Any out-of-towners who happened to wander into the Calhoun County Courthouse in southern Michigan in the spring of 1917 must have found it hard to believe that the plaintiff and the defendant in Kellogg v. Kellogg were brothers. At first glance, it was hard to believe that they were even related.
The plaintiff, John Harvey Kellogg, the man everyone called the Doctor, was the flamboyant founder and director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a combination spa, hospital, and chautauqua where the well-heeled came to see and be seen as they followed a customized regimen of rest, exercise, and diet. A short, plump sixty-five-year-old banty rooster of a man, the Doctor dressed all in white, from his fedora and tie to his spats and high-button shoes. He said he wore white to allow more of the health-giving rays of the sun to reach his body, but he clearly didn’t mind that his sartorial preference helped him stand out in a crowd. He looked more like a man being honored at his own birthday party than a man suing his brother.
The only person in the courtroom the ebullient Doctor didn’t try to charm was the defendant. Fifty-seven-year-old Will Kellogg—he was known as W.K., but only the rare few to whom he had given permission dared call him that to his face—was the founder and president of the Toasted Corn Flake Company, the rapidly growing business that would one day be known as Kellogg’s. The Corn Flake King, as he was dubbed by the press, was a bald, beady-eyed, moon-faced man who wore a rumpled suit, Coke-bottle glasses, and the dour expression of a snapping turtle. Though he was eight years younger than his brother, his phlegmatic affect made him seem eight years older. Few words escaped his pursed lips, but those that did were incisive. During a recess after W.K. had testified, one of the Doctor’s lawyers was heard to say, “Don’t ask him anything else. He is too smart.”
In the courtroom, the brothers ignored each other with the pointedness of a divorced couple. Indeed, for most of the previous decade, the Doctor and W.K. had communicated almost entirely in lawsuits, in a forensic rondo that made Kellogg v. Kellogg seem as arcane and attenuated as Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. And yet, in its essentials, the case boiled down to one simple question: which brother had the right to the family name. As in any sibling rivalry, of course, the roots of the conflict went deep.
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If Sigmund Freud had been an only child, rivalry might not be the first word we think of when we hear the word sibling. Freud, however, was the eldest of eight children. Seventeen months after his birth, his brother Julius was born, and his mother’s attention turned to the new arrival. Looking back on that time, Freud recalled the “genuine childish jealousy” he felt toward his brother and his desire that the tiny, mewling lump would disappear. When he got his wish—Julius died of an intestinal infection at seven months—Freud felt a “germ of self-reproach” that festered, he would tell Wilhelm Fleiss, throughout his life. His brother’s death, Freud suggested, left him with a lifelong need for a “hated enemy” and contributed to “what is neurotic, but also what is intense, in all my friendships.” (As an adult, Freud was renowned for treating his peers and protégés as surrogate younger brothers who sought to usurp him. If any of them questioned the Freudian party line or tried to emerge as psychiatrists in their own right, Freud cast them out of his circle, figuratively killing them before they killed him.) Freud’s second chance at being an only child was brief; within a year of Julius’s death, Anna was born, and by the time he was ten years old there were five more little Freuds clamoring for his parents’ attention. Freud did his best to ignore them. In his brief autobiography, his siblings are not mentioned.
Freud’s experience with his brothers and sisters would provide grist for his characterization of siblings as rivals locked in combat for their parents’ affection, who would gladly be rid of one another if they could. “A small child does not necessarily love his brothers and sisters; often he obviously does not,” he wrote. “There is no doubt that he hates them as his competitors, and it is a familiar fact that this attitude often persists for long years, till maturity is reached or even later, without interruption.”
Despite his strong views on sibling conflict, Freud believed the Oedipal bond to be paramount in the development of the personality and dismissed the sibling relationship as relatively unimportant. The term sibling rivalry, in fact, would not be coined until 1933, six years before Freud’s death, when the child psychiatrist David Levy gave his patients celluloid dolls that represented their parents and younger siblings. When he asked them what they felt when they saw the baby brother or sister doll nursing at its mother’s breast, there ensued scenes of sibling carnage to rival anything in the Old Testament. Among the responses listed by Levy: “dropping,” “shooting,” “throwing,” “slapping,” “hitting with stick,” “hitting against floor,” “hammering,” “crushing with truck,” “crushing with feet,” “crushing with fingers,” “tearing apart,” “twisting the body,” “scattering parts,” “biting,” “piercing (with screw driver).” So many celluloid dolls were destroyed that Levy had to switch temporarily to dolls made of clay. Levy, who would repeat his experiments among the Kekchi Indians of Guatemala with similarly gruesome results, concluded that regardless of age, gender, birth order, or cultural background, sibling rivalry is a fact of family life. (The word rival is derived from the Latin rivalis, which means “having rights to the same stream.” In pre-Christian times, rivals were people or tribes who fought over water from the same river. “In our terms,” the psychoanalyst Peter Neubauer has observed, “the river is the mother who supplies our basic needs, and the children compete for access to her.”)
Sibling rivalry is difficult to quantify, but research suggests that it is all but inevitable. Indeed, it has been said that the only way to avoid it is to have a single child. Using hidden microphones, a University of Illinois psychologist found that the average pair of siblings between the ages of three and seven engages in an extended squabble every seventeen minutes. That figure seems low, if my own childhood is any indication, but with four boys, the Colt family may have been especially fertile ground for conflict. In fact, siblings who have a brother tend to be more competitive than those with a sister; of the three sibling combinations, brother/brother pairs are the most rivalrous, sister/sister the least. The closer in age, the greater the rivalry’s intensity, just as seeds planted close together may suffer in their competition for the sun’s attention. Sibling rivalry may be especially fierce when the age difference is less than three years. If six or more years separate a sibling pair, psychologists say, the relationship may be more paternal than fraternal. (The only sibling with whom Freud got along reasonably well was his youngest brother, Alexander, ten years his junior, who posed no threat to his authority. Whenever Freud went to the baths as a young adult, he made the worshipful Alex carry his bags.) There are exceptions, of course. John Kellogg was eight years older than his brother Will, but their rivalry would become only slightly less ferocious than Cain and Abel’s. The age gap may explain why it took so long to boil over.
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Growing up in Battle Creek, Michigan, not long after the Civil War, John and Will Kellogg seemed unlikely rivals. Of the fourteen children born to John Preston Kellogg, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist who owned a small broom factory, John Harvey, the tenth child, was the most promising. Although he was a small, delicate, tubercular boy, the runt of a large litter, John made up for his frailty with Napoleonic assertiveness. He was outgoing, headstrong, and ambitious. He was also unusual. While his brothers dug tunnels in the yard, waded in the Kalamazoo River, and smoked clover behind the barn, John played the piano and the violin, wrote poetry, and made up stories in which he cast himself as the hero who made miraculous escapes from ferocious wild beasts. He considered games, even the chess his father tried to teach him, a waste of time. John didn’t attend school until he was nine—as Adventists, his parents believed the end of the world was so close at hand that formal education was irrelevant—and he left after two years to work ten-hour shifts in his father’s factory, sorting broomcorn for two dollars a day. John educated himself. He soon exhausted his parents’ meager collection of books and began borrowing from neighbors. He spent his first paycheck on a four-volume set of Farr’s Ancient History and went on to assemble a modest private library of his own: books on botany, astronomy, German grammar, and shorthand, as well as a dictionary. (Words fascinated him; as an adult, he’d carry a vest-pocket dictionary to peruse in his spare moments.) When his father named his company J. P. Kellogg and Son, John was the Son he had in mind. But though John didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life—he talked of becoming a teacher—he clearly dreamed of more than making brooms.
The twelfth Kellogg child was decidedly unpromising. Will was a cautious, deliberate, taciturn boy whose teacher at the Adventist school he attended through the fifth grade assumed he was “dimwitted,” in part because he couldn’t read the words on the blackboard. (It wasn’t until Will was twenty that he realized he needed glasses.) Will wasn’t much to look at either: jug-eared, thin-lipped, and so poker-faced that when he and his classmates played a prank, the teacher never suspected Will. But he was a plugger. At the age of seven, he was working as a stock boy at his father’s factory after school and on Sundays. On summer mornings, he uprooted, bunched, and washed vegetables for the local market. The summer he was nine, he pulled and topped 350 bushels of Bermuda onions. Years later, he’d proudly recall that he was paying for his own clothes at ten and supporting himself at fourteen. There was little time for fun, though if his work at the factory was finished and the cows were milked, his father might let him walk to the station and watch the Michigan Central trains come in. Later in life Will would observe wistfully, “I never learned to play.” He felt especially self-conscious and inadequate next to his cocksure older brother, who rarely let Will forget the eight years that lay between them. John made Will shine his shoes. He made Will mind his manners. If Will complained, John gave him a whipping. Asked for childhood memories of his brother, an elderly Will Kellogg recalled frigid Michigan nights: “I have vivid recollections of John Harvey warming his cold feet by placing same on my back, not conducive to my sleeping well.”
The Kelloggs weren’t the only ones who considered John promising. The family shared a pew at the Battle Creek Tabernacle with Elder James White and his wife, Ellen, the prophet who, as a reclusive seventeen-year-old hatter’s daughter from Maine, had had a vision in which 144,000 harp-playing saints sat down to a supper of fruits, nuts, and manna at a solid silver table presided over by Jesus. White’s lavish revelation won her a leading role in the Seventh-Day Adventist church, whose members believed that the second coming was imminent and that a proper diet was a vital part of preparing for that happy day. Impressed by twelve-year-old John Kellogg, the Whites invited him to learn the printer’s trade at the Adventist publishing plant, where John advanced rapidly from errand boy to apprentice typesetter to proofreader. At sixteen, he was editing the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald. As he worked on various Adventist publications, John was intrigued by the church’s minimalist approach to nutrition. Although one of his favorite foods was oxtail, he decided to become a vegetarian, in part because, at five feet two and a half, he thought it might help him grow a few inches. (It didn’t.) John became the Whites’ protégé, living with them for months at a time, helping Pastor White with his writing. Years later, Ellen White would observe that her husband had been more of a father to John Kellogg than to his own sons.
The Whites had bigger things in mind for John than setting type. In 1866, acting on another of Ellen White’s visions, the Adventists had opened a small medical boardinghouse where ailing guests convalesced on a regime of rest, exercise, and hydrotherapy along with a diet of fruits, vegetables, Graham bread, and water. But the Western Health Reform Institute, as it was called, didn’t attract many customers, and the Whites decided they needed a first-rate physician to distinguish it from the other spas and water-cure establishments that were sprouting across the country. They tried out the eldest Kellogg son, Merritt, but he lacked spark. Their printer’s devil had spark aplenty. The Whites sent John east, where he graduated from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1875. The following year, they made him physician-in-chief of the faltering institute. The twelve patients who remained may have mistaken the diminutive twenty-four-year-old for a student, not the physician-in-charge, but John had the ambition, versatility, and pizzazz of a one-man band. He gave the place a spiffier name, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and added a barrage of new treatments, including massage, calisthenics, electrical stimulation, deep breathing exercises, and surgery. He led sing-alongs and played his violin. He wrote pamphlets and magazine articles describing his work. Within two years, business at the San, as people called it, was so good that John tore down the old farmhouse and built a five-story, mansard-roofed Victorian pile big enough for two hundred patients—the largest building in Battle Creek.
Will was also singled out by the Whites, but for a less-exalted position. While John was dissecting cadavers in New York City, fourteen-year-old Will was driving a horse and cart across southern Michigan, peddling his father’s brooms. Though painfully shy, Will was a determined salesman who rarely took no for an answer. For a time, he worked at his half-brother Albert’s broom factory in Kalamazoo, but when the company failed and Albert was unable to pay his employees, Will moved his trunk onto the front porch of his brother’s home, sat down on it, and announced that he wouldn’t budge until he got his salary. (He didn’t have to wait long.) When Will’s father broke his hip, he put Will in charge of the family business. He did so well that two years later, when the Whites needed someone to manage a struggling Adventist broom factory in Dallas, they sent Will. Supervising sixty men a thousand miles from home was a challenge for a shy nineteen-year-old, but Will turned the company around within a year. Back in Battle Creek, he took a course in bookkeeping at the local business college and prepared to marry his longtime girlfriend, a timid grocer’s daughter he called Puss. Will seemed destined to spend his life making brooms. Then, in April 1880, John Harvey Kellogg asked his younger brother to come work for him at the San.
* * *
In an essay about sibling rivalry, Anna Quindlen described the moment her toddler son realized that he was no longer the only child in the family.
I think it began with Quin one day when the younger one needed me more and I turned to him and said, “You know, Quin, I’m Christopher’s mommy, too.” The look that passed over his face was the one I imagine usually accompanies the discovery of a dead body in the den: shock, denial, horror. “And Daddy is Christopher’s daddy?” he gasped. When I confirmed this he began to cry, wet, sad sobbing.
Quin’s response to the phenomenon Freud called displacement was relatively mild. In Mail Harry to the Moon!, a children’s book by Robie H. Harris, Harry’s older brother variously demands that his new sibling be thrown in the trash, flushed down the toilet, given to the zoo, put back inside Mommy, and mailed to the moon. (The author wrote the book after overhearing a four-year-old ask a family friend to take his baby brother with her when she went back to Chicago.) My cousin told me of a friend who found his toddler son standing at his newborn brother’s bassinet, his hand hovering above the infant’s face, “two fingers locked in a cute little Max Schreck Nosferatu claw.” Asked what he was doing to his baby brother, he replied, “I’m scrambling him.”
Such comments make delightful parental anecdotes, but they are raw expressions of anxiety that constitute the opening salvos in what may be a lifetime of competition. Parental affection is, of course, the Holy Grail, but, like the spirit said to be contained in a primitive talisman, it can be encapsulated in a popsicle, a plastic soldier, or a cloud. (The poet A. E. Housman and his siblings used to sit at the nursery window and argue over which cloud belonged to whom.) The father of two boys told me that whenever the younger brother walked into the playroom, the older brother would immediately sweep all the toys toward a corner, covering them with his arms. Frozen in this position, eyeing his brother warily, he couldn’t play with the toys, but, more important, his brother couldn’t either. (His preemptive strike, of course, made the toys even more desirable, and the younger brother even more covetous.) Sibling rivalry, however, is rarely rational. A friend of mine gave his elder son a bike with a kickstand for his seventh birthday, whereupon the birthday boy’s three-year-old brother threw a tantrum until he was promised a kickstand, too—for his tricycle. My friend’s three-year-old would have sympathized with the four-year-old described by Alfred Adler who, weeping in frustration, cried out, “I am so unhappy because I can never be as old as my brother.”
