The Kelloggs
ALSO BY HOWARD MARKEL
AUTHOR
An Anatomy of Addiction:
Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine
When Germs Travel:
Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America
Since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed
Quarantine!:
East European Jewish Immigrations
and the New York City Epidemics of 1892
COAUTHOR
The Practical Pediatrician:
The A to Z Guide to Your Child’s Health, Behavior, and Safety
The Portable Pediatrician (first edition, 1992; second edition, 2000)
The H. L. Mencken Baby Book
COEDITOR
Formative Years:
Children’s Health in the United States, 1880–2000
Copyright © 2017 by Howard Markel
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Markel, Howard, author.
Title: The Kelloggs : the battling brothers of Battle Creek / Howard Markel.
Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2017
Identifiers: LCCN 2016053946 (print). LCCN 2016054724 (ebook). isbn 9780307907271 (hardcover : alk. paper). ISBN 9780307907288 (ebook).
Subjects: LCSH: Kellogg, John Harvey, 1852–1943. Kellogg, W. K. (Will Keith), 1860–1951. Battle Creek Sanitarium (Battle Creek, Mich.)—History. Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake Company—History. Kellogg Company—History. Physicians—Michigan—Biography. Industrialists—Michigan—Biography. Battle Creek (Mich.)—Biography.
Classification: LCC F574.B2 M36 2017 (print). LCC f574.b2 (ebook). DDC 977.4/22—dc23.
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2016053946
Ebook ISBN 9780307907288
www.pantheonbooks.com
Lettering on cover front by Nick Misani
Cover images: (bottom left) J. H. Kellogg. Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; (bottom right) W. K. Kellogg. Bettmann/Getty Images
Cover design by Janet Hansen
v4.1
a
Again, for my girls,
Sammy and Bess,
the “true golden gold” lights and loves of my life
He that withholdeth corn, the people shall curse him: but blessing shall be upon the head of him that selleth it.
—Proverbs 11:26
Contents
Cover
Also by Howard Markel
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Introduction: The Cain and Abel of America’s Heartland
PART I “MICHIGAN FEVER”
1 “Go West, Young Man”
2 The Chosen One
3 New Brooms Sweep Clean
4 Long-Distance Learning
PART II AN EMPIRE OF WELLNESS
5 Building the San
6 “What’s More American than Corn Flakes?”
7 “Fire!”…and Cease-fire
8 The New San
PART III MANUFACTURING HEALTH
9 The San’s Operations
10 A “University of Health”
11 Will’s Place
PART IV BATTLES OF OLD AGE
12 The Prison of Resentment
13 The Doctor’s Crusade Against Race Degeneracy
14 A Full Plate
15 “Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown”
16 The Final Score
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
Author’s Note
BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY Kelloggs in this book who have the same first name, “John,” I refer to John Harvey Kellogg in the text as “John,” while I add the middle names of his father, John Preston, his nephew, John Leonard, and his grand-nephew, John Leonard Jr., or “Junior,” when referring to them respectively. John and Will’s mother and John Preston Kellogg’s second wife was named Ann Janette Stanley Kellogg; John Preston’s first wife was Mary Ann Call Kellogg. To keep these two women straight in the reader’s mind, I have referred to each by their first and middle names, Mary Ann and Ann Janette, respectively.
Introduction
THE CAIN AND ABEL OF AMERICA’S HEARTLAND
THIS MORNING, MORE THAN 350 million people devoured a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.1 Hundreds of millions more started their day with a cornucopia of crunchy, and frequently sugar-laden, flaked, popped, puffed grains. While perusing the cereal box, peering over the bowl, and gripping a spoonful of the stuff, few of these sleepy diners know that two men created those famously crispy, golden flakes of corn. John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg were brothers from the Michigan hamlet of Battle Creek. Together, they introduced and mass-marketed the concept of “wellness.” And in so doing, they changed how the world eats breakfast.
John and Will began their ascent into the pantheon of American history by building the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a once world-famous medical center, spa, and grand hotel. For more than half a century, “the San” attracted droves of people actively pursuing health and well-being. The brothers also developed a successful medical publishing house, an exercise machine and electrical “sunbath” firm, cooking, medical, and nursing schools, an undergraduate college, and sundry other profitable health product companies. Yet throughout these endeavors and for most of their lives, the “Kellogg boys” hated each other’s guts.
From the late nineteenth century to World War II, John—the elder by eight years—was one of America’s most beloved physicians. His books were worldwide best-sellers. The advice he dispensed in these volumes, lectures, and his magazine, Good Health (“the oldest health magazine in the world—established 1866”), was followed by millions, including some of the most prominent celebrities of the day.2 In 1921, his “lifesaving” research on digestion and diet was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology.3 Eleven years later, a 1932 poll ranked him second on a list of twenty-five important American luminaries and lauded him as “the noblest man” in the United States; only Herbert Hoover ranked higher (a status that would drastically change for the beleaguered president).4
The Battle Creek Sanitarium, circa 1915 Credit 1
During this same period, Will became one of the world’s most successful industrialists. In 1906, he founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, the original name of the Kellogg Company, which today enjoys more than $13 billion a year in net sales of breakfast cereals, snacks, and other manufactured foods in 180 nations around the globe.5 With cunning and élan, Will Kellogg revolutionized the mass production of food, invested a fortune to advertise his wares to the public, and as a result made an even bigger fortune. When he was done amassing his wealth, he created the charitable means to give it away to those most in need of help and support.
