White Bread (16 page)

This was, if you will, a testosterone-charged Grahamism. But it was also a decidedly profane Grahamism. The “crime of weakness and the sin of sickness” MacFadden railed against were not offenses against God's commandments. They reflected a new kind of moral imperative emerging in the early twentieth century. The physical labor of maintaining perpetual vigor had become intertwined with the social labor of demonstrating one's privileged place in the hierarchies of cutthroat capitalism.

In Physical Culture we see contemporary obsessions with externally displayed and internally honed perfect health at a formative moment. To the extent that the quest for the perfect, enduring body has emerged as one of the governing ideals of our age, early twentieth-century gurus like MacFadden, enthralling audiences in his leopard-skin tunic, laid the foundation for our obsessions. Physical Culture was, as R. Marie Griffith argues in her history of Christian health movements, the perfect marriage of Protestant moral obligation and consumer capitalist vanity.
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Its lasting power speaks to something fundamental and enduring about the United States, but in order to really understand the social implications of this seductive dream of food and health, we must understand the unpleasant context of racial thinking out of which it emerged.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, visceral fear of racial decline gripped northern European Americans. America's genetic heritage—assumed, of course, to be pure northern European, and the pinnacle of human evolution—appeared threatened from all sides. With declining birth rates among the country's upper classes and large influxes of darker-skinned immigrants, the country seemed headed toward what pundits of the day ominously labeled “race suicide.” Failure to confront this peril would, as Albert Edward Wiggam, a regular contributor to the magazine
Physical Culture
and champion of white supremacist pseudo-science, warned, “silently and slowly wreck the race that built [civilization].”
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In a time marked by rapid urbanization and demographic change, the doctrines of racial eugenics took on enormous appeal, even to many of the country's most progressive reformers.

While we often associate eugenics with Nazi Germany, the prewar United States served as a crucial proving ground for campaigns to “improve the race.” The American eugenics movement's most infamous achievements came in the form of large-scale government policy—widespread state laws mandating forced sterilization of “dysgenic” groups and new federal immigration policies seeking to limit the taint of inferior blood. But eugenics was also a bottom-up movement lived out in everyday popular culture—in the world of pulp fiction and dietary fads.
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Bernarr MacFadden's career followed eugenics' arc through popular culture perfectly.

During the 1920s and 1930s, eugenic ideals circulated through Hollywood movies, self-help manuals, novels, museum exhibits, and newspaper advice columns. Chic pageants, many sponsored directly by Physical Culture, pitted individuals and even families against each other in eugenic fitness competitions. And across the country, state fair displays informed visitors what they could do to improve the race, offering helpful advice on how to observe and assess the genetic vigor of family and neighbors.
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In eugenics-obsessed America, straying from what was deemed the “standard” path had serious, earthly consequences. As B. G. Jeffries, a popular health book author, admonished, it was wrong to regard bodily weakness caused by “disobedience to nature's dictates” as mere “grievances.” Taking MacFadden's dictum that “weakness is a crime” quite literally, Jeffries argued that physical infirmity should be seen as a willful act of criminal conduct. “Though the evil consequences inflicted on their descendants and on future generation are often as great as those caused by crime, [people with poor bodily discipline] do not think themselves in any degree criminal.”
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Given the urgency of the problem, Jeffries argued not just for forced sterilization of people who dragged down the nation's stock, but also criminal punishments for officials who allowed marriages between people of inferior stock.

But what about people of “normal” genetic makeup who failed to do their best to maintain perfect health? Did Aryans need to strive for improvement, too? Conversely, could people with inferior genes improve themselves through discipline and hard work?