A disproportionate number of brotherly quarrels center around food—a relatively literal stand-in for parental nourishment. When seven-year-old Samuel Taylor Coleridge asked his mother to slice him some cheese for toasting, his older brother Frank, jealous because Sam was his mother’s favorite, crept into the kitchen and minced the cheese into pieces so tiny they couldn’t be toasted. Sam attacked Frank. Frank pretended to be seriously injured, and when Sam bent over him to see if he was all right, Frank punched him in the face. Sam grabbed a kitchen knife and chased after his brother until their mother walked in. (The rivalry between Frank, an extroverted daredevil fond of playing soldiers and stealing apples, and Sam, a timorous dreamer who spent his time reading, was so fierce that the biographer Richard Holmes suggests that the necessity of separating the boys was one of the reasons their parents dispatched Frank to the navy at the age of twelve.) Competition for food was keen in the down-at-heels Joyce household, according to the biographer Richard Ellmann: “On Pancake Night one pancake was left on the platter, and all four boys—James, Stanislaus, Charles, and George—dove for it. James made off with the prize and ran up and down stairs, protesting to his pursuers that he had already eaten it. At last they were convinced, and he then imperturbably removed the pancake from the pocket where it lay hidden, and ate it up with the air of little Jack Horner.” (Such schadenfreude was routine in the Colt kitchen, where it was important not only to get more food than one’s brothers but to lord the victory over them, a gambit that, in our family, was known as “rubbing it in.” Ned would offer me the rest of his milk shake. Touched by his sudden generosity—how gullible I was!—I’d accept, whereupon he’d ostentatiously drink up all but the dregs before presenting it to me with a triumphant “no backs.” Or I’d do the same to him.) A friend of mine who took in two baby squirrels told me that whenever she fed them, one of them would drop his own food to snatch his brother’s; it was more important that his brother not have food than for him to have food himself. In Paris Spleen, his collection of autobiographical prose poems, Baudelaire recalls seeing two beggar brothers fight over a piece of bread he’d given them:
The cake traveled from hand to hand and changed pockets at every instant, changing, alas! in size as well, and when finally, exhausted and panting and covered with blood, they stopped from the sheer impossibility of going on, no cause for feud remained; the piece of bread had disappeared, and the crumbs, scattered all around, were indistinguishable from the grains of sand with which they were mingled.
Such aggression might not have fazed David and Ida Eisenhower. Believing that competition bred mettle, they encouraged their six sons never to let their playmates—or their brothers—beat them in anything. Growing up in Abilene, Kansas, the Eisenhower brothers vied to see who could run the fastest, jump the highest, do his chores the best, read aloud from the Bible the most accurately, and (perhaps demonstrating that they hadn’t fully absorbed what they’d read) fight the hardest. One day, wrestling in the kitchen, the second son, Edgar, sat on the third son, Dwight’s, chest. When Dwight refused to give up, Edgar grabbed his brother’s hair and began pounding his head against the floor. Terrified, the fifth son, Earl, began to pull Edgar off, but their mother, without budging from the stove, said sharply, “Let them alone.”
Two thousand miles east, the Kennedy household was more decorous but no less Darwinian. With nine children born in a span of seventeen years, the family was a veritable petri dish for sibling rivalry, overseen by a father whose competitive zeal was stoked by having grown up Irish-Catholic in anti-Irish Boston. “We want winners,” Joseph Kennedy Sr. would say. “We don’t want losers around here.” There seemed to be no activity in which the children did not compete: swimming, sailing, tennis, touch football, running, chess, Categories, dinner-table current events quizzes, after-dinner word games, math contests, rock-skipping, seashell-floating. The eldest brothers, Joe and Jack, separated by a scant twenty-two months, were the most contentious. “I suppose it was inevitable that they were rivals,” their mother reflected. “Joe was much stronger than Jack, and if there was any physical encounter, Joe really whacked him.” Scrawny Jack wouldn’t back down. One afternoon Joe challenged Jack to a bicycle race. Each pedaled around the block in the opposite direction. As they approached each other halfway, neither boy swerved. They smashed into each other. Joe was unhurt, but Jack’s cuts would require twenty-eight stitches.
Fierce fraternal competition is often leavened by equally fierce loyalty, in accordance with the unwritten corollary by which even the most rivalrous brothers will unite against an outside threat. “Me against my brother; my brother and me against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the stranger” goes an Arabic saying. The Eisenhower brothers may have pounded one another’s heads on the floor, but they banded together against all non-Eisenhowers. Jack Kennedy may have striven mightily to beat up his older brother, but when he saw a Choate classmate begin to pass Joe in a Hyannis sailboat race, he gunned his motorboat in front of his friend’s vessel, slowing him down so that his brother could win. A middle-aged financial planner, the youngest of three sons, told me that his older brothers used to beat him up on a regular basis. “But if someone looked at me cross-eyed at the bus stop, my older brothers beat them up,” he said. “Even today, they’ll give me more grief than anyone else, but if someone attacks me, I know they’ll defend me to the death.”
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To understand the feud between John and Will Kellogg, one must understand the institution to which they devoted much of their lives. By 1900, the Battle Creek Sanitarium was the largest and most popular spa in the country, with four hundred guest rooms, two indoor swimming pools, a surgical hospital, a thousand-seat chapel, twenty cottages, a lakeside resort, and 400 acres of farmland. Here, some three thousand patients a year—locals dubbed them “Battle Freaks”—pursued what John Harvey Kellogg called “Biologic Living,” described by one San brochure as “daily cold water and air baths, swimming, work in the gymnasium, wearing of light and porous clothing and frequent changes of underwear.” It was a little more complicated—and controversial—than that. The Doctor, who had chronic gastrointestinal problems that he blamed on his meat-centric childhood meals, believed that the key to happiness lay in a healthy diet, defined at the San largely by what people couldn’t eat: meat (“only proper food for hyenas and turkey buzzards,” said the Doctor), tobacco (“destroys the sex glands”), coffee (“cripples the liver”), ice cream (“unnatural”), vinegar (“a poison, not a food”), oysters (“swarming with bacteria”), bouillon (“enough creatin to kill nine guinea pigs”), tea, sugar, cheese, chocolate, alcohol, and spices, to name a few. San cuisine consisted largely of nuts and grains, measured out in precise quantities and sculpted to resemble roasts and steaks. The San offered twenty-six basic diets, but each guest had his or her own customized plan: dangerously thin guests might be fed a half pint of milk every thirty minutes from dawn to dusk; guests with high blood pressure might be prescribed ten to fourteen pounds of grapes—peeled—a day. One guest, for reasons that have been lost to medical science, was instructed to follow a goat around the San pasture, “to take nourishment, kid-like, directly from the source,” as Ronald Deutsch delicately put it in his history of American food faddists. Even the healthiest intestine, the Doctor insisted, required regular cleansing, for which he proposed a two-pronged attack: bran, leafy vegetables, and paraffin oil ingested at the north end, water injected at the south. Ever since the Doctor had visited a colony of orangutans in Algeria and noticed that our primate cousins defecate almost continuously, he had maintained that frequent bowel movements were the key to what he called “getting the stomach right.” Not all patients had the fortitude for the recommended five enemas a day, a regimen made possible with the help of a high-speed machine capable, according to the proud doctor, of forcing fifteen gallons of water through the intestines in a matter of minutes.
Between meals—and enemas—patients submitted to a bewildering array of massages, exercises, and hydrotherapies, many of them devised by the Doctor, like the sinusoidal bath (patients stuck their hands and feet into electrified buckets of water), the electric light bath (patients sat in wooden cabinets lined with illuminated bulbs), or the salt scrub (patients clung to iron hooks while attendants scoured their bodies with a saline mush). At the end of each day, patients gathered on the roof, where the Doctor led them in a series of elaborate marching patterns to the strains of the San’s official song, a pulse-quickening two-step called “The Battle Creek Sanitarium March.”
If “Biologic Living” sounded a bit joyless, even masochistic, the San was as much cruise ship as hospital. There were gym classes, cooking classes, folk-dancing classes, greenhouse tours, and Indian-club demonstrations. There were picnics and bird walks in summer, sledding and sleigh rides in winter, and four nonsectarian weekly church services year-round. Guests could browse the gift shop for a postcard of the San, a copy of one of Dr. Kellogg’s books, a bottle of acidophilus milk, or the latest issue of the San’s in-house newsletter, The Battle Creek Idea. They could sit up straight in one of the Doctor’s posture-enhancing “physiologic” chairs on the veranda and gaze out at the manicured grounds, through which deer, marmosets, and a tame bear roamed, delighting the senses and reinforcing the willpower of newly converted “grass eaters.” After dinner, there were plays, singalongs, and basketball games; speeches and performances by notable guests; and concerts by the Sanitarium Glee Club and the Sanitarium Philharmonic Orchestra.
The Doctor was the wizard behind this vegetarian Oz. He was, in his way, no less a visionary than Ellen White, and his goal was no less ambitious: to change the way Americans ate, breathed, dressed, exercised, and defecated. To that end, he churned out nearly fifty books (Rational Hydrotherapy); more than two hundred medical papers (“Surgery of the Ileocecal Valve”); and so many pamphlets for the lay reader (“Nuts May Save the Race”) that even the publicity-conscious doctor couldn’t keep count. He founded a nursing school, a school of hygiene, a liberal arts college, and a medical school, which, not coincidentally, provided the San with a steady stream of low-paid employees. He helped establish more than thirty San franchises across the country. He gave more than five thousand lectures. He made frequent trips abroad: to examine the latest exercise equipment in Sweden; to study advanced surgical techniques in England; to learn about the bowel-cleansing benefits of yogurt in France. He invented a heated operating table, a vibrating chair that increased blood circulation, an electric belt that massaged the hips, a mechanical exercise horse, a machine that kneaded the abdomen to relieve constipation, a canvas sleeve that brought fresh air into a patient’s bedroom at night without chilling the entire room, a tobaccoless Turkish pipe. An ostentatiously prodigious worker, the Doctor rose at four a.m. for an enema, a cold bath, and calisthenics before launching into a twenty-hour workday. He bragged of composing between twenty-five and fifty letters a day (many of them novella-size); of dictating eighteen hours at a stretch (pausing only as one exhausted stenographer gave way to another); of working forty hours straight without nourishment (other than the handful of nuts he hoarded like a squirrel in his coat pocket); of performing as many as twenty-five operations in a day. (Though he made his name promoting fringe medical therapies, the Doctor was an accomplished gastrointestinal surgeon whose precise stitching moved the director of the Johns Hopkins Hospital to remark, “I have never seen such beautiful human needlework.”) Fortunately, the Doctor was a skilled multitasker. While taking his morning bath, he listened to staff reports; while dictating, he polished off a few medical journals. Once, on a camel caravan in the Sahara Desert, clad in nothing but a pith helmet and a loincloth, he took advantage of a brief stop at an oasis to dictate an entire issue of Good Health magazine.
The Doctor percolated with ideas, but he depended on Will to carry them out. The Doctor was the San’s artistic director, Will its stage manager. The Doctor had hired his brother because he needed a hard worker who was not only good with numbers but willing to do what he was told. During his first few months at the San, Will’s duties consisted of sawing the lumber to make the crates in which to ship copies of the Doctor’s books. For this, his brother paid him six dollars a week—less than Will had earned when he worked in his father’s factory at the age of eleven. “Apparently The Doctor was afraid he was not getting full value for the salary he paid me,” recalled Will, “for he soon asked me to run the little printing press he was operating . . . then he made me manager of subscriptions and advertising of Good Health.” (The Doctor liked to point out that he received no salary himself—“not a penny”—but the money he made from the sale of his books alone made him a wealthy man.) To support Puss and their three children, Will took care of a neighbor’s horse for an additional three dollars a week, and ran a small chicken-and-egg operation in his backyard. Even so, he went into debt. “I feel kind of blue,” he confessed to his diary, four years after going to work for his brother. “Am afraid that I will always be a poor man the way things look now.” In another entry he noted, “Puss wanted to go to church but I had no decent shoes to wear.”
As the San expanded, Will’s duties expanded, too. By the turn of the century, not only was he responsible for billing, pricing, and purchasing, but he managed Modern Medicine Publishing and a half dozen other companies his brother had set up to sell his health foods, surgical devices, and exercise machines. He answered the San’s mail—some sixty to a hundred letters a day. He was the unofficial credit manager, a member of the labor committee, a volunteer security guard, and, on occasion, a hospital orderly. Each afternoon, he was besieged by petitioners: wealthy patients requesting extra services; disgruntled employees airing complaints; financially strapped patients seeking discounts on their bills. One evening, Will counted the supplicants who arrived after five o’clock: thirty-three. Whenever an insane patient ran off, it was Will who tracked him down. Whenever a patient died, it was Will who helped the grieving family select a casket and plan the funeral, Will who arranged for the body to leave the San as inconspicuously as possible. (Such occasions were minimized by the Doctor’s strict admissions standards: no one contagious; no one on a stretcher; no one, indeed, who looked very sick. His ideal patients were overweight or neurasthenic women and overworked or dyspeptic men.) Whenever the Doctor lectured, it was Will who was responsible for generating the gas for the magic lantern, setting up the screen, operating the machine by his brother’s side, and putting everything away afterward. Whenever the Doctor stayed up late conferring with a visitor, it was Will who escorted the guest to the railroad station. On one such occasion, the Doctor’s meeting went through the night and into the following morning. “Puss came up to the office about half past seven to see why I didn’t come home,” Will wrote in his diary. “She was so scairt that she cried.”
Will might not have minded serving as his brother’s dogsbody had his contributions been acknowledged. It rankled that the Doctor never named him business manager, never, in fact, gave him a title or a job description during his twenty-five years at the San. It rankled that he worked there ten years before his brother allowed him an office—a small, dark room on the first floor—and that he worked for fourteen years before his brother paid him enough to enable him to get out of debt. It rankled that, like the thousand other employees, he was expected to call his brother “Dr. Kellogg.” Doctor Kellogg didn’t seem to notice that he was humiliating Will. While an orderly administered the Doctor’s morning enema, the Doctor, not wanting to waste a second, gave his brother his marching orders for the day. While the Doctor rode his bike around the circular driveway in front of the San for exercise, he made his brother, pen and notebook in hand, trot alongside, taking dictation under the gaze of sun-worshiping guests on the veranda. Occasionally, the Doctor had Will shave him, or shine his shoes, just as he had when he was a boy. Will left home before his three children were up in the morning and returned long after they had gone to bed, rendering him, his daughter said, “a stranger to his family.” On the rare occasions Will made it home for dinner, he was exhausted. “I don’t want to talk,” he’d tell his wife and children. “I’ve had a long, hard day.” He worked Christmas, New Year’s, and the Fourth of July. He worked for seven years before his brother allowed him a vacation. One week, he was on duty 120 hours. And so it stung when his brother called him a “loafer,” or chewed him out for trying to snatch a meal with his family. Well into his thirties, Will was still being treated as the younger brother on whom the older brother warmed his feet.
