The Kelloggs Read online

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  ALL OF THESE DEMANDING JOBS, however, were secondary to what ultimately became his main role: administering the massive and complex Battle Creek Sanitarium. Will managed the San’s payroll, paid the bills to all of the vendors and suppliers on time, handled every guest’s complaint, real or perceived, and calmly allayed the financial worries of the charity patients, always treating them fairly and with respect. On occasion, he was an unwilling undertaker who arranged the funerals for those who died while being treated at the Sanitarium, all the way down to selecting the deceased’s casket. Many times, Will trekked into the woods surrounding the San to find confused or addled patients who came to the San only to wander away off the grounds.41 Every afternoon, he read, replied to, and frequently signed his brother’s name on some 60 to 120 pieces of mail regarding San business. In the evenings, he operated the hot, smoky lantern-slide projector for his brother’s lectures.

  Perhaps most demeaning, Will was forced into the service of the doctor’s personal valet, shining his white shoes, trimming and shaping his beard each morning with a straight razor, and following John into the bathroom to take ever more dictation while the doctor unloaded one of his four to five daily bowel movements into the toilet. Less disgusting but equally cruel, John humiliated Will by demanding that he follow him about the Sanitarium campus jotting down his latest order to be executed to perfection. An all too familiar sight was the overweight Will jogging, huffing, puffing, and writing down memoranda, while John pedaled his “high-wheeler” bicycle in full view of the guests and staff.

  On days when he felt particularly sanguine about his work, Will referred to himself as the San’s “bookkeeper, cashier, packing and shipping clerk, errand boy, and general utility man.” When trapped in the muck of melancholia, a mood that became more frequent with each passing year, Will groused he was nothing more than “J. H.’s flunkey.”42 Expressing his oppression in body language, an “austere” Will walked the halls in a stiff, halting manner, according to one Sanitarium physician, “just like he had swallowed a ramrod.”43

  Will somehow took John’s verbal and psychic abuse with quiet dignity, much to the detriment of his self-esteem. Yet as good as he was at performing his thankless tasks, it was a constant struggle to keep up with, let alone please, his dynamic brother. With the slightest slip, lapse in judgment, or merely the perception of something that irked his demanding boss, Will suffered the wrath of the doctor’s biting tongue. In later years, long after he left his brother’s oppressive employ, Will complained that during the entire time he worked at the Sanitarium he never held an official title—a vice presidency, perhaps, or even a junior partnership that he could point out to others with a sense of pride and accomplishment. Nonetheless, Will wore many important hats at the San and he wore them all well. Titled or not, he was the San’s “fixer-in-chief” of virtually every problem that arose on any given day at a large facility with hundreds of patients and employees. Most important, he served as buffer for his preoccupied brother. When the doctor’s rough edges inadvertently (and invariably) insulted a patient or staff member, it was Will who upholstered the matter over with a layer of diplomacy and tact.

  As a wealthy industrialist who presided over a multimillion-dollar corporation and worked terribly hard doing it, Will bitterly recalled his years at the San as some of the most difficult of his life:

  Dr. Kellogg was a prodigious worker. He worked long hours and was not only willing but insisted that others work with him….One year I kept a record of the number of hours I was on duty for the sanitarium. This record shows that one week I was on duty 120 hours….Saturday was the rest day at the sanitarium. However, I was expected to open the heavy mail on that day as on other days in order to have the porter meet the trains on which patients might be arriving, since some of them might require an ambulance.44

  Amazingly, Will labored at the San for more than seven years before the doctor granted him his first two-week vacation. “For many years,” Will recalled, “we worked on Christmas and New Year’s Day and were also on duty the Fourth of July.”45 Whenever Will meekly asked for some time off from his busy work schedule so that he might spend a few hours with his growing family, Dr. Kellogg said “No!” and derided Will as a “loafer.”46

  Perhaps the best example of John’s tyranny was the night in 1894 when the doctor kept his brother waiting around the Sanitarium offices “on call,” while John entertained a valued guest well into the early hours of the next morning. Will’s task was to escort the guest back to the train station after the meeting had concluded, while Puss patiently waited for his return home. As each hour passed and Will failed to show up, she fretted over what might have possibly happened to her absent husband. The beleaguered younger brother was not to finish his escorting role until after the break of dawn only to return to the Sanitarium to begin a new day’s work. In his diary that night, Will angrily wrote, “Puss came up to the office about half past seven to see why I didn’t come home. She was so scairt [sic] that she cried.”47

  Making matters worse, Will was poorly paid. He started in 1880 at a mere $9 a week (or $215 in 2016), a sum that barely made ends meet for his growing household. After three and a half years of service, John begrudgingly gave Will a dollar-a-week raise and, a few weeks later, offered an additional $3 per week if Will would feed, water, and clean up after the doctor’s horse (or $317 in 2016). Unlike his successful brother who wore brilliant white, custom-made suits, Will wore the same inexpensive blue serge sack suit day after day, which eventually became so worn out that the seat of his pants and the jacket’s elbows were almost as shiny as a polished coin. And with each new child in the Will Kellogg home, the paychecks were stretched even thinner.

