John Harvey Kellogg

• 1. Introduction

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  John Harvey Kellogg built a chair that shakes its sitter twenty times every second, and visitors to the Kellogg Discovery Center in Battle Creek, Michigan, can still sit in it today. The physician who designed it lived from 1852 to 1943. In that long life he ran one of the best-known health resorts in America and wrote on subjects from water cures to tobacco.

  His name now sits on cereal boxes around the world, yet he was not the one allowed to put it there. He preached that science and Scripture agreed, and his own church eventually pushed him out. He gave money and energy to causes that look very different to us now.

  This documentary asks how a boy with almost no formal schooling became a figure that presidents, explorers and inventors sought out. It asks why his brother, not he, ended up owning the Kellogg name on a breakfast table. And it asks what a man so certain he was improving humanity actually left behind.

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• 2. Broom Factory Boy

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  John Harvey Kellogg was born in Tyrone, Michigan, on the 26th of February 1852. His father, John Preston Kellogg, had six children from a first marriage and eleven more with his second wife, Ann Janette Stanley. One of those eleven was a younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg.

  The father moved through several revivalist churches before settling in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1855 he was one of four believers who pledged substantial sums to bring Ellen G. White and her husband James Springer White, with their publishing business, to Battle Creek. The Kelloggs followed in 1856 and the father opened a broom factory.

  The family expected the Second Coming of Christ at any time, so they saw little point in formal schooling. John Harvey, a sickly child, attended Battle Creek public schools only from age nine to eleven. He then went to work sorting brooms. Reading voraciously, he built a broad education largely on his own.

  At twelve he was offered work by the Whites. He rose from errand boy to printer's devil and then to proofreading and editorial tasks. He set type for the journals Health, or how to live and The Health Reformer, and began following the vegetarian advice printed in them. Ellen White said her husband felt closer to the boy than to his own children.

  Kellogg wanted to teach. At sixteen he ran a district school in Hastings, Michigan, and by twenty he had enrolled in a teacher's course at Michigan State Normal School. The Kelloggs and the Whites steered him elsewhere. He joined his half-brother Merritt, Edson White, William C. White and Jennie Trembley for a six-month medical course at Russell Trall's Hygieo-Therapeutic College in Florence Township, New Jersey. The aim was a corps of trained doctors for the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek.

  With the Whites paying his way, Kellogg went on to the University of Michigan and then Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City. He graduated in 1875. In October 1876 he became director of the institute, and in 1877 he renamed it. The word he coined for it, sanitarium, was meant to suggest both hospital care and sanitation.

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• 3. The Sanitarium Regimen

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  Guests at the Battle Creek Sanitarium marched to their meals, believing the exercise helped them digest what they ate. They also practiced breathing exercises, and they lay under artificial sunbaths. The place blended a European spa, a hydrotherapy institution, a hospital and a high-class hotel. Kellogg also treated poor patients, and as a skilled surgeon he often donated his services to those who could not pay.

  Behind the routines stood a theory about the gut. Kellogg thought bacteria in the intestines could help or harm the body. Harmful kinds, he argued, released toxins while digesting protein, and those toxins poisoned the blood. A low-protein, high-fiber vegetarian diet would shift the balance, in his view. Historians credit him as an early believer in germ theory who linked intestinal bacteria to health.

  He wanted to hurry that shift along. He promoted an enema machine that flushed the bowel with several gallons of water. A pint of yogurt followed, half eaten and half delivered by enema, "thus planting the protective germs where they are most needed and may render most effective service." In 1936 he filed a patent for an improved colonic irrigator that measured liquid entering and leaving the colon and regulated its pressure.

  The sanitarium's machines reached well beyond the bowel. A company founded in 1890 manufactured many of Kellogg's devices. For surgery he designed hooks, retractors, a heated operating table and an aseptic drainage tube for abdominal operations. He also built a hot air bath, an oscillomanipulator, a window tent for fresh air and a pneumograph that charted breathing. Some of his equipment was fashionable enough to appear in the first class gymnasium of the RMS Titanic.

