White Bread (7 page)

This was no idle threat. Most major cities had, at some point, experienced riots sparked by interruptions in bread supply or rising prices. The connection between good, plentiful bread and social peace was intuitively understood. Indeed, New York's first large bakery, the New York Baking Company, was formed by a group of wealthy citizens hoping to prevent future eruptions of unrest like the one experienced during the citywide bakery strike of 1801.
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During the first decades of the twentieth century, industrialists like William Ward would not raise wages or bow to union pressures, but they were smart enough to know that thugs and guns could maintain social stability only for so long. When the Wards built their New York bakeries, the memory of Jewish bread riots in 1903 and 1905 had not yet faded, and the experience of a widespread 1910 bakery strike was fresh in the minds of many. So, while Ward increased his workers' hours and lowered their pay despite record profits, he also endowed a home for the city's elderly poor and a workers' retreat in the Hudson Valley—a bucolic wonderland where Ward bakery workers could rent subsidized summer cabins and their children could escape the corrupting influence of tenement life for a time. In the factory itself, on-site doctors cared for workers' health and taught them “healthy habits.”
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This was precisely the approach that most food reformers took as well. Outside of labor and socialist-leaning movements, the social tensions evoked by Riis and others were understood as a problem not of exploitation but rather of a lack of education and the corrupting influences of poverty itself. The issue wasn't that workers couldn't afford food, but that they didn't know how to use their food budget efficiently, didn't understand scientific principles of good eating, or didn't have the means to cook properly.

Racial eugenicists, reaching the apex of their popularity during the 1910s and 1920s, believed that solving these social problems could be achieved only by purging society of inferior stock. Poor diet, in their minds, constituted clear evidence of unfitness. As Michael Williams argued in
Good Housekeeping
, alluding ominously to forced sterilization and other coercive measures favored by American eugenicists at the time, immediate action must be taken to eliminate “the dregs and waifs of our population” who simply could not “maintain true economy in nutrition.”
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Most home economists, however, inclined toward the more optimistic euthenics movement. For them, racial fitness didn't begin and end with genes. It could be achieved by changing physical environments and teaching new habits. Social work and education would teach modern eating habits to the poor, while better urban planning and provision of what we today call “appropriate technology” would overcome the physical obstacles to proper eating. In a fashion reminiscent of many community-garden and anti-obesity campaigns designed to teach the poor about “healthy eating” today, reformers poured into the country's urban tenements and rural hill countries. What they achieved was not an attack on the economic root causes of poverty, but the spread of a gospel of progress through healthy habits and hygienic eating.

These were well-meaning efforts. Even George Ward's championing of cheap whole wheat bread for the masses can't be glossed merely as a cynical attempt to increase market share—indeed, by all accounts it hurt the company. Yet, ideas about scientific eating were also metrics by which populations could be measured for worthiness. Following expert dietary advice became not just a matter of good practice but a requirement of competent citizenship. Even when reformers' efforts to spread the gospel of good food failed, these failures had the effect of reinforcing social hierarchies. Rather than use these failures as an opportunity for self-reflection (maybe the poor actually need higher wages, not our gospel of good eating), reformers felt confirmed in their belief that poverty stemmed from the poor's ignorance (only a fool wouldn't want to eat hygienically).

Even when reformers failed to convince others to eat correctly, they themselves had deeply internalized their doctrine. Indeed, the greatest impact of this movement to shape how the masses ate was not on the masses, but on the habits and desires of the country's professional classes. Thus, while many of the food reformers' most ambitious projects—communal kitchens in tenement districts, for example—failed miserably, the power of hygienic eating flourished.

With this in mind, the choice of bakery over homemade can be understood as something more than just a question of taste or ease. Preference and convenience must be understood in relation to a whole series of deeply inculcated desires, responsibilities, and aspirations. Centuries of European tradition had linked bread choices with class and status, but the movement for hygienic eating added a whole new level of consequence: individual decisions about bread didn't just mark class differences, they placed eaters' behavior in relation to the larger health of the nation and proclaimed, for all to see, whether one was fit and responsible—or in need of help. The problem was that it was far from clear what kind of bread was most hygienic.

