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Black and White Breakfast
Race, Class, Sexuality, and Corn Flakes
in Alan Parker's The Road to Wellville
page 1 of 2
Contemporary American comedy evades realistic treatment of social issues, opting instead for escape from these issues. That the bulk of racial representation should occur in comedy is an indication...of the attempt to avoid representation of an enormously difficult subject. It also suggests a canny ability to sublimate some of the social energy and anxiety toward the secondary "desire": to recreate a difficult problem as easy solvable. In other words, to recreate race relations as useful insofar as they militate toward humor.1
Described by critics as an "ode to bathroom humor," Alan Parker's film, Road to Wellville (1994), at first glance, is little more than a well-intended attempt to satirize modern-day alternative medicine through the career of turn-of-the-century physician Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Known to the world as the originator of Corn Flakes, Dr. Kellogg was also the founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, arguably the most famous health spa in the United States between the 1890s and World War I, which was the peak of spas, water cures, and health resorts. The "San," as it is affectionately known in the film, is a flamboyant combination of hospital, country club, and grand hotel, where rich and famous Americans, such as John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Eleanor Roosevelt, President Taft, Alfred Dupont, and Montgomery Ward are pampered in elegant surroundings, and restored to health through scientifically-planned exercises and diets.2 However, a glance below the surface of this humorous and extravagant portrayal of life at Dr. Kellogg's health resort yields quite a remarkable racial subtext. Through the cinematic devices of humor, parody, blackface, and role-playing, Parker critiques and deconstructs early twentieth century American racial distinctions, which, as he elucidates in the film, were based on class hierarchy, turn-of-the-century scientific ideology, and sexual/gender metaphors. Moreover, Parker's sophisticated commentary on the sometimes subtle, yet ubiquitous, nature of modern American racism, yields both an incisive and disturbing message: that, despite the nation's best efforts, this deeply-rooted system of white privilege remains with us, even one hundred years after the decline of Kellogg's spa empire.
 Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium  |
Conceptualizing Race and Class in Kellogg's America
Kellogg's racial theory, and thus the racial theory in Road to Wellville, is based on the work of Sir Francis Galton, who, in 1883, invented the term eugenics to express the "science of improving stock, especially in the case of man, to give the more suitable [i.e., "white"] races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing, over the less suitable, than they otherwise would have had."5 As net migration to the United States reached the twenty million mark in 1920, many "progressive" Americans, including John Harvey Kellogg and President Theodore Roosevelt, feared that the "great Protestant-American race," which allegedly possessed superior genetic qualities, might be drowned by an "invasion" of inassimilable, and "uncivilized," immigrants from Asia, Eastern Europe, and Central America.6 By invoking the eugenic specter of race suicide, the pre-existing fear of black-white miscegenation and class-mixing, and the takeover of modern society by defective degenerates and "foreigners" who would out-breed the established white Anglo-Saxon stock, popular authors were able to convince Americans that the influx of these "new" immigrants would affect the national gene pool.7
Riding this turn-of-the-century wave of white supremacy and nativism, in 1910, Charles Davenport established the first major eugenics institution in the United States, the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Records Office, which served as a center for eugenics research until 1939.8 Four years before the establishment of this nationally-recognized organization, John Harvey Kellogg, who, in Road to Wellville, is appropriately portrayed by a buck-toothed, crew cut, Roosevelt-esque Anthony Hopkins, founded the Race Betterment Foundation at Battle Creek, Michigan. When the film begins in 1907, Kellogg is already publishing Good Health, a journal which would later help Battle Creek become a major center of the eugenics movement in America. Moreover, Kellogg's circle of influence, which eventually extended to several successful businessmen including J. C. Penney and C. W. Barron, leant credibility to his position as a leader in the eugenics movement. 9
Like many of the
other eugenicists working in the United States at the time, Kellogg
went beyond the notion of the "degenerate immigrant" and applied his
eugenic ideas to the pre-existing "white" Anglo-American population.