  Light was a favorite tool. Partly because Michigan winters were so gray, Kellogg built his first incandescent light bath in 1891. He exhibited it at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where it drew little notice. It found a warmer reception in Germany, which began manufacturing it. His friend Dr. Wilhelm Winternitz carried it to Vienna, and it was installed in royal palaces across Europe. Demand in the United States came only after cabinet baths became popular abroad. In 1896 Kellogg patented the radiant-heat bath.

  Electricity had a place too. Kellogg built an electrotherapy exercise bed that delivered a painless current for twenty minutes. Reports said it matched the stimulation of a brisk four-mile walk. Yet he made no concerted effort to profit from such inventions.

  The guest list gave the sanitarium its fame. It included former president William Howard Taft, inventor Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, playwright George Bernard Shaw, aviator Amelia Earhart, polar explorer Roald Amundsen, athlete Johnny Weissmuller, activist Sojourner Truth and actress Sarah Bernhardt.

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• 4. Flakes and Feuds

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  Around 1877, Kellogg started baking a dough of wheat, oats and corn at high heat for a long time, hoping to make a softer breakfast food that was easy to chew. Once cooled, the loaf was broken into crumbs. He sold it as Granula, until James Caleb Jackson, who already used that name for a wheat cereal, threatened a lawsuit. In 1881 Kellogg changed the name to Granola. In 1890 he formed the Sanitas Food Company to market such products.

  The flaked cereal came in 1894, and nobody agrees on exactly how. Ella Eaton Kellogg, John, Will and other relatives all told the story differently. One version says Ella suggested rolling the dough into thin sheets and John built rollers for it. Another says John dreamed the idea and used equipment in his wife's kitchen. Most accounts agree that he was called away one night and left wheat-berry dough sitting. The next morning he ran the stale dough through the rollers instead of discarding it, and delicate flakes emerged.

  Will was assigned to work out what had happened and repeat it reliably. The method they had stumbled on, tempering, became a core technique of the flaked cereal industry. Ella and Will often clashed, and each version of events played down the other's role.

  A patent called "Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same" was filed on the 31st of May 1895. It was issued on the 14th of April 1896 as Patent No. 558,393, and it named only John. It covered several grains, not just wheat. Will insisted for years that he deserved more credit.

  In the first year the brothers sold tens of thousands of pounds of the cereal, under the name Granose. They tried rice and corn as well, and in 1898 they released the first batch of Sanitas Toasted Corn Flakes. A version with a longer shelf life followed in 1902.

  The partnership broke over sugar. Will wanted to add it, and John refused. In 1906 Will started the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which grew into the Kellogg Company. John was denied the right to use the Kellogg name on his own cereals.

  Rivals crowded in. C. W. Post was a patient at the sanitarium from the 6th of February to the 9th of November 1891. He opened his own sanitarium, the LaVita Inn, in March 1892. He sold the coffee substitute Postum from 1895 and Grape-Nuts in January 1898. In January 1906 he launched Elijah's Manna, later renamed Post Toasties Double-Crisp Corn Flakes, as a direct competitor.

  In 2006 the National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted John Harvey Kellogg for tempering and the first dry flaked breakfast cereal.

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• 5. Nuts and Meat Substitutes

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  In October 1895, Kellogg wrote to Ellen White that "some very excellent preparations from nuts" had entirely replaced butter at the sanitarium. That letter is among the earliest evidence of nut butter there. Kellogg believed nuts might save humanity as food supplies shrank.

  He applied for two patents on the 4th of November 1895. No. 567901, granted on the 15th of September 1896, covered a food compound built from digested starch, emulsified vegetable oil and cooked nut proteins. Its method called for blanching nuts, preferably peanuts or almonds, boiling them for hours and crushing them through rollers. No. 604493, granted on the 24th of May 1898, covered a process using preferably peanuts, which could be boiled or roasted, then heated in sealed cans until the result resembled cheese.

  Kellogg never patented peanut butter by name, and said that was deliberate: "Let everybody that wants it have it, and make the best use of it." Several others have been credited with the invention. Rose Davis of Alligerville, New York, reportedly made a peanut spread as early as 1840. Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal patented a peanut candy paste in 1884. George A. Bayle of St. Louis sold a cheese-and-peanut snack by 1894. George Washington Carver, who exchanged letters with Kellogg in the 1920s and 1930s, is often credited for promoting peanuts.

