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Excerpt: Modern Food, Moral Food, by Helen Zoe Veit

American eating changed dramatically in the early twentieth century. As food production became more industrialized, nutritionists, home economists, and so-called racial scientists were all pointing Americans toward a newly scientific approach to diet. Food faddists were rewriting the most basic rules surrounding eating, while reformers were working to reshape the diets of immigrants and the poor. And by the time of World War I, the country’s first international aid program was bringing moral advice about food conservation into kitchens around the country. In Modern Food, Moral Food, Helen Zoe Veit argues that the twentieth-century food revolution was fueled by a powerful conviction that Americans had a moral obligation to use self-discipline and reason, rather than taste and tradition, in choosing what to eat.

In the following excerpt from Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (pp. 157-163), Veit explores the ideas and events in American history that transformed American standards of beauty, desirability, diet, and success.

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Sometime in the 1910s, a woman named Nina Putnam decided to go on a diet. She had been slim as a young bride, and for a few years she had stayed that way by cleaning her own house and doing all her marketing on foot. But as her husband’s salary increased, they acquired new things: a vacuum cleaner, an automobile, an apartment in a building with an elevator, and a maid to do the housework. Putnam grew much less active and much less slim, eventually coming to feel like a “hippopotamus” and worrying she was in danger of becoming a “mere wife, instead of a sort of standardized best girl as heretofore.” After finally deciding to lose weight, she saw ads for weight loss products everywhere and tried scheme after scheme, from a reducing corset to an electric massaging roller to special mail-order wheat buns to a dance regimen that involved wearing little but a small towel and a large rubber band. Eventually, seeing that nothing was getting smaller except her bank account, Putnam had a revelation. All those dieting companies were selling, she realized, was “nothing in the world but my own strength of mind” and “a visualization of the courage necessary to diet carefully.” Putnam decided to diet relying on nothing but willpower, and it was then that she really began to lose weight. She restricted herself severely, eating no potatoes, bread, pasta, cake, pie, pastries, ice cream, cheese, mayonnaise, nuts, olives, grapes, or bananas, and allowing herself only extremely small amounts of soup, sauces, milk, butter, cream, bacon, and sugar. She was always a little hungry, and she considered that a mark of her success.[377]

Nina Putnam eventually lost fifty pounds and was so delighted with the triumph of her will that she wrote a book about it. Tomorrow We Diet was published in 1922, and in it Putnam shared the secrets of her success, detailing her list of forbidden foods and stressing that readers could never have a lapse in dieting, any more than they could have a lapse “in ethics or true religion.” To get thin and stay that way, self-control was needed at every turn, at almost every moment. “You can get as slim as you want to,” Putnam wrote, but “two things are required of you—two little eenty weenty things. Self-control and intelligence.” Of course, she fully realized that there was nothing tiny about either, and she related her own desperate struggles with her appetites: “There have been times when the sight of a potato . . . has brought tears of longing to my eyes! Times, too, when I have reached out a trembling hand and surreptitiously patted the soft cheek of a Parker House Roll.” Her willpower won out over her passing desires, however, and she stressed that all her suffering was nothing compared to “the subsequent heavenly, sublime joy” of changing her body, feeling youthful and energetic, and throwing out old clothes that were too big.[378]

Putnam’s weight loss narrative touched upon many of the themes underlying Americans’ changing ideas about bodies and bodily mastery in the 1910s through the 1930s: the open deprecation of the overweight, the difficulties of dieting and the preeminent importance of willpower in doing so successfully, the joy in being thin, and the centrality of thinness to sex appeal and marital happiness, particularly for women. Weight loss testimonies were not new. They had appeared in the mid-nineteenth century in a few tracts aimed at men, most famously in William Banting’s popular Letter on Corpulence, first published in 1863 and then many times thereafter.[379] But it was only starting in the 1910s, as thinness became the dominant beauty ideal for both men and women, that weight loss narratives saw their full flowering as a popular new kind of success story, a kind of success obtainable by almost anybody, in theory. In these narratives, those people with enough determination not only changed their bodies for the better, but they transformed their entire lives. Weight loss supposedly led to greater beauty and personal appeal, prolonged youthfulness and improved health, more energy and efficiency, heightened intelligence and ambition, and subsequent benefits like success in business and pleasure in marriage.[380]

