September 14, 2019 • 31 mins
We're revisiting a 2013 episode about John Harvey Kellogg. His last name is famous for breakfast cereal, but was a 19th-century doctor with some unique (and groundbreaking) beliefs about health and wellness.His Battle Creek Sanitarium was home to anything but treatment as usual. The first episode of Modern Ruhles is now available. You can listen to it here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, Happy Saturday, everybody. I hope your day is great.
Our network has another new show to announce. It is
Modern Rules with Stephanie Rule. Stephanie is an anchor at
MSNBC and this show invites a small number of guests
to join her in candid conversation, often about a contentious
topic that the participants don't necessarily agree on and keeping
(00:22):
with that theme, today's classic goes back to John Harvey Kellogg,
whose opinions and practices were contentious when he was living
and continue to be so today. Whenever we share this
episode on our social media today, there is often a
lively discussion about everything from wellness to pseudoscience, to religion,
to circumcision and everything in between. So stay tuned at
(00:45):
the end of the episode for a little peek at
Modern Rules. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy Wilson and
(01:06):
I'm Holly fry So a note before we begin this.
Some of John Harvey Kellogg's thought was about the sexual
health of adults, so if you are listening with young children,
be aware there is going to be some talk about
sex and some sexual terminology in this episode. Yeah, a
little bit of anatomy that you may or may not
have covered yet. Can I tell you a story, por favour.
(01:28):
I used to be a massage therapist, like a legitimate
massage therapist. I had a license and all that, and
I was getting ready to start my first full time
job at a spa. And this was the spa was
like the kind of place up in the mountains where
you would go and you would get three health food
meals a day and in addition to your massages, there
were day hikes and nutritional counseling and uh and that
(01:50):
sort of thing. Like it was a very health spa. Yeah,
the kind of place where there was such a focus
on healthy eating that people would routinely ask the maintenance
guy and they could smuggle if he could smuggle some
hamburgers for them. Um. So, the night before my first
(02:10):
day of work there, I was staying at this condo
that had cable, and I hadn't had a TV at
all for about four years, so of course I turned
it on and what was on was coincidentally The Road
to Wellville, which is based on a book by TC Boyle.
Yes have you ever seen this or read this? Yes,
and yes, but it's been quite some time on both. Yeah,
it's a fictionalized comedy about John Harvey Kellogg. And in
(02:33):
the movie, everybody is at this spa to get better,
and there's a lot of stuff going on that just
seems really cuckoo, from weird electrical therapies to a hyper
strict focus on never ever ever masturbating. It's absolutely fictional,
but the Battle Creek Sanitarium was a real place run
(02:55):
by John Harvey Kellogg, who was a real guy, and
it had its share of weirdness, which is what we're
going to talk about today. It's almost one of those
things where you're like, why did you fictionalize this? I know,
funny weird as it is. That's sort of like Stone Mountain, Georgia.
They really didn't need to make up all kinds of
craziness about Stone Mountain for thirty Rock because it's got
its own craziness right there. Um. So also this is you,
(03:18):
thank some part to a listener request from Palace. We
are going to talk about John Harvey Kellogg and the
Sanitarium at Battle Creek today. So John hard Fee Kellogg
was born in Tyrone, Michigan, on February eighteen fifty two,
and his parents were John Preston and and Kellogg. He
was one of sixteen it's one six sixteen children, which
(03:39):
included five from his father's first marriage. They were all
devout Seventh Day Adventists, and they moved to Battle Creek, Michigan,
which was at that point the home of the Seventh
Day Advertist Church. When John was young, his father owned
a broom factory there and all of the children worked
in it as soon as they were of legal age
to do so. When John got older, he worked as
(04:02):
a printer's devil, which is kind of a gopher slash
apprentice type role at a Seventh Day Adventist publishing house.
His interest in medicine and health reform probably started there
because of the materials they were printing. Ellen White, who
was co founder of the Seventh day Adventists, had begun
to write extensively about health and wellness. A core Seventh
(04:23):
Day Adventist belief is that people's bodies are the temples
of the Holy Spirit, so they should be treated well
and kept healthy through clean living and healthful behaviors, and
people should avoid quote unclean foods and tobacco and alcohol.
When he was sixteen, he worked for a little while
as a teacher, although some kind of respiratory trouble ended
his teaching work and caused him to return to studying.
(04:47):
John's father did not really see a lot of reason
to educate his children. He believed that the Second Coming
was imminent and that would have been a waste of time.
So many of his siblings never finished high school, and
in spite of that, John got his d from Bellevue
Hospital Medical College in eighteen seventy five UH. For scattered
years between eighteen eighty three and nineteen eleven, he also
(05:08):
studied in Europe UH and continued his education in surgery
and medicine there. His goal in all the study was
really to be a good doctor and a good surgeon,
and he was. He was a successful doctor and a
very respected surgeon, and he continued to practice surgery until
he was in his seventies. He also founded Battle Creek College,
which later became part of Andrews University, and he served
(05:31):
as its first president. He was also an advocate of
health outreach for the poor and needy. He believed that
all Christian institutions should work with the poor in their
local area, and he also believed that Seventh Day Adventists
were in particular called to work as medical missionaries. He
was part of the Adventists creation of a medical mission
in Chicago, the closest major city to Battle Creek at
(05:54):
the time Detroit was much smaller than and that was
in eighteen ninety three, uh and that medical mission became
a model for other missions in Chicago and elsewhere. The
goal was to see to both the physical and spiritual
health of the city's poorest residence. On February eighteen seventy nine,
he married Ella E. Eaton, and they lived in a
fifty room home in Battle Creek. That sounds enormous, it does. Indeed,
(06:17):
they really needed all that room because together they fostered
about forty children and legally adopted seven of them. They
had no biological children because allegedly, as it just seems
to be a running theme with every topic that I picked,
their marriage was chased and never consummated. You do have
bad luck with that, And I don't know if it's
bad luck, it's just it's just funny because you pick
(06:40):
things not knowing that, and it always comes up in
the research. Yeah, I just keep picking people to talk
about and then it turns out that that person, by
coincidence has a chased marriage. Yes, how a chase marriage
and practice celibacy for their whole life. Uh. And although
some of his children were black, John was actually a
proponent of the eugenics movement and founded the Race Betterment
(07:01):
Foundation in nineteen eleven to pursue ideas of racial purity,
which I think is a little startling because you think
about all of his sort of seeming good works and outreach. Well,
there were really a lot of people during those years
who were active in the eugenics movement who uh that
their activity sort of tarnishes all of the other good
(07:22):
works that they did by having been part of this movement.