The Doctor treated most people that way. He found it nearly impossible to apologize, admit a mistake, or delegate. “He was a czar and a law unto himself, ignoring his associates and subordinates,” recalled Will. If another San physician began to develop a following, the Doctor found an excuse to get rid of him. If an employee displeased him, he could be sarcastic; the Doctor performed withering impersonations of his detractors behind their backs. “There is with you a love of supremacy whether you see it or not,” observed Ellen White, concerned with the size of her former protégé’s ego. The Doctor admitted that he had to “play first chair in the orchestra”—even then, he made it sound more like a boast than an apology—but at the same time he scorned those who, like his brother, conceded him that position.
Some San employees felt the Doctor was especially hard on his brother. They believed that the Doctor’s attitude stemmed from his height, which was the only thing about which the otherwise imperturbable man was self-conscious. Although Will was no giant, at five feet seven he was more than four inches taller than his older brother, and the Doctor was envious. On the other hand, Will envied John Harvey for being a doctor. Family members said that Will dreamed of becoming a physician himself, but was so busy supporting his family on the meager salary his brother paid him that he never had the opportunity. “I believe the elder deliberately kept the younger down,” recalled a San physician. “As a matter of fact, he never encouraged any Kellogg to study medicine, because he did not want more than one doctor in the family.” Observed another San physician: “John Harvey Kellogg and W. K. Kellogg were like two fellows trying to climb up the same ladder at the same time.”
The brothers’ antipathy was intensified by their differences. The dapper Doctor, whose all-white outfits matched the color of his carefully cropped Van Dyke (in winter, he donned a snow-white overcoat, a snow-white hat, and snow-white gloves), liked to pose for photographers with his pet white cockatoo on his shoulder. A vain man, he often refused to wear the glasses without which he could hardly see. Will wore drab, baggy, inexpensive suits, shiny with wear, in part because he could afford no better, in part because he preferred to be inconspicuous. The Doctor, escorted by a convoy of nurses, seemed to be everywhere at the San, correcting one patient’s posture, asking another to stick out her tongue (a furred tongue, he said, was a telltale symptom of a poisoned bowel), passing out apples and pears, fawning over new arrivals. Will worked behind the scenes, a quiet, almost furtive presence. The Doctor expressed himself in hyperbolic verbal torrents. Will spoke slowly and carefully when he spoke at all. The Doctor was a preening, pint-size Barnum with a flair for the dramatic: at Christmas, he donned a Santa suit and ho-ho-ho’d as he handed out healthy snacks to guests; at Thanksgiving, he displayed a live turkey in the dining room in front of a sign that read “A THANKFUL TURKEY” so that guests tucking into their turkey-shaped conglomeration of nuts and grains might be reminded of their virtuous deed; at lectures promoting vegetarianism, the Doctor would toss his pet chimpanzee a steak and the chimp would sneer and toss it back, whereupon the Doctor would toss him a banana and the chimp would devour it. Such showmanship disgusted Will, whose natural reticence had been reinforced by a conservative Adventist upbringing that frowned on self-promotion. “He was an austere man—just like he had swallowed a ramrod,” recalled a San physician. The Doctor liked to make an entrance. Whenever a train waited an extra five minutes at the Battle Creek station, chances are it was being held for him: all eyes turned as a chauffeured car roared into the station and disgorged a diminutive figure in white, who strode on board (as convincingly as a portly, five-foot-two-and-a-half man can stride), trailed by a brace of secretaries lugging suitcases full of medical journals and baskets of San health foods to sustain the great man on his journey. Each brother found the other irritating: the Doctor thought Will a plodder, Will thought the Doctor a show-off. The more flamboyant the Doctor became, the more Will withdrew. He seemed determined to be as different as possible from his brother.
Even had their Herculean schedules allowed, the brothers, who lived a few blocks from each other, rarely socialized. The Doctor, something of an intellectual snob, spent his scant spare time hobnobbing with the celebrities who frequented the San. Will, embarrassed at never having gotten beyond the sixth grade, spent his with Puss and their children. The Doctor treated Ella Eaton, the Good Health editorial assistant he had married in 1879, more like a business associate than a wife. They spent their honeymoon revising the Doctor’s new books, The Proper Diet of Man and Plain Facts About Sexual Life. The latter title was ironic, for even if the Doctor could have found time for intimacy, he believed that sex bred disease and bragged that he and Ella had never consummated their marriage and never intended to. (Fearful of germs, he tended to shy away from physical contact of any kind.) Over the years, however, the Doctor and his wife took in forty-two abandoned or needy children, at least nine of whom they formally adopted. Convinced that a healthy diet and proper upbringing could trump any hereditary deficits, the Doctor treated his “waifs,” as he called them, more like research subjects than beloved sons and daughters. Housed in dormitories on the far side of “The Residence,” the Doctor’s twenty-room Queen Anne mansion, they were raised and home-schooled by Ella and a cadre of San staffers on a modified Biologic Living schedule of vegetarian meals, chores, and calisthenics. “All members of the family should consider it a dishonor to violate any of the health principles which they have been taught,” was one of numerous household rules. (In the late 1890s, Ella, who served as San dietician in addition to overseeing the Doctor’s phalanx of adoptees, had a nervous breakdown, likely from overwork, and lived as a semi-invalid until her death in 1920.)
Whenever the Doctor patronized him, or overturned one of his orders to the staff, Will fumed. But having spent his childhood in thrall to the brilliant older brother anointed by their parents and church leaders as the chosen one, Will had grown accustomed to living in the shadow. Given his lifelong sense of inferiority and his brother’s reputation—at the San, the Doctor was regarded as a genius, and his influence over the staff was, a colleague put it, practically “hypnotic”—Will may have felt that he deserved to be “J.H.’s flunky,” as he bitterly referred to himself in his journal. At least for the time being.
* * *
As siblings grow up, move away, and start families of their own, rivalries often lose their intensity, diluted by time, geography, and maturity. They may be camouflaged or expressed more discreetly, in teasing or subtle put-downs that reawaken old resentments. Where once siblings squabbled over who got the biggest drumstick, they may now calculate who has more money, the better job, the healthier marriage, the more successful children. Or the better art collection. (Sterling Clark and his younger brother Stephen, heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune, each spent the first half of the twentieth century striving to amass a finer array of masterpieces than the other.) Or the better book sales. (In 1957, Evelyn Waugh sued a literary critic who had written that his earnings were “dwarfed” by Alec’s; Alec was forced to testify in court that his younger brother was, indeed, the more financially successful Waugh.) Or the worse health. (Lifelong hypochondriacs, William and Henry James competed over whose symptoms were the more impressive; at times, their correspondence reads like a hyper-literate version of the Merck Manual.) Or the bigger house. (In 1846, determined to build a home that would outshine those of his two older brothers, Thomas Pugh, a Louisiana sugarcane planter, began construction of the 11,000-square-foot Greek revival mansion that would be known as Queen of the Bayou. Alas, Pugh wouldn’t get a chance to gloat; he died in 1852, two years before the last of the house’s 600,000 bricks was mortared into place.)
Adult siblings may compete directly for the attention of their aging parents: Who takes better care of them? Who calls them more often? Whose spouse do the parents like best? A parent’s death may revive long-dormant rivalries, and the disposition of an inheritance can find middle-aged siblings fighting over a coffeepot as fiercely as they once fought over a childhood toy—representing, as it may seem, a last morsel of parental love. Plutarch tells the story of Charicles and Antiochus, who, dividing up their late father’s goods, “would not part until they had split in two a silver cup and torn apart a cloak.”
Paul and Robert Moses had always had a contentious relationship, but when their mother died of cancer in 1930, leaving the lion’s share of her considerable estate to her younger son, Robert, it created a rift that would never heal. Paul believed that on the night of their mother’s death Robert persuaded her to sign a new will, cutting him out of his inheritance. In the years that followed, Paul, a brilliant engineer, also came to believe (apparently with some justification) that Robert, the urban planner responsible for much of modern New York City’s infrastructure, was doing everything in his considerable power to keep him from getting a job. Paul fell behind on his income tax payments, slept for a time in a Salvation Army shelter, and grew cadaverous from lack of food. Consumed by hatred for his brother, he talked bitterly about Robert to whoever would listen. Sometimes he’d show up at banquets thrown in honor of his famous brother, standing in the back because he couldn’t afford a seat, scowling at the honoree, the only one in the audience not applauding. Paul was determined to be acknowledged by his brother—as he had not been acknowledged by the will. Robert seemed equally determined to deny his brother’s existence. He refused to see him or take his phone calls, and when Paul asked for a few family photographs by which to remember their parents, Robert, through an intermediary, said no. Asked about his brother by the press, he declined even to say whether his brother was older or younger. (In the first biography of Robert Moses, Paul wasn’t mentioned; it wasn’t until Robert Caro published The Power Broker in 1974 that some of Robert’s friends even knew he had a brother.) In 1962, at the age of seventy-five, Paul Moses, working as a salesman, collapsed while climbing the stairs to his apartment, a single room on the top floor of a five-story walk-up. Told his brother was dying, Robert visited him in the hospital. It was the first time he had seen his brother in twenty years. Paul recovered and Robert got him a job as a glorified errand boy at an engineering firm. But now that he knew his brother wasn’t dying, Robert refused to see him again. Five years later, Paul died in poverty at the age of eighty.
Few rivalries are as rancorous as that of the Moses brothers. Yet one third of adults describe their relationship with a sibling as “rivalrous” or “distant.” Ralph and Herbert Ellison had been allies throughout their hardscrabble Oklahoma City boyhood. But Herbert, a slow-witted, good-natured fellow who didn’t share his older brother’s literary ambitions, was part of the provincial life Ralph was desperate to leave behind when he moved to New York City at the age of twenty-three. After Ellison became famous for his novel Invisible Man, he wrote to his brother and occasionally sent him money, but kept an embarrassed distance. In 1964, when Ellison traveled to Los Angeles, where Herbert now lived, to deliver a series of lectures at UCLA, it was the first time he had seen his brother in twenty-six years.
Several years ago, I spoke with a friend of mine, a renowned psychologist who had recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday and may have intuited that he had only a few months to live. He was reflecting on his long and distinguished life when I asked him whether he had any siblings. There was a pause, and then this supremely self-assured man began to speak, slowly and sadly. “I’m a success—in my own mind—as a husband,” he said. “I had a beautiful wife, physically and emotionally, whom I loved and who loved me. I’m a success as a father. I have four sons whom I adore and who adore me, three physicians and a dentist. But I’m a failure as a sibling. I don’t understand how I and my stupid brother, who happens to be a surgeon, never got along. We never fought but it’s always been a situation of . . . aridity. It’s something I will always regret.”
* * *
In 1883, a few years after Will came to work for his brother, the Doctor established an experimental kitchen in the basement of the San, where the brothers tried to create palatable recipes from the nuts and grains that dominated the San diet. Over the next twenty years, more than eighty different culinary confections would emerge from the kitchen, bearing such appetite-suppressing names as Bromose (small cakes of nuts and dextrinized starch), Nuttose (a croquette-shaped product that could be flavored to taste like chicken, beef, or veal), Malted Nuts (a peanut and almond vegetable milk), and Caramel Cereal Coffee (a coffee substitute made of bran, molasses, corn, and burnt bread crusts). The brothers followed their customary modus operandi: the Doctor jotted down his ideas and passed them along to Will, who, after his fifteen-hour workday, experimented into the night. “Some of the formulae he worked out, some I did, and he made suggestions and I made suggestions, and I think he took most of the credit for the work I did,” Will would testify in court in 1916. “I wrote a great many hundreds of notes for experiments to be conducted, and I have never claimed any glory—the Doctor has claimed that.” At one point, Will developed yet another nut-and-grain concoction and took it to his brother for approval. “The Doctor did not compliment me very highly on the product,” he recalled. “A week later he introduced the identical same thing, and called it Nuttolene, and said it was a very fine article.” By 1897, the Sanitarium Food Company, with Will as manager, offered forty-two different kinds of biscuits, breads, crackers, and ersatz coffees, available by mail order, for those who wished to practice Biologic Living at home.
The Holy Grail of the experimental kitchen was cereal. Ever since his medical school days, when his morning meal usually consisted of two apples and seven crackers, John Harvey Kellogg had wanted to create a nutritious, ready-to eat breakfast food. (He dismissed oatmeal as a “half-cooked, pasty, dyspepsia-producing breakfast mush.”) In 1893, he and Will took notice when a Denver lawyer with indigestion and the improbable name of Perky began to make money selling miniature pillows of what he called shredded wheat. Working after hours in the experimental kitchen, the brothers attempted to cook up a cereal of their own. They tried wheat, oats, and corn. They tried boiling, steaming, and baking. They tried mashing the cooked grains through a strainer. They tried rolling them out on a breadboard. They tried feeding them through rollers. Nothing tasted right. Then one night Will came across a batch of cooked wheat he’d accidentally left out for a day or two. He ran the stale mixture through the rollers; it came out in large, thin, well-formed flakes. When baked, they were crisp, crinkly, and tasty. The Doctor wanted to pulverize the flakes, but Will insisted that they be left intact. For once, the Doctor deferred to his younger brother. The Doctor christened the product—the first flaked breakfast cereal—Granose Flakes.
