The Kelloggs Page 13
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ASSERTING HIS DOMINANCE over an ever-increasing staff and increasingly complex array of clinics, treatment rooms, laboratories, and dining and living facilities, John transitioned from a one-man band to a symphony orchestra conductor who ruled with an iron baton. Those who challenged John’s authority were not likely to last long in his employ. He was the undisputed majordomo. When the Adventist Elders asked if he needed some help from a trusted colleague, such as his half-brother Merritt, the doctor dismissed their request and replied, “I find it difficult to carry a fraction of a burden and leave the rest. If I have any responsibility in a matter, I somehow cannot avoid feeling a burden of the whole.”23 Similarly, if the Sanitarium board gave him a directive he did not like, he simply ignored or dismissed it out of hand. Throughout his career, John interpreted every bit of constructive criticism as an insult or a plot to undermine his work. Those expecting an apology or admission of error from the ever-imperious John had to wait a very long time, indeed.
Dr. Kellogg’s first major move was to change the name of the institution. Always the talented wordsmith, he coined a new one to describe his vision: Sanitarium. On September 15, 1910, Dr. Kellogg told the audience packed into the San’s parlor how he discarded the original name of Health Reform Institute:
I didn’t like the name because I had already had enough experience in the world to know that people didn’t like to be reformed; they liked to be informed and taught, but they didn’t like to be reformed. So I thought I would get rid of that phrase, Health Reform Institute. Our journal now called Good Health was then called the Health Reformer. I changed the name of the journal for the same reason….Well, I was casting about for a name, and I found the word “sanatorium” in the dictionary defined as…a health resort for invalid soldiers; so I changed the word “sanatorium” to “sanitarium.” We didn’t want the institution to be looked upon as a health resort; I wanted it to be…something different from what existed before, and a place where people would cultivate health in every possible way by every means afforded by medical science and by modern hygiene.24
It was a perfect word created long before now familiar medical “brand names,” such as the Mayo Clinic or the Johns Hopkins Hospital, were introduced into the American vernacular. From the onset of his career, John Harvey Kellogg understood the need to establish and widely advertise a temple of health, healing, and well-being. He knew that this institution had to be attractive, modern, luxurious, and a worthwhile destination for those wealthy enough to seek such commodities. Thus, he had to invent the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
To satisfy his evolving ambitions, Dr. Kellogg needed more money, which meant convincing the Whites to invest in a new and bigger Sanitarium. After John retired all but $3,000 (or $70,000 in 2016) of the institute’s debt, James White took the matter up with Ellen, who subsequently had a dream in which the Lord authorized such a plan. The next morning, James embarked upon a fund-raising campaign to cover the proposed costs.25 The goals the Adventist Elders set out for themselves in 1877 were nothing if not transformative. The new Sanitarium, they declared, was “to wield a mighty influence in the world, and to be a powerful means of breaking down the old, pernicious autocracy of empirical practice and of encouraging sanitary reform.”26
A beautiful new structure opened in the spring of 1878 but John remained unsatisfied. The doctor informed his board that he needed an additional $50,000 (about $1.19 million in 2016) for a new wing to house his latest treatment modalities and deluxe patient suites. The board members were hesitant to commit to still more debt, given the poor return on investment they had previously seen with the Health Reform Institute. Some went as far as to call the expansion plan “John’s Folly.” Ellen White, who was already concerned about the doctor’s unquenchable ambition, publicly expressed her strong disapproval. The “financial embarrassment” brought on by the new building, she fumed, “called into active exercise all of Dr. Kellogg’s scheming and planning to gather means to lessen the heavy debt. This has caused him great care and labor, and has nearly cost his life.” Ellen further chastised John for having converted her beloved health institute into a “grand hotel.”27
Mrs. White’s charges were perfectly aimed at John’s psychological buttons and the young physician did not take these goads terribly well. Unfortunately, James White was the one man who reliably tempered the fraught and emotional relationship between Ellen and John. Hardly robust, especially after suffering a stroke in 1865, James developed a mysterious fever in the summer of 1881 and despite all of Dr. Kellogg’s medical ministrations, he died on August 6. Yet even this important relationship grew strained during Elder White’s final year of life, when John grew increasingly suspicious of James White’s strong influence and maneuvered to force the old man off the Sanitarium board. While taking care of James White during his last months, the two men were said to have reconciled but Ellen never forgot or forgave John’s hostile actions.28