In his chef d'oeuvre, Plain Facts for Old and Young, Kellogg
outlined what he believed to be the largest threat to these "pure" Americans:
race destruction. To Kellogg, this meant the loss of racial identity
either "through complete submergence into another race" (i.e., miscegenation),
or simply the failure of the "race" to reproduce itself.10 Kellogg maintained that "the [white Anglo-] American
race was fast dying out, its place being filled by emigrants of different
lineage [i.e., race], religion, political ideas, and education."11 Because he believed that "Races, especially the further
distant ones ... are not equipotential, equally effective, or able,"
he contended that immigrants, as well as all "non-whites," could taint
and damage the gene pool of Anglo-America. Consequently, he insisted
that white Anglo-Saxon Americans isolate themselves, especially in the
realm of reproduction.12
In order to understand the racial subtext in Road to Wellville, it is necessary to comprehend the racial distinctions that existed during Kellogg's era. As Matthew Jacobson conveys in his seminal work, Whiteness of a Different Color, the "white" race in turn-of-the-century America was formed in opposition to a spectrum of other (i.e. "non-white") races.13 In other words, Anglo-Americans derived their whiteness, and racial "superiority," by comparing themselves to a constructed, unequal, dissimilar, and non-white "Other." "Non-whites," or those racial groups not of Anglo-Saxon descent, were seen as possessing characteristics which conflated primitivism, savagery, foreignness and racial difference. These non-white "Others" included the obvious — African-Americans — as well as Anglo-Saxon, and non-Anglo-Saxon, members of the working class. As Jacobson delineates, "skin color itself was not simply determinative of race; race became associated with class, or a set of social or cultural ‘arbiters' such as mannerisms, employment, and housing."14 Because they lived and worked comfortably with blacks, the working class, in general, became a non-white "Other," which, in essence, served to whiten "true," or middle and upper class whites even further. Moreover, the working class, which was perceived as culturally inferior to "true" whites because of its "dangerous societies," "barbarism" and uncivilized behavior of associating with blacks, also became a victim of the most politically-powerful racial instrument in recent U.S. history: Jim Crow. Like African-Americans, "white" members of the working class were also lynched for alleged crimes, and for violating local racial codes by "fraternizing" with blacks. Eventually, in some urban areas, members of the working class were labeled "white niggers" — a term which still exists today.15
From Kellogg's book Colon Hygiene
In Kellogg's opinion, the best way to ensure white racial purity was to cultivate "good health," which he propagated through his articles, books, lectures, and treatments at the San. The key factor of his health doctrine was self-regulation and moderation, which involved avoiding the undesirable elements of society (i.e., immigrants, the working class, criminals, the mentally ill, prostitutes, the diseased, as well as anyone considered "non-white"). When Anglo-Americans did not follow these dictates, they could erode the civility that marked them as "superior," and, just like some of the characters in the Road to Wellville, become the degenerates that they feared. When such degeneration went completely unchecked, Kellogg believed the result could be "an incurable and dirty criminal reminiscent of the dark races; an uncivilized beast."16 In short, Kellogg's adopted son, George, who is played by Dana Carvey in Road to Wellville.
Performing Race: Blackface and Role-Playing in Road to Wellville
In Road to Wellville, Parker uses the comedic techniques of blackface and role-playing to create a "racial double": that is, a "white" character (George Kellogg) who, through class and race-oriented constructions, represents the token inclusion of a black character in the essentially white society depicted in the film.17 George's role as a "person of color" stems from his personal history. In the film, the Kelloggs adopt forty-two children and raise them to be examples of "race betterment" by teaching them the proper rules of diet, exercise, and sexual abstinence. To prove his eugenic theories are valid, Dr. Kellogg adopts a prostitute's son, names him George, and tries to "convert" him to a model of white racial superiority. As George attests: "My mother was a Chicago whore...She died one night, and then weeks later the good doctor found me in the slum, cowering over her dead body. He cleaned me up and took me home, but I'm not that clean now am I?" The fact that George is the son of a prostitute from a working-class Chicago neighborhood, where people of color mixed freely with "lower-class" whites, automatically renders him "black" in both race and class. Moreover, his unsavory background opens up a space in the viewer's imagination for racialized and sexualized encounters in the dark streets of Chicago.
George's racialization is enforced by "visual representations of race, which are understood through [his] body. In the case of racially or ethnically coded characters in modern film, [such as George], the obvious markers of race become skin color and facial characteristics, which are reinforced through a character's accent, actions and values."18 Our first glimpse of George occurs at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where, dressed in rags and smelling of alcohol and the slums, he is a vision of physical corruption. He emerges from a group of wealthy female patients, their white skin and starched-white clothing creating a visual contrast with his black tattered rags and his dirty, or black, face. George's slurred speech, harassing manner, "uncivilized" comportment, and lower-class status are all intended to construct him as not quite "white."