That is, at the time was not looked at with
quite the level of horror as it is today like today,
that whole idea is really upsetting. Um, it was. That
was not really the that's the thought at the time period.
(07:43):
And there's late eighteen hundred, early nine hundred years and
one of the Race Betterment Foundations objectives at the time
was to start a eugenic registry so that they could
ensure racial purity, so yes, that's that's another It sounds
so alien and unsettling, but at the time it was
a pretty common right. There were a lot of people
(08:08):
who I think otherwise were ahead of their time and
what they were thinking about. And then also participated in
the eugenics movement, which becomes startling to people. Yeah, um,
so that that's sort of the the basics of who
this person was. A big part of his life was
his philosophy on health, and you hear a lot about
(08:29):
his very more extreme views. When you hear about John
Harvey Kellogg, it becomes really easy to write him off
as this kind of weirdo quack since a lot of
his practices were way apart from mainstream thought at the time.
They definitely don't hold up to scientific scrutiny now, and
some of them were kind of scientifically questionable even at
the time. Um. But in spite of that, he was
(08:53):
really always on the lookout for medical evidence that his
theories were actually effective, and he did seemed to question
his beliefs pretty regularly. He would he would advocate something,
and then when it turned out that that was not
a good idea and he had proof of that, he
would turn away from it and advocate something else. So
it was kind of a quest for the newest and
(09:14):
best knowledge, and sometimes it didn't pan out, and sometimes
it did. Right. Uh, there's also the context to consider
in the world of medicine at the time, pasteurization and
the germ theory of disease were really only starting to
gain a mainstream acceptance. Diseases still spread rapidly because of
a lack of basic hygiene, and a lot of quote
medicines were patent medicines that had no real medical value.
(09:37):
Cocaine and laudanum were being used medicinally. So Kellogg's focus
on preventive care and healthy living was really groundbreaking in
a lot of ways. As we said before, he was
a trained and respected doctor, and a lot of what
(09:59):
he believe, eaved and wrote about MESH is pretty well
with common sense health beliefs today, or at least mainstream
natural health ideas. He advocated healthy eating, exercise, vegetarianism, and
low calorie diets. Uh, there's last two you could sort
of argue either way for but in the field of
holistic health there pretty much staples at this point, and
(10:22):
we have all kinds of documentations of these ideas for
almost seventy years, Kellogg edited a magazine called Good Health.
It was originally a Seventh Day advent. This publication called
Health Reformer, and in this he would publish his philosophies.
He also wrote many, many books on health and healthy living,
and much of this material is actually in public domain now,
(10:43):
so you can find a lot of his books online
for free. He was really ahead of the curve on
some of the health ideas that we take for granted today.
He was an ardent believer that the American diet included
more protein than people really needed, and that people should
bathe more often than once a week. He that really
wanted people to wear less restrictive, more breathable clothing than
(11:03):
they generally did in the nineteenth century. He was also
an anti smoking advocate, long before mainstream culture was ever
thinking of smoking is hazardous, and he correctly concluded the
smoking is bad for the heart. Uh from tobacco is
m or how tobacco kills. He says tobacco in its
various forms is one of the most mischievous of all drugs.
(11:25):
There is perhaps no other drug which injures the body
in so many ways and so universally as does tobacco.
Some drugs offer a small degree of compensation for the
evil effects which they produce, but tobacco has not a
single redeeming feature and gives nothing in return for the
one point five billion dollars which it costs the nation annually,
besides the one thousand lives which it probably destroys. So
(11:49):
that's a pretty startlingly modern for He also wrote about
the dangers of sitting, which is something that's really been
increasingly as a't in medical literature in the past few years.
From the simple life in a nutshell, one need not
to generate physically because his occupation is sedentary. Always sit erect,
(12:10):
with chest held high, and the small the back supported,
sit as little as possible. Standing in lying are more
natural and healthful positions than sitting. One may exercise while
sitting at work by deep breathing and by stiffening the
muscles of verse one limb a few seconds than the other.
All the muscles in the body may be exercised this way. Again,
(12:31):
still going on today like that's well, and I stand
up desk movement, the standing dust thing is just yeah.
I hear more and more people talking about their standing
desks and I think it's only been maybe in the
last five years that that suddenly you're seeing more and
more research about how how terrible not just the fact
that people are not exercising, but the sedentary time that
(12:53):
they're spending sitting yet during during the work day. Kellogg
also had a huge focus on food, and he developed
up or refined a number of health foods, including peanut butter,
soy milk, substitutes for coffee and tea, and breakfast cereals,
although his brother really did a lot of the legwork
on that one. He also believed in a concept called
biologic living, which combined a near vegan diet along with
(13:16):
other choices in a person's lifestyle. Also from The Simple
Life in a Nutshell, he wrote about this as live
out of doors. Do your work under the trees instead
of behind doors and opaque walls. Dig in the garden,
explore the woods and hills, follow the brooks, watch the
squirrels and their gambles, and learn the songs of the birds.
(13:36):
Bikes up a sleeping portrait balcony, and so taken outing
all night long and every night, and don't move inside
when the frost comes Outdoor sleeping is the best life
preserver ever known. Simple Life in a Nutshell is a
good way to get an overall sense of his health philosophies,
and it goes on to outline all kinds of dietary
and lifestyle recommendations. It covers food, exercise, personal hygienes, leap clothing,
(14:01):
mental hygiene, and some additional suggestions. They start off pretty
common sense, although maybe not science based, like eating only
natural foods, avoiding meats, eating eggs only in moderation, avoiding
cow's milk and animal fats, emphasizes getting the fat your
body needs from olives and nuts instead. He also goes
on to recommend that people avoid quote poison containing foods
(14:25):
which are coffee, tea, chocolate, and cocoa, and he recommends
that people get completely rid of all condiments and spicy foods.
At this is where in that particular synopsis of sort
of what his health believes, where he starts to lose me.
At this point of it's uh, yeah, I'm just saying
I made a cup of coffee and a travel cup
(14:45):
so I could take it in the shower with me
this morning. Yes, I'm definitely going to have hard time
embracing this cop right, even though I recognize that this
is probably it would be extremely helpful, but it would
also involve for me at least a loss of some
quality of life. His mental hygiene ideas included not worrying
(15:08):
or becoming self centered, practicing self control, taking a vacation
when you start dreaming about work, and avoiding patent medicines,
as well as avoiding alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, which is
all pretty common sense. Uh, kind of advice to to
go buy. So you know, so far we've talked about
a lot of stuff that's pretty reasonable. If maybe a
little more restrictive and bland, then we would like um. Hey.