The doctor had little time to mourn his former mentor’s demise. He was too busy raising money for his expanding empire. Legend has it that John came up with a perfect Seventh-day Adventist rationale by having the Sanitarium apply for a twenty-year bank loan. The doctor convinced his all-Adventist board of directors to approve his request by arguing that the Advent of Jesus Christ’s imminent return to earth would occur long before the bank loan would ever come due.29 The truth is far more mundane. Dr. Kellogg organized a separate “stock company” for raising additional funds with the contractual promise to Ellen White and the Elders that the Sanitarium, not the Church, would be responsible for all of its debts. His financial entreaties hardly ended there. In the mid-1880s, he sold a few acres of the San’s grounds to build a charity hospital. Finding the inspiration for this expansion far more pleasing to her Christian sensibilities, Sister White acquiesced and the Sanitarium board followed suit.30
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IN FACT, John never stopped improving the San. The entire complex was based on his careful study of the architectural plans of some of the most famous hospitals in the world. The main building was constructed of wood and covered by a brick veneer. It was five stories tall and the first three floors boasted long wraparound, iron-railed, open-air verandas to provide ample access to fresh air and sunshine. At the complex’s center was an expanse of suites devoted to hydrotherapy, featuring Turkish, Russian, and fifty other types of baths. Every patient’s room was gas-lit, directly supplied with hot and cold water, and centrally heated by means of a $10,000 (about $239,000 in 2016) ultramodern furnace system. There were nearly a “half mile of glassed-in halls” and acres of rolling, manicured lawns replete with fountains. Thanks to multiple standpipes and fire hoses at the ready, along with the Adventist ban against smoking, the doctor insisted that the risk of a fire was “nonexistent,” a boast that would later prove to be monumentally wrong.31
The Battle Creek Sanitarium, circa 1880 Credit 31
John installed an expensive electric dynamo in 1884 to replace the gas lighting and power his electric light baths and electrotherapeutic medical treatments. That same year, he added a plush six-story patient wing on the south end of the Sanitarium to accommodate the growing number of paying patients; two years later, he added a similar wing to the north side of the original building. In 1886, he established a nursery and a kindergarten so that patients who brought along their children could fully participate in all the activities.32 The children, incidentally, were “not required to follow the Sanitarium health regimen, but elementary principles of healthy living were introduced in the nursery when possible.”33 He erected a modern five-story hospital building in 1888, complete with sparkling white-tiled and arc-lamp-lit operating rooms, special facilities for those patients needing more intensive medical care, and a suite of laboratories to analyze every possible bodily fluid and each patient’s caloric intake. Two years later, in 1890, John built a one-thousand-seat auditorium for lectures, entertainments, and concerts. Thus, in a span of only fourteen years, the Sanit
arium’s physical plant evolved from a two-story converted home into a massive, beautiful, and luxurious medical center; it was so grand that it employed over one thousand people, cared for seven to ten thousand patients each year, farmed over four hundred acres of land to grow the vegetables, fruit, and dairy products his guests consumed daily, and operated a canning and food manufacturing facility, laundry, charity hospital, creamery, and a resort comprised of twenty cottages (reserved for the most wealthy of the worried well) overlooking Goguac Lake.34
At the center of Dr. Kellogg’s “university of health” was the Sanitarium’s dining room. Most of man’s maladies, Dr. Kellogg repeatedly insisted, were a result of poor diet—“too much food and not the right kind of it.” The doctor taught his patients that “you are what you eat,” mentally, spiritually, and physically. In its earliest days, however, Dr. Kellogg’s Sanitarium offered a far different menu than the varied vegetarian and grain-based fare it later made so famous. Throughout the 1880s, meat was still served for those choosing to dine at the “liberal table.” At the “conservative table,” one could still tuck into a beefsteak or roast chicken but there was no coffee and tea during or after the meal. At the “radical table,” all of these “flesh foods” were forbidden in lieu of stewed vegetables, crunchy crudité, salt-free broths and jellies, and whole grains, which were boiled and bubbled into tasteless bowls of mush or baked into crunchy hard rolls and biscuits. There was no shortage of San patients lining up to eat at the “radical table” because this was where Dr. Kellogg regularly dined. The price one paid for enjoying erudite conversations with the charismatic physician was to eat the same foods he ate. By the mid-1880s, John banished tea, coffee, and all condiments, but it was not until 1900 that Ellen White finally granted the doctor permission to permanently ban meat from the premises.35