In 1895, the brothers began manufacturing Granose Flakes in a barn behind the San. That first year, despite minimal promotion (the Doctor permitted Will to advertise only in San publications), they sold almost fifty-seven tons. Will knew they could sell much more. He tried to convince his brother to let him advertise nationally, but the Doctor said no. Will pleaded for a catchier slogan than the Doctor’s “ready for solution by the digestive juice and for prompt assimilation,” but the Doctor was unmoved. In 1900, while the Doctor was away, Will visited several members of the San board of directors and told them that, given the opportunity, the San food business would someday be so large that the sanitarium itself would be a mere “side show.” (Even then, the idea of eclipsing his brother seems to have been on Will’s mind.) The directors thought Will was getting carried away. But they agreed to let him build a small factory behind the Sanitarium bakery to house the Granose operation. When the Doctor returned from his trip and heard that the factory cost $50,000, he was furious. Saying he had not authorized the project, he insisted that his brother pay for it. (“I guess my father did not like that very well,” Will’s son would testify in court many years later.) Will, who had to beg friends and relatives for the money, eventually paid off the debt. But he never forgave his brother. And when, a few months later, the Doctor pressed ahead on moving the San’s business office, although it would interfere with a longtime employee’s wedding plans, Will exploded. During the argument that followed, he quit.
After twenty-one years at the San, Will would not find it easy to cut ties to his brother. On February 18, 1902, six months after he left, the San burned to the ground. Having spent more than half his life there, Will felt a responsibility to help rebuild the place in which he had invested so much. He offered to work without pay for “as long my services were needed.” The Doctor put him in charge of financing the new building. Fifteen months after the fire, during which Will had worked eighteen-to-twenty-hour days, a new San rose from the ashes: a six-story, 560-foot long, 1,200-bed Italian Renaissance edifice with mosaic marble floors, a solarium, a roof garden, a gymnasium, and a glass-domed courtyard filled with orchids, orange trees, and twenty-foot banana palms. Somehow, in the excitement, Will forgot that he was quitting.
Indeed, he might never have broken permanently with his brother had it not been for C. W. Post, a thirty-six-year-old inventor, real estate broker, and blanket manufacturer from Fort Worth who had arrived at the San in 1891 with a ten-gallon Stetson, an emaciated frame, and an empty bank account. Though he stayed at the San for nine months and gained almost fifty pounds—his wife sold homemade suspenders door-to-door to keep him there—Post pronounced his treatment a failure. He may not have believed in the San’s curative powers, but he believed in its financial possibilities. In 1892, he opened a scaled-down, cut-rate, meat-serving version of the San across town. A few years later, Post—who had spent much of his time at the San sniffing around its experimental kitchen and peppering the staff with technical questions—began to market Postum, a bran-and-molasses coffee substitute that bore more than a passing resemblance to the Doctor’s Caramel Cereal Coffee. The Doctor was magnanimous, saying, “The more people there are who make such products, the more there are who are likely to use them. That is the important thing.” By 1898, when annual sales of Postum totaled $840,000, the Doctor was less gracious, insinuating that Post was a charlatan and a plagiarist. (That the Texan happened to be a dismayingly tall man, from the Doctor’s perspective, cannot have helped matters.) By 1903, when Post’s fortune was estimated at $10 million, the Doctor became apoplectic at the mere mention of the man’s name.
Will, on the other hand, was envious. Post was doing exactly what Will had urged the Doctor to do: pouring money into advertising and promotion. But Will could only watch as would-be tycoons flocked to Battle Creek in an entrepreneurial hegira as frenzied as the California Gold Rush a half-century earlier—a kind of Michigan Cereal Rush. By 1902, there were thirty-two cereal companies in town. Many of them lured away San employees with the promise of higher salaries. Others copied San products and gave them snappy new names, like Malta-Vita, Malta Pura, Norka Oats, Tryabita, Apetiza, X-Celo Flakes, Cero-Fruito, Grain-O, Malt-Too, Flak-Ota, Cereola, Frumenta, Per-Fo, Force, Vim, Egg-O-See, and Mapl-Flakes. “Battle Creek has twenty-one thousand people,” observed a visitor from Chicago, “all of whom are engaged in the manufacture of breakfast foods.”
It galled Will to slave sixteen hours a day for meager pay while others made fortunes pirating the San’s work. He begged his brother to let him take on their competitors. The Doctor refused. Not only was he parsimonious by nature, he worried that associating his name with commercial advertising would jeopardize his reputation in the medical community. The American Medical Association already looked askance at his fondness for hydrotherapy, vegetarianism, and massage. In any case, he’d rather invent something new than promote something old. The Doctor considered the San’s products to be outgrowths of his real work: spreading the Biologic Living gospel. “I am not after the business,” he said. “I am after the reform.” Will, who was after the business, grew frustrated with his brother. At times they quarreled fiercely; at times they stopped speaking to each other. Hoping, at least, to distinguish the San cereals from their imitators, Will suggested they use his name on the packaging, making it clear that Will, not the Doctor, was endorsing the product and thereby protecting the Doctor from accusations of venality. The Doctor gave in. In 1903, these red-inked words began appearing on a few San products: “Beware of imitations. None genuine without this signature. W. K. Kellogg.” It was a first step not only in differentiating San products from those of their competitors, but in differentiating Will (or W.K., as he would soon be known to the world) from his brother. There was, it seemed, another Kellogg in Battle Creek.
Most of the new companies peddled wheat flakes. Few made cereals from corn, which was considered a lesser grain—“horse food,” some called it. In 1898, the Kellogg brothers had produced a flaked corn cereal, but it lacked flavor. In 1902, they added malt to their flakes, which gave them a richer, nuttier taste. The brothers argued over what to call their new product. Will lobbied for “Kellogg’s Toasted Korn Krisp,” but the Doctor insisted on “Sanitas Flakes.” Once again, the Doctor discouraged promotion, insisting that their mail order sales were perfectly respectable. “I’m not interested in a mail order business,” Will told an associate. “I want to sell those corn flakes by the carload.” Fed up with his brother, galvanized by Post (who was pushing a flaked corn cereal of his own called Elijah’s Manna), Will forged ahead without the Doctor’s permission. He sent salesmen door to door with free samples. He advertised in newspapers, put up streetcar signs, and sponsored store window displays. Reasoning that there were more well people in the world than sick people, he marketed corn flakes as something tasty rather than something healthy: “A BREAKFAST TREAT—THAT MAKES YOU EAT”—hardly Madison Avenue–caliber genius, but an improvement on the Doctor’s “ready for solution by the digestive juice and for prompt assimilation.” In 1905, while the Doctor was on a trip to Europe, Will did the unthinkable—he coated the flakes with sugar. When the doctor returned, he “had a fit,” recalled Will’s son. But sales soared and the sugar stayed.
The end would come not long afterward, when an insurance executive from St. Louis who had enjoyed Sanitas Flakes as a patient at the San offered to help finance a company devoted solely to corn flakes. Will presented the idea to his brother. The Doctor wasn’t interested. Will offered to buy the corn flake rights from his brother. They haggled for six months before the Doctor, still in debt from the fire, settled for $35,000 cash and more than half the new company’s stock. In February 1906, Will opened the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company in a ramshackle, one-story wooden building with a single oven left behind by its previous occupant, a failed cereal start-up named Hygienic Food, erstwhile purveyor of Mapl-Flakes. Although Will was president and chief executive, the Doctor, as majority stockholder, retained the controlling interest. Not believing his brother’s company would amount to much, the frugal Doctor distributed chunks of his stock to San physicians in lieu of salary increases before traveling to Russia to observe the work of a physiologist named Ivan Pavlov. He returned several months later to find that while he had been watching dogs salivate, his younger brother had been tracking down and buying up the stock that the Doctor had so cavalierly given away. Will now had the controlling interest in his own company. On the eve of his forty-sixth birthday, he was no longer his brother’s lackey.
* * *
In the animal kingdom, some sibling groups get along famously: wild turkey brothers are lifelong companions, adolescent peregrine falcons teach each other to hunt. Others turn against each other as they attempt to establish dominance or compete for food, in scenes that make mealtime in the Joyce or Coleridge households seem downright tame. The female blue-footed booby usually lays one egg more than she and her mate can successfully feed, triggering a round of avian musical chairs in which the eldest chick in the nest may peck to death the youngest chick in order to increase its own chances of survival. The blue-footed booby is one of about two dozen bird species—including the cattle egret, the tawny eagle, the brown pelican, and the kittiwake—that routinely engage in siblicide. Among mammals, siblicide is less common, but researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, filming the births of cubs in pens, found that spotted hyenas routinely attack their younger sibling within minutes of its birth, sinking their teeth into its shoulder blades and shaking, in order to decrease the competition for their mother’s milk. Sand tiger sharks get a head start: they devour one another inside their mother’s womb until only one shark is left to be born. Spadefoot tadpoles are more considerate; they taste other tadpoles before devouring them in order to determine whether their prospective meal is a relative. If they accidentally swallow a sibling, they spit it out, but if food is scarce, they become less gastronomically discriminating and gobble up any passing tadpole, related or not.
Most sibling rivalry in the animal kingdom doesn’t end in death, of course. Piglets, for instance, are born with eight temporary “needle” teeth they use to fight for a position nearest the sow’s head, where the nipples deliver the most milk. Aggressive piglets thrive; their kinder, gentler siblings, forced to settle for the less productive teats in the rear, may become runts. Evolutionary biologists point out that sibling rivalry in Homo sapiens serves a similar function, as an adaptive response to limited resources. Sibling rivalry, they say, is perfectly natural. Indeed, psychologists point out that some sibling rivalry may be healthy. It may teach a child lessons he’ll need in the wider world: how to cooperate, negotiate, and compromise; how to manage and resolve frustration. (I doubt it occurred to Ned or me as we squabbled over the marshmallows in a box of Lucky Charms that we were learning conflict-resolution skills.) It may, as the Eisenhower parents hoped, teach toughness. Children who haven’t been exposed to the rigors of in-house rivalry may be ill-equipped to fight for a seat on the subway or to win a job in a recession. (In China, critics of the government’s one-child-per-family policy complain that the pampered male children that result—known as “little emperors”—have never learned to overcome obstacles or “eat bitterness.”) Rivalry may spur a sibling to greater accomplishment in the wider world. If John and Will Kellogg had been only children, the corn flake might never have been invented.
And if George W. Bush had been an only child, he might never have become president. From an early age, George and his younger brother Jeb competed fiercely to prove their worth to the father they idolized. George, seven years older than Jeb, seemed the front-runner. Like his father, he attended Andover and Yale and, after graduation, went to Texas to get into the oil business. Unlike his father, however, he was a C student, an unexceptional athlete, and a disappointing oilman. He was also a joker, a braggart, and a drinker. If George was “the family clown,” as his youngest brother, Marvin, described him, Jeb was the family striver. Responsible, articulate, and hardworking, he finished the University of Texas in three years, and, like his father, made Phi Beta Kappa. Jeb was the first son to marry, the first to have children, the first to become wealthy, the first to consider following his father into politics. At six feet four, he was also the tallest, an issue about which George, five inches shorter, was sensitive. At a certain point, it was evident that Jeb had outgrown his older brother in maturity as well, and become his father’s heir apparent. (“I want to be able to look my father in the eye and say, ‘I continued the legacy,’” Jeb told a reporter.) Sensing his father’s disappointment in him, believing both his parents preferred Jeb, George embraced his role as the profane, wisecracking, hard-drinking, chip-on-the-shoulder rebel. (At a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth II, he introduced himself to the British monarch as “the black sheep of the family.”) He was a rebel with a thin skin. Attending a Houston Astros baseball game, George fumed when Jeb and his son were seated in their father’s vice-presidential box while he was assigned a seat several rows behind them.
In 1986, at the age of forty, George gave up drinking and became an evangelical Christian. Seven years later, knowing that Jeb was running for governor of Florida, George shocked his family by announcing that he was running for governor of Texas. His mother urged him not to, worried that he’d take the limelight—and the financial contributions—away from Jeb. The brothers’ relationship, never close, grew strained as they competed not only against their gubernatorial opponents but, indirectly, against each other. When George won and Jeb lost, the Bush parents couldn’t conceal their surprise. “Why do you feel bad about Jeb?” George asked his father, talking on the phone on election night. “Why don’t you feel good about me?” By the time Jeb won the Florida governorship in 1998, George was planning to run for the presidency, which he would win only when Jeb swallowed his envy and worked to help George take Jeb’s home state. Even then, their mother made a joke of her astonishment that it was George and not Jeb who was running for president.
Growing up in Georgia, Ray Guy used to kick a football with his older brother, who took fiendish joy in booting the ball over Ray’s head and making him retrieve it. “When I started, I was just trying to make the ball do what Al did with it,” Guy explained. “I’d experiment: how to hold the ball, how to drop it. I had no clue what the hell I was doing. I just knew that one day I was going to kick it over Al’s head and make him go chase after it.” The younger Guy would become the greatest punter in National Football League history, one of thousands of professional athletes whose skills were honed in backyard games against their siblings. In large families, the competition multiplies exponentially. Growing up on a farm in Alberta, Canada, the seven Sutter brothers competed ferociously in everything from hay baling to bathroom access to pond hockey. “Going out to catch the school bus, we’d have had five fights by the time we’d get to the end of [the] lane,” recalls Brian, the second oldest. Six of the seven Sutters would go on to play in the National Hockey League, one of more than 230 sets of brothers to reach the NHL. (The National Football League has had more than 330 sets of brothers, Major League Baseball more than 350.) In 1980, when Brian’s St. Louis Blues played Darryl’s Chicago Blackhawks, the first of hundreds of NHL games in which Sutters played Sutters, fraternal pride took a backseat to sibling rivalry. “I would have run over him if that’s what it had taken for us to win,” said Brian. “If anything, I tried harder when he was out there. The last thing any of us wants to do is lose to one of our brothers.” Especially if that brother is younger. As Peyton Manning put it, in a radio ad promoting a 2006 football game between the Indianapolis Colts, the team he quarterbacked, and the New York Giants, quarterbacked by his younger brother, Eli, “You’re not supposed to lose to your little brother.” (He didn’t.)
Given that brothers under the age of seven fight every seventeen minutes, it may not be surprising that seven pairs of American brothers have won Olympic medals in wrestling or boxing. In most of these cases, the brothers were each other’s first, unofficial opponents. When fifteen-year-old Leon Spinks took up boxing to defend himself against the gangs that roamed his St. Louis housing project, he’d come home from the gym each night and practice on his brother Michael. Three years younger and desperate to emulate his older brother, Michael followed Leon to the gym. “We were like race horses racing each other,” said Michael. “Leon never could stand to see me outdo him, especially in boxing. He says he’s supposed to set the examples.” Both won gold medals at the 1976 Olympics, both became world champions. Jerry Quarry and his younger brother, Mike, literally fought each other for the attention of their father, a hard-luck day laborer and sometime boxer bent on turning his sons into prizefighters. As they grew, their father, who served as their co-manager, made them spar. Jerry, six years older and twenty-five pounds heavier, always got the better of his little brother, but Mike heeded their father’s motto, “There’s no quit in a Quarry,” and their battles invariably ended in brawls. Unfortunately, the Quarrys, both of whom went on to distinguished ring careers, followed their father’s motto too faithfully, boxing long after they should have retired and developing symptoms of pugilistic dementia, in which repeated blows to the head cause the brain to atrophy. Shortly before his death in 1999 at the age of fifty-three, Jerry, by now unable to feed or dress himself, apologized to Mike for hitting him so hard when they were young. Seven years later, Mike would die in an assisted-living facility, unable to walk or talk.
