The Kelloggs Read online

  As a young man, the five-foot-four medical dynamo embarked upon a self-appointed mission from God to make the world healthier. Always overcompensating for his small physical stature, John was a member of just about every prestigious medical, scientific, and public health association in the United States. Dr. Kellogg knew and interacted with nearly every prominent doctor and medical scientist of his era.20 Several medical professors and social reformers derided Dr. Kellogg’s bombastic personality behind his back but they always took his telephone calls and answered his letters. He began his clinical practice when medicine was just starting to evolve from a murky craft based on religious beliefs, antiquated theories, quackery, and outright mumbo jumbo. By the time he died, in 1943, the field was a bona fide scientific enterprise demanding the accrual and expenditure of enormous amounts of money in the development of new hospitals, medical schools, research laboratories, breakthrough discoveries, technological advances, and the promise of miraculous cures.

  Today’s medical consumer might consider some of Dr. Kellogg’s theories to be quaint, if not outright wacky. A latter-day Nostradamus, many more of his medical predictions and prescriptions are now widely accepted. Without doubt, his most lasting contribution to American society was encouraging the active pursuit of wellness, the now commonplace concept of being healthy in mind, body, and spirit in order to promote longevity and even prevent illness. Wellness was not yet a word in the American lexicon when John prescribed such practices; instead, he called it “biologic living.” Regardless of its name, Dr. Kellogg presciently warned his patients against sedentary lifestyles, meat21, tobacco,22 sugar23, caffeine, alcohol, and overeating. Long before the medical profession caught up with him, he described obesity “not just as a mere inconvenience or a deterrent to physical attractiveness but a definite health hazard.”24

  Throughout his career, the doctor advocated regular, vigorous exercise, massage therapy, fresh air, spirituality, laughter, a worry-free demeanor, the reduction or elimination of stress, plenty of sleep, and, much to the deterioration of his posthumous reputation, an avowed allegiance to sexual abstinence (excepting for procreation) and a ban against masturbation. More to his credit, John abjured drugs and advised patients to drink plenty of pure, clean, unadulterated water. As early as 1875, for example, Dr. Kellogg was warning his patients about the dangers of lead poisoning from consuming water supplied through lead pipes.25

  It was another set of pipes—the alimentary canal with its streams and rivulets—that most concerned the doctor. The son of a broom manufacturer, Dr. Kellogg was obsessed with bodily cleanliness, both external and internal. In his never-ending battle against constipation, he developed fiber and bran products guaranteed to produce four to five odorless bowel movements a day, just like the gorillas he studied in zoos around the world.26 On the other end of the equation, the doctor’s paramount prescriptions centered on diets consisting of grains, nuts, fruits, vegetables, yogurt, and soy milk. The goal of these carefully measured meals was to improve one’s overall health, aid digestion, guard against overeating and obesity, and repopulate the intestinal flora with beneficial rather than potentially pathogenic microbes.

  Dr. Kellogg originally derived many of his ideas from a prescribed set of Seventh-day Adventist Christian beliefs on health reform. No doctor, John modestly posited, ever healed patients on his own. A benevolent Creator and a willingness to obey His laws of natural, wholesome living made for the best medicine, or as the doctor often said, “It is a good thing for a sick man to have faith in God.”27 That said, John was a pack rat of the many medical concepts he appropriated and embellished from the greatest scientific minds of his era. Always bending, shaping, and shoehorning these discoveries into his faith and worldview, the doctor applied the latest findings in microbiology, physiology, surgery, nutrition, pathology, eugenics, genetics, and chemistry, to name but a few of the scientific fields he followed in his exhaustive and multilingual reading, to underpin his greatest creation, the Battle Creek Sanitarium. As he pursued this eclectic approach, the doctor helped lead the charge for a thorough cleansing of the grime and sickness that characterized late-nineteenth-century America.