While the Great War had lasted, pronouncements about self-discipline and sacrifice as ends in themselves had been nearly ubiquitous. In fact, such pronouncements had been so commonplace and so potent that they nearly muffled associations between food conservation, weight loss, and a growing conviction that thinness was the physical ideal. Yet these associations existed, and they were gaining enormous cultural power during the era. The notion that wartime food restrictions might result in Americans becoming desirably thin was an idea unthinkable during Civil War food shortages. Its attractiveness in the 1910s shows how the idealization of thinness that surged into popularity at the end of the Great War, and that came to overwhelm American conceptions of beauty in the twentieth century, was profoundly compatible with Progressive ideals of self-control, moral righteousness, and asceticism.

A variety of factors contributed to the explosion of weight loss culture during and after the Great War, and one especially potent factor was the creep of metrics into daily life. The application of calories to food in the late nineteenth century and the emerging discipline of statistics resulted in well-publicized comparisons of food consumption and body weights between individuals and across populations.[381] At the same time, life insurance statistics were revealing new correlations between excess weight and chronic disease. More and more Americans, meanwhile, were purchasing newly affordable home scales and buying their clothing ready-made, and thus increasingly thinking of their bodies in terms of numbers and sizes instead of, say, just making clothes to fit their individual bodies.[382] Moreover, metrics grew more prevalent in daily life just as the motion picture industry was taking off and as a visually oriented print media continued to expand.[383] Handed the tools to make physical comparisons, Americans eagerly made them. The growing ease of numerical and visual comparisons contributed directly to the valorization of thinness. But what accounts for the moral stigma that leeched onto the idea of being overweight? The answer lies at the heart of the Progressive ideology of self-control, a value that transcended the Progressive Era itself, both supporting and thriving within the enduring associations between thinness, willpower, and beauty.

IF YOU ARE DOING YOUR BIT, DO NOT FEAR FOR YOUR FIGURE

Today, the food conservation diet suggested for Americans in World War I sounds an awful lot like a weight loss diet. Government administrators urged Americans to eat less red meat, white flour, butter, and sugar, and to eat more lean meat, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. The reasons for these recommendations had nothing to do with losing weight, of course, since administrators simply wanted to send dense, high-calorie commodities to Europe. Although the reasons for these changes were not to make Americans thinner or healthier, however, Americans during the war increasingly believed—and hoped—that they might.[384] For the first time during the 1910s, slenderness and attractiveness were becoming nearly inseparable as mainstream aesthetic ideals, and middle-class Americans who had been eating more and exercising less in previous years celebrated the idea that wartime food conservation might also improve their “health and physical appearance.”[385] Columns appeared suggesting that young women “desirous of having a slender, sylphlike form and graceful carriage” or “all adipose ladies and gentlemen who wish to preserve their figures and serve the nation” had special incentive to eat less in wartime.[386] It was no coincidence that when Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters first published her fantastically popular Diet and Health, with Key to Calories in 1918—a book that would become one of the best-selling diet books in American history—she dedicated it to Herbert Hoover.[387]

Fat was not universally reviled in this era, however. Americans had long associated thinness with malnutrition and poverty, and in the 1910s they still regularly used fat to describe beauty and good health. Mothers of soldiers in the Great War were happy to hear their sons were “growing fat and strong” in army camps, for example, and some people reported happily that they had “gained considerably in weight as well as in health” even while following food conservation rules.[388] People in the 1910s often wanted to be fatter than they were, and advice columns in U.S. magazines and newspapers regularly featured queries about how best to gain weight. Skinniness—or looking like “an animated walking stick”—was wholly undesirable aesthetically.[389] Many were proud of Americans’ reputation for having “robust physique[s]” and of statistics demonstrating that they ate more on average than people anywhere else in the world.[390] Indeed, the idea that the United States was “the fat nation of the earth” was central in appeals to Americans to spare some of their abundance for hungry Europeans.[391] Immigrants often came to the United States in order to escape situations of true deprivation and prolonged hunger, and for many recent immigrants and poor Americans, full figures for men and women remained positive symbols of security and success.[392]