  Peanuts were the cheapest nut, so they rapidly dominated the market. By 1898 the Kelloggs were selling many nut foods through the Sanitas Nut Food Company. Joseph Lambert, a former sanitarium employee, began selling a hand-operated peanut butter grinder in 1896. His wife Almeda published a Guide for Nut Cookery in 1899.

  In the sanitarium kitchen, Ella Eaton Kellogg directed a school of cookery and wrote Science in the Kitchen. Her recipes used sanitarium products such as Nuttolene, a peanut pâté, and Protose, a combination of nuts and grains.

  Meat substitutes followed. Kellogg credited Charles William Dabney, an agricultural chemist and Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, whose letter around 1895 sparked his interest. In 1896 he introduced Nuttose, the first commercially produced alternative to meat. It was made mainly from peanuts and looked like "cold roast mutton." Seasoned or marinated, it could pass for fried chicken or barbeque. On the 19th of March 1901 he received the first United States patent for a "vegetable substitute for meat," Protose.

  In a 1916 statement, Kellogg said the food business was only part of his scheme to spread biological living and a philanthropic effort, not a commercial enterprise.

  His last major food was patented in 1934, an acidophilus soy milk meant for bottle-fed babies. When he heard that Marie Dionne of the famous Dionne quintuplets had a bowel infection, he sent a case to her doctor, Allan Roy Dafoe. Her infection cleared, and by 1937 each quintuplet drank at least a pint daily. Polar explorer Richard E. Byrd also benefited from the drink.

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• 6. Crusades Against Poison

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  In 1878 Kellogg joined Ellen G. White and several others to organize the American Health and Temperance Association, aimed at exposing the dangers of tobacco, alcohol, tea and coffee. He served as its president for all fifteen years of its existence. By then he had been editing the Health Reformer since 1874. The journal became Good Health in 1879, kept his editorship until his death, drew more than 20,000 subscribers and ran until 1955.

  The philosophy behind these campaigns was what he called biologic living. It held that diet, exercise and recreation were all needed to keep body, mind and soul healthy. He wrote seven textbooks for Adventist schools and colleges, stressing fresh air, exercise and sunshine. He recommended eight to ten glasses of water a day. His faith in the system was so strong that he did not feel the need for a smallpox vaccination.

  Tobacco drew his sharpest language. He wrote that it had "not a single redeeming feature" and was among the most deadly poisonous plants known to the botanist. His 1922 book Tobaccoism, or How Tobacco Kills cited many studies. He even attributed women's longer lifespans to their smoking less. He led the Michigan Anti-Cigarette Society and, after the First World War, sat on the Committee of Fifty to Study the Tobacco Problem alongside Henry Ford, George Peabody and John Burroughs. The group produced one of the first educational films against smoking. In 1929 Utah Senator Reed Smoot introduced a bill to place tobacco under the Pure Food and Drug Act. It failed.

  Alcohol, to Kellogg, was no stimulant at all. Doctors of his day often prescribed it as one, but he cited research showing it lessened vital activity. He called its use as a remedy "an evil of stupendous proportions." He held that a poison was a poison in every dose, so even moderate drinkers were affected. Caffeine fell under the same verdict. He blamed the popularity of tea and coffee partly on heavy marketing, and he said pure water and fruit juices met every need.

  Water was his positive answer. In his 1876 book The Uses of Water in Health & Disease, he argued that no drug lowered body temperature as efficiently. A cold bath could cut the pulse by 20 to 40 beats per minute within minutes, he wrote. A hot bath could push it from 70 to 150 beats in a quarter of an hour. One claim in the book, that water has the highest specific heat of any compound, is wrong.

  He was no cold-water zealot. He mocked doctors who prescribed ice-cold baths for every patient, even in unheated rooms in winter. One patient with a low typhus fever received 35 cold packs and died. Kellogg also called Preissnitz, the founder of modern hydropathy, ignorant for treating water as a cure-all.