These were tricky questions for eugenicists, and a key place where Physical Culture supplemented pessimistic ideas about racial predestination. Although MacFadden was deeply committed to the principles of eugenics and regularly directed his readers toward race-betterment manuals, he inclined toward a different interpretation of evolution. In this view, more Lamarckian than Darwinian, vigorous effort could offset the curse of bad genes. Indeed, as the son of a drunken Ozarks farmer of Irish descent, MacFadden should not have been allowed to be born, according to eugenic principles—yet he had achieved superhuman vitality. So MacFadden offered a compromise between eugenics and Physical Culture, nature and nurture: “No matter how strong the hereditary influence may be toward vigorous bodies, if people do nothing on their own initiative, through the idea that they are so well born that they do not need to make any effort toward obtaining or maintaining health, much that has been gained by inheritance will be lost.”
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In one sense, MacFadden's emphasis on the power of effort was libratory, granting “inferior” peoples a chance to overcome genetic predestination. At the same time, it extended the coercive power of eugenics to everyone: even affluent white Aryans needed to demonstrate their worthiness. In this context, what food people chose and how it affected their bodies mattered. In an era when politicians openly advocated letting weaker people die out in the name of the greater good, conforming oneself to dominant ideals of beauty and vigor mattered.

The so-called normal white American might not fear the worst manifestations of eugenics, but there were smaller, quiet consequences to every bodily choice. Paul Popenoe, in his popular 1925 handbook of advice for young men, even warned that no eugenically minded girl would choose a constipated man because one's innards didn't lie. They inevitably revealed the soundness of one's character and the intelligence of one's choices.
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In this context, a person's bread selection mattered. And, as readers' letters to
Physical Culture
revealed, switching from white bread to brown bread, or no bread at all, demonstrated fitness. One previously feeble man wrote that by substituting whole wheat for white bread, he was able to hike eighty miles in two days through California hills “without the slightest stiffness of joints or soreness of muscle.”
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Seen through the lens of eugenics, we can now appreciate MacFadden's macho antics a little better. As R. Marie Griffith suggests, whereas earlier reformers saw dietary discipline and fasting as gateways to spiritual virtue, “MacFadden took for granted that [its] … real appeal … was the experience of absolute power evoked by a fast. Through fasting, MacFadden promised, a person could exercise unqualified control over virtually all forms of disease, while revealing a degree of strength and stamina such as would put others to shame. In short, fasting was a stunning weapon of mastery, an instrument with which to prove one's superiority over menacing perils ranging from microbes to men.”
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Of course, defenders of white bread could wield the exact same language of racial vigor. Dr. Woods Hutchinson, for example, a widely read New York health writer, directed eugenics-infused vitriol at nearly every aspect of claims that white bread destroyed the white race. Touting the “triumphant vindication of white bread” by science, he argued that “all this torrent of denunciation and prophecy of evil, to the effect that we are undermining the constitution of the race and devitalizing our tissues by the use of this attractive and toothsome but nutritious pale ghost of real bread, is pretty nearly moonshine.”
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To the contrary, Hutchinson reasoned, one need only compare strapping, tall Americans with specimens from any rice- or brown bread-eating nation. In strength, valor, and intelligence, the American surpassed them all. So eat what you want, Hutchinson intoned; “white flour, red meat, and blue blood” are the emblems of global conquest. To
not
eat them would threaten America's place in the pantheon of nations. Indeed, as one of Hutchinson's fans quoted him in the
Los Angeles Times
, brown bread and vegetables were “the diet of the enslaved, stagnant and conquered races.” A cartoon advertisement for Whitmer bakeries appearing around the same time drove this point home visually. In it an American doughboy towers over a rice-eating Asian. “Bread eaters lead the world,” it affirmed, and among them, “the most progressive” eat white wheat bread.
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Thus, as memoirs and novels of Jewish life in 1920s America confirm, consuming dark rye bread marked one as racially inferior, and eating white bread represented a key step toward “Americanization.”
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It wasn't just that white bread was culturally associated with white civilization—a symbol of progress or Americanness. White bread was believed to have
made
white American civilization possible. Superior men required superior fuel.

This raised an important question: how could consumers be sure that white bread offered the best foundation for racial fitness? Hutchinson willingly conceded whole wheat bread's superior endowment of vitamins and minerals. So how could he, and so many like him, argue for the nutritional superiority of white bread? On one level, Hutchinson simply rejected what he viewed as “food faddists' ” misreading of nature. Flipping Graham on his head, Hutchinson argued that “the unconquerable preference of the human stomach for white bread” was entirely natural. “Never was [there] a better or more convincing illustration of the sound common sense of unregenerate humanity than the irresistible way in which wheat bread has swept the board as the staple bread-stuff of civilized man.”
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To shill for rough brown bread was to rebel against human instinct.