Moreover, until the early twentieth century, thinness and self-control had not necessarily seemed to be allied concepts. Yes, many believed that the obese were sinfully self-indulgent, but at the turn of the century most people who were very thin were so because of poverty, regular physical labor, or illness—not because of willpower. According to most nutritionists at the time, in fact, endocrinal problems were generally more to blame for extra fat than overeating.[393] Before the application of calories to food energy and a thorough understanding of the workings of metabolism, people had not even necessarily believed that eating too much caused someone to become overweight, since according to casual observation, an active person might eat abundantly and not gain weight, while someone else might gain weight even while eating sparingly, especially if they ate mainly high-calorie foods.[394] And even when calories were applied to food, many people thought about food’s energy in a completely positive light. For example, today a nutritionist might conceptualize calories by saying that someone would have to walk an extra mile to burn off the energy in three teaspoons of sugar. But in the early twentieth century, Americans more often thought of three sugar lumps as helpfully providing enough energy that they could walk an extra mile.[395]

For a brief time in the 1910s, public opinion was fairly balanced on the question of overweight and underweight.[396] Indeed, those words had only come into existence at all in 1899, premised on the novel concept that there was an ideal and supposedly normal weight to compare them against.[397] In the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, diet specialists were as likely to help people gain weight as they were to help them lose it.[398] But the scales of public opinion were tipping fast. For one thing, underweight actually was less and less of a public health issue. The growing popularization of automobiles and other automated forms of transport, combined with increasing urbanization and the expansion of a sedentary, white-collar workforce, resulted in fewer Americans regularly performing physical activities.[399] At the same time, improvements in food distribution and preservation systems had resulted in a more stable and abundant food supply in all seasons, and rising U.S. wages in previous decades had allowed a broader swath of people to buy adequate amounts of it, steep price increases in the early twentieth century notwithstanding.

As underweight receded as a public health concern, worries about overweight took its place. Some blamed industrial food for Americans’ rising weights.[400] One food reformer, for example, said that new foods, concentrated foods, and out-of-season foods tempted Americans at every turn, confusing them into spending too much, eating too much, and choosing foods based on what tasted good rather than what was good.[401] And of course, at the high point of the temperance movement, commentators also drew connections between the intemperance of drinking alcohol and the intemperance of overeating.[402] If anything, food was more insidious than alcohol because opportunities to abuse it were everywhere.[403] And like excessive alcohol, excessive food was increasingly thought to be not just morally corrosive but also physically harmful.[404]

Indeed, another important factor in fat’s vilification was rapidly accumulating evidence that fat was unhealthful, even deadly. In the recent past, U.S. doctors had generally agreed that the greatest danger regarding food was too little of it, since being underweight could indicate malnutrition and predisposed people to tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other diseases.[405] In 1912, for instance, one dieter had said it was uncomfortable to be fat but scoffed at the idea that fat was actually harmful.[406] Attitudes were changing, however. Most damningly, new mortality studies sponsored by life insurance companies revealed that after the age of thirty-five, death rates increased steadily and predictably the more people weighed.[407] In fact, they showed that people actually lived longest when they weighed ten pounds less than average.[408] As study after study revealed the thin outliving the fat, life insurance companies contracted their range of acceptable weights and considered weight as they calculated risk.[409] Dietitians were becoming important contributors to the field of medicine in this era, while doctors were beginning to pay serious attention to their patients’ eating habits.[410]