(15:33):
He also for a while was pushing the idea that
people should fletcherize their food, which is just to to
it until it became sort of a goofy mask that
would go down your throat on its own. Um. This
idea came from Horace Fletcher, known as the Great Masticator,
and that's where the two each byte thirty two times
rule comes from. So this is an example of where
when evidence started to suggest that maybe that was not
(15:55):
the best idea, John Harvey Kellogg changed his point of view. Um.
He moved away of recommending that people fletcherize their food
once he determined that that much chewing was basically pulverizing
the food's fiber into uselessness. So you were denying yourself
the benefits of fibrous foods Uh. From his New York
(16:16):
Times obituary, there's a quote an authority on water therapy.
He was the discoverer of the therapeutic value of the
electric light and inventor of the electric light bath. He
was also the discoverer of the sine soidal current. So
this was the point in the world of John Harvey
Kellogg's health beliefs, That is, it starts to kind of
nudge into the Okay, notcher what's going on there. This
(16:38):
is clearly something that people would have known what it
was about, because it was in his obituary when it
was printed. But at this point they're far enough out
of the mainstream thought that I had to go look
up what they were. Um. The electric light bath was
a device that you would sit in. It enclosed everything
but your head, and inside of it were lots and
lots of light bulbs and clusters that were that were
(16:59):
direct that at different parts of your body. He built
one and used it by his own counts, so who
knows if this number is inflated in fifty cases. He
wrote in the book Light Therapeutics about his precursors using
light to basically cure everything, but he wrote about mostly
using it in short treatments to draw blood into the skin,
(17:21):
saying that doing so would treat kidney disease, diabetes, rheumatic diseases, anemia,
and other diseases. He also advocated the use of the
light bath as a preventive measure and people who had
sedentary lifestyles, calling it quote the best substitute for muscular activity.
And the sinus soidal current was a high frequency, oscillating
(17:42):
electrical current that would make muscles contract without causing pain,
and he used this to make a device meant to
exercise the muscles without having to actually move, which is
the thing that people are still trying to do today. Right.
Both of these things have analogs that are in actual
medical use today, like light their p first seasonal effective
disorder um and electrical stimulation that's used in some physical therapies,
(18:06):
but neither of them today are in sort of the
widespread cure all everyone should do this fashion of of
what Kellogg was advocating, and additionally a lot of his
health practices were focused on the bowel. There were lots
and lots of enemas and colonic irrigations in his approach
to health and wellness. That all the stuff with the
(18:28):
enemas and the colon and all of that, it comes
up over and over and is one of the things
that starts to mark John Harvey Kellogg is kind of
maybe a little bit off base in terms of what
he advocated, and there are still people to advocate for those, yes,
but it's not like a widespread accepted medical approach to
(18:48):
treating conditions the way that Kellogg was advocating for. Yeah,
he was probably he was pretty much giving everyone who
came to the sanitarium anema's all time as a course
of general health and wellness. So sometimes when you will
see in a like some kind of quack doctor in
a movie he was saying, oh you should you need
an enema, that it is absolutely a call back to him.
(19:14):
He was also into electrical electro therapy and vibrational therapy,
and again both of these do have some uses today,
but he was pretty much advocating them in broad widespread
use on everyone. Often and he had some very restrictive
views on sex. Uh. It was in his mind barely
acceptable even within marriage and then only very infrequently. It
(19:38):
was certainly unacceptable outside of marriage. And he was very,
very very focused on people not masturbating ever. H He
blamed masturbation for everything from poor posture to cancer. He
was in favor of circumcision without anesthetic for boys, and
the application of carbolic acid to the clitter is for
girls as an anti masturbation tool. Yes, y yikes, is
(20:02):
exactly what I was thinking. I just I'm sure listeners
like me are um feeling tense right at the moment.
So John Harvey Kellogg put all of these beliefs into
(20:23):
active practice at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, also known as
The Sand, where he became the chief physician in eighteen
seventy six when he was only twenty four. He also
opened a second sanitarium in Miami Springs, Florida, in ye.
The Sand had been originally opened in eighteen sixty six
as the Western Health Reform Institute, which was a health
facility based on Seventh Day Adventist beliefs and practices. The
(20:47):
idea was to treat illnesses naturally and to encourage people
into preventative wellness practices. So its heart was in the
right place for sure, really, especially considering the state of
medicine at the time, and it wasn't really all that
successful before and got there. There wasn't an official medical
staff and it housed only about twenty patients when John
came on board, so one of the first things that
(21:07):
he did was to hire a staff of doctors and nurses.
He set about trying to attract a clientele, and his
target market was primarily made up of people who had
things we might think of today as stress related illnesses,
so Harry businessmen experiencing things like exhaustion and chronic indigestion.
A lot of what went on at the sand were
common sense wellness practices like eating healthy, if extremely bland food,
(21:32):
exercising and abstaining from alcohol and tobacco uh, and a
lot of the things that you'd also think of when
you hear the word SPA, like massages and nice relaxing baths.
But it also had all kinds of the electrical and
vibrational treatments that like we talked about earlier, lots and
lots of electric light therapies and enemas and all the
other sorts of things that are sort of regarded as
(21:55):
quackery today, and it ended up becoming a retreat for
the rich and really famous people actually visited the Sand
to take the cure, including John D. Rockefeller, Amelia Earhart
sojourn Or Truth, and Mary Todd Lincoln. A fire destroyed
part of the Sanitarium in nineteen o two, including all
of the main building, but it was eventually rebuilt. In
(22:16):
nineteen o three. John's relationship with the Church became strained
after he published a book that didn't entirely mesh with
the Adventist doctrine. He ultimately split from the church, and
he set up the Sanitarium as an independent entity with
its own board, making a nondenominational institution. The Sand reached
its height of popularity in nineteen o six. That year,
(22:38):
it received seven thousand guests and employed eighteen hundred staff.
It continued to operate until the Great Depression, when financial
circumstances forced John to sell it after sixty seven years.