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  JOHN HARVEY KELLOGG often told audiences how he first conceived the idea of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals in 1875, while still an impoverished medical student at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital Medical College. Short on time to prepare a hot bowl of porridge, he began a search for palatable concoctions of wheat, oats, and corn for a fast, cheap, and nutritious meal. The result, some twenty years later, was the creation of “flaked cereals.” This story, of course, is much more complicated and John required a great deal of help in the process.

  Two decades later, his shy brother Will worked right beside him, during many long nights in the kitchen, seeking their culinary quest. They rolled out endless sheets of dough to find the precise configuration of ingredients, cookery, machinery, and toasting. John was so busy strutting his medical stuff that Will had to assume the time-consuming task of perfecting their cereal by mixing up batch after batch of failed attempts of “flaking” grain. Stewing in resentment, the younger brother labored for over five years before emerging with a bowl of Corn Flakes. John’s bossiness, however, reflected more than dominance between a physician and staff member. There was a streak of cruelty that ran through their relationship and would ultimately pull the brotherly bonds asunder.

  As children, John terrorized the smaller Will with stinging rebukes, mean-spirited practical jokes, tattling, and harsh beatings from which he never fully recovered. As adults their conflicts ceased to be physical; nevertheless, the psychological warfare continued. While making his rounds across the Sanitarium’s vast campus, Dr. Kellogg often rode his bicycle from building to building while insisting that his brother, pad and paper in hand, jog alongside him recording his every creative thought. At other times, the doctor demanded that Will accompany him into the bathroom, à la Lyndon Johnson, so as not to waste any time even as he defecated.28

  Indeed, when it came to relations with his “little brother,” the doctor was too often an overbearing oaf, given to histrionic behavior, impulsivity, boastfulness, and, in the words of one scientist, “irresponsible emotionalism.”29 If John Harvey Kellogg fell in love with an idea no matter how far-fetched or lacking in evidence it may have been, that notion quickly became something he carried out to wide promotion. For the multitude of readers and patients who hung on to his every word, the doctor could do no wrong. Still, there were many times when his enthusiasm and outright exaggerations took him too far out on the limb of scientific progress, only to be sawed off by a more judicious member of the medical establishment. Such grandstanding behavior irritated the far more precise Will, a man who “would not make an extreme statement or take an extreme position until he had controlled and corroborated evidence.”30

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  WILL WAS, IN FACT, a serious student of the emerging “science” of business, whether he was publishing his brother’s books and magazines, running the Battle Creek Sanitarium, or manufacturing cereal. He methodically analyzed, applied, and adopted efficiency techniques and business systems espoused by the best commercial gurus of the day. For nearly a quarter of a century, while John enacted one scene after another of fraternal dominance, the quiet, stolid Will was doing far more than merely taking orders. He was preparing to become a renowned captain of industry. Just as Henry Ford was figuring out the economies of scale to sell the millions of automobiles rolling off his vaunted assembly line, Will Kellogg revolutionized the administration of the modern medical center and, later, the mass production and marketing of “manufactured food.”31 Many of the industrial best practices he helped develop remain familiar parts of our daily landscape and lives.

  Soon after establishing his company, Will tirelessly convinced American grocers to carry his products and consumers to relish his cereals. Echoing his brother by heralding breakfast as “the most important meal of the day,” Will made the hecti
c mornings of beleaguered mothers and dads so much easier by providing a quick, convenient, healthy, nutritious breakfast they could simply pour out of a box and into a bowl.32 He was an early adopter of the newly created field of mass advertising and invested millions of dollars in a never-ending barrage of colorful and attractive advertisements, slogans and jingles, cartoon characters, and, when radio, and later, television, took the nation by storm, entertaining shows and commercials. He was quick to recognize and target youngsters as the demographic group most likely to hunger for his products. Over the years, many billions of children gleefully sang the catchy tune “K-E-Double L-O-Double-Good, Kellogg’s Best to You!” as they hunted for the prized coloring books and toys he so cleverly placed in his cereal boxes.

