Kellogg brothers snap, crackle and pop in bio

Study your Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in the morning and you may be hardpressed to see them as the product of high drama. But as biographer Howard Markel reveals, ferocious fraternal rivalries went into their creation.

Markel’s new book, “The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek,” vividly recounts the contentious story of two men behind the early 20th century’s revolution in ready-to-eat foods.

Health crusader Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his younger brother, breakfast cereal entrepreneur Will Keith Kellogg, worked together for 20-plus years before becoming bitter enemies in the last four decades of their lives. When Markel dubs them “The Cain and Abel of America’s Heartland,” he’s not exaggerating by much.

“Their tempestuous relationship,” he says, “was a battle royal over primacy, credit, and respect.” But his book isn’t limited to their personal feud.

“(T)he lives and times of the Kellogg brothers,” he points out, “afford a superb window through which we can view vast changes in social mores, belief systems, lifestyles, diets, health, science, medicine, public health, philanthropy, education, business, mass advertising, and food manufacturing as they evolved in the United States from the Civil War up to World War II.”

The story starts in 1834, when John and Will’s parents moved the family from Massachusetts to Michigan, where they became deeply involved with the newly founded Christian sect of Seventhday Adventism. Church leaders Ellen and James White soon had 16-yearold John editing the church’s monthly magazine, The Health Reformer, in which Ellen, acting on the frequent visions she had, proselytized against consuming meat, tobacco, coffee, tea, alcohol, spices, pickled food or “drugs of any kind.” She also condemned “self vice” (masturbation) and “excessive sexual intercourse,” prohibitions that young John endorsed and apparently practiced throughout his life.

John’s severe gastrointestinal troubles and recurring bouts of tuberculosis gave him a personal stake in maintaining a rigorous healthy regimen. In 1867, the Whites, hoping to install professionally trained staff at their newly established Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, Mich., underwrote the costs of John’s medical studies in New York. Upon his return to Battle Creek, he began to create a spa/hospital/ spiritual retreat/publishing empire that was world famous by the turn of the century. In Markel’s account, this ever-evolving extravaganza of an institution resembles something out of the pages of Steven Millhauser. Its name was Battle Creek Sanitarium, or “the San,” for short.

Will ran the San, serving as its “bookkeeper, cashier, packing and shipping clerk, errand boy, and general utility man.” This earned him no respect from John, and Will confessed to sometimes feeling like “J.H.’s flunkey.” The brothers especially differed over the commercial possibilities of the ready-to-eat breakfast foods they had developed over the years.

Resentful of his older brother’s domineering ways, Will left the San in 1906 and launched what became the Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake Co. Epic legal battles followed over who invented Corn Flakes and who had the rights to the Kellogg name. Attempts at reconciliation repeatedly fell through, and Will’s own efforts to designate a family heir to his breakfast cereal empire also failed, thanks to his chilly control-freak temperament.

Meanwhile, without Will’s steadying hand to keep it going, the San fell to pieces. Its once-grand premises became a U.S. military hospital during World War II and later were converted to a federal office building.

Markel’s tale is a mix of a Horatio Alger success story and a cautionary fable about blind egos sabotaging their own best efforts. His book is lively throughout as it delivers a tale both personal in intensity and grand in scope.