And today's preponderance of breakfast cereals is thanks in part
to the Sand, where the biologic diet was so boring
and monotonous that John was constantly looking for alternative is
(23:00):
that fit the philosophical criteria but also offered variety. While
John was the staff physician at the sand his brother
will Keith Kellogg, also known as w K Kellogg, managed
the sanitarium, handling the books, the supplies, the general maintenance,
all of that kind of stuff. So while John was
seeing to the medical end of things, w K was
(23:21):
handling pretty much all of the day to day running
of the place. The administration. Yes, and their relationship wasn't
always on the best of terms. John could be a
taskmaster and w K worked really long hours for very
little pay, allegedly seven days a week with no vacations
for seven years, which is interesting because it seems to
contradict his brother John's writings, which say to observe the
(23:44):
sabbath without working at all, and he advocates for taking
a vacation when you start to dream about work, So
assumably yes, he Presumably if w K had been working
seven days a week for his taskmaster brother for seven
years in a vacation, he's probably dreaming about work often,
probably horrible nightmares and stress. So yeah, John's seemed to
be like you all should do this unless you are me,
(24:06):
unless you are my brother, one of the two of
us working diligently to make sure the rest of you
do things. Yes, it's a little unclear exactly which of
the Kellogg brothers really invented wheat flakes, which were a
wheat based version of what we think of as corn
flakes today. That happened in and as is the case
in quite a number of inventions, John claimed the idea
(24:29):
for how to make these wheat flakes came to him
in a dream. We've had that come up in several podcasts.
But according to other sources, John had given w K
this easy to digest but very disgusting to eat wheat
paste and told him to try to make something good
out of it. W K left a batch of it
out overnight where it started to dry out, and when
(24:52):
he came in in the morning, he rolled what was
left through rollers and then baked it and it was
actually pretty good, and they named it Granos. This wasn't
the first ever breakfast cereal. It's pre date. It's predated
by Granula, which was created by James Caleb Jackson that
was made from Graham flour and it was not really delicious,
(25:13):
so it did not take off once it was introduced.
John also made a cereal made of corn meal and
oatmeal biscuits which were then ground, named Granula, and they
actually got sued and they had to rename it Granola. Yes,
it probably was not as smartest idea to make a
thing that was like your competitors thing in the name
of the same thing, because then you might get sued.
(25:34):
It was also predated by shredded wheat, which was invented
by Henry D. Perky of Colorado in eighteen three. He
had promised to sell John a shredding machine which he
was going to use to make his own shredded wheat,
but he never delivered, which is one of the things
that led to this experimentation of making cereals from other
foods and Will and John started Santita's Food Company in
(25:57):
to sell their cereal. In their first or, they sold
more than one hundred thousand pounds of granose. Their factory,
as it was called, was actually a barn on the
grounds of the sand They brought out corn flakes in
and the profit margin was huge and as people figured
this out, suddenly there were a lot of competitors one
(26:17):
was C. W. Post, who founded what became the Post
Cereal Company, who was a former sanitarium patient, and Post
distributed a pamphlet called The Road to Wellville with his cereals.
The novel in later movie got their name from that pamphlet.
Posts earliest products were Post Them, which was a coffee
substitute made from cereal, which giuse me a little bit
of a chin scratch to go, I would try that,
(26:39):
and grape nuts. Grape nuts still survived today. John was
really reluctant to promote the sale of these cereals. He
was afraid that it was going to somehow reflect badly
on the sand. So his brother did it all on
his own, putting together a marketing campaign that included everything
from door to door taste tests to big window displays,
(27:00):
and in eighteen ninety, while John was abroad, Will actually
went ahead and built a factory to replace the barn,
which John made him pay fifty dollars for After he returned.
Will also took advantage of one of John's trips abroad
to add sugar to corn flakes, which of course deepened
the divide between them. Yes, John, of course was not
in favor of adding sugar to anything. Um, they did
(27:22):
kind of men things a little bit. They established the
Battle Creek Toasted corn Flake Company in nineteen oh six.
Will owned a third of it and John owned the
other two thirds. The employees were mostly paid in stock
because John was not a general a generous person when
it came to giving other people money. So, once again
employing this sort of quick while he's not looking strategy,
(27:45):
Will would quietly buy up the employees stock that they
were being paid in while John was away. So he eventually,
through doing this, gained a controlling share in the company
and was able to basically kick his brother out of it.
That's quite a sibling reallyation ship. Yeah, they did not
seem to have the most loving and supportive uh feeling
(28:06):
between them. Yeah. The Kellogg serial story goes on from there.
But long story short, the Kellogg Company became a juggernaut.
It was doing good business by the twenties, so by
the time the Great Depression took hold, people were thinking
of cereals as daily staples, and while the idea of
a health spa had become a completely frivolous expense. Uh.
The Kellogg Company thus became this huge institution of provisions,
(28:32):
but John unfortunately mostly became considered something of a joke. Yeah,
his wife Ella died in ninety John himself had wanted
to live to be a hundred, but he died on
December fourteenth three in Battle Creek at the age of
His cause of death was pneumonia. Thank you so much
(28:56):
for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard
an e mail address or Facebook you are l or
something similar over the course of today's episode, since it
is from the archive that might be out of date. Now,
you can email us at History podcast at how stuff
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
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(29:43):
in complicated times. It feels like there's a whole new
set of rules, but nobody knows where the actual lines
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podcast filling the void with words. It seems like there's
less of an actual conversation. I'm Stephanie Rule, MSNBC anchor,
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about my new podcast, Modern Rules. On this season of
(30:06):
Modern Rules, I'm going to be spending time unpacking the
harrius of today's topics, from privilege and political correctness to
me to masculinity a moral leadership. I've had some of
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same way that Black Lives Matter has a secret ellipsus
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word too. I realized that I'm gonna hear hashtag speak
so well. An actress author activists Amber Tamberlin to talk
about the me too movement. I'm not gonna sit and
spend time trying to think about how to help men
rehabilitate themselves. They need to do that work. Digital activist
(30:49):
for Shad Robinson, who brings interesting perspective on social media
and moral leadership. Had the white woman not exposed it.
We would have never actually even had the story where
Howard Chelton had to go on air and talk about
he was forced to do the right thing. And just
to show you what I mean when I say we're
gonna get real, I am bringing on my mom Louise
(31:12):
Rule talk about all things feminists. They seem to think
they have to push it, push it, push it, and
you don't have to push it. I like people to
open the doors. I like people to say I look nice,
that's not an insult. For the next eight weeks, you're
going to get into topics that are not always comfortable,
but they're always compelling. I hope he'll join me this
season for Modern Rules. Listen and subscribe to my new podcast,
(31:34):
Modern Rules on Apple Podcast, the I Heart Radio app,
or wherever you get your podcast
Hey, Happy Saturday, everybody. I hope your day is great.
