to see him until he was gently persuaded to cancel all his appointments for the remainder of the week. Approaching the fate he knew came to every living creature, John confessed to his personal physician, James R. Jeffrey. “Well, maybe this is the last time, doctor. ” Shortly after this admission, Dr. Kellogg fell into a coma and died.34
A few days after the doctor’s funeral, Judge Blaine W. Hatch of the local 37th Circuit Court of Calhoun County adjudicated a compromise in which no single party walked away entirely pleased. The Adventist Church received $550,000 in cash (or $7.53 million in 2016) and three farms worth $75,000 (or $1.03 million in 2016) in return for relinquishing any claim on the San. The settlement also allowed a small group of Dr. Kellogg’s most loyal acolytes to run John’s iteration of the Sanitarium in the buildings his estate owned, across the street from the now government-owned complex of buildings. This shell of what was once the splendid San limped along for over a decade before closing its doors in 1957.35
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WILL DEEPLY MOURNED his brother’s death despite all the years of hostility and avoidance. He even sent a photograph of Dr. Kellogg’s tombstone to several of John’s friends and admirers.36 The depth of Will’s sorrow might be best explained by returning to that heartfelt letter of reconciliation John wrote Will on September 8, 1941. The mystery of why Will never responded was finally solved six and a half years later. Remarkably, John’s assistant who recorded the doctor’s dictation of the seven-page letter felt that it was beneath the dignity of the once great man. She was especially worried about alerting Will to John’s admission of senility. “I find my memory failing,” he wrote, “I thought I had about reached the end of walking and was distinctly doddering.”37 Instead of placing the letter directly in the mail, she sealed the envelope and stuffed it into a file cabinet where it reposed unopened.38 John’s letter was rediscovered and finally delivered to Will on June 22, 1948. Shortly after its arrival, Will’s nurse read the communiqué to the blind old man:
It was the greatest possible misfortune to the work that circumstances arose which led you and me in different channels and separated our interests. I am sure that you were right in regards the food business….Your better balanced judgment has doubtless s
aved you from a vast number of mistakes of the sort I have made and allowed you to achieve magnificent successes for which generations to come will owe you gratitude….I am making desperate efforts to get all my affairs into such shape as to preserve as much as possible what good they may represent and to mend as many as possible of the errors I have made. I earnestly desire to make amends for any wrong or injustice of any sort I have done to you and will be glad if you will give me a very definite and frank expression of anything I have said or done which you feel should be justly designated unbrotherly or otherwise open to criticism….I hope that this note may find you more comfortable and that you have many years left to promote the splendid enterprises that have given the name you bear a place among the notable ones of our time.39
“Magnificent successes.” “Amends.” “The errors I have made.” Sadly, John’s sincere good wishes could no longer facilitate a fraternal discourse, an awkward, stiff embrace, or even a handshake. Would the letter have healed the torturous relationship between Will and John had it only arrived more promptly? Such a question generates speculation beyond the ken of the historian. One cannot help but hope the doctor’s loving message might have been therapeutic enough for Will to finally find peace and satisfaction. Alas, the words, the sentiments, the thoughtful appreciations were too tardy to do much good.
Had Will Kellogg’s life been made into a motion picture, John’s letter would have been his “Rosebud,” the moment he finally squelched or, at least, better understood his inner demons over the parental and fraternal love denied him. Imagine if he were portrayed in the manner of Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz’s masterpiece, Citizen Kane. The audience would watch a master shot of the nurse reading the letter, dissolving into a close-up of Will’s blind eyes tearing up, finally “seeing” the truth. The scene would segue into a medium shot of the old man uttering a plaintive wail and slumping over in his wheelchair. The camera would slowly pan out for one final long shot of the dead man, accompanied by a dramatic swell of music, followed by the closing credits and the familiar: “The End.”40
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