To any late nineteenth-century observer, the answer to the question of what bread was most hygienic would have been obvious:
home
-baked bread was better. Bakery bread was one of the few processed foodstuffs widely associated with poverty rather than affluence, and bakeries themselves suffered under a cloud of suspicion. Except for a few “sanitary bakeries,” the vast majority of the country's bakeries were more dark satanic mills than shining palaces.
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Poorly capitalized and facing cutthroat competition, the country's small bakeries slashed any cost possible. They stretched and whitened cheap flour with plaster of Paris, borax, ground bones, pipe clay, chalk, alum, and other nefarious compounds. They invariably sold underweight loaves, and they worked laborers as hard as they could. As the lyrics of an 1884 union anthem from St. Helens, Oregon, asked, “Full eighteen hours under the ground, / Toiling and making bread! / Shut off from air and light and sound, / Are we alive or dead?”
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Beginning in the 1870s, labor organizations were able to bring these abuses to light and raise public outcry about “Slavery in the Baker Shops”—but not the outcry they hoped for.
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Rather than rousing sympathy for exploited workers, unions and their allies succeeded in focusing the country's outrage on dirty bread and the dirty hands that made it. Reports of “disease-breeding bread” had circulated since the 1880s, but with the attention called to Chicago's meatpacking industry by Upton Sinclair's muckraking journalism, concern about bread exploded in the mid-1900s. Months after
The Jungle
hit bookstores in February 1906, the city's chief sanitary inspector declared that bakery “conditions rival those discovered in the worst of the packing houses.”
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Sensationalist descriptions of unventilated and pestilent cellar bakeries filled local newspapers and echoed through the city's lecture halls. Sanitary inspectors painted pictures of dark, vermin-infested caves with raw sewage dripping from pipes into dough-mixing troughs, street dust and horse manure blown onto dough, bread cooling on dirt floors, and whole families sleeping on rag piles in bakeries, alongside their chickens. In the worst cases, bakers worked ankle deep in water and sewage when storms backed up city drains.

As pressure for a federal pure food law mounted, Chicago civic organizations, women's groups, and self-styled sanitary activists conducted surprise bakery inspections and drew up “white lists” of acceptable establishments. Under pressure from these groups and driven from within by crusading health officials, the city government stepped up regulation. A 1907 ordinance established guidelines for bakery construction, outlawed sleeping in bakeries, and mandated regular inspections. Later, a second ordinance banned cellar bakeries outright.

These were the first such ordinances in a major city, and Pure Food activists around the country took Chicago as a model. There was still much work to be done, though: in 1908 only thirty of one thousand bakeries inspected under Chicago's new ordinance passed without citation.
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At least they had been inspected. In New York, thousands of cellar bakeries went virtually unregulated. By 1910, however, with sensational accounts of filthy bakeries filling newspapers and stories of progressive action flooding in from Chicago and elsewhere, pressure mounted. Blue-ribbon commissions were appointed and “professional sanitarians” deployed.

In November 1911, the New York State Factory Investigating Committee convened days of hearings on the city's bakeries. Consumer protection advocate Frances Perkins, who would later become FDR's secretary of labor and the country's first female cabinet member, lent the proceedings celebrity status. During 1910, she had personally inspected one hundred New York bakeries, and found conditions revolting.
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In her testimony before the committee, Perkins repeatedly emphasized bakeries' criminal lack of ventilation. The toll poor air quality took on the lungs of journeymen bakers was horrific. As a public health doctor confirmed later in the hearings, nearly 100 percent of bakery workers in New York showed signs of tuberculosis, bronchitis, and other lung infections. When dealing with other industries, the committee showed concern for workplace safety, but when it came to bread making, it was more interested in hearing about workers' hygiene.