Our network has another new show to announce. It is
Modern Rules with Stephanie Rule. Stephanie is an anchor at
MSNBC and this show invites a small number of guests
to join her in candid conversation, often about a contentious
topic that the participants don't necessarily agree on and keeping
(00:22):
with that theme, today's classic goes back to John Harvey Kellogg,
whose opinions and practices were contentious when he was living
and continue to be so today. Whenever we share this
episode on our social media today, there is often a
lively discussion about everything from wellness to pseudoscience, to religion,
to circumcision and everything in between. So stay tuned at
(00:45):
the end of the episode for a little peek at
Modern Rules. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy Wilson and
(01:06):
I'm Holly fry So a note before we begin this.
Some of John Harvey Kellogg's thought was about the sexual
health of adults, so if you are listening with young children,
be aware there is going to be some talk about
sex and some sexual terminology in this episode. Yeah, a
little bit of anatomy that you may or may not
have covered yet. Can I tell you a story, por favour.
(01:28):
I used to be a massage therapist, like a legitimate
massage therapist. I had a license and all that, and
I was getting ready to start my first full time
job at a spa. And this was the spa was
like the kind of place up in the mountains where
you would go and you would get three health food
meals a day and in addition to your massages, there
were day hikes and nutritional counseling and uh and that
(01:50):
sort of thing. Like it was a very health spa. Yeah,
the kind of place where there was such a focus
on healthy eating that people would routinely ask the maintenance
guy and they could smuggle if he could smuggle some
hamburgers for them. Um. So, the night before my first
(02:10):
day of work there, I was staying at this condo
that had cable, and I hadn't had a TV at
all for about four years, so of course I turned
it on and what was on was coincidentally The Road
to Wellville, which is based on a book by TC Boyle.
Yes have you ever seen this or read this? Yes,
and yes, but it's been quite some time on both. Yeah,
it's a fictionalized comedy about John Harvey Kellogg. And in
(02:33):
the movie, everybody is at this spa to get better,
and there's a lot of stuff going on that just
seems really cuckoo, from weird electrical therapies to a hyper
strict focus on never ever ever masturbating. It's absolutely fictional,
but the Battle Creek Sanitarium was a real place run
(02:55):
by John Harvey Kellogg, who was a real guy, and
it had its share of weirdness, which is what we're
going to talk about today. It's almost one of those
things where you're like, why did you fictionalize this? I know,
funny weird as it is. That's sort of like Stone Mountain, Georgia.
They really didn't need to make up all kinds of
craziness about Stone Mountain for thirty Rock because it's got
its own craziness right there. Um. So also this is you,
(03:18):
thank some part to a listener request from Palace. We
are going to talk about John Harvey Kellogg and the
Sanitarium at Battle Creek today. So John hard Fee Kellogg
was born in Tyrone, Michigan, on February eighteen fifty two,
and his parents were John Preston and and Kellogg. He
was one of sixteen it's one six sixteen children, which
(03:39):
included five from his father's first marriage. They were all
devout Seventh Day Adventists, and they moved to Battle Creek, Michigan,
which was at that point the home of the Seventh
Day Advertist Church. When John was young, his father owned
a broom factory there and all of the children worked
in it as soon as they were of legal age
to do so. When John got older, he worked as
(04:02):
a printer's devil, which is kind of a gopher slash
apprentice type role at a Seventh Day Adventist publishing house.
His interest in medicine and health reform probably started there
because of the materials they were printing. Ellen White, who
was co founder of the Seventh day Adventists, had begun
to write extensively about health and wellness. A core Seventh
(04:23):
Day Adventist belief is that people's bodies are the temples
of the Holy Spirit, so they should be treated well
and kept healthy through clean living and healthful behaviors, and
people should avoid quote unclean foods and tobacco and alcohol.
When he was sixteen, he worked for a little while
as a teacher, although some kind of respiratory trouble ended
his teaching work and caused him to return to studying.
(04:47):
John's father did not really see a lot of reason
to educate his children. He believed that the Second Coming
was imminent and that would have been a waste of time.
So many of his siblings never finished high school, and
in spite of that, John got his d from Bellevue
Hospital Medical College in eighteen seventy five UH. For scattered
years between eighteen eighty three and nineteen eleven, he also
(05:08):
studied in Europe UH and continued his education in surgery
and medicine there. His goal in all the study was
really to be a good doctor and a good surgeon,
and he was. He was a successful doctor and a
very respected surgeon, and he continued to practice surgery until
he was in his seventies. He also founded Battle Creek College,
which later became part of Andrews University, and he served
(05:31):
as its first president. He was also an advocate of
health outreach for the poor and needy. He believed that
all Christian institutions should work with the poor in their
local area, and he also believed that Seventh Day Adventists
were in particular called to work as medical missionaries. He
was part of the Adventists creation of a medical mission
in Chicago, the closest major city to Battle Creek at
(05:54):
the time Detroit was much smaller than and that was
in eighteen ninety three, uh and that medical mission became
a model for other missions in Chicago and elsewhere. The
goal was to see to both the physical and spiritual
health of the city's poorest residence. On February eighteen seventy nine,
he married Ella E. Eaton, and they lived in a
fifty room home in Battle Creek. That sounds enormous, it does. Indeed,
(06:17):
they really needed all that room because together they fostered
about forty children and legally adopted seven of them. They
had no biological children because allegedly, as it just seems
to be a running theme with every topic that I picked,
their marriage was chased and never consummated. You do have
bad luck with that, And I don't know if it's
bad luck, it's just it's just funny because you pick
(06:40):
things not knowing that, and it always comes up in
the research. Yeah, I just keep picking people to talk
about and then it turns out that that person, by
coincidence has a chased marriage. Yes, how a chase marriage
and practice celibacy for their whole life. Uh. And although
some of his children were black, John was actually a
proponent of the eugenics movement and founded the Race Betterment
(07:01):
Foundation in nineteen eleven to pursue ideas of racial purity,
which I think is a little startling because you think
about all of his sort of seeming good works and outreach. Well,
there were really a lot of people during those years
who were active in the eugenics movement who uh that
their activity sort of tarnishes all of the other good
(07:22):
works that they did by having been part of this movement.
That is, at the time was not looked at with
quite the level of horror as it is today like today,
that whole idea is really upsetting. Um, it was. That
was not really the that's the thought at the time period.