John Harvey Kellogg in his heyday, circa 1915 Credit 2
W. K. Kellogg, at his Arabian horse ranch in Pomona, California, circa 1925 Credit 3
Behind all these triumphs the Kelloggs’ filial relations were a mess. For decades John and Will fought, litigated, and plotted against one another with a passion more akin to grand opera than the kinship of brothers. Born the sons of two early votaries of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a denomination predicting the imminent end of the world and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, they were unable to contain the destruction wrought by their long-running quarr
el. In their dotage, each brother came to regret their feud’s acidic effects even if they were never able to reach a peaceful resolution. In light of their incredible success, how could things have gone so horribly wrong between them?
At age eighty-nine, John decided he had had enough of the hot and cold war. On September 8, 1941, he sat down, unscrewed his fountain pen, and searched his soul to compose a letter to his long-estranged sibling. The result was a heartfelt expression of apology for all the fights and slights that characterized their every discourse over eight decades. It was a glowing appreciation of Will’s phenomenal accomplishments. In the months that followed, John must have wondered why his brother never acknowledged, let alone responded to, this literary equivalent of an olive branch.
We do know that the doctor’s attempt at rapprochement failed miserably during their last face-to-face meeting. In early October 1942, John invited the cereal mogul to his home hoping for financial assistance to pull his Sanitarium out of the quicksand of bankruptcy, an embarrassment brought on by overexpansion, the Great Depression, and the advent of World War II. The tête-à-tête lasted more than five hours and was anything but civil. Will had heard John’s mea culpas too many times to put much stock in promises of brotherly concord. Every interaction the two brothers attempted rapidly fell into the rut of past fights and was warped by the corrosive dynamics of emotional pain, hostility, and resentment. Will walked into the doctor’s parlor anticipating—and then finding—a packet of annoyance and aggravation. Almost as soon as he left, the eighty-two-year-old Will began a whispering campaign attacking his brother’s mental acuity. Worse, he plotted with members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (which originally owned the Sanitarium and, in 1907, excommunicated John) to buy the facility for its own imperial plans.6
—
ON DECEMBER 14, 1943, the doctor died. He was ninety-one years and nine months old, only eight years and three months shy of his goal of living to be one hundred. The following morning, his body was transported to the Andrew C. Hebble Funeral Home on Main Street. Once there, the mortuary staff embalmed, tonsured, and dressed the doctor in his standard uniform: an all-white three-piece suit, with matching shirt, tie, socks, and shoes, made to measure by Marshall Field and Company of Chicago. The doctor wore this flamboyant ensemble during much of his professional life. He claimed it was “impossible to wear a garment two hours without soiling it.”7 The white suits allowed him to identify contact with dirt of any kind and, upon such discovery, change into a new suit of fresh white clothing.
John’s mahogany and silk-lined coffin was taken to the Sanitarium where it was placed atop a carnation-lined bier on the stage of its cavernous auditorium and surrounded by an honor guard of his former nurses. In the aisles was a long line of patients, friends, and admirers, each clutching a long printed pamphlet reproducing the condolence telegrams sent by hundreds of prominent writers, industrialists, journalists, former U.S. presidents, physicians, politicians, academics, scientists, and world leaders who could not attend the ceremony.8 Some mourners were better at holding back their tears than others; all of them wanted to pay their last respects to the man they reverentially referred to as “Doctor.”
