January 2011

In the midst of all the social change at the end of the last century, the United States underwent a minor revolution to which social historians have paid little attention. Its principal breeding ground was the little town of Battle Creek, Michigan, from which a major assault was delivered on the eating habits of the nation. AMERICAN HERITAGE herewith presents portions of Gerald Carson’s Cornflake Crusade , which will be published in November by Rinehart & Company.

“Everyone,” he wrote, “is jostling his neighbor and his mouth is filled with pork, rum and tobacco.”

A Massachusetts man, Wheeler had seen what a breakfast of pork and beans and pie could do to the parishioners of the Congregational Church on a hot summer Sunday morning. The effects were so stupefying that the minister preached, in effect, to tons and tons of pork and beans. Wheeler knew well the salt fish diet, too, and had seen countless little girls hand up a “store order” to the clerk: “Please send by the bairer six pounds of codfish.” He knew the molasses, flour, and condiments, the ginger and the bags of black pepper that went into the salt-box houses of eastern Massachusetts—and the nostrums that followed to repair the damage.

The Mansion is what the children of the district call it, knowing nothing of its history. It stands narrowly on its once rural hill, as it has these 200 years, in a peripheral Boston slum where the tide of middle-class respectability ebbed two generations ago. Roxbury, between Uphams Corner and the Dudley Street terminal, is not the place where one would expect to find a royal governor’s residence. There is a mean anonymity to these encroaching streets. However many people may live out their lives here, a visitor is apt to feel that the outer world will never hear of them. The houses press in on each other, solid mansard-roofed houses of the Seventies and Eighties that were once decent, if never fashionable, rackrent three-deckers built for the swarming immigrants.