The fact that George
is in "blackface" throughout the entire film is an important aspect
of the racial commentary in Road to Wellville. According to Lester
Friedman, "the white actor in blackface allows a safe, cinematic, non-discussion
of the place and origins of blacks in America."19
Blackface minstrelsy, which involves white entertainers donning black
make-up to "perform" black stereotypes on stage or in film, essentially
constructs the minstrel (i.e., George) as the classical fool. Set apart
from society and believed to be mentally inferior and immature, blackface
characters such as the "city dandy," the "plantation darky," and "Sambo
the Coon," can express serious criticism without compelling the audience
to take them seriously. Through the antics and opinions of these "benign"
characters, audiences can laugh away racial anxieties while being assured
that racial categories have not been altered. While the material conditions
of slavery and segregation embodied white racism in the real
world, blackface minstrelsy created Jim Crow in the theatrical
world, guaranteeing racial domination in the imaginary realm well into
the twentieth century.20
"If black comics, such as Eddy Murphy, are coming to wear an invisible whiteface in a kind of minstrelsy-nouveau (in films such as Trading Places, 48 Hours, and Beverly Hills Cop) then the white comic, like the minstrels of old, occasionally indulge in, if not exactly blackface, then black role playing."21 In Road to Wellville, George uses blackface to perform the black "role." That is, a satire of black culture as it is envisioned by white society. When, as an adult, he discovers that he does not belong in the Kellogg household, he decides to leave and make his own way in the world. However, because he is white, he does not act like the typical street-smart black found in modern American film. Rather, George embodies the comedic "coon": he dresses in layers of rags, he is gullible, and he is out of control in both his personal vices (drinking) and his libido (he often accosts the female patients at the San). George is a white man performing essentialized "blackness" — a man who is supposed to be white yet because of race and class constructions, does not fit into white culture.22 Consequently, the audience perceives him as a "safe" character, for like the original minstrels, he addresses race in a humorous manner.
The veneer of social altruism perpetuated by Kellogg in Road to Wellville is more or less a conscious metaphor for a nostalgic time when "coons were coons" and racial segregation allowed whites to live in glass houses, such as the San, oblivious to the real world around them. In this context, the business relationship between George Kellogg and Charles Ossining (John Cusack), an upper class Anglo-American who ventures into the cereal business for amusement and economic independence, complements the racial subtext of the film. During business negotiations, George is consistently aloof, more concerned with whiskey than with economics. Constantly laughing, eating, and conning his father out of money, George mimics socially constructed "qualities of blackness, i.e., brutality, crime, idleness, and licentious behavior."23 Thus, George clearly fits many of the racial stereotypes that exist in modern, as well as in antebellum, culture. A modern minstrel, George "mirrors the antebellum belief that slavery was good for the slave since it drew upon his natural inferiority and willingness to serve...Slaves were content coons. The proof was offered in the happy images of Sambo, a feebleminded slave who was content to laugh, eat, and drink."24 In Road to Wellville, George is a modern-day "Sambo."
Sexuality and Miscegenation at the "San"
According to Franz Fanon, the black man in any "white" society is not simply perceived as merely racially different. His "darkness" represents the savagery of the jungle; he becomes an "uncontrollable beast," or the embodiment of lustful hyper-sexuality: "One is no longer aware of the Negro, but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis."25 Consequently, as a racialized character, George assumes the essentialized "black" traits of excessive sexuality and moral depravity. In one scene, George manages to infiltrate Eleanor Lightbody's suite, where she is in the process of taking a therapeutic milk bath. Eleanor (Bridget Fonda), who, in Road to Wellville exemplifies the sexually-passive Victorian woman, is nude, singing innocently as she washes herself. In the middle of her bath, she is startled by George, who emerges from a black curtain, his blackface creating a sharp contrast with the whiteness of the milk and Eleanor's skin. He introduces himself to Eleanor and, as he is undressing, begins to tell her about his questionable activities, his threatening sexuality exuding from every sentence: "I come here to look at the nude ladies. I like nude ladies. You have a very nice body Mrs. Nicebody, I mean Lightbody. My mother had a nice body too. She was a whore." The play on Eleanor's last name highlights George's excitement over Eleanor's vulnerable body, as well as the lightness, or "whiteness" of her body. Moreover, the sexualized comparison between Eleanor's body and his mother's body is also suggestive of incest and illegitimacy — two moral transgressions that Kellogg sought to eliminate through his theory of race improvement.