  Will Kellogg, of course, benefited by creating his business at the dawn of the twentieth century when huge corporations and interstate commerce began to boom and nationally known brands first gained favor with the American public. He became the “Corn Flake King” during the synchronous rise of urban populations, better living and nutritional conditions, and a national system of transportation, first by rail and later by highways, which allowed for the rapid delivery of a constant stream of raw grain into his factories and cases of cereal out of them. He capitalized on the widespread distribution of his food products, thanks to the development and rise of self-serve grocery stores and supermarkets, and the nationwide delivery of clean, safe, fresh, nutritious, pasteurized milk—the essential accoutrement to any bowl of cereal.

  Yet there was far more to Will Kellogg’s genius than mere timing or the willingness to adopt new business methods. As he labored to create the means to process corn and, later, rice, wheat bran, and even soybeans into ready-to-eat cereals, Will Kellogg refused to be satisfied with the status quo. The boss’s charge was to always improve on what the company produced. He encouraged his employees to develop ever more sophisticated means of packaging to keep his cereals fresh and toasty whether on the grocery shelf or in the kitchen cabinet. He worked indefatigably to insure that his factories were safe, hospitable, and fiscally sound workplaces. Like many industrial magnates of his era, Will was fervently anti-union, but he was also sincerely concerned about and loyal to his workers. During the Great Depression, for example, Will split the factory’s three 8-hour work shifts into four 6-hour lengths of time to keep more employees on the payroll.33

  In 1906, Will announced himself to the American public with a facsimile of his signature on every box of the “original” Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. It was initially devised as a means of thwarting the dozens of copycat companies stealing ideas and sales from his cereal business. (Parenthetically, Will’s signature looked a lot like John’s, who, when they were partners, refused to sign the cereal boxes lest it damage his hard-won medical reputation.) Above Will’s signature was the solemn promise that the box’s contents were tasty, crisp, fresh, nutritious and, most importantly, genuine. This pledge, backed by better and better means of quality control, was essential to building a long-standing, trustworthy, and profitable relationship with the American public.

  Three decades later, in 1936, W. K. Kellogg’s signature was famous enough to warrant lampooning in a New Yorker cartoon drawn by the magazine’s founding cartoonist, Rea Irvin. In it, a bald, bespectacled, black-suited and plump Will is sitting at an enormous desk, pen in hand, meeting with one of his underlings. Directly behind him is a wall of stacked Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxes. The caption accompanying the cartoon, “Historic Moments in the Annals of American Industry: An efficiency engineer discovers that printing will save Mr. Kellogg from having to sign his name on each of the Corn Flakes boxes.”34 Will, of course, already knew and did just that; nevertheless, the joke managed to tickle New Yorker readers. Today, an artist’s rendition of Will’s signature—the familiar red script “Kellogg’s”—appears on virtually every product his company manufactures. It is a scribble almost as famous as another iconic American scrawl, “Walt Disney.”

  Food industrialist W. K. Kellogg portrayed in a 1936 New Yorker cartoon. The cartoon’s caption reads “Historic Moments in the Annals of American Industry: An efficiency engineer discovers that printing will save Mr. Kellogg from having to sign his name on each of the Corn Flakes boxes.” Credit 5

  John built his medical kingdom upon the foundation of his personality, ideas, and vitality. It was a realm he dreamed would last forever even though it effectively ended with his funeral. Will died a little more than eight years later and, despite their differences, was buried only a few dozen feet away at the Oak Hill Cemetery. Nevertheless, it was Will, the lonely, unloved, unappreciated little brother, who achieved immortality on his own terms. The company he founded remains a multinational behemoth of food production. The charitable foundation he endowed is one of the largest in the world and continues to work for the welfare of children, families, and communities. When uttering the name “Kellogg” today, it is, undoubtedly, Will’s industry we recall.