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THE MONEY TO PAY for all these improvements remained a troubling concern to the Adventist churchmen, as did John’s growing power among the fold. Much of the revenues John generated for the San came from his clinical activities and medical procedures. To increase his bottom line further, Dr. Kellogg decreed that his staff members be paid minimal amounts of money in exchange for room, board, and the experience of working at the San. Amazingly enough, an army of the Adventist faithful accepted this penurious arrangement for virtually the entire period Dr. Kellogg ran the place. Yet no set amount of money was enough to transform John’s endless rolls of blueprints into bricks and mortar. The Sanitarium’s debt increased with every new idea, piece of equipment, or hospital wing the doctor demanded, much to his board’s discontent.
At this point in his career, John must have sensed that a break with the Whites and the Seventh-day Adventists was inevitable. His ambitions were so large and his patience far too limited for his timid partners, most of whom he considered unimaginative and unqualified to appropriately judge his medical goals. This troubling dynamic led John to embark on what became one of the most contentious but clever legal maneuvers of his career. As with all nonprofit corporations in Michigan during the late nineteenth century, the Battle Creek Sanitarium was required by law to operate under a state charter limited to a lifetime of thirty years. The San’s charter expired in April of 1897. Recognizing the risks to his medical empire, John convinced the “stockholders” of the Western Health Reform Institute’s original corporation (all of them Adventist church members) to oppose any separation or breakup of the San’s assets. When the charter did expire, a court order logically made John, as the institution’s medical director and superintendent, the receiver. The following year, a new Michigan Sanitarium and Benevolent Association was incorporated with every word of the new charter carefully written by Dr. Kellogg. Soon after, a public auction was held to sell the “old corporation’s” physical plant, and because there were no other bidders besides the new association, Dr. Kellogg purchased the entire place for the exact amount of the San’s outstanding bank loans.36
The doctor hedged his bet by neatly tucking into the charter’s boilerplate a description of the San as a “nonprofit and benevolent corporation.” This meant that the new Michigan Sanitarium and Benevolent Association was required by state law to be nondenominational rather than a Seventh-day Adventist venture. Some of the Adventist stockholders balked at this new configuration but Dr. Kellogg convinced them it was to their benefit since it allowed the San to continue grossly underpaying the staff and would yield significant tax savings on any profits accrued. Such fiscal advantages were critical to keeping the Sanitarium’s ledgers in the black. If the Seventh-day Adventists chose to buy the Sanitarium outright and run it as a for-profit institution, he argued, they could never manage to fund the nonsubsidized employee payroll, let alone pay the state tax bills.
John veered toward the disingenuous as he explained that the new legal phraseology simply meant that if the “new” Sanitarium was “to be conducted as a medical institution, that it may have the advantages of the statutes of the state; as a hospital it must be carried on as an undenominational institution. It cannot give benefits to a certain class, but must be for the benefit of any who are sick. The institution may support any work it chooses with the earnings of the Association, but cannot discriminate against anyone because of his beliefs.”37 Dr. Kellogg’s explanation carried the day and the stockholders unanimously consented to the plan. These explanations, however, obscured John’s tactics of consolidation. In 1905, he confessed to a close colleague that he had anticipated a break from the Adventists for more than a decade, which was why he so adamantly insisted that the San was a “private, distinct independent corporation.”38
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WITHOUT FEAR OF CONTRADICTION, the most important move John made in insuring the Sanitarium’s success began in 1880 when he hired Will as his assistant. Balding and already plump, Will hid his bulbous nose with a toothbrush bristle of a mustache, which he would not shave until after he successfully started his own cereal company. Preternaturally shy, his highly observant eyes hid quietly underneath thick-lensed round spectacles. Will’s looks mattered little to John, who knew him to be completely trustworthy and in possession of a drive and business savvy that complemented the doctor’s unparalleled clinical creativity.
