Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  99 Congressional Record, 49 Cong., 2d Sess., vol. XVIII, Pt. II, 1887, p. 1875.

  100 Ibid.

  101 Congressional Record, 49 Cong., 2d Sess., vol. XVIII, Pt. II, 1887, p. 1875.

  102 Quoted in Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004), 252.

  103 Ibid., 379.

  104 Michael Greenberger, “Did the Founding Fathers Do ‘A Heckuva Job?’ Constitutional Authorization for the Use of Federal Troops to Prevent the Loss of a Major American City,” http://www.umaryland.edu/healthsecurity/docs/Greenberger%20Did%20the%20Founding%20Fathers%20Do%20a%20Heckuva%20Job.pdf.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 A. Kucharski, “Medical Management of Political Patients: The Case of Dwight D. Eisenhower,”Perspectives in Physiology and Medicine 22 (1978): 115-26. Clarence G. Lasby, Eisenhower’s Heart Attack: How Ike Beat Heart Disease and Held On to the Presidency (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997). Cardiologist Mattingly in 1987 claimed that Ike had heart trouble all his life and that Snyder had misdiagnosed Eisenhower’s first heart attack in the 1940s, then covered up the record for years after that. Lasby sides with Dr. Snyder, concluding Ike indeed likely had stomach trouble, and the cautionary electrocardiogram that Snyder ordered in 1948 after one of the attacks proved normal (45).

  2 Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease (New York: Knopf, 2007), 4.

  3 “The Fat of the Land,” Time, January 13, 1961, 48-52.

  4 Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories, 5.

  5 Paul Dudley White, My Life and Medicine: An Autobiographical Memoir (Boston: Gambit, 1945), 220; Jean Mayer, Diet for Living (New York: David McKay, 1975), 138.

  6 T. Cooper, “Arteriosclerosis, Policy, Polity, and Parity,” Circulation 2 (February 1972): 433-40.

  7 “Why Executives Drop Dead,” Fortune 41 (1950): 88-91, 144-45.

  8 Pedoe H. Tunstall, “Epidemiology of Coronary Heart Disease,” in R. Duncan and M. Weston-Smith, The Encyclopaedia of Medical Ignorance (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1984), 95-106.

  9 I. H. Page, F. J. Stare, A. C. Corcoran, H. Pollack, and C. F. Wilkinson, Jr., “Atherosclerosis and the Fat Content of the Diet,” Circulation 16 (August 1957): 163-78.

  10 R. Lozano, C. J. Murray, A. D. Lopez, and T. Sato, “Miscoding and Misclassification of Iscaemic Heart Disease Mortality,” World Health Organization, 2001, http://www.who.int/entity/healthinfo/paper12.pdf.

  11 Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories, 10.

  12 Jane Brody, Jane Brody’s Good Food Book: Living the High-Carbohydrate Way (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 2.

  13 J. H. Young, “The Long Struggle for the 1906 Law: Food and Drug Administration,” FDA Consumer, June 1981, http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/“rrd/history2.html; W. Root and R. De Rochemont, Eating in America: A History (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995), 211.

  14 D. L. Call and A. M. Sanchez, “Trends in Fat Disappearance in the United States, 1909-65,” Journal of Nutrition 93 (October 1967) (2 supplemental): 1-28; Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories, 11; United States Department of Agriculture, Consumption of Food in the United States, 1909-1932, Agriculture Handbook No. 62 (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1953).

  15 H. Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat (New York: Doubleday, 1986), 46; R. O. Cummings, The American and His Food: A History of Food Habits in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 10-24.

  16 Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (New York: Walker and Company, 2009), 18.

  17 Ancel Keys, “The Inception and Pilot Surveys,” in D. Kromhout, et al., eds., The Seven Countries Study: A Scientific Adventure in Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology (Utrecht: Brouwer, 1994), 15-26.

  18 Ancel Keys, “Human Atherosclerosis and the Diet,” Circulation 5 (January 1952): 115-18.

  19 Jacob Yerushalmy and Herman E. Hilleboe, “Fat in the Diet and Mortality from Heart Disease: A Methodologic Note,” New York State Journal of Medicine 57 (July 15, 1957): 2243-54.

  20 Page, et al., “Athero-sclerosis and the Fat Content of the Diet,” passim.

  21 H. Blackburn, “Contrasting Professional Views on Atherosclerosis and Coronary Disease,” New England Journal of Medicine 292 (January 9, 1975): 105-7; T. R. Dawber, “Annual Discourse—Unproved Hypothesis,” New England Journal of Medicine 299 (August 31, 1978): 452-58, and his 1980 book, The Framingham Study: The Epidemiology of Atherosclerotic Disease (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 141.

