White Bread

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

  Legions of women heeded the advice of scientific nutrition and hygiene, changing the way their families ate. Legions more poured into the country’s tenement zones and mountain hollers to spread what they called “the gospel of good food” to the turbulent masses. Unfortunately, these efforts to improve the poor typically failed, often spectacularly. Middle- and upper-class reformers’ eagerness to help was often matched only by their ignorance of what kinds of assistance the poor might actually want. Progressive advocacy for systemic change—consumer protections, public services, and accountable government—had a huge, and largely positive, impact on most Americans. On the other hand, eager attempts to “improve” the poor by teaching them about “good food” may have made reformers feel great about themselves but often missed the point. The emphasis on scientific diet and efficient household management as routes out of poverty was no match for the grinding structural forces keeping people poor: nativism, racism, political corruption, anti-worker laws, and monopoly power. 9

  Through their own militant embrace of scientific eating, however, middle- and upper-class reformers did sow the seeds of a new way of thinking about food that would have long-term repercussions. At the very least, by the 1930s, the bread question had been decisively answered: the country had abandoned its home-baked loaves and craft bakery bread, both scorned as dangerously impure, and embraced air-puffed, chemically conditioned, ultra-refined marvels of modern industry.

  A BREAD REVOLUTION

  In 1890, 90 percent of American bread was baked at home by women. From Perry County, Missouri, where German homesteaders made their own sourdough starters from beer mash and baked dark loaves in communal brick ovens, to the Deep South, where black and white field hands lunched on cornbread, to the country’s Gold Coasts and Upper East Sides, where servants in starched aprons plated gleaming white rolls, homemade bread, in some form, was the country’s staple. Despite periodic vogues for store-bought “French bread,” the only people consistently purchasing the staff of life in the decades following the Civil War were affluent urbanites or recent immigrants living in tenement districts. The country’s few commercial bakeries were nearly all tiny one-oven shops with five or fewer employees. Bread was—as it had been for millennia—the product of unstandardized ingredients, artisan labor, and unreliable technology.

  Forty years later, this had changed completely. By 1930, 90 percent of the country’s most important staple food was baked outside the home by men in increasingly distant factories. The few small bakeries left were rapidly disappearing, and bread had begun to take on the form in which we know it today: a standardized, homogeneous product of food science and assembly-line manufacture.

  The industrialization of bread began haltingly after the Civil War, picking up speed as the century ended. By 1900, the country’s largest bakeshops could produce fifteen thousand loaves a day. By 1910, large bakeries regularly churned out one hundred thousand loaves a day, and Ward’s Brooklyn and Bronx factories together produced five hundred thousand. A model bakery set up by the American Bakers Association at its 1925 meetings in Buffalo was said to have topped 1 million loaves in twenty-four hours. Across the country, “model palaces of automatic baking” captured the public’s imagination, each one a spectacle of scientific “system and order.”10

  Bread baking had been slow to industrialize compared to other sectors of the food system that saw major upheavals after the Civil War. There were cultural reasons for this, but it was also technically and economically difficult. Unlike most food industries, which deployed science to freeze food’s living processes into an ideal state called “freshness,” bakers had to work with bread’s biological life.11 Organic fermentation was essential to the magical alchemy that turned pasty globs of flour and water into light, sweet, aromatic loaves. This introduced a whole series of obstacles into the bakery assembly line: imagine how crazy it would have made Henry Ford if his Model T parts shrank or grew with slight variations in temperature, collapsed in air drafts, deflated after minor production delays, and depended on fickle microbes for energy. Before bakeries could become mass-production assembly lines, bread’s living nature would have to be tamed.

  With advances in microbiology, cereal chemistry, climate control, and industrial design during the first three decades of the twentieth century, bakers overcame these challenges. The Wards were early adopters of nearly every important technological development that drove this revolution. Perhaps more importantly, they pioneered the economic model of mergers and oligopoly that would define the industry for the rest of the century, as well as the cultural model of selling bread through the language of purity and hygiene that would convince Americans to eat the product of those powerful companies.

