Different from similarly-regarded health spas like in Lourdes or Wiesbaden, people flocked to "The San" not for some healing natural feature but to come under the instruction of its founder, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg who "combined modern medicine, surgery and bacteriology with an eclectic blend of hydropathy, vegetarianism, electrotherapeutics, exercise, and spiritual uplift." Some journalists called Kellogg's adherents "Battle Freaks."
Kellogg's father, John Preston Kellogg, bounced around various Second Great Awakening movements - the Baptists and the Congregationalist Church - before settling on the Seventh-day Adventists, who made Battle Creek, Michigan their headquarters. The Kelloggs left Massachusetts for Battle Creek in 1856 and John Preston Kellogg built a broom factory. Seventh-day Adventists were founded by William Miller, a former Baptist preacher who predicted that Jesus' return would take place on October 22, 1844. Why October 22, 1844? It had to do with Daniel 8:14 and the number of days until the sanctuary was cleansed.
Anyway, Jesus didn't return to earth on October 22, 1844, and the date became known as The Great Disappointment. But the Seventh-day Adventists, assisted by self-proclaimed prophetess Ellen White and her husband James, recovered by focusing on health and diet, "bringing healing of body, mind, and spirit on the fact that Christ ministered to the whole person." The Whites sent Kellogg to medical school.
The Kellogg family practiced pretty much what John Harvey Kellogg preached years later based on the Seventh Day Adventist lifestyle: vegetarianism, no coffee or tea or spices or alcohol, fresh air, exercise, and pure water for a clean, healthy lifestyle.
The standard breakfast fare of the mid- to late-19th century was "a cholesterol-laden hot meal of eggs, bacon, sausage and beef or chicken, plus cooked grains, biscuits, toast, butter and jam. It was part of the British tradition of a lavish breakfast, to fortify the gentry for a day of sport" according to
The Nibble's Karen Hochman. Walt Whitman referred to Indigestion as "the Great American Evil." The rise of industrialized Midwestern cities' role in meat and pork production carried this over, and the American farmer was happy to load up in the morning to prepare for a day of work.
This went against basically everything the Seventh-day Adventists believed. John Harvey Kellogg believed that any sexual activity - particularly masturbation - was evil, going so far as to allegedly working on writing an anti-sex book during his honeymoon. He and his wife never consummated their marriage, slept in separate bedrooms, and fostered over 40 children.
To counter the desire of having sex, Kellogg developed the modern ideals of the healthy diet. Kellogg developed "Protose," a vegetarian meat substitute. Mental Floss:
[Kellogg] thought that meat and certain flavorful or seasoned foods increased sexual desire, and that plainer food, especially cereals and nuts, could curb it.
John Harvey Kellogg's brother, Will Keith (W.K.), was thought to be an idiot until everyone apparently realized he needed glasses. They worked together on certain foods at The San. John Harvey made an oatmeal and cornmeal biscuit that he broke into pieces and called "Granula." This was unfortunate since James Caleb Jackson - another dietitian from upstate New York - was also selling a health food named Granula. Jackson sued Kellogg and Kellogg changed his concoction's name to "Granola." This was part of an overall plan to develop easy, healthy, ready-to-eat, anti-masturbatory breakfasts. For real.
John Harvey and W.K. accidentally developed the Corn Flake in an effort to find a healthy alternative to bread. But John Harvey was also kind of a jerk (forcing W.K. to take dictation while he was on the toilet, for instance) and the two brothers had a falling out that led to W.K. leaving the Sanitarium and forming his own company that sold "Kellogg's Corn Flakes," with W.K. assuming - correctly - that a healthier option for breakfast would also appeal to those who could not journey to Battle Creek. John Harvey sued over the use of the family name and, when W.K. won the suit in 1920, they never spoke again. The Kellogg's Company is obviously still thriving. The rooster mascot on Kellogg's boxes? The Welsh word for Rooster is "ceiliog" and W.K. liked that it sounded like his last name.
[Quick aside: Kellogg's main competitor then (and, to an extent, now) was Post. C.W. Post was a patient at The San but couldn't afford the fees required for treatment. The Kelloggs let him work in the kitchen, where he was able to see exactly how they made their cereals. He bought exclusive rights to build the essential cereal rolling machine...that W.K helped design. Post was initially more successful because he broke one of Kellogg's #1 rules: he added sugar.]