Another startling change in the late 1910s was that chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes for the first time surpassed epidemic diseases as the leading cause of death among Americans. And experts tended to attribute chronic diseases to living habits—increasingly defined as bad habits—like drinking too much or smoking, getting insufficient exercise, worrying excessively, and especially overeating.[411] The weight loss authority Lulu Hunt Peters informed readers in 1918 that they should either diet or prepare to die: “no joke; you can’t tell how near you are to it if you are much overweight.”[412] As doctors and nutritionists stated with growing confidence that being thin was actually healthy, people who had previously considered themselves problematically underweight more and more heard that their “problem” was in fact no such thing. For example, when women in 1918 wrote to Good Housekeeping magazine complaining that they were “extremely thin,” the food expert Harvey Wiley informed them that unless their low weight was caused by tuberculosis or a parasite, they should rejoice at being thin.[413]

The wartime food conservation campaign both reflected and magnified rising concerns about body fat. Far from worrying that overzealous housewives might damagingly underfeed their families, people started worrying that food conservation had not gone far enough in mitigating “excessive personal tubbiness.”[414] Some claimed that the health of Europeans who were eating less because of war conditions was improving, and one doctor began a study based on that premise at the Carnegie Nutrition Institute laboratories in 1917, aiming to prove that Americans would be healthier by eating 10 to 20 percent less.[415] Doctors argued that “Self-Martyrizers” who fervently followed food conservation directives were not martyrs at all, because eating less would actually do their bodies good.[416] So obvious were the benefits of eating less that one journalist in a small-town Wisconsin paper felt the need to reassure readers that nothing was detracted from the moral act of going without food “either as a religious or a patriotic exercise by the knowledge that it is a health exercise as well.”[417] Wartime weight-loss clubs formed, like the “Fatless League,” which encouraged Americans to order food by calories instead of simply ordering different dishes, and the “180 Club” in Los Angeles, which aimed to reduce the weight of any “fat men” who weighed more than 180 pounds.[418]

As part of the personality cult around Herbert Hoover, physical descriptions often cast him as strong and trim. Hoover was certainly trimmer in the war years than when he entered the White House a decade later, but he was never particularly slender, and the starched collar fashionable for men in the 1910s only accentuated his ponderous jowls and tendency toward a double chin. Still, one journalist described Hoover as “slight of build,” and another author claimed that he “thinks himself thin,” and that his “rather spare figure” resulted from his “abstemious personal habits” as well as from his intensive brainwork.[419] Others described him as “angular,” physically “Herculean,” or “Samsonlike,” and people wrote that in contrast to average “flabby invertebrates,” Hoover radiated strength.[420] One journalist said Hoover was the model of the sort of “he-men” the country needed, and another wrote that Hoover “gives at once an impression of force. His limbs look hard; his smooth face is strong.”[421] This was not simply a case of changing ideas about what constituted a lean or a heavy person. If anything, the changing standards for men go in quite the opposite direction; after all, Hoover himself—who weighed between 180 and 190 pounds—would have qualified as a “fat man” according to the standards of the 180 Club.[422] In an age when photographs were still a relatively expensive luxury in print media, detailed physical descriptions were common fare in journalism, but the almost phrenological assessments of Hoover hint at an expectation that if those who shirked food conservation were the “fat and disloyal,” then food conservation personified was righteously hard and lean.[423]

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From Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century. Copyright © 2013 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Helen Zoe Veit is associate professor of history at Michigan State University. Her book Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century, which was a James Beard Foundation Book Award finalist, is now available in paperback.