  At one point, Will grew so desperate for funds to pay his mortgage and put food on the table, he informed his brother of his plan to sell whatever he owned in Battle Creek and move his family west. Carolyn Geisel, a physician who worked for years at the Sanitarium, described the doctor’s influence as “practically hypnotic.”48 John used these powers time and again on his younger brother and almost every time he did Will capitulated, accepted another small raise in salary, and remained in the family business. Will’s salary gradually increased over the next decade, thanks to a series of structured deals where John granted him a percentage of the profits generated by the publishing business and, later, the sales of their food products. Yet even with these new sources of income, it took him thirteen years before he was free from debt and could pay off the mortgage on his house.

  Although John may have demeaned him on a daily basis, Will was widely respected by his employees as a “just man and an efficient straw boss.”49 As one of John’s junior doctors recalled years after Will left his brother’s employ, “The helpers around the San held this united opinion: if you want anything done, go to W.K. He will listen to your story and he will give you an answer and the answer will be perfectly fair and it will be accomplished as he says.”50 Will held these important personnel meetings in hallways and stairwells because he did not have his own office until 1890, a decade after he joined the Sanitarium’s staff. The chamber he finally commanded was little more than a cramped and dingy storage room, off in a remote corner of the first floor of the hospital. The tiny window was “darkened by a veranda,” which prevented the entry of a single, warming ray of sunlight. Regardless of where he conducted his business, the enormous staff of doctors, nurses, orderlies, maids, cooks, clerks, laundresses, waiters, boiler operators, carpenters, plumbers, and groundskeepers, not to mention the patients, constantly besieged Will with favors, requests, and adjudication of the intrigues, battles, and political skirmishes that occur in every workplace. With his typical efficiency and attention to detail, the dutiful Will kept records of each of these meetings and their resolution or progress. For example, in 1890 he noted, “I kept account of the people who called on me one evening after 5:00 and they numbered thirty-three.”51

  The San’s “Staff and Family,” 189
7 Credit 33

  If one were searching for a training ground on how to run a major international corporation, such as the Kellogg cereal company, one could hardly have done better than to apprentice for and assume command of John’s medical kingdom. It is just that the psychological costs charged to the account of Will’s fragile ego were much higher than most of us would be willing to pay. Few people said it loudly, at least in the doctor’s presence, but it was widely accepted that the Sanitarium prospered because of two Kelloggs, not one. The doctor was the San’s showman and carnival barker while Will kept the place running smoothly and served as a brake to his brother’s tendency to make poor and costly business decisions. The real pity, as we delve into the guarded, inner life of Will Kellogg, is that he was never able to fully appreciate that he was, in fact, remarkable. An insightful description of Will’s state of mind during this period, and for many years thereafter, was the melancholy diary entry he wrote for September 27, 1884:

  “I feel kind of blue. Am afraid that I will always be a poor man the way things look now.”52

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  “What’s More American than Corn Flakes?”

  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR SOMEONE born after World War I to appreciate the stunning sensation ready-to-eat breakfast cereals created at the beginning of the twentieth century. Long before that event, many American housewives prepared hot cereals from grains such as oats, barley, buckwheat, and corn. Bowls of this thick or thin mess, depending upon one’s budget, were alternatively called “porridge,” “gruel,” or “mush.” It required hours of boiling and cooking to soften up the grain, meaning the cook had to awaken quite early before she could serve it to her family. Other common breakfasts of this era, as noted earlier, were comprised of salt pork products, gravies, syrup, hot milk, and boiled coffee. These meals, too, required a great deal of work and time, especially in the days when stoves were powered by wood fires that had to be lit and tended. None, then or now, are desirable chores upon arising from a deep slumber, a hard night of insomnia, or, especially, after taking care of one’s younger (and all too awake) children.

  Oats, in the form of “oatmeal,” first emerged as a popular and faster option for a hot, healthy, filling grain breakfast in 1875. The “father” of this now familiar cereal was Henry Parsons Crowell, an evangelical Christian businessman from Cleveland. Casting about for a milling company to launch, Crowell was impressed by the methods of an irascible German American miller named Ferdinand Schumacher. With machinery Schumacher designed himself, oat kernels were cracked into tiny cubes and, thus, easier to boil and soften. Even with this preparation, however, many customers still complained that the preparation time for the new “cracked oats” product was not all that faster than the older methods. Crowell also had difficulties developing an affordable way to ramp up Schumacher’s inefficient “oat-cracking” machinery. Everything changed, however, when one of Crowell’s employees, William Heston, rigged a series of rollers and blades for cutting the oats so that they could be far more easily milled, rolled, and packaged. The greatest feature of Crowell’s oatmeal, beyond its nutritional value, was that it required far less time to cook than traditional porridge.1

  By 1883, Crowell was successfully producing his rolled oats (often in bitter competition with Ferdinand Schumacher) at a mill in Ravenna, Ohio, thirty-five miles outside of Cleveland. Working with several other millers in Ohio, he organized the Consolidated Oatmeal Company in 1887. As a means of promoting the firm’s integrity and the product’s healthy qualities, Crowell named his product “Quaker Oats.” He also innovated the practice of selling his cereal in individual packages, rather than the older method of sending barrels of the stuff to full-service grocers who would then dole out the amount a customer requested. The sales of his red, round, sealed, and hygienic two-pound canisters, featuring a reassuring “Quaker Man” on the label, were terrific.2 Oatmeal soon became a popular breakfast option; but even with Crowell’s new “rolled oat” process, preparing it was hardly “instant” by today’s microwave standards. Consequently, making oatmeal during this period still signified a time burden for millions of women who had more than enough menial tasks to complete every morning in addition to making the family breakfast.