The December 15, 1943, issue of The Battle Creek Enquirer and News Announcing Dr. Kellogg’s Death Credit 4
Once the service drew to a close, and after the pallbearers lugged the casket into Mr. Hebble’s black Cadillac hearse, a phalanx of automobiles made its way down the hill from where the Sanitarium was perched.9 The procession passed an enormous billboard proclaiming in two-foot-tall letters: “GET BETTER IN BATTLE CREEK.” If any of the car radios were turned on during the doctor’s last ride, they probably played the dulcet tones of Battle Creek’s premier radio station, W-E-L-L. (The original call letters of that broadcast station, incidentally, were W-K-B-P, or “We Keep Breakfast Popular.”)10
The funeral cortege finally wound into the Oak Hill Cemetery, the town’s most distinguished burial ground. Here were the remains of Sojourner Truth, the former slave and author, and Ellen White, the founding prophetess of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Nearby was the famously rich C. W. Post, whose popular Postum “cereal coffee,” Grape-Nuts, and Post Toasties was the nucleus of what became the massive General Foods Corporation. The Kellogg brothers despised Charley Post, a former Sanitarium patient, because Post acquired his millions only after “borrowing” some of their most popular recipes. Legend has it that Post was buried under seven feet of concrete to prevent grave robbers from stealing his corpse; and yet he remains easy to find because his mausoleum is the largest monument in the cemetery.11 John opted, instead, for a simple stone, upon which was carved his name and years on earth. He rests, hopefully in peace, next to his beloved wife, Ella Eaton Kellogg, who died of colon cancer in 1920.12
—
CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT from the memorial proceedings was Will Kellogg. He was across the continent, in Palm Springs, California, convalescing from a recent illness. From the distance of more than two thousand miles, his anger at John simmered and spluttered even as his elder brother’s casket was being lowered into the ground. Sadly, no amount of Will’s riches could purchase a healing opportunity for forgiveness.13
In 1906, at the age of forty-six and after serving twenty-two and one half years as the Battle Creek Sanitarium’s business manager without official title, Will exploded out from under his brother’s yoke. Complaining that the doctor “was a czar and a law unto himself, ignoring his associates and subordinates,” Will decided he had had enough of being John’s right hand.14 He was, however, docile enough to ask his older brother for permission to start up his own corn flakes cereal company. John consented only after Will proffered a sizable tribute of money and stock in the nascent firm. In return, the elder brother aggravated and harassed Will long after he was finally able to completely buy John out of the business. Undaunted, Will described the certainty with which he decided to strike out on his own, “I sort of feel it in my bones.”15 A mere three years later, Will’s company was producing 120,000 cases of Corn Flakes a day.16
It was precisely when Will’s business began to soar that John attempted to destroy his success by setting in motion a series of lawsuits lasting more than a decade. The doctor’s antagonistic actions did more than just taunt or anger Will. John’s nasty maneuvers forced Will to litigate all the way to the Michigan State Supreme Court over the issue of which brother held the claim over their greatest creation and the commercial rights to use the family name. John insisted he was the originator of flaked cereal (he was) and the more widely known of the two (he was). Will just as forcefully argued that he was the Kellogg who perfected the recipe for Corn Flakes (he did), legally bought the doctor’s rights to the cereal (he did), and because he so widely and effectively advertised the brand name of Kellogg in connection with his cereals, he and his company deserved the commercial rights to the family surname (in the end, he was right).
After the contentious legal battle was decided in Will’s favor, the brothers rarely spoke to each other if they could possibly avoid it, and when they did things often became bitter, fast. Their tempestuous relationship was a battle royal over primacy, credit, and respect. The Kellogg brothers shared so much and yet resented one another so deeply. Their beloved sister Emma described it best as she observed, “The Kellogg women are amenable, but the Kellogg men can be mean.”17
Will was a major player in an entirely new industry centered on the transformation of foods from their natural state into cooked, shaped, chemically manipulated, mass-manufactured products. During his lifetime, his name appeared on billions of boxes of Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, All-Bran, Bran Krumbles, Pep, Corn-Soya Shreds, and similar products. After his death, in 1951, his company successfully pushed glucose-loaded concoctions such as Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes, Sugar Smacks, Froot Loops, Cocoa-Krispies, Pop-Tarts, Frosted Mini-Wheats, and Apple Jacks and, later, Eggo frozen waffles, Special K, Nutri-Grain breakfast bars, cookies, crackers, drinks, potato c
hips, veggie burgers, and a long list of other processed foods. Many of these food products are nutritious and convenient; others played a role in fueling the current obesity epidemic among children and adults. Regardless of the precise ingredients filling the Kellogg Company’s horn of plenty, Will’s crunchy, toasted grain concoctions comprise the most consumed breakfasts in the history of humankind.
In a pun reluctantly intended, Will Kellogg’s accomplishments are ingrained in our national fiber, as Bing Crosby crooned in the opening refrain of a song he recorded in 1968, “What’s more American than Corn Flakes?”18 By all measures, except for his own, Will’s life constitutes a classic American success story. Sadly, no matter how much he achieved, Will could never squelch the relentless, inner voice. It was a voice that tormented him with what would appear to objective observers as an absurd notion: the belief that he was nothing more than his older brother’s lackey.
—
IT COULD NOT HAVE BEEN easy being John Harvey Kellogg’s little brother. Even as boys, it was understood that John was their mother’s favorite child and the family’s brightest star while Will was considered to be slow, at best. Young John was so brilliant that the leaders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church groomed him to preach its health reform gospel. As adults, the doctor was a famous and respected visionary long before Will ever dreamed of becoming a food manufacturer. Dr. Kellogg exuded waves of charisma, good cheer, eloquence, showmanship, and clinical reassurance. He possessed an encyclopedic intellect, an oceanic ego, and a volcanic temperament. Too often, he unleashed withering torrents of sarcasm against anyone who disagreed with him. John’s drive and industry were truly breathtaking but he was an impossible boss, unwilling to accept excuses or failures from his employees and adamantly opposed to delegating a micron of his authority. His religious counselor, the Seventh-day Adventist prophetess Ellen White, once reproached him: “there is with you a love of supremacy whether you see it or not.”19