Seven Events That Made America America (17 page)

Cleveland only echoed a long line of Founders who had believed in such a principle. In the
Federalist
No. 44, James Madison wrote, “No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than that wherever the end is required, the means are authorized.”
¹⁰²
Much mischief has been undertaken through the so-called “elastic clause” of the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, clause 18, which says, “The Congress shall have Power to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” When Alexander Hamilton, as secretary of the treasury, sought to use the clause to establish a national bank and subsidize manufacturers, Madison responded, “If not only the
means
, but the
objects
are unlimited, the parchment had better be thrown into the fire at once.”
¹⁰³
Hamilton increasingly sought to make the “general welfare” clause a tool for Congress to take under its management anything it should deem “for the
public welfare
.”

Katrina and Johnstown were opposite examples of how natural disasters have been handled. Johnstown’s flood was a pivotal event in our history because it was the clearest (but not the only) demonstration of private charity combating the effects of natural disasters. The Founders knew that government did have a role to play in natural disasters, namely, keeping order. That was a military function.
¹⁰⁴
But relief and disaster response by the federal government would always come up short compared to the compassionate efforts of communities and neighbors.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

 

 

 

 

I
n a chapter dealing with food, it’s appropriate to start with a recipe: begin with two parts unsettled science; add three parts anticapitalism; stir in four parts big-government nannyism and vegan extremism; then sprinkle generously with overpopulation hysteria and top with a healthy dollop of global warming. Your dish? A disastrous war on meat whose initial objective—to reduce the rate of heart disease among the population—led to the politicization of the American diet in the name of public health, while providing cover for every crackpot food fearmonger and free-marketophobe in the United States. The heartburn you feel after ingesting this dish is just the first sign of something much harder to swallow: the idea that pseudoscientists can dictate, via the government food police, what you are supposed to eat. This malignant yeast of junk science has subsequently laid waste to entire industries, diverted AIDS research in unproductive directions, and most recently spawned the Lysenkoist “man-made global warming” nonsense that earned Al Gore a Nobel Prize. And it all began a half-century ago on a Colorado golf course, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower was on vacation.

After playing twenty-seven holes of golf on September 23, 1955, at Cherry Hills Golf Club in Denver, Eisenhower complained about an upset stomach. His physician, Dr. Howard M. Snyder, treated him for heartburn and Ike returned to the nearby home of his mother-in-law, Elivera Doud, where Ike and his wife were spending the evening. After midnight, he woke up with severe chest pain, and his wife, Mamie, summoned Snyder back around 2:00 a.m. The doctor gave him some injections, one of which was later discovered to be morphine, but he did not take Eisenhower to Fitzsimons Army Medical Center until twelve hours later. When Ike was finally admitted, local doctors disagreed about the proper treatment. Meanwhile, Thomas Mattingly, chief cardiologist at Walter Reed Army Hospital, who had arrived the day after Ike had been admitted to the hospital, was convinced Ike had suffered a previous myocardial infarction (or heart attack) but had been misdiagnosed with an attack of inflammatory bowels. This blockage had caused an aneurysm. Mattingly quickly contacted Dr. Paul Dudley White, a Harvard cardiologist and one of the nation’s top heart surgeons.
¹

Though it’s often overlooked in history books, Ike’s heart attack was probably the most important single medical case of the twentieth century, as it fundamentally changed the way Americans viewed food. The “science” surrounding Ike’s treatment and recovery eventually instigated a war on meat that continues to the present. Whether Ike meant to or not, he soon became a role model for “heart-healthy” living, becoming an “exercise freak,” instituting a strict postattack diet of more fruit, fewer meals, and fewer calories. In the words of Dr. Snyder, “He eats nothing for breakfast, nothing for lunch, and therefore is irritable during the noon hour. . . .”
²
Yet instead of
reducing
cholesterol—as the experts predicted would happen—Ike’s low-fat diet
increased
his cholesterol the more he cut back on fats and cheese. If those foods were bad for you, as some suggested, Eisenhower’s “metrics” (to use a modern buzzword) should have improved.

The media, as ever, jumped on the news of Ike’s heart attack and recovery. Because of the media’s uninformed sensationalism around the event, and the medical profession’s activism, Americans began to believe the government should play a role in individuals’ health. After all, if the president’s diet was a matter of public record and could be manipulated to improve his health, shouldn’t the same dietary guidelines be available to everyone? And if they were good for everyone, shouldn’t the government require Americans to follow these guidelines? More important, if government could now determine what made a diet healthy, did that not place incredible power in the hands of those who defined healthy diets? Ultimately, the events on that Denver golf course started a long, but uninterrupted, march toward dietary nannyism. But the more frightening problem came when the government—never heralded as a bastion of scientific knowledge—began to take advice from so-called experts based on preliminary and incomplete studies and to give the public potentially dangerous and very unhealthy guidelines.

In twice-daily press conferences, the news media eagerly followed the president’s recovery, in the process instructing Americans on the dangers of coronary disease. A new word crept into the everyday vocabulary: cholesterol. It had dark, evil overtones.
Cholesterol
. This was the monster Americans must defeat! A healthy person must keep his or her cholesterol low! High cholesterol portended to be the new polio, and Americans quickly embraced any maxim to lower cholesterol: quit smoking, exercise, and eat right. Ike had quit smoking in 1949, exercised, kept an optimal weight, and his cholesterol was below normal just prior to his attack. Afterward, Eisenhower began a strict, low-fat diet. . . and his weight began to rise. He cut out breakfast entirely, after first switching from oatmeal and skim milk to melba toast and fruit, but his weight still inched up. At that point Dr. Snyder was mystified: how can a man eat so little, exercise regularly, and still gain weight? After the president read about a group of New Yorkers who were battling cholesterol by cutting margarine, lard, cream, and butter out of their diets (and replacing them with corn oil), he followed suit.