Like the theater managers who played up the rivalry between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, Harry Houdini understood that fraternal competition could be good for business. A master showman about whom a friend said he “would murder his grandmother for publicity,” Houdini staged a mock rivalry with his younger brother, Theo, also a well-known escape artist, in which they traded boasts and accusations in the press to boost ticket sales. Underneath the fake rivalry, however, there lurked a measure of real rivalry, mostly on Harry’s side. Theo worshiped his older brother, who had taught him most of his illusions and escapes, and had given him his stage name, “Hardeen.” Houdini, for his part, was perfectly happy for Hardeen to do well—as long as he didn’t do as well as Houdini. (Houdini was also keenly aware that while he and his wife were unable to have children, his younger, taller, stronger brother had sired two.) When Hardeen took their faux rivalry a little too far, suggesting to an interviewer that his admiration for the legendary Houdini was so great that he might even be willing to hire him as his assistant, an enraged Houdini forgot that the insult was part of the act he himself had invented. “There was nothing synthetic about his anger,” Hardeen recalled.
Authentic fraternal anger can be highly profitable. After serving in the German Army during World War I, Rudolf and Adolf Dassler returned to the Bavarian village of Herzogenaurach and started a sports shoe company in the laundry room of their family home. With Rudi overseeing sales and younger brother Adi overseeing design, Gebrüder Dassler flourished. (At the 1936 Olympics, Jesse Owens won four gold medals in Dassler spikes.) The brothers’ contrasting personalities, however, caused friction. Adi, a thoughtful, down-to-earth fellow, was happiest tinkering in his leather-littered workshop or taking long runs through the forest. Rudi was subject to mood swings that left him infectiously enthusiastic one minute, brash and bullying the next. Though they built partitions in the house they shared with their parents, their poisonous arguments reverberated throughout all three floors. In 1943, when the Nazis mobilized Rudi but told Adi he was more valuable to them at the Dassler factory making soldiers’ boots, Rudi suspected Adi of engineering his removal so he could take control of their company. In 1948, the brothers agreed to split. Rudi moved to the other side of the river that ran through town and started his own shoe company, calling it Puma. Adi renamed his business Adidas. (Herzogenaurach became known as “the town of bent necks,” because its citizens—most of whom worked for one brother or the other—were careful to notice what shoes someone wore before starting a conversation.) Engaging in cutthroat competition from their offices a few miles from each other, the brothers made fortunes as their rival companies dominated the sports shoe industry for decades. They never reconciled; when they died, they were buried as far as possible from each other in the town cemetery. Their sons, however, continued the feud, even as the companies they inherited continued to grow.
Brothers don’t have to work in the same field to push each other. “I would not have a career without my brother,” observed the actor John Malkovich, who used the memory of his daily childhood brawls with his older brother to inspire many of his performances. “He was imitating Danny,” Malkovich’s mother said of her son’s performance in True West, Sam Shepard’s play about fratricidal brothers. “All that craziness and fighting and destroying everything in sight—that was Danny. I’d stay in the kitchen and hum so I couldn’t hear them fighting.” (Danny, who woke up his younger brother by sitting on his head and drooling, would channel his aggressiveness into a career as a small-town newspaper publisher.)
According to his biographer James Atlas, Saul Bellow spent a lifetime trying to prove himself to the brothers with whom he shared a bed in childhood. Crude, aggressive boys, Maurice and Sam belittled their sickly, bookish baby brother’s literary aspirations. Even after Bellow won the National Book Award in 1953 for The Adventures of Augie March, they were dismissive. “It’s true that my name won’t go down in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but I have money, and he doesn’t,” said Maurice, a developer who drove a black Cadillac, brandished a thick roll of bills, and liked to tease Saul by asking him who “Prowst” was. Sam, a nursing-home magnate, pointed out that while Saul’s books could be found in the library, he still had to turn to his older brothers for handouts. Bellow, whose fictional portraits of philistine businessmen were inspired by Maurice and Sam, impressed the literary critics, but he couldn’t impress his brothers. “A lot of people in my family just think I’m some schmuck with a pen,” he told a friend. A few years later, when he was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, Bellow marveled, “All I started out to do was show up my brothers.”
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Will Kellogg liked to say he was “an old man” when he finally went into business for himself, but like the stone released from a slingshot, whose thrust is directly proportional to the force with which it has been restrained, he quickly made up for lost time. In his first year, he handed out four million free samples, convinced that once people tried his corn flakes, they’d continue to buy them. He spent $30,000—one third of the company’s initial working capital—on a single full-page ad in Ladies’ Home Journal. By the end of 1906, Will was indeed selling corn flakes by the carload: 178,943 cases in that first year alone. The following year, when some stray Independence Day fireworks set off a blaze that demolished his factory, Will had a Chicago architect on site within twelve hours and a new, fireproof plant in full production within six months. In 1907, while the Doctor was abroad, Will, observing that “the word ‘Sanitas’ partakes too much of a disinfectant,” changed the name of his product to Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes. His promotion grew ever more aggressive. “Please Stop Eating Toasted Corn Flakes for Thirty Days,” one ad implored, explaining that production needed time to catch up with sales. There were baby picture contests; food-show demonstrations; mail-order premiums; sandwich men walking the streets in eight-foot papier-mâché ears of corn; a thirty-inch Tiffany urn for the farmer who grew the best-looking corn; and a girl-next-door type plucked from the stenography pool to represent the company as “The Sweetheart of the Corn.” Will may have absorbed more of his brother’s Barnumesque flair than he cared to admit. In 1912 he erected an 80-by-106-foot electric billboard—the largest advertising sign in the world—on the roof of the Mecca Building in Times Square. It showed a boy’s face. When the words “I WANT KELLOGG’S” appeared, the boy began to cry. When the words “I GOT KELLOGG’S” appeared, the boy smiled. By now Will was running a million-dollar-a-year business. He had come a long way from trotting alongside his brother’s bicycle, taking dictation.
The Doctor was infuriated by his brother’s success. The way he saw it, he had given Will a job and an identity, and his brother repaid him by becoming a greater traitor than C. W. Post. The Doctor had never brooked challenges to his authority. Now he tried to put his younger brother back in his place. He insisted that Will, as manager of the Sanitas Food Company, was technically still his employee, and was therefore entitled to only one quarter of the $250 monthly salary he received as president of the new company. For nearly a year, the Doctor made Will sign his paychecks over to him, whereupon he returned one fourth of the amount and kept the rest for himself. This bit of petty harrassment triggered an escalating game of sibling Got You Last. Will resigned his position in the Sanitas Food Company. The Doctor resigned as a director of the Toasted Corn Flake Company. Will removed the picture of the Battle Creek Sanitarium from his corn flake packages. The Doctor began printing his cereal boxes with the legend “Sanitas Toasted Wheat Flakes is the only flaked product which has a legitimate pedigree.” When rumors circulated that Will’s new corn flake company had cheated the Doctor’s Sanitas company out of five thousand dollars, Will was convinced that his loose-lipped brother was the source. “For twenty-two and one-half years, I had absolutely lost all my individuality in you,” he wrote the Doctor. “I tried to see things with your eyes and do things as you would do them. You know in your heart whether or not I am a rascal. You also know whether or not I would defraud anyone, under any circumstances.”
But these were minor skirmishes. The war began in 1908, when the Doctor, claiming he had never liked the name, changed the Sanitas Nut Food Company to the Kellogg Food Company. Will was outraged. The Doctor had never shown the slightest interest in using the Kellogg name on his products—indeed, he had insisted on not using it—until his brother began printing it on his corn flake boxes. The Doctor, said Will, was trying to reap the benefits of the advertising dollars Will had spent to “make the name Kellogg’s of some value.” The Doctor countered that he was the one whose work at the San had made the name Kellogg valuable, and anyone seeing the name on a cereal box would assume that it referred to him. Will called on the Doctor and demanded that he stop using the name Kellogg on his products. The meeting quickly turned acrimonious. “Having been importuned for many hours in a most strenuous manner,” the Doctor would later testify, he agreed to stop using the name, “purely as a matter of brotherly regard.” (That his brother agreed to pay him $50,000 for the gesture surely didn’t hurt.) A few days later, however, when Will’s lawyers presented him with a contract to that effect, the Doctor refused to sign. Later still, the Doctor relented and telephoned Will to inform him that, “as an evidence of goodwill,” he had decided to drop the name Kellogg from his Toasted Rice Flakes. But the following day, when he learned that Will had enticed away one of his sales managers, the Doctor’s goodwill evaporated and he retracted his offer. On August 11, 1910, Will filed suit to keep his brother from using the name Kellogg “either in a corporate name or as a descriptive name of a food.” The issue was literal: which brother had the legal right to put the family name on his products? It was also figurative: which brother was the “original and the genuine” Kellogg?
The suit would be settled the following year with an out-of-court compromise in which the Doctor agreed not to use the word Kellogg on any flaked cereal food or display it conspicuously on any packaging. The truce lasted a few months. When Will tried to trademark the facsimile of his signature, the Doctor filed suit, triggering another series of legal maneuvers that kept the brothers in and out of court for several more years. The jousting would culminate in what newspapers called “The Battle of Bran.” A longtime proselytizer for bran’s laxative qualities, the Doctor had for several years been selling a breakfast cereal he called, with his unerring ear for mouth-watering names, Battle Creek Diet System Sterilized Bran. In 1915, the Doctor changed its name to Kellogg’s Sterilized Bran, insisting that the 1911 agreement applied only to flaked cereals. In any case, he argued, the name change wouldn’t harm his brother’s business, because Will didn’t sell any bran products. At the same time, the formerly ad-phobic doctor began advertising Kellogg’s Sterilized Bran in national publications. It was a shot across his brother’s bow.
Will returned fire. Shortly after the name change, he suddenly discovered that he had a passion for bran. He began manufacturing Kellogg’s Toasted Bran Flakes, followed closely by Kellogg’s Flaked Bran, then Kellogg’s Bran in granular form. Accusing Will of invading the bran market purely from spite, the Doctor sued. Will countersued. The suits came to trial in 1917. After three weeks of testimony, the judge ruled against the Doctor on every major point: Will, he reiterated, was the exclusive owner of the trade name Kellogg. Three years later, the ruling would be upheld unanimously by the Michigan State Supreme Court. Showing his brother a measure of mercy, Will agreed to waive his right to damages as long as the Doctor paid legal costs for both sides—a not insignificant $225,000. When a payment of $78,620.54 came due, Will went out of his way to let the Doctor’s friends know that he would insist on collecting every last one of those fifty-four cents. Ten years of legal battles were over, but the brothers’ estrangement was complete.
For more than a decade, the Kelloggs had seen each other primarily in court. During that time, the Doctor’s other antagonists had left the battlefield. In 1914, C. W. Post, hobbled by a chronic digestive ailment and beset by depression, shot himself in his ailing stomach with a hunting rifle and died at fifty-nine. A year later, eighty-seven-year-old Ellen White (who, rightly suspecting that the San had become more important to her former protégé than the church, had “disfellowshipped” the Doctor in 1907), died in California. As in Hollywood Westerns after the smoke clears, only the Kellogg brothers were left to fight. There were periods of relative calm, ruffled only by minor annoyances, as when mail for one Kellogg was mistakenly delivered to the other. When feeling run-down, Will even checked himself into the San for short stays, though he complained bitterly about the place while he was there. But inevitably, something would come up—one of Will’s salesmen would discover one of the Doctor’s cereals on a grocery store shelf it wasn’t legally allowed to be on—and the injunctions would fly. At times, Will wouldn’t talk to his brother on the phone without having his vice-president listen in on an extension. When Will met a man who had recently left his brother’s employ, he congratulated him: “Your happiness is just beginning.”
Will seemed determined to pay back his brother for his years of abuse. When the Doctor brought out a pulverized zwieback-and-vitamin snack called Pep, and it sold well, a jealous Will did some research and learned that a small candy manufacturer in New York City had already trademarked that name. Will dispatched a Kellogg lawyer to visit the man, one J. W. Surbrug of Surbrug’s Nut Products. Surburg told the lawyer that someone named John Kellogg of Battle Creek had recently offered him $5,000 for the name. Surbrug was holding out for $7,500. Will instructed his lawyer to pay the $7,500. Two days later, the Doctor called on the candy manufacturer and was told he had lost out over a mere $2,500 to a lawyer named Clarke. The Doctor was forced to destroy thousands of preprinted Pep cartons. When he found out that it was his brother who had bought the rights from under his nose, he was doubly incensed. The Doctor renamed his snack Zep, but had to abandon his plans when his brother filed suit for trademark infringement. Meanwhile, Will cooked up a granulated cereal, called it Pep, and made another fortune.
The Doctor fought back with the means at his disposal. In 1917, five years after the death of his beloved Puss, at the height of the fraternal lawsuits, Will began showing up at the San to take Carrie Staines, a staff physician, for rides in his car. The Doctor told Staines she’d be fired if she continued to date his brother. Challenged by his brother’s opposition, fifty-seven-year-old Will, who had vowed never to remarry (“I made one woman unhappy. Why should I inflict myself upon another?” he said), suddenly proposed. The wedding took place on New Year’s Day, 1918. (The Doctor was not invited.) But Will and his bride had little in common except their introversion and their devotion to their work. In the second year of their marriage, Will left his wife at home while he went on a five-month cruise to the Orient with a friend. As time went on, and they led increasingly separate lives, it was hard not to escape the conclusion that even when it came to marriage, Will was motivated by a desire to spite his brother.