(07:43):
And there's late eighteen hundred, early nine hundred years and
one of the Race Betterment Foundations objectives at the time
was to start a eugenic registry so that they could
ensure racial purity, so yes, that's that's another It sounds
so alien and unsettling, but at the time it was
a pretty common right. There were a lot of people
(08:08):
who I think otherwise were ahead of their time and
what they were thinking about. And then also participated in
the eugenics movement, which becomes startling to people. Yeah, um,
so that that's sort of the the basics of who
this person was. A big part of his life was
his philosophy on health, and you hear a lot about
(08:29):
his very more extreme views. When you hear about John
Harvey Kellogg, it becomes really easy to write him off
as this kind of weirdo quack since a lot of
his practices were way apart from mainstream thought at the time.
They definitely don't hold up to scientific scrutiny now, and
some of them were kind of scientifically questionable even at
the time. Um. But in spite of that, he was
(08:53):
really always on the lookout for medical evidence that his
theories were actually effective, and he did seemed to question
his beliefs pretty regularly. He would he would advocate something,
and then when it turned out that that was not
a good idea and he had proof of that, he
would turn away from it and advocate something else. So
it was kind of a quest for the newest and
(09:14):
best knowledge, and sometimes it didn't pan out, and sometimes
it did. Right. Uh, there's also the context to consider
in the world of medicine at the time, pasteurization and
the germ theory of disease were really only starting to
gain a mainstream acceptance. Diseases still spread rapidly because of
a lack of basic hygiene, and a lot of quote
medicines were patent medicines that had no real medical value.
(09:37):
Cocaine and laudanum were being used medicinally. So Kellogg's focus
on preventive care and healthy living was really groundbreaking in
a lot of ways. As we said before, he was
a trained and respected doctor, and a lot of what
(09:59):
he believe, eaved and wrote about MESH is pretty well
with common sense health beliefs today, or at least mainstream
natural health ideas. He advocated healthy eating, exercise, vegetarianism, and
low calorie diets. Uh, there's last two you could sort
of argue either way for but in the field of
holistic health there pretty much staples at this point, and
(10:22):
we have all kinds of documentations of these ideas for
almost seventy years, Kellogg edited a magazine called Good Health.
It was originally a Seventh Day advent. This publication called
Health Reformer, and in this he would publish his philosophies.
He also wrote many, many books on health and healthy living,
and much of this material is actually in public domain now,
(10:43):
so you can find a lot of his books online
for free. He was really ahead of the curve on
some of the health ideas that we take for granted today.
He was an ardent believer that the American diet included
more protein than people really needed, and that people should
bathe more often than once a week. He that really
wanted people to wear less restrictive, more breathable clothing than
(11:03):
they generally did in the nineteenth century. He was also
an anti smoking advocate, long before mainstream culture was ever
thinking of smoking is hazardous, and he correctly concluded the
smoking is bad for the heart. Uh from tobacco is
m or how tobacco kills. He says tobacco in its
various forms is one of the most mischievous of all drugs.
(11:25):
There is perhaps no other drug which injures the body
in so many ways and so universally as does tobacco.
Some drugs offer a small degree of compensation for the
evil effects which they produce, but tobacco has not a
single redeeming feature and gives nothing in return for the
one point five billion dollars which it costs the nation annually,
besides the one thousand lives which it probably destroys. So
(11:49):
that's a pretty startlingly modern for He also wrote about
the dangers of sitting, which is something that's really been
increasingly as a't in medical literature in the past few years.
From the simple life in a nutshell, one need not
to generate physically because his occupation is sedentary. Always sit erect,
(12:10):
with chest held high, and the small the back supported,
sit as little as possible. Standing in lying are more
natural and healthful positions than sitting. One may exercise while
sitting at work by deep breathing and by stiffening the
muscles of verse one limb a few seconds than the other.
All the muscles in the body may be exercised this way. Again,
(12:31):
still going on today like that's well, and I stand
up desk movement, the standing dust thing is just yeah.
I hear more and more people talking about their standing
desks and I think it's only been maybe in the
last five years that that suddenly you're seeing more and
more research about how how terrible not just the fact
that people are not exercising, but the sedentary time that
(12:53):
they're spending sitting yet during during the work day. Kellogg
also had a huge focus on food, and he developed
up or refined a number of health foods, including peanut butter,
soy milk, substitutes for coffee and tea, and breakfast cereals,
although his brother really did a lot of the legwork
on that one. He also believed in a concept called
biologic living, which combined a near vegan diet along with
(13:16):
other choices in a person's lifestyle. Also from The Simple
Life in a Nutshell, he wrote about this as live
out of doors. Do your work under the trees instead
of behind doors and opaque walls. Dig in the garden,
explore the woods and hills, follow the brooks, watch the
squirrels and their gambles, and learn the songs of the birds.
(13:36):
Bikes up a sleeping portrait balcony, and so taken outing
all night long and every night, and don't move inside
when the frost comes Outdoor sleeping is the best life
preserver ever known. Simple Life in a Nutshell is a
good way to get an overall sense of his health philosophies,
and it goes on to outline all kinds of dietary
and lifestyle recommendations. It covers food, exercise, personal hygienes, leap clothing,
(14:01):
mental hygiene, and some additional suggestions. They start off pretty
common sense, although maybe not science based, like eating only
natural foods, avoiding meats, eating eggs only in moderation, avoiding
cow's milk and animal fats, emphasizes getting the fat your
body needs from olives and nuts instead. He also goes
on to recommend that people avoid quote poison containing foods
(14:25):
which are coffee, tea, chocolate, and cocoa, and he recommends
that people get completely rid of all condiments and spicy foods.
At this is where in that particular synopsis of sort
of what his health believes, where he starts to lose me.
At this point of it's uh, yeah, I'm just saying
I made a cup of coffee and a travel cup
(14:45):
so I could take it in the shower with me
this morning. Yes, I'm definitely going to have hard time
embracing this cop right, even though I recognize that this
is probably it would be extremely helpful, but it would
also involve for me at least a loss of some
quality of life. His mental hygiene ideas included not worrying
(15:08):
or becoming self centered, practicing self control, taking a vacation
when you start dreaming about work, and avoiding patent medicines,
as well as avoiding alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, which is
all pretty common sense. Uh, kind of advice to to
go buy. So you know, so far we've talked about
a lot of stuff that's pretty reasonable. If maybe a
little more restrictive and bland, then we would like um. Hey.