A New York City-raised Harvard-educated biologist named Charles Davenport became the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1904, where he studied the genetics of personality traits and mental illness. It didn't take long for Davenport to settle on the dilution of the gene pool as a major cause of [waves hands] problems in society. He promoted eugenics, and in 1910 founded the Eugenics Record Office, funded by the Harriman Railroad fortune and the Carnegie Institution. Davenport wrote a book, Race Crossing in Jamaica, that "used a timed, block-arrangement exercise called the Knox Moron Test to test their subjects." Its conclusions were unsurprising, given the history of eugenics:
The general impression made in this comparison of the three groups is that the Whites are relatively swift and accurate, the Blacks are slow but accurate, while the Browns are slow and inaccurate.
In 1906 John Harvey Kellogg was concerned about race degeneracy, which is code for "white supremacy." It's curious, though, that several of the children John Harvey and his wife fostered were black. Together with Davenport and economist Irving Fisher, Kellogg created the Race Betterment Foundation, which sponsored a conference from June 1-6, 1914 at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Among the topics discussed were Kellogg's views of health and diet, but also an encouragement to build a eugenics registry. There was another conference in 1915 in San Francisco that was part of the World's Fair and included what was called a "Joy Zone" - a mile-long promenade of re-created villages of cultures around the world that also happened to be incredibly racist in an effort to prove the necessity of eugenic, which was gaining in popularity and influence among medical professionals.
In 1912, Walter Fernald - the first resident superintendent of what was then the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded (which would later be renamed in his honor) - spoke before the Massachusetts Medical Society:
The only way to reduce the number of the feeble-minded is to prevent their birth. High-grade female imbeciles (were the most dangerous). They are certain to become sexual offenders and to spread venereal disease or to give birth to degenerate children.
Sometimes doctors took matters into their own hands in regards to eugenics. Dr. Harry Haiselden was the Chief Surgeon at the German-American Hospital in Chicago, as well as the founder of the Bethesda Industrial Home for Incurables. Here Dr. Haiselden became horrified by institutionalization for the mentally ill, which would play a large role in what happened next:
On November 12, 1915 Anna Bollinger delivered a baby with "extreme intestinal and rectal abnormalities." She called him Allan. Dr. Haiselden consulted with his colleagues, there was disagreement about whether the baby could be treated, and Haiselden decided that the baby should die from Denial of Treatment. A lady named Catherine Walsh went to the hospital and pleaded for Haiselden to treat the Allan. "If the poor little darling has one chance in a thousand, won't you operate to save it," Walsh asked Haiselden, who allegedly laughed and replied, "I'm afraid it might get well."
This was the basis of eugenics. Haiselden, at an inquest into the death of Allan Bollinger:
I should have been guilty of a graver crime if I had saved this child's life. My crime would have been keeping in existence one of nature's cruelest blunders.
The result of the inquest was that there was no evidence to indicate that Allan "would have become mentally or morally defective," but also that Haiselden acted within his professional right as a physician. He was not punished or fined. "Eugenics?" Haiselden told one reporter, "Of course it's Eugenics." In 1917 Haiselden starred in an extremely problematic silent film called "The Black Stork" (which you can actually watch on YouTube) in which he advises a "genetically mismatched couple" not to have children because they're likely to be defective. Of course, they do and the baby is "defective" and the mother lets the baby die, upon which the baby levitates into the waiting arms of Jesus.
The movie played around the country for over a decade, which brings us to 1927's Buck vs. Bell. The aforementioned Charles Davenport hired Harry Laughlin - a former high school teacher and principal - to be the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Laughlin wrote model legislation for states to follow when drafting eugenics and sterilization laws, that resulted in 18 states getting sterilization legislation passed after its publication, including Virginia in 1924. To test the law, Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy, superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, filed a petition to sterilize 18-year old Carrie Buck (whom Dr. Priddy claimed had the mental capacity of a 9-year old) on the grounds that she was a genetic threat to society. Carrie Buck had been adopted, but her foster family committed her shortly after she gave birth to an illegitimate child.