* * *
Even as they battered each other in court, the Kelloggs goaded each other to greater achievements. The San prospered in the magnificent new building Will’s work had made possible, its 1,390 beds filled with movers and shakers, including the novelist Upton Sinclair (whose 1906 exposé of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, had given vegetarianism a boost); the automobile mogul Henry Ford (who brought along his own square dance band); the aviator Amelia Earhart (who took the Doctor for a spin above the San, permitting him a God’s-eye view of his creation); the Olympic swimmer and Tarzan impersonator Johnny Weissmuller (who broke one of his records in the San pool, a feat the Doctor attributed to the salubrity of the San cuisine); and the grape juice tycoon Charles Edgar Welch (who liked the San so much he returned thirty-one times). Not every celebrity signed up for the full enema-and-Nuttose regimen, but the Doctor was flexible when it came to the famous, whose photos mingled on his office walls with portraits of Greek philosophers. Given the Doctor’s nose for publicity, it was surely no coincidence that the San’s 100,000th patient, registered by the Doctor with a maximum of fanfare, happened to be former President William Howard Taft. In 1916, in the midst of the Bran Wars, the Doctor organized a three-day celebration of the San’s fiftieth anniversary that culminated in a torchlight parade through the streets of Battle Creek with seven bands, twenty-three floats, a fireworks display, and a keynote address by the San habitué William Jennings Bryan.
In his sixties, the Doctor still put in eighteen-hour days: inventing foods (chocolate-caramel laxatives he called Paramels); bubbling over with ideas (unrealized plans for 800 acres of litchi trees in Battle Creek); and churning out books (The Itinerary of a Breakfast: A Popular Account of the Travels of a Breakfast Through the Food Tube and of the Ten Gates and Several Stations Through Which It Passes, Also of the Obstacles Which It Sometimes Meets). A half-century before Jane Fonda popularized workout tapes, the Doctor produced a 78 rpm record of himself leading calisthenics, so that patients could keep up their San-approved exercise at home. He revived the old Battle Creek College and cheered for its football team, which he predicted would be especially successful because of its customized San diet. (The administration dropped the sport after a single season, concluding that football was too violent to be healthy; Battle Creek locals suspected the real reason was that the team lost so many games.) He somehow found time to take up golf, though he played as quickly as possible, trotting from shot to shot. Linking Biologic Living to the increasing interest in eugenics, he created the Race Betterment Foundation and proposed a Eugenics Registry to encourage Americans to consider heredity when choosing a spouse. He founded Three-Quarter-of-a-Century Clubs, whose septuagenarian members pledged: “I hereby promise to do my best to attain the age of one hundred years.” The Doctor was determined to reach the century mark himself. He was even more determined to live longer than his brother.
Two miles away, the Corn Flake King, as he was dubbed by the press, focused on one thing: cereal. His office was decorated with a photo of the corn flake milling room at the Battle Creek plant. Like his brother, Will was an indefatigable worker. Unlike his brother, he had an eye for detail and an almost photographic memory. (The Doctor had always assumed that Will would take care of the details for him.) “He never forgot figures and could reel off data and statistics by the page, sales, carloadings, the price of grain,” a colleague recalled. Like his brother, Will was whip-smart. Unlike his brother, he was concise; when he asked someone for a minute of his time, he meant sixty seconds, no more. Like his brother, Will was frugal; on factory tours, he pointedly turned off unused lights as he went. Unlike his brother, he didn’t hesitate to take financial risks. “Attack boldly. Crack it or quit,” he told his executives. “The trouble with you men is that you don’t know how to lose money.” After the 1929 crash, when most companies were retrenching, Will ordered his executives to double the advertising budget, saying, “This is the time to go out and spend more money.” His boldness paid off. By the early 1930s, Kellogg was a $5.7 million company, with plants in Canada and Australia.
Will often said that he was motivated not by money but by competition. Those who knew him had no doubt as to its source. “Dominated as he was by an older brother for many years, Will Kellogg developed what is known today as an inferiority complex,” observed a psychologist friend. “In overcompensating for this complex, Mr. Kellogg went to limitless bounds and it is likely that this was the greatest driving force behind the success. He was going to show his brother, himself, and the world that he, too, had superior qualities.” (After so many years under the Doctor, Will did not like to be second in anything. On long drives, he’d urge his chauffeur to “open her up to seventy or eighty so that the other cars can’t pass us.”) Will delighted in proving doubters wrong. When a prominent San administrator sold his Kellogg’s stock early on, Will was annoyed. As the stock rose, whenever Will encountered the man, he’d take out his little black book—“Let’s see, now,” he’d say. “If you had held on to your several hundred shares . . .”—and gleefully calculate how many thousands the disbeliever’s stake would now be worth. It was, of course, an act of projection. The man he really wanted to prove wrong was his brother.
* * *
Sibling rivalry may push people to greatness; it may also do great damage. In a 2006 study, University of New Hampshire sociologists interviewed more than two thousand children (or their caregivers) between the ages of two and seventeen and found that 35 percent had been “hit or attacked” by a sibling in the previous year. This may not seem surprising, perhaps not even troubling. (In the Eisenhower and Kennedy households, it was business as usual.) Fourteen percent, however, were attacked repeatedly; 5 percent were hit hard enough to sustain cuts, bruises, chipped teeth, or broken bones; and 2 percent were hit with weapons—toys, broom handles, sticks, shovels, rocks, knives. If the attackers had been adults, the authors pointed out, they could have been arrested for assault and battery. Because they were children, however, their behavior could be dismissed as “roughhousing” or “horseplay,” with the observation that “boys will be boys.” Sibling violence, which tends to taper off as children enter adolescence and turn outside the family for companionship, is found most often in large families composed of closely spaced boys and in families in which parents are physically or emotionally absent.
Although sibling violence among Homo sapiens is fairly common, it rarely ends in death. (One is more likely to kill one’s child, parent, or spouse than one’s brother.) Literature, on the other hand, teems with fratricide and near-fratricide, from the mythical Romulus, who killed his identical twin, Remus, in an argument over where to build the city of Rome (not altogether surprising given that their father was Mars, the god of war), to Claudius, who killed his brother, Hamlet, married his sister-in-law, and became king of Denmark (one of several fratricidal brothers in Shakespeare), to Cal Trask (“sharp and dark and watchful”), who heedlessly drives his straight-arrow twin, Aron (“a boy you like before he speaks and like more afterwards”), to his death in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Steinbeck, who grew up the only boy among three sisters, was inspired to write the novel by his two sons, to whom he would dedicate the book. He was fascinated by how different they were: one troubled and defiant, the other more easygoing and well-mannered. Steinbeck, who had a tendency to view life in dichotomous terms, told a friend that he saw Cain and Abel—whose story he called “the basis of all human neurosis”—in his boys. They were five and three at the time. Both would grow up to serve in Vietnam, become writers, and struggle with addiction. According to the younger brother’s wife, East of Eden acted as a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Whenever the brothers got together, wrote Nancy Steinbeck in The Other Side of Eden, they’d drink themselves senseless while engaging in a “primal tug of war” over “who had it worse when they were kids. And who had more delayed stress from Vietnam. And who drank more or fought less with their girlfriends. Even, which one Mother loved more.”
John Cheever, whose fiction abounds with rivalrous and fratricidal brothers, had a fraught relationship with his own brother. They were inseparable in youth, when Fred, a bluff, athletic boy almost seven years older, had been, as John told a therapist years later, “mother, father, brother and friend” to him. But their relationship had what Cheever called “an ungainly closeness” (the biographer Blake Bailey suggests it may have been sexually as well as emotionally incestuous), and at twenty-two John left small-town Massachusetts to become a writer in New York. Fred would become the kind of alcoholic, failed businessman about whom Cheever wrote with sorrowful affection in his fiction. If in life Cheever couldn’t resolve his feelings for his brother—his journal entries about Fred are a stew of contempt, resentment, and adoration, all of them complicated by the guilt he felt over his own bisexuality—he did his best to rid himself of his brother in his work. In the short story “Goodbye, My Brother,” the narrator, irritated with his youngest brother’s behavior at a family reunion, impulsively bashes him over the head with a piece of driftwood. In May 1976, as Cheever was finishing the novel Falconer, whose main character is a college professor imprisoned for murdering his brother with a fire iron, he visited his ailing brother. “I killed you off in Falconer,” John told him. “Oh good, Joey, good,” Fred, using his brother’s family nickname, replied. “You’ve been trying all these years.” A few weeks later, when his flesh-and-blood brother died of a massive heart attack, Cheever felt some relief. As the months went on, however, he felt restless and bereft. His relationship with Fred was, he told his daughter, “the strongest love of my life.” Several years before his own death in 1982, talking with his biographer Scott Donaldson, Cheever said, “Some people have parents or children. I had a brother.”
Far more common than actual fratricide is the symbolic fratricide in which rivalrous siblings break off contact and become, figuratively, dead to each other, like the Moses brothers, who didn’t speak to each other for twenty years, or the Clarks, who didn’t speak to each other for thirty-four. Sigmund Freud’s grandsons Lucian, the painter, and Clement, the politician and television personality, went more than fifty years without exchanging a word. Some say the Freuds fell out in the 1950s when Lucian asked his younger brother for a loan to pay off a gambling debt. Others date it back to a boyhood race that Clement was about to win when Lucian called out, “Stop, thief!” A passerby detained Clement, and Lucian sprinted past his furious brother to the finish line. Either way, the brothers were famously, nastily, estranged. (Offered a knighthood, Lucian turned it down with the explanation, “My younger brother has one of those. That’s all that needs to be said on the matter.”) By the time of Clement’s death in 2009, Lucian had also stopped speaking to his older brother, Stephen, the owner of a hardware shop, but their estrangement was of shorter duration, lasting a mere decade or so.
Estrangement is harder when siblings live under the same roof. After several years of increasingly volatile arguments, a college student of my acquaintance hasn’t spoken to his older brother in five years. “I decided that if he wasn’t going to try to get along, I wouldn’t either.” When he comes home on vacation, they avoid eye contact, refuse to acknowledge each other, and take pains never to be in the same room, which, given that their bedrooms are next to each other, requires careful choreography. If one brother walks into a room and finds the other there, the other brother will leave. “My parents insist that we are brothers and ought to be close,” says the student. He agrees. But as the years go by, he can’t imagine how they’ll repair the rift. At the same time, he can’t bear the thought of it continuing into their old age.
As children, Heinrich and Thomas Mann fought so fiercely for their mother’s affection that they went a year without speaking to each other, despite sharing a bedroom. But when Thomas decided to become a writer like his older brother, Heinrich encouraged him, commissioning reviews for the literary monthly he edited and inviting him to spend summers with him in Italy, where they wrote together, drank wine together, played dominoes together, and argued about art together. In May 1901, when Thomas, suicidally depressed, asked Heinrich to meet him in Venice, Heinrich came at once and spent much of the rest of the year at his brother’s side.
That same year, the publication of Buddenbrooks made Thomas famous. Critics began to compare and rank the writer-brothers. The competition kindled in childhood flared anew. In a 1903 review, Thomas criticized “the bellows-type of poetry which has been introduced in recent years from the beautiful land of Italy”; though he didn’t name Heinrich, his brother knew to whom he was referring and took offense. When Heinrich repeated some unflattering remarks he’d heard about his brother’s work, hypersensitive Thomas was furious. Their rivalry was exacerbated by their differences. Heinrich was a lifelong outsider who felt more at home in Italy and France, and wrote witheringly about his homeland. Thomas, a self-described “good” German, married a millionaire’s daughter, built a mansion in Munich and a summerhouse in the Bavarian hills, and settled into the kind of comfortable bourgeois life Heinrich satirized in his fiction. Heinrich felt his brother’s work was narcissistic and reactionary; Thomas felt his brother’s work was tasteless and hastily written. (In 1905, after Heinrich’s eighth book was published, Thomas wrote in his journal, under the heading “Anti-Heinrich,” “I consider it immoral to write one bad book after another out of fear of idleness.”) Thomas craved fame and ridiculed his brother’s progressive ideals; Heinrich felt it was a writer’s duty to speak out against injustice, yet was jealous of his brother’s commercial success. Neither approved of the other’s wife; each aligned himself with a different sister. “That you turn away from your brother and sister completely makes me very sad for you,” his mother wrote. “Hold to them, my dear Heinrich, send them now and then a few friendly lines, and do not let them see that you feel less appreciated by the literary world than Thomas is at the moment—or if you do, then that it does not affect you.” There were moments of hatchet-burying. In 1906, when one of Thomas’s books was savaged by a critic, Heinrich published a spirited defense. “It is like old times: someone attacks me, and my elder brother comes and avenges me,” Thomas wrote. That same year, taking notes for a new book, Thomas observed, “the fraternal problem still preoccupies me.”
The fraternal problem might have resolved had not the First World War intervened. Thomas defended militarism as an essential ingredient in his country’s character and called the war, in which thousands were slaughtered each day, a “festive struggle” that would have a “cleansing” effect on the nation. Heinrich, one of the few German intellectuals to oppose the war from the start, was appalled. The brothers refused to see each other, but from their writing desks a mile apart in Munich, they engaged in what their biographer Nigel Hamilton called “an act of mutual literary fratricide.” In 1915, Heinrich wrote an essay praising Zola’s stand in the Dreyfus case. The essay was an allegory, in which Heinrich identified himself with the “banned and silenced” Zola, and his brother with Zola’s nationalist persecutors. Reading the essay, Thomas wrote a friend, “rendered me ill for weeks.” He responded with Reflections of a Non-Political Man, a 650-page attack clearly aimed at Heinrich. By now, all Germany was aware of the rift between its two best-known writers. In 1917, Heinrich wrote Thomas a letter titled “Attempt at Reconciliation,” in which he insisted that he had always tried to defend, support, and understand his brother. Thomas was having none of it. “If you have found me a difficult brother, I naturally have found you even more so . . .” he replied. “Every line of your letter was dictated by moral smugness and self-righteousness. Don’t expect me to fall sobbing on your breast.” The letter concluded: “Let the tragedy of our brotherhood take its course to the bitter end. . . . Farewell.”
* * *
When there was nothing left to sue each other over, the Kelloggs found another arena in which to compete: philanthropy. The Doctor put most of his money into ad hoc charitable work. His own home, with its bumper crop of “waifs,” was a charitable work in itself, and when he could fit no more children into his house, he established a two-hundred-bed orphanage in Battle Creek and invited its occupants to use the playground and swimming pool at The Residence. In 1893, asking Chicago police to show him the “dirtiest and wickedest” part of the city, he opened a mission on the South Side that provided free medical care, baths, laundry service, San health foods, and San water treatments (which proved to be remarkably effective in sobering up drunkards). Three years later he opened a “Workingmen’s Home” that provided room and meatless board for four hundred homeless Chicago men, and instituted a “Life Boat Rescue Service,” in which pairs of nurses roamed the streets, trying to persuade prostitutes to find a new line of work. In Battle Creek, he organized “Christian Help Bands,” groups of San employees who visited the sick and poor to demonstrate healthy cooking and hygienic housekeeping. All this in addition to a regular slate of individualized giving. In 1895, his biographer Richard Schwarz points out, “while supporting a family of twenty-nine, he also paid the salaries of a Methodist and a Baptist missionary in India, met half of the expenses of ten boys in a mission school, and endowed two charity beds in the Seventh-Day Baptist hospital in Shanghai, a bed in the Adventist medical mission in Mexico, and one in the Battle Creek Sanitarium.”
