White Bread (15 page)

Faced with such widespread opposition and torn apart by its own fundamentalism, Grahamism waned after the 1850s, although it never quite disappeared. By 1874, a columnist in the
Chicago Daily Tribune
could state confidently that Graham would have been hard pressed “to muster a baker's dozen of followers.”
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But this wasn't quite true. Enclaves of Grahamism appeared here and there until the end of the century. Bronson Alcott's short-lived Fruitlands experiment was just one example. Equally ill-fated but far more ambitious, the Vegetarian Settlement Company tried to build an entire city in Kansas supported by sales of Graham flour and Graham crackers. During the 1860s, the founders of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church adopted Graham's dietary prescriptions almost exactly. Eight million Adventists around the world today live out Graham's legacy. The church also gave rise to Grahamism's most famous twentieth-century preacher: John Harvey Kellogg, the breakfast cereal king. Harder to trace directly, but still palpable, Grahamism, channeled through 1960s counterculture, lingers in tens of millions of Americans' instinctive belief in the virtues of “natural food.”
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So what are we to make of this legacy? It would be easy to make a joke of it, as many have: to laugh at Graham's sexual prudery and loathing of sensual pleasure. I prefer to stress the more complicated politics smuggled in with calls for “simple repast.” The disparity between suffragist ideals and a diet dependent on unremitting female labor was just the tip of the iceberg.

Under the guise of good bread, Graham peddled a sentimental utopia of rural simplicity that conveniently ignored the many forms of exploitation, debt bondage, and global connections that had always plagued supposedly “independent” frontier households—not to mention the human and environmental costs of the conquest of Indian Territory. Calls for local wheat sound pleasant today, but, in the 1840s, Graham's exaltation of “virgin soils” and “comfortable log houses” would have clearly read as a warrant for westward expansion. For Graham and his followers, building the Kingdom of God on Earth from the stomach out was inseparable from the emerging imperial ambitions of their young Republic. As Kyla Tompkins, a scholar of nineteenth-century food movements, has explained, whole wheat bread, locally grown and produced by whites, “signified domestic order, civic health, and moral well-being; ingesting more [good] bread, [Graham] promised would … ensure America's place in the pantheon of civilized nations.”
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Strange as it may seem, for Graham, the destruction of Native American peoples and their indigenous food-ways represented a necessary step in the country's quest for harmony with nature.

This raises awkward questions about the power to declare things “natural” or “unnatural.” If we honestly and passionately love the taste of store-bought white bread, why isn't that a natural craving? More disturbingly, Graham's assumption that property-owning, small-scale farmers living in white, male-headed, heterosexual households and grinding their own “local” wheat were the most “natural” Americans—the ultimate expression of moral virtue, democratic spirit, and natural harmony—still resonates strongly today. But what—and
who
—gets left out of this picture?

We might, like some contemporary vegetarian activists, forgive these elements of Grahamism as unfortunate but understandable products of their time. But we would do better to appreciate the tensions inherent in the movement. Grahamism demanded justice for animals and slaves, while longing for land cleared of Native Americans. It challenged the abuses of an industrializing food system in ways that reinforced women's subordination. And it questioned the entrenched authority of medical experts, while reinforcing divides between “virtuous” elite eaters and the “intemperate” poor.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, America's utopian impulse to perfect society from the intestines out would lose some of the radical social critique that makes Grahamism attractive. Early twentieth-century bread critics drew heavily on Graham's coupling of bodily health and civic virtue, but theirs was a more worldly approach. As debates about the effect of modern bread came once again to prominence between 1910 and 1930, all sides would rely on the unsavory premises of social Darwinism and racial eugenics. Concerns about white bread's effects on bodies would increasingly channel earthly anxieties about the survival of the fittest. Christian physiologists' spiritual dreams of social and inner harmony, for all their flaws, would give way to obsessions with external appearance and material success. Two early twentieth-century food gurus, Alfred W. McCann and Bernarr MacFadden, epitomized the evolution from Christian physiology to more ruthless dreams of social fitness demonstrated through bodily discipline.