  1. [377]Putnam, Tomorrow We Diet, 7-8, 30, 34-35, 42-48, 52, 70-72.↩
  2. [378]Ibid., 79-80, 66, 74-75, 90.↩
  3. [379]See Vester, “Regime Change,” 39.↩
  4. [380]For more on the history of diet, weight reduction, and the thin ideal, see Schwartz, Never Satisfied; Vester, “Regime Change”; Bargielowska, “Culture of the Abdomen”; Forth and Carden-Coyne, Cultures of the Abdomen; Jou, Controlling Consumption; Stearns, Fat History; Seid, Never Too Thin; Gilman, Fat; and Lowe, “From Robust Appetite to Calorie Counting.”↩
  5. [381]See Cullather, “Foreign Policy of the Calorie.”↩
  6. [382]Vester, “Regime Change,” 42.↩
  7. [383]See Stearns, Fat History.↩
  8. [384]“Feel Better, Look Better!,” 9 February 1918, folder “New York City Tribune Edit (NY),” box 566, Record Group 4 (RG 4), United States National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (NARA); “War Foods Healthful as Well as Patriotic,” 9 July 1918, folder “Wapakoneta News News (OH),” box 567, RG 4, NARA; “Food and Health,” 26 February 1918, folder “Clinton Chronicle News (OK),” box 570, RG 4, NARA; “People Benefit Physically Now by Eating Less Meat,” 10 May 1918, “Philadelphia Inquirer News (PA),” box 568, RG 4, NARA; “Saving of Food Help to Health,” 11 July 1917, folder “Alameda Times-Star News (CA),” box 530, RG 4, NARA; “War*Time*Cook*Book,” press release to farm journals, 1 December 1917, folder “Press Releases, to Farm Journals,” box 12, United States Food Administration (USFA) Collection, Hoover Library.↩
  9. [385]“Sweetbread for Economy,” 3 January 1918, folder “Columbus State Journal News (OH),” box 567, RG 4, NARA; L. Harper Leech, “War Diet Real Health Saver,” 20[?] October 1917, folder “Waterloo Times Tribune News (IA),” box 535, RG 4, NARA; “Exit the Double Chin,” 10 July 1917, folder “Hackensack Record Edit (NJ),” box 540, RG 4, NARA.↩
  10. [386]“Eat Less Sugar, Be Sylphlike, Cooke’s Advice to Young Women,” 9 May 1918, folder “Philadelphia North American News (PA),” box 568, RG 4, NARA; “Reducing Excess Weight,” 13 December 1917, folder “Merced Sun Edit (CA),” box 530, RG 4, NARA; untitled blurb, 1 December 1917, folder “Anderson Bulletin (IN),” box 534, RG 4, NARA.↩
  11. [387]Schwartz, Never Satisfied, 175.↩
  12. [388]“What Ohio’s War Board Says Today,” 11 January 1918, folder “Dayton News Edit (OH),” box 567, RG 4, NARA; “Food Saving Means ‘Defeatless Days,’” 3 January 1918, folder “Columbus State Journal Edit (OH),” box 567, RG 4, NARA; letter from the teachers and pupils of Bremestead School, Diamond Point, Lake George, N.Y., to Hoover, 28 May 1918, folder “58 Bremestead School,” box 300, RG 4, NARA; letter from Mrs. Cardine Wardle, West Coxsackie, N.Y., 7 August 1918, folder illegible, box 296, RG 4, NARA.↩
  13. [389]“Cannot Be Fat and Be Patriotic,” 18 March 1918, folder “Boston Post News (MA),” box 557, RG 4, NARA.↩
  14. [390]Hoover, quoted in an originally anonymous interview with Will Irwin, typed text of “First Aid to America: How Civilians Must Get Together and Get Behind Strong Leaders,” Saturday Evening Post, 24 March 1917, bound folder “Addresses, Letters, Magazine Articles, Press Statements, Etc. Inclusive Dates: February 1, 1917–April 6, 1918,” vol. I, part 1, box 93, Hoover Collection, Hoover Institution.↩
  15. [391]Frederic J. Haskin, “Lean Europe and Fat America,” 1 June 1917, folder “Lexington Herald Edit (KY),” box 535, RG 4, NARA.↩