  22 Cathy Young, et al., “Effect on Body Composition and Other Parameters in Obese Young Men of Carbohydrate Level of Reduction Diet,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 24 (1971): 290-96.

  23 Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. H. C. Green (New York: Dover Publications, 1957 [1865]), 38.

  24 Meyer Friedman, Pathogenesis of Coronary Artery Disease (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 77.

  25 Paul Johnson, Modern Times: A History of the World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 2-3.

  26 Ibid., 3.

  27 Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories, 25. On Navajos, see I. H. Page, L. A. Lewis, and J. Gilbert, “Plasma Lipids and Proteins and Their Relationship to Coronary Disease Among Navajo Indians,” Circulation 13 (May 1956): 675-79; on Irish, see M. F. Trulson, et al., “Comparisons of Siblings in Boston and Ireland,” Journal of American Dietetic Association 45 (1964): 225-29; on Swiss Alpine farmers, see D. Gsell and J. Mayer, “Low Blood Cholesterol Associated with High Calorie, High Saturated Fat Intakes in a Swiss Alpine Village Population,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 10 (June 1962): 471-79; and on Trappist monks, J. B. Groen, et al., “The Influence of Nutrition and Ways of Life on Blood Cholesterol and the Prevalence of Hypertension and Coronary Heart Disease Among Trappist and Benedictine Monks,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 10 (June 1964): 456-70.

  28 G. V. Mann, et al., “Cardiovascular Disease in the Masai,” Journal of Atherosclerosis Research 4 (July-August 1964): 289-312; A. G. Shaper, “Cardiovascular Studies in the Samburu Tribe of Northern Kenya,” American Heart Journal 63 (April 1962): 437-42.

  29 W. B. Kannel, et al., “Serum Cholesterol, Lipoproteins, and the Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: The Framingham Study,” Annals of Internal Medicine 74 (January 1971): 1-12.

  30 W. B. Kannell and T. Gordon, The Framingham Diet Study: Diet and Regulation of Serum Cholesterol, Section 24 of The Framingham Study: An Epidemiological Investigation of Cardiovascular Disease (Bethesda, MD: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, and National Institutes of Health, 1968), 15.

  31 On Puerto Rico, see M. R. Garcia-Palmieri, et al., “Relationship of Dietary Intake to Subsequent Coronary Heart Disease Incidence: The Puerto Rico Heart Health Program,” Journal of American Clinical Nutrition 33 (1980): 1818-27; on Honolulu, K. Yano, et al., “Dietary Intake and the Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Japanese Men Living in Hawaii,” ibid., 31 (July 1978): 1270-79; on Chicago, O. M. Paul et al., “A Longitudinal Study of Coronary Heart Disease,” Circulation 28 (July1963): 20-31; on Israel, H. A. Kahn et al., “Serum Cholesterol: Its Distribution and Association with Dietary and Other Variables in a Survey of 10,000 Men,” Israeli Journal of Medical Sciences 5 (November-December 1969): 1117-27. And there were many other studies still, not cited here, but available in Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories, notes on 465.

  32 R. B. Shekelle, et al., “Diet, Serum Cholesterol, and Death from Coronary Heart Disease: The Western Electric Study,” New England Journal of Medicine 8 (January 1981): 65-70.

  33 Ibid.

  34 “Linking of Heart Disease to High-Cholesterol Diet Reinforced by New Data,” Washington Post, Jan. 8, 1981; “Long-Term Study Links Cholesterol to Hazard of Early Coronary Death,” New York Times, Jan. 8, 1981.

  35 A. Koryani, “Prophylaxis and the Treatment of the Coronary Disease,” Theraputica H
ungarica 11 (1963): 17; and Research Committee, “Low-Fat Diet in Myocardial Infarction: A Controlled Trial,” Lancet 286 (September 11, 1965): 501-4.

  36 “Diet Linked to Cut in Heart Attacks,” New York Times, May 17, 1962.

  37 I. D. France, Jr. et al., “Test of Effect of Lipid Lowering by Diet on Cardiovascular Risk: The Minnesota Coronary Survey,” Arteriosclerosis 9 (January-February 1989): 129-35; Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories, 38.