In the late 1920s, just two miles away from the Ward Baking Company's Brooklyn factory, another family was making its fortune selling a very different kind of loaf. The Dugan brothers began baking bread in 1875, as a complement to their pushcart grocery business. By the 1920s, their business had outgrown a series of ever-larger bakeries, and was likely the country's largest producer of 100 percent whole wheat bread.
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Large-scale production of whole wheat bread faced technical challenges that had long dissuaded most manufacturers from attempting it: whole wheat flour spoils quickly compared to white and its tiny bran particles slice gluten strands to pieces, making it hard to raise a light, airy loaf. As a result, even bakers producing “whole wheat” breads frequently used blends of white and whole wheat. David H. Dugan, on the other hand, insisted on 100 percent whole wheat—even when his own workers protested that it couldn't be made by machine.

Even more challenging, however, whole wheat bakers had to convince a skeptical public to eat the stuff. And in this, the Dugan Brothers Bakery received invaluable assistance. It came in the form of one of the country's most popular dietary advisors, Dr. Alfred W. McCann, who pitched Dugan Brothers bread daily on his WOR radio show. The Dugan brothers were known for the religious roots of their health bread empire, and McCann's daily fulminations against processed foods likewise drew heavily on Graham and the Christian physiologists. McCann's arguments and examples, however, would eventually provide the foundation for a wide range of decidedly secular attacks against white bread.
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As the longtime food editor of the
New York Globe
and head of his own pure food laboratory, McCann was a bottomless source of studies, experiments, and anecdotes. He packed his broadcasts and books with accounts of tests in which dogs, chickens, pigs, and even orphans or refugees were fed nothing but white bread for weeks, their declining health meticulously observed. More importantly, he had a genius for parables of “white bread poisoning.”

Two such stories in particular captured the early twentieth-century imagination: in “the Madeira-Mamore case,” purportedly conveyed to McCann by the survivor of a South American railroad project gone awry, four thousand tracklayers were said to have perished on the Brazil-Bolivia border after subsisting on nothing but white bread rations for months. Actual evidence for the Madeira-Mamore deaths was secondhand and scant, but McCann himself played an eyewitness role in the second story, which he dubbed “the
Kronprinz Wilhelm
incident.”

In 1915, hundreds of sailors on the German battleship
Kronprinz Wilhelm
nearly died of fatigue and heart failure after 255 days at sea eating plentiful rations of white flour, white potatoes, white sugar, and red meat. When the ship sought refuge at Newport News, Virginia, McCann offered his services as a health expert, insisting that the source of the sailors' affliction lay in their highly refined diet. As McCann told the story, the ship's surgeon and U.S. medical authorities quickly rejected his theory. The
Kronprinz Wilhelm
sailed under the steam of a classic American diet—nutrition couldn't be the cause of its affliction. Eventually, though, McCann's theories were confirmed, and he crowed that the
Kronprinz Wilhelm
incident proved conclusively “the inadequacies of the very foods on which America relies for the protection of her troops, as well as the protection of her so-called middle and lower class civilians.”
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These were compelling just-so stories, and during the 1920s, white bread critics invoked them so frequently that they didn't have to rehash the details. Just referring to their legendary names—“the Madeira-Mamore case,” “the
Kronprinz Wilhelm
incident”—sufficed to strike terror in the stomachs of health-minded bread eaters.