"I come here to look at the nude ladies.
I like nude ladies."
In his haste to bathe himself under an adjacent shower, George splashes some of the dirty, black water dripping from his body onto Eleanor. The mixture of black water and white milk can be interpreted as a form of social contamination, or potential miscegenation, given the sexual context of the scene. In this case, not only does George's body pollute the sterile environment of the San, but it also offends the genetic social order Kellogg believed would save mankind. Because Kellogg maintained that the act of miscegenation is a form of degeneracy, with the "mulatto child as visible proof of this degenerate practice," morally deprived individuals, such as George, who possess the potential to commit such an act, must be separated from society.26 In his work Plain Facts, Kellogg even prohibits those with contagious "urban" diseases, such as tuberculosis, and cholera, from marrying and reproducing offspring, essentially targeting immigrants, and those whom he collectively labeled "the lower classes," (i.e., peoples of color). According to Kellogg, "a few generations of such a degenerating process would exterminate the [white] race, and drive it back to Darwin's ancestral ape."27 Kellogg even compared the product of miscegenation — "hybrid" humans — with mongrel dogs: "Different varieties or races of the same species may form a fertile union, the result of which is a mongrel — a cross between its two parents, possessing some of the qualities of each. All the varieties of dogs are produced by crossing different races, and so are mongrels. The various mixed races of men, such as mulattos and half-breeds, are also mongrels."28 Thus, miscegenation, which deconstructs the "purity" of bloodlines, was strictly forbidden by Kellogg, for it threatened the "white" nuclear, and national, family.29 In his opinion, miscegenation, illegitimacy, and racial impurity had no place in the construction of a pure and legitimate national race. Consequently, it is understandable why the fictitious Kellogg goes to great lengths to keep his son out of the San. After George is discovered in Eleanor's room, Kellogg informs the Sanitarium security patrol, and orders George to be chased out of the San not by human guards, but by vicious dogs.
 "Biological living" and physical discipline at the spa |
NEXT PAGE: Life is death postponed
Notes
1. Lester Friedman, ed. Unspeakable Images. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 191-192.
2. Gerald Carson, Cornflake Crusade. (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1957), 122.
3. The phrase "Road to Wellville" was coined by C.W. Post, originator of Grape Nuts, after undergoing an appendix operation at the San. He later used the expression as the title of a pamphlet he created to accompany his cereal. Basically, the pamphlet urged consumers to "Eat Grape Nuts, drink Postum, and think positive thoughts." Carson, 155.
4. In an effort to distinguish what was said by the fictitious Kellogg from what was said by the "real" Kellogg, I will preface a quote from the "real" Kellogg with the name of the work from which it comes, and follow the quote with a footnote. All quotes that are not followed by a footnote come from the film.
5. The word eugenics comes from the Greek "eu," meaning "good," and "gen," meaning "people." In nineteenth century scientific and medical literature, "race" and "blood" were used almost interchangeably, for it was maintained that one was dependant on the other (i.e., that race was determined by blood, and that blood determined race). The American obsession with "octoroons," "one drop" theories, and racial "passing" strategies further illustrates the fascination with this interconnection. Carson, 105 – 106.
6. The term "net migration" is used to exclude another five to ten million immigrants who returned to their country of origin or made another migration elsewhere. Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 150.
7. Ibid., 153.
8. Carson, 98.
9. Ibid., 100.
10. John Harvey Kellogg, Plain Facts for Old and Young. (Burlington, Iowa: Segner and Co., 1889), 82.
11. Ibid., 470.
12. Ibid., 84 – 85.
13. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9.
14. Ibid., 56.
15. Ibid., 57.
16. Kellogg, 88.
17. Friedman, 193.
18. Joanne Hershfield, The Invention of Dolores del Rio. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000), xii.
19. Friedman, 195.
20. Ibid., 196.
21. Ibid., 195.
22. Ibid., 195.
23. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 22.
24. Friedman, 196.
25. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1952), 170.
26. Kellogg, 120.
27. Ibid., 122.
28. Ibid., 101.
29. Hershfield, 30.
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