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  UNFORTUNATELY, the recorded evidence Will left behind is far less voluble when compared to the hundreds of boxes of papers, writings, letters, and scrapbooks the doctor bequeathed to three universities.35 “W.K.,” as he is still referred to in hushed, reverential tones along the halls of his foundation, wanted no such snooping. Although he authorized a writer named Horace B. Powell to write his biography, Will died four years before it was published. His company and foundation, zealously protective of their beneficent founder’s memory, had final editorial say over what went into the finished copy. There are many frank insights that the cagey tycoon and his proxies did allow to be published even if this corporate biography primarily represents only what Will was willing to reveal to the world, no more and no less. His final will and testament decreed that his diaries, letters, photographs, and papers be safely placed within the W. K. Kellogg Foundation’s archives. Lovingly preserved and indexed, Will controls them even from the grave. Will’s will dictates that these materials cannot be reviewed, let alone quoted or reproduced, without contractual permission of his $8 billion foundation. Presently, if one is granted access to his papers, every page of any book using those materials must be approved, and potentially redacted before publication by representatives of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. The foundation’s lawyers politely warn each historian that the publication of any unsanctioned quotation (or what the foundation considers to be undesirable descriptions of Will Kellogg) emerging from such an archival review may well result in legal action. I fully understand their intent to honor their founder’s wishes but these are conditions no serious historian can sanction. As problematic as these restrictions may be, however, I was fortunate to discover a trove of W. K. Kellogg materials quietly reposing in other archives and libraries, including long-ignored reams of legal depositions and testimony transcripts, letters, advertising copy, business ledgers, interviews, a wide number of superb historical articles and books, and forgotten photographs and advertisements long in the public domain, as well as a wonderful, privately printed memoir of him, written by his grandson Norman Williamson Jr. This latter volume is especially important not only because the author knew his subject so well but also because Williamson makes extensive use of and liberally quotes from Will’s now restricted diaries. Taken in toto, then, the available materials afford a fascinating, albeit incomplete, glimpse into the life, work, words, and mind of a fascinating and tight-lipped man.36

  Main Street, Battle Creek, Michigan, circa 1900 Credit 6

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  RELEGATING THE Kellogg brothers’ long, internecine warfare as a nasty sibling rivalry trivializes and obscures their epic drive, ambition, and genius. Each brother spurred the other on to greater heights and many of their achievements were symbiotic, even if they were not always able to acknowledge that fact. Nor can their productive lives be explained merely as a contrary response to growing up in a religious culture predicting the imminent end of the world and fiery destruction of most of its inhabitants. Their childhoods were
equally shaped by the harsh realities and grand promises of settling on the frontier. From adolescence into adulthood, they witnessed the authority of religious faith supplanted by an even more authoritative, modern science. During their professional careers, they became key historical actors in what Henry Luce characterized as “the American century.”37 Indeed, the lives and times of the Kellogg brothers afford a superb window through which we can view vast changes in social mores, belief systems, lifestyles, diets, health, science, medicine, public health, philanthropy, education, business, mass advertising, and food manufacturing as they evolved in the United States from the Civil War up to World War II.

  In recent years, too many novelists, journalists, and screenwriters have lampooned and ridiculed John Harvey Kellogg’s unconventional theories while virtually ignoring Will Keith Kellogg. Such disregard delivers a resounding disservice to the historical record. John and Will’s supreme achievement was to dream up and deliver the American pursuit of wellness. This quest focused on health, physical exercise, nutrition, moderation and, above all, balance in how we maintain our bodies, how much and what we eat and the consistency, color, volume, texture and even the smell of what we excrete.

  At the same time, John and Will Kellogg suffered a tragic, emotional imbalance, if not outright constipation, in their relationships with each other and their loved ones. Personal strife aside, John and Will Kellogg were magnificent showmen, resolute empire builders, and unwavering visionaries. Eccentric, perhaps, but just as their Michigan-reared peers Henry Ford and Thomas Edison ruled over vast realms of automobiles and electricity, the Kellogg brothers set forth a veritable fountain of fitness and, in the process, became industrial kings of health.