UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 6

If it was like the city's other pre-Civil War immigrant bakeries, the conditions in Hugh Ward's shop
would have been grim: he would have worked alongside his workers fourteen to sixteen hours a day
in the building's stoop-ceilinged and vermin-infested basement. Twenty-three hours on Saturday. He
would have slept what little he could with his family in a room above the shop, or alongside his workers
on the bakery's dough-mixing tables. It would have been hot, living always in the glare of the oven. He
would have worn a second skin of ash, flour, and sweat.
For six years Hugh Ward's bakery produced two hundred loaves a day for Lower East Side families.
Then, in 1856, like so many others, Ward closed up shop and headed for the great American West. He
made it as far as Pittsburgh. With its fiery coal furnaces and eternally black sky, Pittsburgh must have
seemed to Ward like a city-sized version of his basement bakery. Certainly, with its population doubling
every ten years, booming iron and glassworks, and glimmers of a prosperous future built on steel and
armaments, it must have seemed like a good place to start a bakery.
Fueled by industry and immigrants, the Wards' new Pittsburgh establishment grew rapidly. Its secret,
Ward's son Robert remembered later, was using low-grade flour to make the cheapest bread possible
for Pittsburgh's poor. The bakery specialized in soot-colored “jumbo” loaves that sold for half the price
of regular white bread. It was, in today's business parlance, a “bottom of the pyramid strategy.” And it
worked. The bakery required fifteen barrels of flour a week, more than triple the consumption of Ward's
Broome Street establishment.
In 1897, the bakery, then run by Ward's sons Robert and George, combined with a profitable biscuit
and cracker company, and capital from the merger allowed the company to open “Pittsburgh's first mod-
ern sanitary bakery” in 1903. Over the next eight years, Robert and George Ward oversaw one of the
most remarkable periods of innovation and expansion in the history of baking. First in Pittsburgh, and
then in a steady stream of new bakeries opened or acquired in St. Paul, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and
Providence, the Ward brothers developed the country's most advanced mechanical mixers, kneaders,
loaf shapers, and bread wrappers. While most of the country's bakeries still shuttled batches of bread in
and out of hearths not that different from those that supplied the Roman Empire, Ward loaves flowed
continually through long “tunnel ovens,” assembly-line style. Less visibly, the Wards played a key role
in bringing laboratory science to bear on baking, endowing the country's first research chair in bakery
science at the Mellon Institute. As a 1925 paean to industrial baking in the New York Times beamed,
“Each new invention eliminated labor, cut down the cost of production, and increased profits; and the
Ward bakeries took advantage of every one.” 13
In 1909, when the first reports leaked to the press that the Wards had set their eyes on the New
York market, the New York Times could easily call them Pittsburgh's “rulers of baking.” 14 Hugh Ward
had left Manhattan fifty-three years earlier a moderately successful immigrant baker. Now his sons and
grandsons were returning, ready to invest $3 million outright and backed by a total capitalization of
around $25 million, likely put up by Pittsburgh steel magnates (about $72 million and $600 million, re-
spectively, in 2011 dollars).
This was appropriate. The man who would come to define the Wards' New York operation—Hugh's
grandson William—was born with flour in his blood, but it was the brute tactics of steel barons that
defined his career. William began to rise in the company after his father died in 1915, and, by the early
1920s, he had muscled aside an uncle and assorted nephews to consolidate control. Wildly ambitious
and often accused of stock swindles, boardroom thuggery, political corruption, and violent anti-union
activities, all glossed with the sheen of high-profile charity work and benevolent paternalism, William
put into motion the most audacious plan ever seen in American baking. Between 1921 and 1926, from
his office in the company's New York flagship bakery, he executed a stealthily choreographed series of