On another level, Hutchinson helped popularize a key scientific argument against whole wheat bread. While whole wheat bread contained more nutrients than white, many early twentieth-century scientists believed that they could not be absorbed as well by the body. As Hutchinson explained, whole wheat bread's nutrients came “in an utterly indigestible and unutilizable form, namely bran and husks. So weight for weight, white bread is more nutritious than brown as well as free from the irritating effects of the husks upon the food tube.”
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From the vantage of early twentieth-century medicine, whole wheat backers' logic seemed flawed. “What the faddists apparently do not see at all,” popular health author Dr. Logan Glendening charged, “is that the two parts of their argument are self-contradictory. The roughage is valuable because it contains vitamins, but the only reason it is valuable as roughage is because it goes through the intestinal tract undissolved or undigested. If the bran does any good as roughage it does no good as vitamin container.”
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This concept did not stand the test of time—or new understandings of nutrient absorption—but it made intuitive sense to many people and became something of an early twentieth-century health axiom. Nevertheless, by the mid-1920s, a growing field of food gurus and dietary advisors had begun to sow serious doubts among ordinary consumers about the damaging effects of industrial white bread.

By the mid-1920s, despite Dr. Hutchinson's efforts, anti-white bread forces were gaining ground rapidly. As one columnist observed incredulously, the “man in the leopard suit” (MacFadden) was “hoodwinking” audiences across the country. And to MacFadden's voice a chorus joined: Delle Ross, a well-known dietician, wrote in the
New York Telegram
that “white bread kills more than any other food,” and Eva Osgood of the League of Women Voters warned mothers that “giving [too much] white bread to children will cause blindness before they are six.” Charles Froude's
Right Food
proclaimed white bread the wrong food, responsible for “morbidity of mind and body.” And an editorial in the
Chicago Journal of Commerce
observed that “wide open expressionless eyes, a pinched nose and contracted jaws [are typical characteristics of the] woman who has been disfigured by the use of white flour.”
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These were not a few fringe comments. In 1927, Louis Rumsey at the American Institute of Baking assembled a nearly book-length compendium of accusations against white bread.
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Critics pinpointed white bread as the source of, among other ailments, anemia, cancer, diabetes, criminal delinquency, tuberculosis, polyneuritis, neurasthenia, gout, rheumatism, liver disease, kidney failure, overstimulated nervous systems and, of course, acidosis. Constipation, an obvious example, rarely made the list, although one “Mr. Sibley,” writing for a Chicago newspaper, denounced white bread as a feminine plot “to choke the intestines of men with starch paste.” In the golden age of the radio jingle, great slogans caught the ear: white bread was “corpse-white,” “the broken staff,” “grain minus life,” and “the food that doesn't feed.” Most famously, Dr. P. L. Clark, a Chicago radio personality, gave us a ditty still repeated today: “The whiter your bread, the quicker you're dead.”
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As always, it's hard to gauge the impact of this onslaught on everyday consumer decisions, but by 1929, Philip Lovell could observe, “Fifteen years ago it was only the ‘freak' or the health ‘nut' who would go into the bakeshop … and ask for whole wheat or rye bread. … The darker flours were known only to the foreigners who had been accustomed to them from their mother country. True Americans used only white flour. Today—what a change! Every up-to-date restaurant or cafeteria carries two or three different kinds of whole wheat breads. … A visit to any downtown cafeteria will also show that at least four out of five of its patrons choose the dark flours for their breadstuffs.”
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Lovell's enthusiasm doesn't quite synch with data on bakery production—whole wheat and rye bread accounted for less than 20 percent of the nation's output during this period.
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But even accounting for exaggeration, something
was
changing. At least enough to send bakers into a defensive frenzy.