The thin paperback manual was among a group of cookbooks I had picked up at an auction. I bought the lot because it contained a copy of a book I already own called “Parasols Is for Ladies.”
I love old cookbooks, so I decided to go for the lot rather than singling out the children’s book with the little black girls on the cover. I figured I’d get the box home and see what cookbook goodies were in there. Later, as I was researching a book with the boring title “Healthful Living: Fundamental Facts About Food and Feeding,” I was instantly curious when I saw a small red emblem on the cover.
“Battle Creek Sanitarium,” it said in even tinier letters.
Flipping open the book – more a manual than a book – I saw that it was published by the Battle Creek Food Company, which was connected to the famous breakfast cornflakes. This manual, though, focused on healthy eating, healthy diets and healthy living. The manual also included recipes and food products that it said were originally created for guests at the sanitarium. I found that even more fascinating.
Googling, I learned that this sanitarium was not the type of place we commonly associate with the word. The Battle Creek Sanitarium was a world-famous health resort/spa aimed at helping sick people get well and tired people get rejuvenated through diet and exercise.
What I found even more fascinating were the people who ventured to Battle Creek for a health fix. Among such white patrons as John D. Rockefeller Jr., Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Amelia Earhart were Sojourner Truth, the former slave turned abolitionist and women’s rights advocate; Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama; Madame C.J. Walker, founder of the first black-hair-care enterprise, and a relatively unknown educator named Elizabeth Evelyn Wright, who founded Voorhees College for blacks in South Carolina.
I found this latter group interesting because they stayed at the resort at a time when black folks were not accepted in many places in this country. How did they end up here, I wondered about both the sanitarium. I was also curious about the man behind it.
The sanitarium began as the Western Health Reform Institute in 1866 operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It became an internationally known retreat under the direction of John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-day Adventist who took it over in 1867 and eventually changed its name.
Kellogg advocated natural and holistic healing, a vegetarian diet, fresh air, sunshine and rest for his patients/guests. He designed unusual medical contraptions and treatments to facilitate their healing. The patients – the wealthy and middle-class – were treated by Kellogg, a medical doctor, and his staff of doctors and nurses.
The building itself was luxurious: a huge lobby with Persian rugs and crystal chandeliers, a dining room with food that he created (a type of peanut butter, flaked corn that would eventually be produced widely as cornflakes), an indoor palm garden, marble flooring, guest rooms and other housing units, a modern clinic, indoor pools and baths. To relax the mind, he offered a theater that presented plays, a ballroom that featured an orchestra and dancing, and horses and stables.
Kellogg also took health to the extreme. He advocated a form of eugenics called euthenics, a theory that “a committed individual (and, thus, the population at large) could acquire a superior set of inheritable traits through healthy living, improved hygiene, and better living conditions.” He believed that these traits could be passed on to one’s descendants.
It was something akin to what Hitler and the Nazis would perpetrate decades later in their ideology of a superior race.
Kellogg founded the Race Betterment Foundation in 1911 and held conferences that drew other eugenics scholars. He even invited Booker T. Washington to his first “National Conference on Race Betterment” at the sanitarium in 1914. In his speech, Washington talked about the survival instincts of African Americans and their history in this country, and asked whites for their help in bettering his people.
Kellogg was a complicated man who believed in racial segregation, although he adopted children of different nationalities, races and backgrounds. He did not allow segregation at the sanitarium or any of the schools that it operated for doctors and nurses. Many of the African Americans who graduated from the schools worked at the sanitarium. Under the mentorship of Kellogg, Lottie Blake, an African American woman, was trained as a nurse and doctor at the sanitarium. She was the first African American physician in the Seventh-day Adventist faith.
So how did Sojourner Truth end up here?
Truth bought land and a house in Battle Creek from proceeds of her book in the 1850s, after living in New York and Ohio. She was a prominent national figure and speaker who rallied in support of the rights of blacks and women. At a women’s rights conference in Ohio in 1851, she gave her infamous “Ain’t I A Woman” speech challenging the negation of black women by all who would deny them their rights.
She was set to go to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1883, but ulcers on her legs prevented her from doing so. Truth visited the sanitarium in July of that year for treatment by Kellogg, who was said to be a friend who used skin from his arm to graft onto one of her sores. The other sores were beyond treatment, so she was sent home where she was visited each day by doctors from the sanitarium.
Sojourner Truth died in November 1883 of complications from the ulcers. A decade later, an original painting of a meeting between her and Abraham Lincoln was hung in the lobby of the sanitarium until the building burned down in a fire in 1902. The painting was done by Franklin C. Courter around 1893.
Booker T. Washington visited the sanitarium around 1911 for some relaxation and to raise money for Tuskegee. Kellogg contributed $500, which Washington thanked him for in a fund-raising letter a year later. Washington spent several days at the sanitarium to check out its treatments (he seemed to have suffered often from indigestion because of his travels).
At the race betterment conference in 1914, he began his speech by thanking Kellogg for his contributions to Washington’s health in another way:
“Some three years ago I found myself almost out of commission physically. Without my knowledge or consent, my wife in some way got hold of a colored man trained here under Dr. Kellogg, by the name of Mr. Crayton. He came to Tuskegee, was installed in my home by my wife and for six months he had charge of me. At the end of that six months I was a new man, but not only a new man, but I knew more about living and enjoying life than I had ever known before.”
Madame C.J. Walker, the millionaire owner of a black-hair care empire, suffered from inflamed kidneys and spent a few days at the sanitarium in1917. Elizabeth Evelyn Wright, founder of Voorhees College in Denmark, SC, spent time there in 1906 suffering from fever and gastritis. She died while being treated.