With a few exceptions, committee members darted around witnesses' appeals for workplace safety regulations, restating the bakery problem as a question of how best to control immigrant workers. Commissioners' questions focused on immigrant bakers' beer drinking, tobacco chewing, sleeping habits, and spitting, their scabs, their lice, their sweat, their filthy hands, and their unwashed clothes. As the city health commissioner, Ernst Lederle, argued, cellar bakeries themselves were not the problem, the problem was that “the people were dirty and careless.”
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Indeed, in both Chicago and New York, public uproar about cellar bakery conditions was hard to separate from larger anxieties about the habits of the nation's new Jewish and Italian immigrants. Thus, even when Perkins and other witnesses defended workers' hygiene habits, the commission voiced skepticism. In one revealing exchange, state assemblyman Cyrus Phillips argued with a public health doctor. “These men you have described are naturally and inherently unclean; aren't they? And they don't know how to do anything else?” the assemblyman queried. “Why, I guess that's true,” the doctor ventured cautiously, but the assemblyman pressed on with his point about the nature of immigrant bakers: “No amount of inspection will improve them very much?” Then the doctor surprised those present in the hearing by responding that yes, he did believe that bakers' habits
could
be changed. Assemblyman Phillips replied incredulously, “[You think] that they could counteract their natural and inherent tendencies?” “I certainly do,” the doctor repeated. The two officials weren't talking about bread anymore, they were debating the nature of new immigrants. Sensationalist accounts of dangerous bread likely reflected unease about newcomers more than any real hazards posed by eating the product of their ovens. And this is, in the end, the grain of salt with which we must take fears of cellar bakeries—and a clue to why bakeries like the Wards' flourished.

Whether or not bread from small bakeries was actually unsanitary, the moral panic around dirt, germs, and immigrant habits was a gift for industrial bakers. “I want to know where my bread comes from!” an affluent woman demanded in a national advertising campaign for Holsum bread. “I don't want bread from some nameless basement bakery. I want my bread from a bakery that's clean as my own kitchen. … I've stopped baking but I still want clean bread.” Or, as an ad from Los Angeles more bluntly put it, “Many bakeries in New York, Chicago, and other cities are being condemned by health officers as unclean and unsanitary. How often do you inspect
your
bakery?”
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Strange as it might seem to contemporary foodies, in the early twentieth century the language of “knowing where your food comes from” was a public relations coup for industrial food.

Bakeries across the country overwhelmingly adopted the new language of clean bread in their advertising, but it was the Wards, once again, who set the bar. Alongside reprinted news reports on the “shocking state of cellar bakeries,” the Wards invited New York to visit its bakeries. “You can see every detail in the making of Ward's Tip-Top Bread. The human hand never touches bread at these, the greatest bakeries in the world—daylight bakeries, snow-white temples of cleanliness.” Transparency, cleanliness, and modernity displaced taste, cost, convenience, and even freshness in bread advertising. The “bare hand” became the greatest enemy of bread. As a Ward Bakeries ad in the
New York Times
stressed in italics,
“Bread kneaded by hand or mixed by hand can never be made a truly clean sanitary product.”
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Of course, even bread “untouched by human hands” still required the presence of a few workers, and this bothered consumers bombarded by images of disease-ridden bakers. So the Wards' advertising also trumpeted the company's meticulous inspection of workers' health and habits—even their moral character.

Consumers around the country flocked to witness the spectacle of sanitary baking. They crowded around the glass of smaller “window bakeries,” where all operations could be viewed from the street, and lined up for tours of larger factories. One Ohio bakery even encouraged teachers to plan hygiene lessons for their students around tours of its factory. A trip to Stolzenbach's scientific bakery, the company claimed, would instill pupils with “the great, lifelong value of a thorough understanding of the inestimable advantage of perfect cleanliness.”
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