One of Will’s earliest administrative assignments at the Sanitarium was to run the doctor’s publishing house, alternatively called the Modern Medicine Publishing Company, the Health Publishing Company, and the Good Health Publishing Company. Unlike virtually every other major publishing operation in America, the doctor’s firm only had one major author to publish: John Harvey Kellogg. Preferring to dictate his medical wisdom, John hired and maintained a rotating staff of four or more secretaries. All of them, primarily men, were on call for work, no matter what time of day, to record his every thought. A typical day’s dictation often lasted four to five hours and the doctor would ramble on at around two hundred words per minute as the written pages stacked up higher and higher until there were enough to be bound into his latest book or treatise. John’s dictation sessions frequently lasted well into the early hours of the morning because “3:00 to 4:00 am were his best working hours,” without regard to how grueling these marathons were for those who worked for him. The doctor’s longest literary sitting lasted over twenty hours, all the while one attendant massaged his temples and another placed bags of ice on top of his head to keep him stimulated as he dictated “for hours” on the open porch of his home during the dead of night to a “benumbed secretary.”39
John dictating to Will at the San, circa 1890 Credit 32
When traveling across the country by train for lecture tours and medical meetings, the doctor was always accompanied by at least two stenographers who each kept a bag packed at the ready. They were armed with reams of pads and packs of newly sharpened pencils so that every word the doctor dictated along the journey was properly recorded. Upon completion of the dictation of the article, chapter, or lecture John was composing, the stenographer jumped off the train at the first convenient stop
and traveled back to Battle Creek to type up the notes so they were in perfect order upon the doctor’s return.
Will had little to do with the composition, editing, or really any of the creative work that went into producing John’s many books and the dozens of issues of medical magazines he put out each year (with titles such as Good Health, Health and Temperance Beacon, Modern Medicine Journal, Bacteriological World, Modern Medicine and Bacteriological Review, Health Reformer, Medical Missionary, and the Bulletin of the Battle Creek Sanitarium Hospital and Laboratory of Hygiene, as well as his weekly newsletter and monthly magazine directed at patients, the Sanitarium News and the Battle Creek Idea). Instead, Will was the one who saw to it that every book, magazine, and pamphlet the doctor wrote or edited was properly printed and that the proofs were checked and double-checked to remove any typographical or factual errors. He supervised the bindery men to insure that no page was stapled or sewn out of order. Once bound, the finished copies were gently placed in wood crates filled with soft, curled wood shavings known as excelsior to prevent any damage during delivery. Clipboard and inventory in hand, Will made certain that every crate was correctly sealed, addressed, and stamped with the necessary postage and shipped by train to the subscribing library, university, medical institution, or individual reader. Will kept systematic records so each subscription was recorded and every payment deposited. It is doubtful that any one of Dr. Kellogg’s millions of readers thought much about Will’s fastidious labors as they pried open the coveted parcels from Battle Creek and eagerly consumed the doctor’s latest medical sermon. That is, no one contemplated these issues until something went wrong, such as a delay in delivery, a problem with the U.S. Post Office or the freight train companies, and a dozen other potential snafus that plague any mail order business. When these problems did arise, upset readers often wrote scathing letters of complaint that landed on Will’s desk. After investigating these grievances, Will corrected the problem by sending out a new book and a letter of apology that very day. Today, such practices would be called “customer service.” Will referred to them as “good business.” Within months of watching his younger brother perform these tasks so efficiently, it became clear that the more responsibilities John gave Will, the better things ran. As a result, John appointed Will the general manager of a family of other businesses that included a health food company and equipment companies producing sun lamps, exercise machines, sanitary supplies, and clothing.40