(15:33):
He also for a while was pushing the idea that
people should fletcherize their food, which is just to to
it until it became sort of a goofy mask that
would go down your throat on its own. Um. This
idea came from Horace Fletcher, known as the Great Masticator,
and that's where the two each byte thirty two times
rule comes from. So this is an example of where
when evidence started to suggest that maybe that was not
(15:55):
the best idea, John Harvey Kellogg changed his point of view. Um.
He moved away of recommending that people fletcherize their food
once he determined that that much chewing was basically pulverizing
the food's fiber into uselessness. So you were denying yourself
the benefits of fibrous foods Uh. From his New York
(16:16):
Times obituary, there's a quote an authority on water therapy.
He was the discoverer of the therapeutic value of the
electric light and inventor of the electric light bath. He
was also the discoverer of the sine soidal current. So
this was the point in the world of John Harvey
Kellogg's health beliefs, That is, it starts to kind of
nudge into the Okay, notcher what's going on there. This
(16:38):
is clearly something that people would have known what it
was about, because it was in his obituary when it
was printed. But at this point they're far enough out
of the mainstream thought that I had to go look
up what they were. Um. The electric light bath was
a device that you would sit in. It enclosed everything
but your head, and inside of it were lots and
lots of light bulbs and clusters that were that were
(16:59):
direct that at different parts of your body. He built
one and used it by his own counts, so who
knows if this number is inflated in fifty cases. He
wrote in the book Light Therapeutics about his precursors using
light to basically cure everything, but he wrote about mostly
using it in short treatments to draw blood into the skin,
(17:21):
saying that doing so would treat kidney disease, diabetes, rheumatic diseases, anemia,
and other diseases. He also advocated the use of the
light bath as a preventive measure and people who had
sedentary lifestyles, calling it quote the best substitute for muscular activity.
And the sinus soidal current was a high frequency, oscillating
(17:42):
electrical current that would make muscles contract without causing pain,
and he used this to make a device meant to
exercise the muscles without having to actually move, which is
the thing that people are still trying to do today. Right.
Both of these things have analogs that are in actual
medical use today, like light their p first seasonal effective
disorder um and electrical stimulation that's used in some physical therapies,
(18:06):
but neither of them today are in sort of the
widespread cure all everyone should do this fashion of of
what Kellogg was advocating, and additionally a lot of his
health practices were focused on the bowel. There were lots
and lots of enemas and colonic irrigations in his approach
to health and wellness. That all the stuff with the
(18:28):
enemas and the colon and all of that, it comes
up over and over and is one of the things
that starts to mark John Harvey Kellogg is kind of
maybe a little bit off base in terms of what
he advocated, and there are still people to advocate for those, yes,
but it's not like a widespread accepted medical approach to
(18:48):
treating conditions the way that Kellogg was advocating for. Yeah,
he was probably he was pretty much giving everyone who
came to the sanitarium anema's all time as a course
of general health and wellness. So sometimes when you will
see in a like some kind of quack doctor in
a movie he was saying, oh you should you need
an enema, that it is absolutely a call back to him.
(19:14):
He was also into electrical electro therapy and vibrational therapy,
and again both of these do have some uses today,
but he was pretty much advocating them in broad widespread
use on everyone. Often and he had some very restrictive
views on sex. Uh. It was in his mind barely
acceptable even within marriage and then only very infrequently. It
(19:38):
was certainly unacceptable outside of marriage. And he was very,
very very focused on people not masturbating ever. H He
blamed masturbation for everything from poor posture to cancer. He
was in favor of circumcision without anesthetic for boys, and
the application of carbolic acid to the clitter is for
girls as an anti masturbation tool. Yes, y yikes, is
(20:02):
exactly what I was thinking. I just I'm sure listeners
like me are um feeling tense right at the moment.
So John Harvey Kellogg put all of these beliefs into
(20:23):
active practice at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, also known as
The Sand, where he became the chief physician in eighteen
seventy six when he was only twenty four. He also
opened a second sanitarium in Miami Springs, Florida, in ye.
The Sand had been originally opened in eighteen sixty six
as the Western Health Reform Institute, which was a health
facility based on Seventh Day Adventist beliefs and practices. The
(20:47):
idea was to treat illnesses naturally and to encourage people
into preventative wellness practices. So its heart was in the
right place for sure, really, especially considering the state of
medicine at the time, and it wasn't really all that
successful before and got there. There wasn't an official medical
staff and it housed only about twenty patients when John
came on board, so one of the first things that
(21:07):
he did was to hire a staff of doctors and nurses.
He set about trying to attract a clientele, and his
target market was primarily made up of people who had
things we might think of today as stress related illnesses,
so Harry businessmen experiencing things like exhaustion and chronic indigestion.
A lot of what went on at the sand were
common sense wellness practices like eating healthy, if extremely bland food,
(21:32):
exercising and abstaining from alcohol and tobacco uh, and a
lot of the things that you'd also think of when
you hear the word SPA, like massages and nice relaxing baths.
But it also had all kinds of the electrical and
vibrational treatments that like we talked about earlier, lots and
lots of electric light therapies and enemas and all the
other sorts of things that are sort of regarded as
(21:55):
quackery today, and it ended up becoming a retreat for
the rich and really famous people actually visited the Sand
to take the cure, including John D. Rockefeller, Amelia Earhart
sojourn Or Truth, and Mary Todd Lincoln. A fire destroyed
part of the Sanitarium in nineteen o two, including all
of the main building, but it was eventually rebuilt. In
(22:16):
nineteen o three. John's relationship with the Church became strained
after he published a book that didn't entirely mesh with
the Adventist doctrine. He ultimately split from the church, and
he set up the Sanitarium as an independent entity with
its own board, making a nondenominational institution. The Sand reached
its height of popularity in nineteen o six. That year,
(22:38):
it received seven thousand guests and employed eighteen hundred staff.
It continued to operate until the Great Depression, when financial
circumstances forced John to sell it after sixty seven years.