Finally, his weight stabilized . . . but his cholesterol
rose
. Snyder grew so conscious of Ike’s fretting—his obsessing—about cholesterol that he began lying to him about the real cholesterol levels, understating them so Ike wouldn’t worry. Despite the fact that Eisenhower had essentially eliminated all supposedly high-cholesterol foods from his diet, his readings dramatically soared to what some physicians would call dangerous levels. History has a way of shining the spotlight on the ironic: at the very moment Ike’s physician was concealing cholesterol reports from his patient under the assumption that cholesterol caused heart ailments,
Time
magazine heralded Ancel Keys, a physiologist from the University of Minnesota whose research “proved” that a low-fat, low-cholesterol, carb-heavy diet would prevent heart disease.
³
Two weeks later, the American Heart Association endorsed the Keys analysis, calling for low-fat/low-cholesterol diets. “Diet Linked to Cut in Heart Attacks,” proclaimed
The New York Times
in May 1962. And Ike? He lived for another fourteen years after his first heart attack.

Eisenhower’s own cardiologist bought into the dietary fat hypothesis, claiming a “great epidemic” of cardiovascular disease had struck America in the post-World War II period.
⁴
Similarly, Jean Mayer of Harvard claimed in 1975 that the rise of heart disease was an epidemic as dire as the “arrival of bubonic plague . . . in fourteenth-century Europe, syphilis . . . at the end of the fifteenth century, and . . . tuberculosis at the beginning of the nineteenth century.”
⁵
At the same time, medical “experts” and government officials began claiming that Americans had changed their diets to eat more red meat and fats in the twentieth century. In fact, both claims were false, and, as in the case of AIDs some thirty years later, one could make or break an “epidemic” simply by fiddling with definitions. And, as would be the case with global warming fifty years later, one could prove virtually anything based on where one started the trend line.

It is true that coronary cases seemed to increase dramatically between 1940 and 1970—but this was entirely because other diseases were being conquered and thus were not as rampant. A quarter of all men died of coronary disease in 1910, for example, and another quarter died from infections, parasites, flu, pneumonia, bronchitis, or tuberculosis, virtually all of which were eliminated or greatly suppressed by 1970. Cancer, meanwhile, went from eighth on the list to number two, and the rate of heart disease “doubled.”
⁶
Simply put, modern medicine had conquered so many diseases over the previous century that people lived long enough to encounter (and die from) new or rare diseases.
⁷
Cancer and heart disease, which took longer to manifest themselves than, say, smallpox, became the leading killers.

At the same time, improvements in technology made it possible to more accurately diagnose the cause of death, hence, unexplained or sudden deaths that had once been mysterious were finally, correctly, attributed to heart disease or cancer.
⁸
Even the American Heart Association admitted that the “new” classification of arteriosclerotic heart disease in 1949 made a “great difference,” and that the “remarkable increase in the
reported
number of cases of this condition” lay almost entirely in the use of the electrocardiogram in confirming clinical diagnoses (emphasis in original).
⁹
Predictably, when the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) added a second heart disease category (ischemic heart disease), the percentage of heart-disease deaths shot up dramatically. Even the World Health Organization acknowledged that “much of the apparent increase in [heart disease] mortality may simply be due to improvements in the quality of certification and more accurate diagnoses. . . .”
¹⁰

Around the same time, the false notion that the United States used to be a vegan society began to gain traction, thus further contributing to misconceptions about meat. Proponents of this myth argued that the late 1800s had been some “idyllic era free of chronic disease,” which was ruined after the rise of meat and fat consumption consigned Americans to heart attacks.
¹¹
Americans, according to this legend, got away from eating as they did in the old days, when they consumed more cereals. Jane Brody’s 1985
Good Food Book
claimed that “Within this century the diet of the average American has undergone a radical shift away from plant-based foods such as grains, beans and peas, nuts and potatoes, and other vegetables and fruits and toward foods derived from animals. . . .”
¹²
Two factors contributed to this perception. First, the publication of
The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair in 1906, which demonized the meat industry, cut American meat sales by half, and by the time of the Great Crash in 1929, meat packers had still not recovered.
¹³
Second, there were flawed estimates by the United States Food and Drug Administration, which used “food disappearance” methods to calculate what people ate. Not only did the data go back no farther than the 1920s—one scholar described the data as “lousy” and said “you can prove anything you want to prove”—but most historical records show that Americans were voracious meat eaters in the 1800s.
¹⁴
Some studies show that nineteenth-century Americans ate forty to sixty pounds of meat more per capita per year than in the twentieth century—but such evidence did not fit the “meat-makes-us-unhealthy” argument so it was largely ignored.
¹⁵
Moreover, the farther back one goes, the clearer it becomes that hunter-gatherer (i.e., heavy meat-eating) societies were healthier than farmer societies (whose diets were high in carbohydrates—grains, corn, and rice). Tom Standage, in his
Edible History of Humanity
, noted that