Today these tragedies would likely be diagnosed as the result of severe thiamin deficiency (which causes loss of muscle control, confusion, and eventually heart failure), but for McCann, malnutrition had more complex pathways. It resulted not from absolute deficiencies, but rather from imbalances between “base-forming” and “acid-forming” foods, leading to dangerous “acidosis.” Refined sugar and “bread bled white” were acid-forming foods eaten in such large quantities by Americans that they skewed the country's metabolic balance toward acidosis, sapping national vitality while triggering cancer, kidney disease, early childhood mortality, tuberculosis, and heart disease. As McCann argued in a best-selling book reprinted by newspapers across the country, “Millers will never know how many babies they have handicapped … from their commercial disregard of the laws of Nature [and] interfer[ence] with the inexorable laws which the Creator has ordained.”
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By the time Alfred McCann himself died young of a heart attack in 1931, shortly after delivering a two-hour radio tirade, fear of acidosis had become a national obsession—much like early twenty-first-century concerns about gluten. A 1932 survey of new health and dietary advice books, for example, reported skeptically on the overwhelming consensus: “Nearly every disease in the world [seems] not to be the result of eating improper food, but also of eating proper foods in improper combinations. … If a person is so ignorant as to permit [white bread and sugar] to pass his lips, he is doomed.”
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Alfred W. McCann instilled Graham's Christian physiology with a Progressive distaste for bread trusts and food oligopolies. Refined white flour was the product of greedy industrialists whose violations of “the provisions of the Creator” accelerated the country's moral decline. America must defy these “Moneybags,” he argued, and return its eating practices to the basic laws of God.
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Nevertheless, by the 1920s, a decidedly more pecuniary philosophy of health would outshine McCann's ideas. The real prophet of 1920s amylophobia was Bernarr MacFadden, a sinewy entrepreneur with a genius for self-promotion and a love of big business. MacFadden adapted Christian physiology to preach a more optimistic and secular creed—the gospel of personal improvement.

Like all good diet gurus of his time, MacFadden was born a sickly child. And, of course, like all good diet gurus, MacFadden overcame his weakness through strict physical discipline—his version marked by relentless exercise, heroic fasts, and a Graham-influenced diet. By 1899, at age thirty-one, his muscles rippling and constitution brimming with vitality, he founded a secular church called “Physical Culture” and began to preach. “Weakness is a crime; don't be a criminal” was his worldly commandment.
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Half social movement, half business empire, Physical Culture would eventually come to include a health and diet publishing conglomerate, the country's most popular lineup of pulp fiction magazines and books, newspapers throughout the country, a Physical Culture restaurant chain, several Physical Culture spa resorts, a model for Physical Culture schools, and a planned residential community in New Jersey based on MacFadden's principles. When he died in 1955 (a respectable eighty-seven, but still a bit shy of the 150 birthdays he had vowed to celebrate), the unabashed egomaniac had been a popular-culture icon for four decades, unsuccessful Republican politician, advisor to presidents, the subject of countless scandals, and a guru to Hollywood celebrities. He had taken on patent medicine makers, a nation's sexual prudery, and the American Medical Association. He had denounced constrictive clothing, shoes, alcohol, cigarettes, Communists, Jews—and, of course, white bread, “the greatest humbug ever foisted upon a civilized people.”
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MacFadden inspired many imitators, some of whom, like Charles Atlas (groomed by MacFadden) and Jack LaLanne (taught by MacFadden's star pupil), would eventually eclipse his memory. But Bernarr MacFadden was the original. With his high brow, aquiline nose, and muscular physique posed nearly naked on thousands of posters and magazine covers, he was the early twentieth-century's image of what health should look like—and how to achieve it.

Although MacFadden presented himself as a real-life Superman, he insisted that anyone could achieve the same results. Powerful physique, sexual virility, worldly success, and long life were all within the reach of the average American. His prescription was rigorous but relatively simple: all disease arose from blood impurities caused by poor diet and metabolic imbalance. Strenuous exercise and regular fasting cleansed the blood and sculpted a successful-looking body, while good diet prevented the buildup of blood impurities and unattractive fat. Maintaining outward appearance was just as important as inward harmony, he argued, because it gave visual testimony of one's virtue and vigor.

MacFadden's specific dietary advice changed over the years, with certain steadfast exceptions: “As nearly as possible foods should be used in their natural condition,” uncooked, whole, and with as little variety as possible.
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Nuts, fruits, and water made the best meals. One should eat little meat and avoid alcohol, caffeine, and white bread. When he was a youth, MacFadden claimed, white bread had sickened him horribly, so the cause of its elimination was close to his heart. For forty years, he would fight a personal, passionate battle against the nation's bakers and millers. A few bites of what he called “the staff of death” might not actually kill the strong, but it weakened them. People with sickly constitutions were to avoid all bread. For the rest, whole wheat was best.