UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 3

the foundation of social progress. During the first decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of
New Yorkers flocked to the Ward Bakery on school field trips and weekly tours to witness the spectacle.
The Ward Bakery in Brooklyn, along with its twin in the Bronx, was the flagship of a revolution in
the way the country's single most important staple was produced and sold. In the early twentieth century,
when average Americans got 30 percent of their daily calories from bread, more than any other single
food, New Yorkers ate more bread than any other group in the country. New Yorkers also purchased
more of their bread than the rest of the country, and they bought a lot of it from the Ward Baking Com-
pany. At the company's height, Ward's Brooklyn and Bronx factories supplied one in every five bakery
loaves eaten in New York City. By the end of the 1920s, the company had extended that power across
the entire country, coming astoundingly close to achieving monopoly control over every single sizable
bread market in the nation. 4
The Ward family achieved this dominance by pioneering key technological breakthroughs, running
roughshod over union labor, laying waste to small competitors, and concocting financial machinations
that would have dazzled Gordon Gecko. But the Ward Baking Company owed its uncanny ability to win
over skeptical customers to a much larger sense of disquiet hanging over early twentieth-century Amer-
ica.
The Ward Bakery went up in Brooklyn at a moment when poor wheat harvests, commodity specu-
lation, and the power of railroad monopolies had stressed bread supplies, causing occasional riots and
widespread fear of famine. In the first decades of the twentieth century, “the bread question” was the
question for many observers, and it wasn't just the bread supply that mattered. The country was divided
on how bread should be produced in the first place. As one national household advice columnist wrote in
1900, “No subject in the history of foods has been of such vital importance or aroused so much diversion
of opinion as bread making.” 5 These specific concerns, in turn, reflected a larger set of perturbations
agitating the country.
From the 1870s to the 1920s, a singular convergence of forces buffeted the United States, upending
all sense of stability and order. Unprecedented influxes of southern and eastern European immigrants,
rapid urbanization, explosive technological change, and a series of grave economic downturns strained
old institutions built around the dream of an Anglo-Saxon nation of self-sufficient rural communities.
Thrust into an emerging system of global grain trading and financial speculation, rural America reeled. 6
Urban infrastructure collapsed under demographic pressures. Corrupt politicians and their private
sector cronies stepped in to provide basic services at high cost. Great trusts—vast corporations with
monopoly power—came to dominate nearly every important sector of the emerging industrial economy.
Work, once carried out on an intimate scale, suddenly felt controlled by distant, impersonal forces. For
white, native-born Americans, everything felt undone. Old elites struggled to maintain authority. The
poor felt themselves tossed around by the whims of shadowy bosses and threatened by an invasion of
foreigners. And elites and the poor alike searched for ways to make sense of a world turned upside
down.
As many groups faced with great upheavals have done throughout history, late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century white Americans scapegoated—placing the blame for large-scale social change on
immigrants and minorities. The period saw some of the ugliest nativism and most violent exclusion of
minorities in U.S. history. Racial eugenics and white supremacist theories of human evolution flour-
ished, providing scientific authority for the country's fear and harsh prescriptions for social improve-
ment.
And yet, amidst all the exclusion and vitriol, other ways of responding to upheaval, championed by
both working-class organized labor and an emerging population of middle-class professionals, produced