Will scoffed at his brother’s scattershot approach, which often left his charitable programs sputtering as his interest turned elsewhere. “My brother is the best disorganizer in the world,” observed Will, who applied the same systematic efficiency to philanthropy that he applied to making corn flakes. The Doctor gave away his money as soon as it came in; Will let his money grow and then gave it away. Staked over the years to more than $66 million of Will’s own funds, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation became one of the largest charitable organizations in the United States. The man who had never learned how to play was determined that others might have that opportunity: he built schools, libraries, parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, gymnasiums, auditoriums, Boy Scout campgrounds, hospitals, bird sanctuaries, and farms. His generosity no doubt came from an innate sympathy for the less fortunate. He often anonymously covered a struggling employee’s rent payment or hospital bill, and he made Kellogg’s one of the first companies in the United States to institute eight-hour shifts and five-day weeks and provide life insurance, a health plan, and day care. But he also wanted to show that not only could he make more money than his brother, he could give more away. Indeed, the schools and sanctuaries and airports he funded were often named for himself; the man may have been shy, but he wanted to make sure people knew which Kellogg had donated them. In the last year of his life, he told his advisors that he wanted to drop his name from the title of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. When his advisors convinced him that it should retain the Kellogg name, he suggested that they eliminate his initials. “The only way I could stave off this suggestion,” recalled the foundation president, “was to tell Mr. Kellogg that to take the initials from the name of the Foundation would be to leave the public in wonderment as to which Kellogg (W.K. or John Harvey) was back of the Foundation.”
In all nonfraternal matters, Will preferred anonymity. Though he was now at least as famous as his brother, Will shunned publicity as if it were a toxic gas. He declined honorary degrees, refused to be listed in Who’s Who (observing that he “preferred to pay for any advertising”), and rarely appeared at public gatherings, especially those designed to honor him. If he couldn’t avoid being present, he sat in the back row. He agreed to attend the dedication ceremony for the W. K. Kellogg Auditorium and Junior High School on the condition that the speaker not mention him. When the man couldn’t resist thanking him in a single sentence, Will walked out. (The Doctor, by contrast, had been known to walk out in the middle of a medical conference if he felt that not enough fuss had been made over him.) When he gave the Youth Building to Battle Creek, Will refused a newspaper’s request for a photograph: “Print the Doctor’s picture,” he snapped. Kellogg employees knew not to gossip about their boss, who often traveled under a pseudonym to avoid being recognized. Asked to prepare a short autobiography, Will came up with a mere sixteen sentences, dismissing his quarter-century at the San in a single, inscrutable, brother-free phrase: “took a job in April, 1880, continued same 25 years.”
But Will was haunted by the past, recapitulating his rivalry with his brother in his relationships with the competitors he sued, with the former colleagues he needled, and, most tragically, with the family members he criticized. An insomniac ever since those late nights at the San, Will would lie awake and, in the notebook he kept at his bedside to jot down business ideas, take notes on what he wanted each of his children and grandchildren to accomplish. What he wanted most was for his son Lenn to take over the business someday. Like his father, Lenn was hardworking and ambitious; like his uncle, for whom he worked when he was young, stirring vats of steaming wheat flakes by hand, he was outgoing and creative. In seventeen years with Kellogg’s, he would be responsible for more than two hundred patents. But father and son found it no easier to coexist than brother and brother. Like the Doctor, Will rarely handed out compliments and didn’t tolerate failure, especially in his own family. (On a grandson’s twenty-first birthday, Will sent him a check and a note that ended with the admonition, “A Kellogg should always be successful.”) When Will took a five-month trip to the Far East in 1919, he left Lenn in charge; he returned to find the company in financial difficulty. Although the falloff was likely due to the postwar recession, Will blamed his son. The son, no less hard-headed than the father, protested, and they quarreled. Several years later, when Will was in Europe, Lenn, now president of the company, bought an oat-milling plant in Iowa. (As with the Doctor and Will, the trouble always seemed to begin when the boss was away.) The plant ended up losing heavily, and Will was furious. Not long afterward, Lenn divorced his wife to marry a young employee in the Kellogg office. Will, a strict moralist who had always interfered in his children’s personal lives, demanded his son’s resignation. Although father and son would eventually reconcile, they never worked together again.
Disappointed by his son, Will turned to his grandson, fourteen-year-old John L. Kellogg Jr. He took the boy to the plant and taught him the basics of manufacturing, shipping, and advertising. He made him stand next to him in the company lobby at Christmas, shaking the hand of every employee as he or she left for the holiday. He sent him a list of fifteen “SUGGESTIONS FOR ONE WHO WISHES TO HIT THE TRAIL SUCCESSFULLY, MAKE THE GRADE, PLAY THE GAME, AND WIN.” He put him through business college, gave him a five-month round-the-world trip for graduation, and, on his return, appointed him a vice president in the company at $10,000 a year. It proved to be too much too soon for the mercurial young man, who, like his great-uncle, fizzed with ideas and ambition but lacked his grandfather’s stick-to-it-iveness. Realizing that he might have brought his grandson along prematurely, Will cut his salary to $40 a week and put him on the road as a salesman. John hated sales and asked to be transferred to the experimental laboratory, where he came up with a process for puffing corn grits. When he tried to sell the rights to his own grandfather, Will was outraged, John resigned from the company, and Will brought an infringement suit against his grandson. Once again, a Kellogg family spat ended in court. “There was great affection between grandfather and grandson,” reflected a family friend. “However, there was something about the Kellogg breed . . . apparently there was no organization, house or other thing big enough to hold two male Kelloggs.” John moved to Chicago, where he started his own company to manufacture the cheese-coated puffed treats he called Nu-Corn. The following year, when a patent application for his Nu-Corn machine was rejected, the twenty-six-year-old entrepreneur, recently married and with a baby on the way, went to his office on a Sunday and shot himself.
* * *
Will went out of his way to help his employees enjoy themselves, but he didn’t know how to do so himself. He tried. He traded in his baggy old black suits for bespoke ones. He replaced his modest stucco home with a thirty-room Tudor mansion, complete with seven-car garage, tennis court, croquet pitch, greenhouse, $100,000 lawn sprinkler system, and Dutch windmill. He later added an 800-acre Arabian horse ranch in southern California, a home in Palm Springs, an Italian-style villa on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and an apartment building across the street from the San, from which he could keep an eye on his brother’s operation. After all those years minding the San while his brother went abroad, he began traveling: to Alaska, Hawaii, Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. And after all that Bromose and Nuttose, he feasted on his forbidden favorites—lobster, chocolate, and oysters—even after he began suffering from gout. A friend invited for lunch recalled Will pointedly remarking that “this was one Kellogg home where they served chicken.”
Despite his wealth, Will was no less shy than he had been as a boy. In news photographs taken with Tom Mix, Mary Pickford, and other Hollywood stars who came to his Sunday-afternoon Arabian horse shows, he looks as comfortable as a man submitting to an enema. He could talk with animation about the cereal business, but he fiddled with his watch chain when the conversation turned to anything else. “I would give the world to be able to get along with people as well as you do,” he told one of his few close friends. Underneath the forbidding exterior lay the insecure boy who had always felt inadequate next to his charismatic brother. “While Mr. Kellogg would rebuff any effusive thanks for his various generosities, he was a man literally starving to death for appreciation, understanding and compliments,” observed a friend. (The friend couldn’t have meant “literally” literally; the well-fed Will was as round as a grapefruit.) Although few dared approach the Corn Flake King, he was almost pathetically grateful when anyone did. A secretary who sent him flowers before the start of an ocean voyage was taken aback by the effusiveness of his thanks. A foundation staffer who sent him a birthday cake was touched by his obvious delight. Company executives called him Mr. Kellogg; it was an honor akin to knighthood when he gruffly gave someone permission to call him “W.K.” He was formal and self-conscious with his children, hugging them only when he knew no one was watching. “W.K. did not really approve of strong feelings of any kind unless pets were concerned,” said a friend. A relative who happened to be a therapist commented, “In all my long practice of psychiatry, I don’t know of a more lonely, isolated individual.”
For all his ebullience, the Doctor, too, was lonely. He had thousands of acquaintances around the world, many of them famous, but few close friends. His wife died in 1920, and he never remarried. He remained proudly and publicly celibate. He seemed hardly able to keep track of his adopted children; his parenthood had seemed less a labor of love than an experiment in the relative importance of nature and nurture. (When one of his adoptees, despite being raised on the San regime, became a drunkard who tried to blackmail his foster father, the Doctor became an even more fervent proselytizer for eugenics.) Other than his sister Clara, the only sibling with whom he had much contact—albeit antagonistic—was Will.
As the brothers aged and their lawsuits faded into the past, their relationship seemed, at times, almost guardedly cordial. The Doctor addressed an occasional letter to “Dear Brother Will,” and signed it, “As ever, your affectionate brother.” Will sent the Doctor cucumbers from his garden, and, on another occasion, orchids from his greenhouse. In turn, the Doctor sent Will some iris bulbs he’d transplanted from their ancestral home in western Massachusetts. At one point, Will invited his brother to use his Palm Springs home as a place to work; afterward, the Doctor wrote a thank-you note: “I am starting home tonight, and am writing this note to tell you how much I appreciate your courtesy.” Although Will took every opportunity to criticize his brother, he reserved that right for himself. An employee who had heard her boss make numerous derisive remarks about his brother was surprised when, out of the blue, Will said to her, “I never want to hear of you saying anything derogatory about Dr. Kellogg. I don’t want anyone around me to talk against my brother.”
Pride, however, kept both brothers from reaching out far enough to forgive each other. In the 1930s, when Battle Creek College was struggling, it was said that Will stood ready to give the college a million dollars, but wanted the Doctor to ask him for it. The Doctor didn’t; he wouldn’t. They did their best to avoid each other, but Battle Creek was a small town, and when they met by accident two or three times a year, they were both on edge. It didn’t take much to get them fighting again. Both brothers had the same favorite sister, Clara, who, after her children had grown, moved in with the Doctor and served as his secretary. One year, Will invited her to stay with him at his lakeside estate. Clara enjoyed her visit, but when she wrote a letter to the Doctor in which she mentioned that she missed him, the Doctor, like an aging knight rescuing a damsel who isn’t in distress, rushed over to Will’s house to fetch his elderly sister.
“She wants to come back,” he told his brother curtly.
“She doesn’t need to come home,” growled Will. “She is well cared for here.”
After an extended verbal tug of war, Clara went home with the Doctor.
* * *
Twenty years after Jacob hoodwinked Esau out of his birthright, the brothers met again. Hearing that Esau was approaching with an army of four hundred men, Jacob assumed that his brother had come to slay him and all his people. “But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.”
Rivalry usually mellows with age—even Joseph and his brothers ended up reconciling. Sometimes, however, it takes a glimpse of mortality to bring brothers together. In January 1922, fifty-year-old Heinrich Mann developed peritonitis. The surgery went well, but there were bronchial complications and for several days he lay near death. Terrified he might lose his brother, Thomas sent flowers and a card whose message ended, “Those were difficult days that lie behind us, but now we are over the hill and will get better—together if in your heart you feel as I do.” A week later, Heinrich was out of danger, and Thomas came to see him. They hadn’t spoken in seven years. A grateful Heinrich told him they should “never lose each other again.” Cautiously, they resumed their friendship. In 1927, Thomas refused a place in the Berlin Academy of Arts unless Heinrich was also elected. When Thomas was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize, Heinrich made a warm congratulatory speech on the radio. Heinrich didn’t even seem to mind when, at the ceremony installing him as president of the literature section of the Prussian Academy of the Arts in 1931, the chairman slipped and called him “Thomas.” In 1932, after Thomas praised his brother’s most recent novel, Heinrich thanked him, writing, “You were always, in every moment of my life, my closest friend, and here again you demonstrate it.”
The First World War had cemented their rift; the second solidified their reunion. As Hitler rose to power, Thomas joined Heinrich to become an outspoken opponent of fascism and a supporter of the democratic ideals his brother had long championed. In 1930, Thomas’s speech denouncing National Socialism was interrupted by the catcalls of SA men. In 1933, Heinrich’s books were burned on Goebbels’s orders. A Nazi Party newspaper called Heinrich “national vermin” and suggested he “should have a bomb put under him.” Heinrich escaped into France, carrying only an umbrella and a briefcase containing the notes for his next book. Later that year, after delivering a speech deemed insufficiently complimentary to Richard Wagner, Thomas was accused of “intellectual high treason.” He eventually fled with his family to the United States. When Heinrich was able to make his way to America in 1940, Thomas, who had arranged his brother’s entry visa, was at the dock in New York to meet him.
When they were young writers, Heinrich had looked after Thomas. In the United States, where Thomas was lionized as a giant of twentieth-century literature and Heinrich was all but unknown, Thomas played the paternal role. He got his seventy-year-old brother a job writing screenplays at Warner Brothers and, when that ended, helped support him with monthly checks. After Heinrich’s second wife killed herself in 1944, the older brother, lonely and ailing, grew ever more dependent on the younger. When Thomas fell ill with grippe and was taken to Chicago for treatment, Heinrich cabled him: “My beloved brother you must have the strength to live and you will. You are indispensable to your great purposes and to all persons who love you. There is one who would feel vain to continue without you. This is the moment for confessing you my absolute attachment.” Yet even in old age, the brothers were concerned with their relative rank in the literary pantheon. In 1950, not long before he died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of seventy-eight, Heinrich told his sister-in-law, “You know, of the two of us, Tommy is the greater, of that I am certain.” Six weeks before his own death of lung cancer in 1955, Thomas wrote to a friend, “my basic attitude toward him and his somewhat formidably intellectual work was always that of the little brother looking up at the elder. . . . It was an indescribable shock to me, and seemed like a dream, when shortly before his death Heinrich dedicated one of his books to me with the words: ‘To my great brother, who wrote Doctor Faustus.’ What? How? He had always been the great, the big brother. And I puffed out my chest and thought of Goethe’s remark about the Germans’ silly bickering over who was the greater, he or Schiller: ‘They ought to be glad they have two such sons.’”