  38 Review Panel of the National Heart Institute, Mass Field Trials of the Diet-Heart Question: Their Significance, Feasibility, and Applicability—Report of the Diet-Heart Review Panel of the National Heart Institute, American Heart Association, Monograph No. 28, 1969.

  39 Jean Meyer, “By Bread Alone,” New York Times Book Review, December 15, 1974, 19.

  40 Larry Schweikart, The Entrepreneurial Adventure: A History of Business in the United States (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, 2000), 274.

  41 “Food Pyramid History,” http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall02/Greene/history.htm.

  42 Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs of the United States Senate, Dietary Goals for the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977). After publication, there was a firestorm of protest from researchers, scientists, doctors, and nutritionists who insisted that the science was far from settled, and that there was no consensus.

  43 Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories, 46.

  44 Ibid., 48.

  45 George Mann, “Diet-Heart: End of an Era,” New England Journal of Medicine 297 (September 22, 1977): 644-50.

  46 David Kritchevsky, quoted in Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories, 52.

  47 Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial [MRFIT] Research Group, “Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial: Risk Factor Changes and Mortality Results,” Journal of the American Medical Association 248 (September 24, 1982): 1465-77; “Heart Attacks: A Test Collapses,” Wall Street Journal, October 6, 1982.

  48 “Cholesterol: And Now the Bad News,” Time, March 1984.

  49 C. Everett Koop, “Message from the Surgeon General,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1988, and the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), iii-iv, 3-4l; National Research Council, Committee on Diet and Health, Food and Nutrition Board, Commission on Life Sciences, Diet and Health: Implications for Reducing Chronic Disease Risk (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1989), 13.

  50 Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories, 49.

  51 Ibid., 66.

  52 “In 4-diet Study, All Lost Weight if they Watched Their Calories,” USA Today, February 25, 2009. See the disclaimers in the article, “Comparison of Weight-Loss Diets with Different Compositions of Fat, Protein, and Carbohydrates,” New England Journal of Medicine 360 (February 26, 2009): 859-73. Nor did this very small study (811 subjects) reduce carbohydrates enough, nor increase fat intake enough, to make significant judgments.

  53 Ancel Keys, “Sucrose in the Diet and Coronary Heart Disease,” Atherosclerosis, September-October 1971, 93-202; “Cholesterol: Debate Flares Over Wisdom of Widespread Reductions,” New York Times, July 14, 1987.

  54 Robert C. Atkins, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution (New York: M. Evans & Co., 2002), 20-21.

  55 Ibid., 22.

  56 Frederick L. Benoit, R. L. Martin, and R. H. Watten, “Changes in Body Composition During Weight Reduction in Obesity: Balance Studies Comparing Effects of Fasting and a Ketogenic Diet,” Annals of Internal Medicine 63 (October 1965): 604-12.

  57 T. L. Halton et al., “Low-carbohydrate-diet Score and the Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Women,” New England Journal of Medicine 19 (February 9, 2006) 1991-2002.

  58 Iris Shai et al., “Weight Loss with a Low-Carbohydrate, Mediterranean, or Low-Fat Diet,” New England Journal of Medicine 359 (July 17, 2008): 229-41.

  59 A. J. Nordmann et al., Effects of Low-carbohydrate vs Low-fat Diets on Weight Loss and Cardiovascular Risk Factors: A Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials,” Archives of Internal Medicine 3 (February 13, 2006): 285-93. The argument about LDL (low-density lipoproteins), which is entirely different from whether a low-carb diet is superior for losing weight, has subsequently become a fallback position for the antifat crowd, but a better measure of the risk than the so-called LDL cholesterol was the size and density of LDL particles and the number of ApoB proteins (the component of very low-density lipoproteins and low-density lipoproteins)—and in that regard, a comparison of carbs and fats shows that carbs produce denser LDL while fats make the LDL large and fluffy, or, generally, fats are far less harmful particles.

  60 G. D. Foster et al., “A Randomized Trial of a Low-carbohydrate Diet for Obesity,” New England Journal of Medicine 21 (May 22, 2003): 2082-90.

  61 J. Powles, “Commentary: Mediterranean Paradoxes Continue to Provoke,” International Journal of Epidemiology 30 (October 2001): 1076-77.

  62 M. Nestle, “The Ironic Politics of Obesity,” Science 269 (February 7, 2003): 781.

  63 C. W. Enns et al., Trends in Food and Nutrient Intakes by Adults: NFCS 1977-78, CSFII 1989-91, and CSFII 1994-95, Family Economics and Nutrition Review 10 (1997), quoted in Atkins, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, 25.