Priddy passed away while the case was working its way through the system, but his replacement - Dr. John Hendren Bell - took up the cause. In arguments before the Supreme Court, Buck contended that the due process clause was being violated because all adults have the right to procreate. They also invoked the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause since "not all similarly situated people were being treated the same."
Harry Laughlin, who had never met Carrie Buck, testified that Buck represented "the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South."
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.
In short: sterilize them before they become a drain on society. Plot twist: Carrie Buck wasn't "promiscuous" as the court claimed. She was raped by the nephew of her adopted mother, and they committed her to hide the family shame. Buck had her tubes tied, was hired out to be a domestic to a Virginia family, and apparently was an avid reader until she died in 1983. There is evidence that Carrie Buck's lawyer - Irving Whitehead - wasn't exactly keen an arguing in her defense, seeing as how he was pretty tight with Dr. Priddy and was on the board of the institution where Buck was placed.
The ruling of Buck v. Bell legitimized eugenic sterilization in the United States. Charles Davenport was quoted in textbooks, which caught international attention. Harry Laughlin's model legislation started to make its way across the Atlantic and played a role in the 1933 Sterilization Laws of Nazi Germany to the extent that Laughlin was given an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1936.
Off of Highway 202 in Massachusetts, north and slightly east of Springfield and Northampton, sits Shutesbury. In 1928 it was the site of the Shutesbury Study. Teams of researchers from Harvard and other elite New England institutions descended on the town of 200-ish (as of the 1920 census) without them knowing that they were considered a "network of indecency." Twenty-six people - oddly, mostly 14-15 year old boys, were sterilized for reasons ranging from epilepsy to kleptomania. The man behind the study was Leon Whitney, president of the American Eugenics Society. Charles Davenport was the Vice-President. Whitney wrote a book called "The Case For Sterilization" that earned a fan letter from a recently-released-from-prison German corporal who was rising through the political ranks named Adolf Hitler. In the legitimately terribly-written (and obviously morally wrong) Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote:
The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole.
Leon Whitney declared, of Nazism:
While we were pussy-footing around...the Germans were calling a spade a spade.
Joseph DeJarnette was the superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital from 1906-1943, another facility in which society could place their "undesirables." As Nazi Germany's eugenics movement progressed, DeJarnette monitored it closely, and wrote favorably of the Nazi efforts to cleanse their gene pool. In 1934 he asked the Virginia State Assembly to broaden the state's sterilization laws, adding:
The Germans are beating us at our own game and are more progressive than we are.
In 1919 North Carolina enacted its first legislation regarding sterilization, which began in earnest in 1929. Over the next 40+ years, North Carolina sterilized over 7,000 people, a disproportionate number of them black, and poor, since North Carolina gave the power of deciding on sterilization to social workers, in addition to doctors. The heirs of the fortune of Proctor & Gamble and Hanes (the underwear company) founded the Human Betterment League in 1947 to promote sterilization and eugenics in North Carolina. Wallace Kuralt - father of CBS journalist Charles - was the head of the Mecklenberg County public welfare program and saw sterilization as a way for the government to pay for extremely permanent birth control. When the birth control pill became prevalent in 1960, sterilizations dropped.
By 1933 California had forcibly sterilized more people than all other states combined and was influential in Germany's sterilization program, as California eugenicists were sending pro-sterilization literature to German scientists. The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund a number of German eugenics programs, including the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics which was the final stop for a captain in the SS named Joseph Mengele prior to his appointment as Chief Physician at Auschwitz.
A California eugenicist named C.M. Goethe told a colleague :
You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought...I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.
Lest you think this push for eugenics was simply the result of the influence of "well-bred" wealthy white people, it's worth mentioning that a 1937 poll in Fortune showed that 67% of those polled supported sterilization of "mental defectives" and 63% supported the sterilization of criminals. Only 15% of respondents opposed both ideas.
By the end of the 1930s, as Nazi Germany's full sterilization efforts and plans began to come to light, support for eugenics faded, even more so after the full horrors of the Holocaust became apparent. The Carnegie Institute removed its funding of the Eugenics Record Office in 1939. That said, North Carolina's last recorded forced sterilization occurred in 1973.
In all, 30 states adopted sterilization laws. Over 60,000 Americans were sterilized as a result.