  16. [392]This was not necessarily the case with second-generation immigrants, however. By the late 1920s, Christine Frederick reported that even in immigrant communities, the “young women, traditionally buxom, now want the slim American figure” (Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, 75).↩
  17. [393]Stearns, Fat History, 30.↩
  18. [394]“Your Fuel Need,” n.d., typed document, folder 8, “Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur. 17 May–24 November 1917,” box 1, series 5H, USFA Collection, Hoover Institution.↩
  19. [395]Rose, Everyday Foods in War Time, 62.↩
  20. [396]The historian Harvey Levenstein argues that it was in the late 1910s that “overweight and underweight reach[ed] a kind of balance in public concern” (Revolution at the Table, 166).↩
  21. [397]Oxford English Dictionary, s.vv. “overweight, adj.,” “underweight, adj.” For more on hardening concepts of “average” and “normal,” see Igo, Averaged American.↩
  22. [398]For instance, the health and beauty lecturer Susanna Cocroft stressed that she had helped equal numbers of women gain weight and lose weight. “Reduce Your Weight,” Susanna Cocroft advertisement,Union Signal 43, no. 9 (1 March 1917): 16; “Why Be Thin?,” Susanna Cocroft advertisement, Union Signal 43, no. 7 (15 February 1917): 15; Blythe, Fun of Getting Thin, 11; Antoinette Donnelly, “Watch Your Weight! Says Lulu Hunt Peters, A.B., M.D.,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 September 1915, B4, ProQuest Historical Newspapers (PQHN).↩
  23. [399]While Americans were growing somewhat heavier, Schwartz argues that their modest weight gains alone cannot nearly account for growing rejection of fat. Schwartz, Never Satisfied, 157.↩
  24. [400]Christian, “Three Great Laws that Govern Life,” 6; Donahey, Calorie Cook Book, 13; McFadden, Eating for Health and Strength, 210; Rorer, “Food,” 19.↩
  25. [401]Purdy, Food and Freedom, 35–36.↩
  26. [402]The Day’s Food in War and Peace, USFA booklet, American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences Records, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (AAFCSR), #6578, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (DRMC); Reverend Lloyd H. Miller, at Woodward Avenue Christian Church in Detroit, quoted in “Heavy Eater Is a Traitor,” 29 October 1917, folder “Detroit Free Press News (MI),” box 537, RG 4, NARA.↩
  27. [403] “Anyway, We Eat Too Much,” 8 December 1917, folder “San Pedro News Editorial (CA),” box 530, RG 4, NARA.↩
  28. [404]Cocroft, What to Eat and When, x.↩
  29. [405]Goudiss and Goudiss, Foods That Will Win the War, 74.↩
  30. [406]Blythe, Fun of Getting Thin, 9–10.↩
  31. [407]Dr. T. J. Allen, “Daily Diet Hints: Longevity Favored by Reducing Weight,” Washington Post, 26 February 1910, 7, PQHN; C. M. Cartwright, “Risk Firms Find Mortality High Among Fat Men,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 1 May 1916, 12, PQHN; Dr. W. A. Evans, “How to Keep Well: Insurance and Health,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 January 1918, 8, PQHN.↩
  32. [408]“Your Weight and Health: Better Be Over the Average When Young and Under When Old, Say Insurance Men,” Pittsburgh Courier, 29 November 1912, 8, PQHN; “Your Weight and Health: People Past Thirty Years of Age Should Combat Any Increase of Adipose Tissue,” Los Angeles Times, 4 July 1915, I6, PQHN.↩
  33. [409]Schwartz, Never Satisfied, 155.↩
  34. [410]McCollum and Simmonds, American Home Diet, 111.↩
  35. [411]“The Prevention of Diseases of Heart, Blood Vessels and Kidneys,” Life Extension Institute advertisement, display ad 139, New York Times, 5 September 1920, BRM17, PQHN.↩