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  IT WAS AT THIS POINT when the Kellogg brothers made their entrée into the breakfast business. Unfortunately, telling this story is difficult because so many conflicting narrative strands have convoluted it. There is John’s version and, of course, a slightly different version from Will on how, beginning in the 1880s, they discovered a process that converted wheat dough into flakes. John’s wife, Ella, also insists she played a seminal role in the proceedings. And there exist accounts by a few early Sanitarium employees who claimed minor roles as well. We must also factor in versions of the Kelloggs’ chief rivals, who were just as eager to create and control the highly profitable ready-to-eat cereal manufacturing industry. The most interesting competitor was Henry Perky, who invented Shredded Wheat. The Kellogg brothers’ most unlikable foe was Charles W. Post, who made bundles of cash after stealing and manufacturing many of the doctor’s and Will’s most successful recipes. And then there are the reams of conflicting secondary historical and journalistic accounts. As a result, recounting and accommodating all the multiple “histories” of the origins of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes is neither a simple nor a linear task.

  Battle Creek Health Foods advertisement, 1897 Credit 34

  What is not in dispute is the germinating idea behind the whole enterprise. While still a busy medical student at Bellevue, John was frustrated with the time and effort it took to prepare a nourishing, inexpensive hot breakfast out of whole grains. Making mushes of oats, barley, or wheat just took too long to accommodate his busy schedule of lectures, hospital rounds, and cramming pages of medical knowledge into his brain. Years later, John described his “Eureka moment” in great detail:

  As a boy of 14 years old I became very much interested in a scientific way of eating; read books thereon and resolved to adopt and follow during my lifetime a scientific or biologic diet. When a student in normal school I made experiments to ascertain the cost of living; was paying my way through school, rented a room, paid the landlady for cooking for me but I furnished foods for myself, [and] made an observation that it cost me six cents a day for a period of three months; I continued these experiments and others as to the cost of a biologic diet; later in New York as a medical student in 1874 I rented a room and boarded myself, purchasing raw materials and prepared it. One day I found in the market a package of food, oatmeal labeled “steam cooked.” However, I found it as raw as any. That brought me to think it important to prepare cooked foods to be bought at market in packages, ready for immediate use and I resolved to give that consideration.3

  Beyond convenience or affordability, John’s long search for a ready-to-eat, “already cooked” cereal centered on his clinical studies of the disabled gastrointestinal system, which he so often treated among his many patients at the San. The doctor sought “to displace the half-cooked, pasty, dyspepsia-producing breakfast mush” with a healthier whole grain version that stimulated and aided the digestive process.4 Digestibility rather than profitability was John’s main concern in the development of flaked cereals. This focus placed Dr. Kellogg in the center of a scientific revolution then occurring in understanding the gastrointestinal system. Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, gastroenterology was a field as productive and intellectually exciting as the burgeoning fields of bacteriology and surgery. Such enthusiasm for the vague and testy workings of the gut was hardly confined to the scientific literature. In a society beleaguered by upset stomachs and constipation, large numbers of people, on both sides of the Atlantic, followed the progress then being made in gastrointestinal research and consumed a long list of best-selling books and magazine articles on the topic.5

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  SHORTLY AFTER MAN’S first bowel movement, if not soon before, humans became curious about the set of circumstances we call
digestion. Yet for more than 2,500 years of recorded history, no one really knew how this process worked. Some of the best scientific minds from Antiquity to the nineteenth century asked questions they could not come close to answering even as they encountered evidence of the way we eat and eliminate every day. Why did we become hungry at predictable intervals? What happened to the food we bit, chewed, and swallowed after it traveled down the gullet and into the stomach? How did we extract the nutrients from the food we eat, affording us energy and vigor, and then transform those meals into the smelly, brown feces we pushed out of our rectums? And how did all of these machinations coordinate themselves into a concerted set of events?

  The textbooks John read during his medical school days in the 1870s presented a hodgepodge of digestive theories, none of them satisfactory. This confusion would not be clarified until well after the scientific grounding of physiology (the study of how the organs in the body work), which was just beginning to emerge in Germany, Russia, Great Britain, France, and, ultimately, North America. Precisely when John began his medical practice, science had advanced to the point where a cadre of cutting-edge researchers posited that every physiological mechanism of our organs and cells was based on a series of specific, reproducible chemical and physical reactions. Accompanying such innovative thinking was the development of an arsenal of experimental, chemical, surgical, and imaging technologies to actually observe, measure, and record the mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestines, liver, pancreas, colon, and rectum in action.6