And today's preponderance of breakfast cereals is thanks in part
to the Sand, where the biologic diet was so boring
and monotonous that John was constantly looking for alternative is
(23:00):
that fit the philosophical criteria but also offered variety. While
John was the staff physician at the sand his brother
will Keith Kellogg, also known as w K Kellogg, managed
the sanitarium, handling the books, the supplies, the general maintenance,
all of that kind of stuff. So while John was
seeing to the medical end of things, w K was
(23:21):
handling pretty much all of the day to day running
of the place. The administration. Yes, and their relationship wasn't
always on the best of terms. John could be a
taskmaster and w K worked really long hours for very
little pay, allegedly seven days a week with no vacations
for seven years, which is interesting because it seems to
contradict his brother John's writings, which say to observe the
(23:44):
sabbath without working at all, and he advocates for taking
a vacation when you start to dream about work, So
assumably yes, he Presumably if w K had been working
seven days a week for his taskmaster brother for seven
years in a vacation, he's probably dreaming about work often,
probably horrible nightmares and stress. So yeah, John's seemed to
be like you all should do this unless you are me,
(24:06):
unless you are my brother, one of the two of
us working diligently to make sure the rest of you
do things. Yes, it's a little unclear exactly which of
the Kellogg brothers really invented wheat flakes, which were a
wheat based version of what we think of as corn
flakes today. That happened in and as is the case
in quite a number of inventions, John claimed the idea
(24:29):
for how to make these wheat flakes came to him
in a dream. We've had that come up in several podcasts.
But according to other sources, John had given w K
this easy to digest but very disgusting to eat wheat
paste and told him to try to make something good
out of it. W K left a batch of it
out overnight where it started to dry out, and when
(24:52):
he came in in the morning, he rolled what was
left through rollers and then baked it and it was
actually pretty good, and they named it Granos. This wasn't
the first ever breakfast cereal. It's pre date. It's predated
by Granula, which was created by James Caleb Jackson that
was made from Graham flour and it was not really delicious,
(25:13):
so it did not take off once it was introduced.
John also made a cereal made of corn meal and
oatmeal biscuits which were then ground, named Granula, and they
actually got sued and they had to rename it Granola. Yes,
it probably was not as smartest idea to make a
thing that was like your competitors thing in the name
of the same thing, because then you might get sued.
(25:34):
It was also predated by shredded wheat, which was invented
by Henry D. Perky of Colorado in eighteen three. He
had promised to sell John a shredding machine which he
was going to use to make his own shredded wheat,
but he never delivered, which is one of the things
that led to this experimentation of making cereals from other
foods and Will and John started Santita's Food Company in
(25:57):
to sell their cereal. In their first or, they sold
more than one hundred thousand pounds of granose. Their factory,
as it was called, was actually a barn on the
grounds of the sand They brought out corn flakes in
and the profit margin was huge and as people figured
this out, suddenly there were a lot of competitors one
(26:17):
was C. W. Post, who founded what became the Post
Cereal Company, who was a former sanitarium patient, and Post
distributed a pamphlet called The Road to Wellville with his cereals.
The novel in later movie got their name from that pamphlet.
Posts earliest products were Post Them, which was a coffee
substitute made from cereal, which giuse me a little bit
of a chin scratch to go, I would try that,
(26:39):
and grape nuts. Grape nuts still survived today. John was
really reluctant to promote the sale of these cereals. He
was afraid that it was going to somehow reflect badly
on the sand. So his brother did it all on
his own, putting together a marketing campaign that included everything
from door to door taste tests to big window displays,
(27:00):
and in eighteen ninety, while John was abroad, Will actually
went ahead and built a factory to replace the barn,
which John made him pay fifty dollars for After he returned.
Will also took advantage of one of John's trips abroad
to add sugar to corn flakes, which of course deepened
the divide between them. Yes, John, of course was not
in favor of adding sugar to anything. Um, they did
(27:22):
kind of men things a little bit. They established the
Battle Creek Toasted corn Flake Company in nineteen oh six.
Will owned a third of it and John owned the
other two thirds. The employees were mostly paid in stock
because John was not a general a generous person when
it came to giving other people money. So, once again
employing this sort of quick while he's not looking strategy,
(27:45):
Will would quietly buy up the employees stock that they
were being paid in while John was away. So he eventually,
through doing this, gained a controlling share in the company
and was able to basically kick his brother out of it.
That's quite a sibling reallyation ship. Yeah, they did not
seem to have the most loving and supportive uh feeling
(28:06):
between them. Yeah. The Kellogg serial story goes on from there.
But long story short, the Kellogg Company became a juggernaut.
It was doing good business by the twenties, so by
the time the Great Depression took hold, people were thinking
of cereals as daily staples, and while the idea of
a health spa had become a completely frivolous expense. Uh.
The Kellogg Company thus became this huge institution of provisions,
(28:32):
but John unfortunately mostly became considered something of a joke. Yeah,
his wife Ella died in ninety John himself had wanted
to live to be a hundred, but he died on
December fourteenth three in Battle Creek at the age of
His cause of death was pneumonia. Thank you so much
(28:56):
for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard
an e mail address or Facebook you are l or
something similar over the course of today's episode, since it
is from the archive that might be out of date. Now,
you can email us at History podcast at how stuff
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I
(29:19):
Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuff you missed in hisstory classes a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my
Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We are living
(29:43):
in complicated times. It feels like there's a whole new
set of rules, but nobody knows where the actual lines
are drawn. And for cable news, social media and Yes
podcast filling the void with words. It seems like there's
less of an actual conversation. I'm Stephanie Rule, MSNBC anchor,
an NBC News correspondent, and I want to tell you
about my new podcast, Modern Rules. On this season of
(30:06):
Modern Rules, I'm going to be spending time unpacking the
harrius of today's topics, from privilege and political correctness to
me to masculinity a moral leadership. I've had some of
the smartest, most thoughtful people I know joined me in real,
candid conversations, people like my friend Questlove, who joins me
to discuss political correctness, masculinity. All right, so look the
(30:28):
same way that Black Lives Matter has a secret ellipsus
at the end of that sentence, you know, missing the
word too. I realized that I'm gonna hear hashtag speak
so well. An actress author activists Amber Tamberlin to talk
about the me too movement. I'm not gonna sit and
spend time trying to think about how to help men
rehabilitate themselves. They need to do that work. Digital activist
(30:49):
for Shad Robinson, who brings interesting perspective on social media
and moral leadership. Had the white woman not exposed it.
We would have never actually even had the story where
Howard Chelton had to go on air and talk about
he was forced to do the right thing. And just
to show you what I mean when I say we're
gonna get real, I am bringing on my mom Louise
(31:12):
Rule talk about all things feminists. They seem to think
they have to push it, push it, push it, and
you don't have to push it. I like people to
open the doors. I like people to say I look nice,
that's not an insult. For the next eight weeks, you're
going to get into topics that are not always comfortable,
but they're always compelling. I hope he'll join me this
season for Modern Rules. Listen and subscribe to my new podcast,
(31:34):
Modern Rules on Apple Podcast, the I Heart Radio app,
or wherever you get your podcast
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