  36. [412]Peters, Diet and Health, 80.↩
  37. [413]Harvey Wiley, “Dr. Wiley’s Question Box,” Good Housekeeping, September 1918, 88; Harvey Wiley, “Dr. Wiley’s Question-Box,” Good Housekeeping, January 1918, 55–56, 93.↩
  38. [414]Untitled blurb, 16 January 1918, folder “Chicago News Edit (IL),” box 554, RG 4, NARA; “Dr Wiley Would Put Nation on Rations—Not as War Measure, but in Interest of Health,” Boston Daily Globe, 28 January 1918, 5, PQHN.↩
  39. [415]“To Find Out How Much We Over-Eat,” 7 October 1917, folder “Boston Herald News (MA),” box 536, RG 4, NARA; “Less Food, Better Health,” 19 June 1917, folder “DC Washington Post Editorials,” box 532, RG 4, NARA; “How to Be Healthy,” 19 January 1918, folder “Idaho Boise News Editorials,” box 533, RG 4, NARA.↩
  40. [416]“Become Disciple of Hoover and Live Longer, New War Food Maxim,” 19 November 1917, folder “Boston Traveler Edit (MA),” box 537, RG 4, NARA.↩
  41. [417]“Hooverize for Health,” 4 October 1917, folder “East Ellsworth Record News (WI),” box 549, RG 4, NARA.↩
  42. [418]“Eat by ‘Calories,’ Slogan of Fatless League Campaign,” 11 January 1918, folder “Los Angeles Record News (CA),” box 551, RG 4, NARA; “Fat Men Plan to Save Food by Reducing at Waist,” 25 October 1917, folder “Los Angeles Herald News (CA),” box 530, RG 4, NARA; Peters, Diet and Health, 79.↩
  43. [419]Irwin, “The Autocrat of the Dinner Table,” Saturday Evening Post, 23 June 1917, 57–58, folder “Writings about Hoover,” box 219, Hoover Collection, Hoover Institution.↩
  44. [420]“Ways of the World,” 11 December 1917, folder “San Francisco Bulletin Edit (CA),” box 531, RG 4, NARA; Irwin, “The Autocrat of the Dinner Table,” Saturday Evening Post, 23 June 1917, 57–58, folder “Writings about Hoover,” box 219, Hoover Collection, Hoover Institution; “Here’s the Food Boss of America ‘Snapped’ on Visit to Chicago,” August 1917, folder “Chicago Herald News (IL),” box 533, RG 4, NARA; Donald Wilhelm, “Herbert Hoover: The Man Who Fed Twenty-one Nations,” in “If He Were President: The Independent Series of Articles on Some Likely Candidates for 1920s, Presenting the Views of Leading Republicans and Democrats on the Vital Issues of Today,” The Independent, 13 December 1919, folder “Writings about Hoover,” box 219, Hoover Collection, Hoover Institution; “Herbert C. Hoover—How He Made His Millions,” 3 June 1917, folder “San Francisco Examiner Edit (CA),” box 530, RG 4, NARA; William C. Edgar, “Two American Heroes,” The Bellman 19, no. 468, 3 July 1915, folder “Writings about Hoover,” box 219, Hoover Collection, Hoover Institution.↩
  45. [421]“Hoover—the Man and the Moral,” 27 January 1918, folder “New York City Tribune Edit (NY),” box 566, RG 4, NARA; Ernest Poole, “Hoover of Belgium,” Saturday Evening Post, 26 May 1917, folder “Writings about Hoover,” box 219, Hoover Collection, Hoover Institution.↩
  46. [422]Joe Toye, “Who’s Hoover?,” 27 May 1917, Boston Sunday Post, folder “May 27–June 17, 1917, Hoover’s Genius,” box 12, Hoover Library; “Here’s the Food Boss of America ‘Snapped’ on Visit to Chicago,” August 1917, folder “Chicago Herald News (IL),” box 533, RG 4, NARA.↩
  47. [423]Ben Allen, interoffice memo to Gertrude Lane, 13 September 1918, folder “Home Card, Oct. 1917–1918,” box 3, series 5H, USFA Collection, Hoover Institution; Kellogg, “Herbert Hoover, as Individual and Type,” The Atlantic, March 1918, folder “Writings about Hoover,” box 219, Hoover Collection, Hoover Institution.↩

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