* * *
Rivalry, psychologists point out, can be an expression of intimacy; a fight can, paradoxically, be a way of connecting. One sees this most clearly in childhood, when the fraternal mood can be as changeable as Mark Twain’s weather. “Frank had a violent love of beating me,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “but whenever that was superseded by any humour or circumstance, he was always very fond of me—& used to regard me with a strange mixture of admiration & contempt.” In Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, a small boy, watching the snow fall, matter-of-factly observes, “It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.” A friend of mine has thirteen-year-old twins. “They are each other’s best friends and worst enemies,” he tells me. “They fight over which one gets to go through a doorway first, yet if one gets invited to a birthday party or a sleepover, he won’t go without the other.” In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Jamie Tyrone, after telling his younger brother, Edmund, how jealous of him he has always been, adds, “But don’t get the wrong idea, Kid. I love you more than I hate you.” The muted rivalry between William and Henry James lasted a lifetime, but they were always each other’s best friend and never stopped writing each other long, newsy, affectionate letters, signing them “Bro” or “your brotha.” On his deathbed in 1910, William made his wife promise that she would be at his bachelor brother’s side when Henry himself approached the end. She was. In December 1915, Alice crossed the wartime Atlantic to nurse seventy-two-year-old Henry through his final months. “He thinks he is in foreign cities, among old friends,” she wrote to a friend of Henry’s, a few weeks before his death, “and that his brother William, the only one he asks for, will be coming in ere long.”
Plutarch, one of three brothers himself, compared the relatives and friends acquired by marriage to tools that can be replaced when lost, “yet the acquisition of another brother is impossible, as is that of a new hand when one has been removed or that of a new eye when one has been knocked out.” Even estranged brothers will always be brothers. Indeed, like the “dry alcoholic,” who no longer drinks but whose life now revolves around not drinking, estranged brothers can be more profoundly connected than brothers who get along but don’t really connect. My college acquaintance and his brother may not speak to each other, but as they tiptoe around the house, listening for the other’s every step, they are, perhaps, no less entwined than they would be if they were sitting side by side on the couch, talking about their days. “I try to stop thinking about him,” the student says. “But it’s impossible to stop thinking about him. He’s my brother.” Thomas Mann peppered his journal with scornful references to the brother he was estranged from and preoccupied with, while thoughts about their conflict filtered into his fiction. “When all is said and done, one ought to treat a rift like ours with respect, one ought not to try and take away its deadly seriousness,” he wrote to a friend, on the occasion of Heinrich’s fiftieth birthday. “Perhaps separated we are more brothers to one another than we would be at the same table, celebrating this occasion.”
No matter how rivalrous, no matter how malicious, brothers seem inexorably bound, unable and, perhaps, unwilling, to part, like the legendary German brothers who, fighting over a woman (their old nursemaid, it seems), built neighboring castles along the Rhone so they could keep an eye on each other. Or the Hungarian brothers who, with an entire state to choose from, set up rival restaurants across the street from each other in a tiny Wyoming town. Or the feuding California architects who, asked to design a college classroom building, each designed half the building, making sure his floors did not align with his brother’s. Yet the architects didn’t turn down the commission. They didn’t build separate buildings. And the feuding brothers who inherited their ancestral home in a town near ours in western Massachusetts didn’t sell it; they divided the house down the middle and, working side by side in silence, created two separate entrances, built two separate staircases, and painted each half of the house a different color. They have lived there, side by side, in silence, ever since. In Athol Fugard’s allegorical drama The Blood Knot, two South African brothers—one a dark-skinned black, the other light-skinned enough to pass as colored under apartheid’s classification system—find that despite their physical differences and their personal antipathy, they cannot escape each other. “You see, we’re tied together, Zach,” says Morrie, at the end of the play. “It’s what they call the blood knot . . . the bond between brothers.”
Several years ago, on a cross-country flight, my wife was seated next to two unaccompanied minors, brothers aged seven and ten. “For the entire five-hour trip, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. They were pinching, punching, slapping, pulling hair,” recalled Anne. “And yet just as suddenly, they’d be sweetly affectionate.” The younger boy clearly revered his older brother. When Anne asked the older brother if he played an instrument, the older brother listed four or five, including the kazoo. “And he’s great at all of them,” the younger brother volunteered. At one point, the younger brother nestled his head on his brother’s lap and the older brother stroked his hair. “It’s a very soft pillow,” the younger brother murmured. But a moment later, they were trying to demolish each other again. “They couldn’t help themselves—it was as if they’d been programmed,” Anne told me. “It was love or hate. There seemed to be nothing in between.” Anne, who grew up with an older brother with whom she never fought, was astonished that their obvious fondness for each other could not check their casual aggression. “Couldn’t you each keep your hands on your side of the armrest and not fight till we land?” she asked. The older brother looked surprised. He turned to Anne and, patiently, as if talking to a child, said, “But that’s what brothers do.”
* * *
The Kelloggs would have one last battle. In 1928, the San expanded again, adding a $4 million, fifteen-story, 265-room tower—the tallest building between Detroit and Chicago. The timing could hardly have been worse. Planned during the Roaring Twenties, the renovated San opened a year ahead of the Crash. At the height of the 1930 season, some 300 patients were rattling around in a facility designed for 1,300. But the San’s problems weren’t only financial. New members of the medical team were less willing to adhere to the Doctor’s Biologic Living standards. Some smoked on the premises. Some even suggested adding meat to the menu. The Doctor, it seemed, no longer had a “hypnotic” effect on his staff. Indeed, the quintessence of Biologic Living was ailing. He cut his workday to a mere twelve to fifteen hours and began spending his winters in Florida, where, in 1930, he opened the hundred-bed Miami–Battle Creek Sanitarium. The new San thrived, but the Battle Creek flagship went deeper into debt. In 1938, the San underwent bankruptcy reorganization, and the revamped board of directors reduced the aging Doctor to something of a figurehead, denying him even an office in which to see his patients—a humiliation that Will, who had gone officeless at the San for so many years, may have found fitting.
Although the octogenarian doctor was increasingly regarded as a harmless eccentric from another era, he remained indefatigable. He continued his culinary experimentation, no matter the consequences: who but the Doctor could boast of receiving a letter in which a young colleague consoled him, “I’m sorry to learn about the ToFu but I am glad that no one was injured.” He continued to stump for the importance of “getting the stomach right,” a task he likened to cleaning the Augean stables and to which he personally devoted efforts that can be described only as Herculean. Insisting that with the proper diet and an enema-filled lifestyle, one’s bowel movements could smell “as sweet as those of a nursing baby,” the Doctor liked to provide visitors with fresh evidence supporting his theory. “He will leave you in the midst of a conversation, go into his little private toilet, come out with a little pot in his hand containing some of his defecation, stick it under your nose, and practically force you to say that it smells very sweet,” wrote an elderly friend in 1941. His brother was mortified by such antics. When photos were published of the aged doctor performing calisthenics clad only in a G-string, Will looked into legal measures that might force his brother to wear more clothes. His lawyers told him a lawsuit would be not only unwinnable but likely to bring Will bad publicity.
In 1942, the main San buildings in Michigan were sold to the government for use as a military hospital. After paying off its debt, the San had $725,000 left from the sale. The Doctor herded the remaining patients down the street to one of the few buildings the San still owned. Named superintendent of this skeleton operation, the ever-optimistic Doctor vowed a return to the San’s glory days as “a great university of health.”
The Doctor’s plans would be challenged by a familiar antagonist. When a group of Adventist elders, sensing the Doctor’s vulnerability, began organizing an effort to take back control of the San, Will threw his considerable weight behind them. His motivation isn’t clear. Perhaps he believed that, having founded the Sanitarium, the Adventists had the right to help decide its future. Perhaps he believed that, having spent a quarter-century at the San, he had the right to help decide its future. Or perhaps he just saw one last opportunity to rest his cold feet on his brother’s back.
On October 3, 1942, Will called on his brother. At ninety, the Doctor, even with an earpiece, had difficulty hearing, and his eyesight was so poor that he barely recognized himself in the photos he autographed for San guests. Eighty-two-year-old Will had been diagnosed with glaucoma five years earlier and was completely blind. He got around with the help of a white cane and a German shepherd. The conversation, which lasted more than five hours, did not go well. Will tried to convince his brother that he was too old to lead the San. If he wasn’t willing to relinquish control, then he should at least let his old Adventist colleagues help him. The Doctor rejected his brother’s advice. After sixty-six years running the place, he wasn’t about to give up the San, especially not to the Adventists. He embarked on a tirade against his old religion. Will cut his brother off and gave him a “tongue-chastisement,” as he later called it, the likes of which he had never given anyone “during my rather long life.” The Doctor, uncharacteristically, sat still for it, prompting Will to observe: “That the doctor did not resent some of the cutting things I said to him indicated very plainly to me that he, in a way, admitted the truthfulness of my remarks.” They discussed the Doctor’s health. The Doctor told Will that he was being rejuvenated by a homemade brew of malt honey, vitamins, and minerals that was even helping strengthen the fingernails he compulsively bit. They discussed the war. The Doctor said that the widespread use of tobacco by the army would likely lead to America’s defeat. Will later recalled their discussion as “the most rambling conversation I ever had with anybody in my life,” and described the Doctor’s ideas as “unheard of, unreasonable, and nonsensical.” He worried that his aged brother might be losing touch with reality. Their conversation turned to the past. Thirty-six years after Will had left his brother’s employ, the wounds were still fresh. Will complained that the Doctor’s wee-hour conversations with San visitors had deprived him of many nights of sleep. “I talk too much,” the Doctor admitted. “I have to overcome it. I talk too much.”
Having failed to convince his brother to give up the San voluntarily, Will tried force. He wrote to members of the Constituency, the governing body responsible for oversight of the San, urging them to attend the upcoming annual meeting and vote an Adventist-approved board of trustees. He pledged $5,000 for transportation, lodging, and food so that members could travel to Battle Creek from as far away as Florida and Oregon for the crucial vote. When the Doctor got wind of his brother’s plans, he went on the offensive. He subpoenaed the records of the Seventh-Day Adventists. He dictated sixteen hours at a stretch. He seemed revitalized. But his hopes were dashed at the Constituency meeting on March 31, 1943, when 241 new members recruited with Will’s help were deemed eligible to vote, enabling the Adventist forces to elect a new board. The Doctor took out an injunction that prevented the new trustees from convening. He followed up by getting an amended order banning them from interfering with the San. The judge appointed six interim trustees to operate the San until the litigation was resolved. The Kellogg brothers were back in court.
But the Doctor was exhausted. His memory was failing, and an attack of Bell’s palsy had left part of his face immobilized. As he awaited the judge’s ruling, he stayed in seclusion at The Residence, where he kept abreast of the San by phone, fretting over the patients’ comfort, worrying about the new plumbing. He could still rise—briefly—to the occasion. At a photo shoot, the ninety-year-old doctor trotted back and forth across a cinder path, boasting that he could run as long as the photographers’ film held out. He proffered a firm forearm. “Feel it—give it a good pinch,” he said. “I’m like that all over.” But on December 11, an attack of bronchitis developed into pneumonia. On December 14, the Doctor died in his sleep, nine years short of the longed-for century mark. Will sent photos of the grave to the Doctor’s friends, a seemingly thoughtful gesture that may also have served as a subtle reminder that he had outlived his brother. Not long afterward, the battle over the San ended in a compromise: the Doctor’s associates paid the Adventists $550,000 to relinquish their claim. A scaled-down version of the San remained in operation, but without its Barnum, it was the San in name only.
Three years after his brother’s death, eighty-five-year-old Will Kellogg resigned from the Kellogg board of directors, though he continued to keep track of each new advertisement, salary increase, and sales report. Every so often he had his chauffeur drive him to a side street near the Kellogg plant, where he’d roll down the window and listen to the hum of the machines. His second wife had a series of strokes and died in 1948. His son Lenn had a cerebral hemorrhage and died in 1950. His sister Clara died the following year. Although his children and grandchildren would have liked to visit more often, they were afraid to show up at his house without an invitation, and Will wasn’t the inviting kind. He spent several Christmases alone with his household staff. He was, perhaps, closest to his nurse, who read aloud to him and listened to him talk about the vicissitudes of his long life.
Will expressed regret several times that he and John Harvey never reconciled. He may have been especially penitent on June 22, 1948, six years after the Doctor’s death, when he received a letter from his brother. The Doctor had dictated it not long before he died, but his secretary hadn’t sent it, believing that it was demeaning for her boss to write about his failing memory, his difficulty walking, his “doddering,” as he called it. Indeed, it would have been the first time the Doctor had allowed himself to show vulnerability to his younger brother. Now eighty-eight-year-old Will listened as an aide read aloud his dead brother’s words. The seven-page letter—the Doctor was prolix to the end—was conciliatory, particularly when it touched on their history at the San. “It was the greatest possible misfortune to the work that circumstances arose which led you and me in different channels and separated our interests . . . I am sure that you were right as regards the food business. . . . Your better balanced judgment has doubtless saved you from a vast number of mistakes of the sort I have made and allowed you to achieve magnificent successes for which generations to come will owe you gratitude.” Near the end of the letter, the proud old doctor came as close as he could to an apology:
I am making desperate efforts to get all my affairs into such shape as to preserve as much as possible what good they may represent and to mend as many as possible of the errors I have made. I earnestly desire to make amends for any wrong or injustice of any sort I have done to you and will be glad if you will give me a very definite and frank expression of anything I have said or done which you feel should be justly designated unbrotherly or otherwise open to criticism. . . . I hope that this note may find you more comfortable and that you may have many years left to promote the splendid enterprises that have given the name you bear a place among the notable ones of our time.
Three years later, on October 6, 1951, Will Kellogg died. He was ninety-one. Although he had outlived his brother by eight years, he was three months younger than the Doctor had been when he died. After lying in state in the lobby of the Kellogg Company until workers on every shift had a chance to pay their respects, Will was buried next to his brother. In happier times, Will and the Doctor had put up matching twin monuments on their lots. At some point during their estrangement, however, Will had ordered his monument torn down and replaced by another: a bronze sundial on which a robin tugged a worm out of the earth. Will, it seemed to say, was the proverbial early bird who got the worm—or at least before his brother got it.