  64 H. E. Garrett, E. C. Horning, B. G. Creech, and Michael De Bakey, “Serum Cholesterol Values in Patients Treated Surgically for Atherosclerosis,” Journal of the American Medical Association 189 (August 31, 1964): 655-59; D. Rittenberg and R. Schoenheimer, “Deuterium as an Indicator in the Study of Intermediary Metabolism. XI. Further Studies on the Biological Uptake of Deuterium into Organic Substances with Special Reference to Fat and Cholesterol Formation,” Journal of Biological Chemistry 121 (1937) 235-53.

  65 Kelly Brownell and K. B. Horgan, Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 8.

  66 Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories, 234; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Physical Activity Trends—United States, 1990-1998,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports 50 (March 9, 2001): 166-69.

  67 “Taking Exercise to Heart,” New York Times, March 27, 1977; “Passion to Keep Fit: 100 Million Americans Exercising,” Washington Post, August 31, 1980.

  68 J. D. Wright et al., “Trends in Intake of Energy and Macronutrients—United States, 1971-2000,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports 53 (February 6, 2004): 80-82.

  69 John Higginson, “From Geographical Pathology to Environmental Carcinogenesis: A Historical Reminiscence,” Cancer Letters 117 (1997) 133-142, and his “Rethinking the Environmental Causation of Human Cancer,” Food and Cosmetics Toxicology 19 (October 1981): 539-48.

  70 J. O. Hill and J. C. Peters, “Environmental Contributions to the Obesity Epidemic,” Science 299 (February 7, 2003) 1371-74.

  71 David Pimentel and Marcia Pimentel, “Sustainability of Meat-based and Plant-based Diets and the Environment,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 78 (September 2003), supplement, 660S-663S.

  72 Nathan Fiala, “How Meat Contributes to Global Warming,” Scientific American, February 4, 2009.

  73 “Fatties Cause Global Warming,” The Sun, April 21, 2009, http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2387203.ece.

  74 Fiala, “How Meat Contributes to Global Warming.”

  75 Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal (New York: Penguin, 2002).

  76 Adam W. Shepard, Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream (New York: Collins, 2008).

  77 “Childhood Obesity Report Calls for Government Regulations to Limit Access to ‘Unhealthy’ Restaurant Chains,” CNSNews.com, September 2, 2009, http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/53374.

  78 Peter Gwynne, “The Cooling World,” Newsweek, April 28, 1975.

  79 Richard Lindzen, “Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus,” CATO Institute 15 (Spring 1992), http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n2/reg15n2g.html.

>   80 B. Bruce-Briggs, The War Against the Automobile (New York: Dutton, 1977); John Heitmann, The Automobile and American Life (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009).

  CHAPTER 5

  1 Interview with Felix Cavaliere, Rascals founder, March 10, 2009.

  2 Ray Manzarek, Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors (New York: Berkley Boulevard Books, 1999), 14.

  3 Barry Miles quoted in Peter Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars, and the Rise and Fall of the ’60s (New York: Canongate, 2007), 174.

  4 This was a well-established business trend of controlling the entire production process. See Larry Schweikart and Lynne Pierson Doti, American Entrepreneur (New York: Amacom Books, 2009).

  5 Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On, 70.

  6 Jonathan Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (New York: Harmony Books, 2007), 61.

  7 John Heitmann, The Automobile and American Life (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009).

  8 Ray Kroc and Robert Anderson, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1977); Kemmons Wilson, The Holiday Inn Story (New York: The Newcomen Society, 1968); Bob Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976); Randy Bright, Disneyland: Inside Story (New York: Abrams, 1987).

  9 Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love, 147.

  10 Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On, 77.

  11 Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love, 221.

  12 The influence of the Beatles on the American music scene was, in an understatement, massive. West Coast rockers such as Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek and East Coast “white soul” singer/keyboardist Mark Stein of Vanilla Fudge identified the Beatles as one of the most important influences in their music (interviews with Mark Stein, various dates, 2008-9). Dave Mason, of Traffic, observed that “they were raw, brand new, everyone copied them” (interview, April 14, 2009). The impact was not universal: Doors guitarist Robby Krieger cited edgier British bands, such as the Rolling Stones and the Animals, as his primary influence; and David Paich of Toto leaned toward American jazz and blues artists (interview with Robby Krieger, July 1, 2009; interview with David Paich, June 25, 2009).