THE STAFF OF DEATH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 45

ular fasting cleansed the blood and sculpted a successful-looking body, while good diet prevented the
buildup of blood impurities and unattractive fat. Maintaining outward appearance was just as important
as inward harmony, he argued, because it gave visual testimony of one's virtue and vigor.
MacFadden's specific dietary advice changed over the years, with certain steadfast exceptions: “As
nearly as possible foods should be used in their natural condition,” uncooked, whole, and with as little
variety as possible. 41 Nuts, fruits, and water made the best meals. One should eat little meat and avoid
alcohol, caffeine, and white bread. When he was a youth, MacFadden claimed, white bread had sickened
him horribly, so the cause of its elimination was close to his heart. For forty years, he would fight a per-
sonal, passionate battle against the nation's bakers and millers. A few bites of what he called “the staff
of death” might not actually kill the strong, but it weakened them. People with sickly constitutions were
to avoid all bread. For the rest, whole wheat was best.
This was, if you will, a testosterone-charged Grahamism. But it was also a decidedly profane Gra-
hamism. The “crime of weakness and the sin of sickness” MacFadden railed against were not offenses
against God's commandments. They reflected a new kind of moral imperative emerging in the early
twentieth century. The physical labor of maintaining perpetual vigor had become intertwined with the
social labor of demonstrating one's privileged place in the hierarchies of cutthroat capitalism.
In Physical Culture we see contemporary obsessions with externally displayed and internally honed
perfect health at a formative moment. To the extent that the quest for the perfect, enduring body has
emerged as one of the governing ideals of our age, early twentieth-century gurus like MacFadden, en-
thralling audiences in his leopard-skin tunic, laid the foundation for our obsessions. Physical Culture
was, as R. Marie Griffith argues in her history of Christian health movements, the perfect marriage of
Protestant moral obligation and consumer capitalist vanity. 42 Its lasting power speaks to something fun-
damental and enduring about the United States, but in order to really understand the social implications
of this seductive dream of food and health, we must understand the unpleasant context of racial thinking
out of which it emerged.
SAVING THE RACE THROUGH DIET
During the first decades of the twentieth century, visceral fear of racial decline gripped northern
European Americans. America's genetic heritage—assumed, of course, to be pure northern European,
and the pinnacle of human evolution—appeared threatened from all sides. With declining birth rates
among the country's upper classes and large influxes of darker-skinned immigrants, the country seemed
headed toward what pundits of the day ominously labeled “race suicide.” Failure to confront this peril
would, as Albert Edward Wiggam, a regular contributor to the magazine Physical Culture and champion
of white supremacist pseudo-science, warned, “silently and slowly wreck the race that built [civiliza-
tion].” 43 In a time marked by rapid urbanization and demographic change, the doctrines of racial eu-
genics took on enormous appeal, even to many of the country's most progressive reformers.
While we often associate eugenics with Nazi Germany, the prewar United States served as a crucial
proving ground for campaigns to “improve the race.” The American eugenics movement's most infam-
ous achievements came in the form of large-scale government policy—widespread state laws mandat-
ing forced sterilization of “dysgenic” groups and new federal immigration policies seeking to limit the
taint of inferior blood. But eugenics was also a bottom-up movement lived out in everyday popular cul-
ture—in the world of pulp fiction and dietary fads. 44 Bernarr MacFadden's career followed eugenics'
arc through popular culture perfectly.
During the 1920s and 1930s, eugenic ideals circulated through Hollywood movies, self-help manu-
als, novels, museum exhibits, and newspaper advice columns. Chic pageants, many sponsored directly