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• 7. Faith, Fire and Schism

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  On the 4th of October 1878 the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists passed a resolution about Kellogg. A rumor had spread that he held infidel views, and the delegates unanimously invited him to speak. Two days later, before a large audience, he addressed the harmony of science and the Bible, and the congregation thanked him.

  That harmony was his lifelong theme, though his version unsettled the church. He rejected original sin and human depravity, joking that "total depravity" was half the time "nothing more nor less than total indigestion." He saw Jesus's atonement in his exemplary life rather than in the Cross. Historian Brian C. Wilson notes that in one of Kellogg's key texts "God" appears a hundred times and "Jesus Christ" only twelve.

  In The Living Temple in 1903, Kellogg described God as present within nature, in the tree, the flower and the beating heart. Church leaders heard pantheism, or a belief that everything is in God. Kellogg answered that he was only restating the omnipresence of God.

  Something more practical was also at stake. Control of the sanitarium's finances had long caused friction as its patients grew wealthier. Then, on the 18th of February 1902, fire destroyed the sanitarium. Nearly everyone escaped, but the loss was estimated at $300,000 to $400,000, about twice the insured amount. Ellen White, who had warned of a cleansing sword of fire over worldly Battle Creek, opposed rebuilding. A manuscript she wrote against it was not sent to Kellogg, and he did not consult her. With the board's support he rebuilt at double the size.

  The new fireproof brick building, designed by architect Frank Mills Andrews of Ohio, opened on the 31st of May 1903. It rose six stories, stretched 550 feet along Washington Avenue, and cost more than $700,000. It held a solarium and palm court.

  The book faced its own flames. A commission of the General Council had opposed printing it after W. W. Prescott called it heretical. Kellogg arranged to print it privately, and on the 30th of December 1902 fire struck the Herald where it was typeset. When it appeared in 1903, White sharply criticized its pantheism. Conflict with General Conference President A. G. Daniells deepened, and in 1907 Kellogg was disfellowshipped. He kept the sanitarium and the American Medical Missionary College, which he had helped establish in 1895.

  In 1941 he defended Ellen White against critic E. S. Ballenger, calling her sincere and honest and her influence immensely helpful to a vast multitude of people.

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• 8. Legacy and Shadows

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  In 1906 Kellogg, Irving Fisher and Charles Davenport founded the Race Betterment Foundation, which became a major center of the American eugenics movement. Kellogg co-organized National Conferences on Race Betterment and tried to start a eugenics registry. He supported racial segregation and believed immigrants and non-whites would harm the white gene pool. He also backed the sterilization of people labeled mentally defective. While on the Michigan Board of Health he helped write such authority into state law.

  His private household told a different story. Kellogg married Ella Ervilla Eaton of Alfred Center, New York, on the 22nd of February 1879. They kept separate bedrooms and had no biological children. They fostered 42 children, legally adopted eight, and raised several black foster children, though he held segregationist views.

  The Great Depression hit the sanitarium and forced a sale. He ran another institute in Florida for the rest of his life, though it was a step down. In 1937 Oglethorpe University gave him an honorary degree as Doctor of Public Service. Historian Will Durant, a vegetarian since eighteen, called him his old mentor.

  Some myths cling to Kellogg. One credits him with starting routine infant circumcision in the English-speaking world. He did recommend circumcision without anesthetic as a cure for masturbation. But Lewis Sayre had introduced the practice for various ailments in the United States in 1870. In later editions of Plain Facts for Old and Young Kellogg softened his stance, warning of harm to the urethral opening. The 1994 film The Road to Wellville, with Anthony Hopkins as a fictionalized Kellogg, adds its own embellishments.

  The feud with Will never healed. After the court fight over cereal rights, the two brothers stayed apart. When Kellogg was in his nineties he wrote a letter hoping to reopen the relationship. His secretary decided it demeaned him and never sent it. Will did not see it until after his brother died.

  Kellogg died on the 14th of December 1943 in Battle Creek and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. In his will, he left his entire estate to the Race Betterment Foundation.

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