  UP FROM BROOME STREET

  During the Ward Baking Company’s heyday in the 1910s and 1920s, Hugh Ward’s well-heeled heirs loved to tell his story. Or at least their publicists did. Prominently displayed in newspaper ads and paraded out for interviews, the rags-to-riches tale of the company’s founder gave an attractive aura of hard work and street cred to the Robber Barons of Bread.12 As the story went, Hugh Ward and his father, James, landed in New York in 1849, fleeing Belfast and the Irish potato famine. Their first home was the Lower East Side, somewhere near Five Points, then a violent and squalid Irish and black quarter. At that time, opening a small bakery was still a relatively inexpensive affair—a seat-of-the-pants venture just within the reach of ambitious immigrant entrepreneurs with small stashes of cash and a penchant for long nights of hard work. Hugh Ward was one of them. A few months after landing in New York, he opened a small one-oven bakery in a brick building on Broome Street.

  If it was like the city’s other pre-Civil War immigrant bakeries, the conditions in Hugh Ward’s shop would have been grim: he would have worked alongside his workers fourteen to sixteen hours a day in the building’s stoop-ceilinged and vermin-infested basement. Twenty-three hours on Saturday. He would have slept what little he could with his family in a room above the shop, or alongside his workers on the bakery’s dough-mixing tables. It would have been hot, living always in the glare of the oven. He would have worn a second skin of ash, flour, and sweat.

  For six years Hugh Ward’s bakery produced two hundred loaves a day for Lower East Side families. Then, in 1856, like so many others, Ward closed up shop and headed for the great American West. He made it as far as Pittsburgh. With its fiery coal furnaces and eternally black sky, Pittsburgh must have seemed to Ward like a city-sized version of his basement bakery. Certainly, with its population doubling every ten years, booming iron and glassworks, and glimmers of a prosperous future built on steel and armaments, it must have seemed like a good place to start a bakery.

  Fueled by industry and immigrants, the Wards’ new Pittsburgh establishment grew rapidly. Its secret, Ward’s son Robert remembered later, was using low-grade flour to make the cheapest bread possible for Pittsburgh’s poor. The bakery specialized in soot-colored “jumbo” loaves that sold for half the price of regular white bread. It was, in today’s business parlance, a “bottom of the pyramid strategy.” And it worked. The bakery required fifteen barrels of flour a week, more than triple the consumption of Ward’s Broome Street establishment.

  In 1897, the bakery, then run by Ward’s sons Robert and George, combined with a profitable biscuit and cracker company, and capital from the merger allowed the company to open “Pittsburgh’s first modern sanitary bakery” in 1903. Over the next eight years, Robert and George Ward oversaw one of the most remarkable periods of innovation and expansion in the history of baking. First in Pittsburgh, and then in a steady stream of new bakeries opened or acquired in St. Paul, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and Providence, the Ward brothers developed the country’s most advanced mechanical mixers, kneaders, loaf shapers, and bread wrappers. While most of the country’s bakeries still shuttled batches of bread in and out of hearths not that different from those that supplied the Roman Empire, Ward loaves flowed continually through long “tunnel o
vens,” assembly-line style. Less visibly, the Wards played a key role in bringing laboratory science to bear on baking, endowing the country’s first research chair in bakery science at the Mellon Institute. As a 1925 paean to industrial baking in the New York Times beamed, “Each new invention eliminated labor, cut down the cost of production, and increased profits; and the Ward bakeries took advantage of every one.”13

  In 1909, when the first reports leaked to the press that the Wards had set their eyes on the New York market, the New York Times could easily call them Pittsburgh’s “rulers of baking.”14 Hugh Ward had left Manhattan fifty-three years earlier a moderately successful immigrant baker. Now his sons and grandsons were returning, ready to invest $3 million outright and backed by a total capitalization of around $25 million, likely put up by Pittsburgh steel magnates (about $72 million and $600 million, respectively, in 2011 dollars).

  This was appropriate. The man who would come to define the Wards’ New York operation—Hugh’s grandson William—was born with flour in his blood, but it was the brute tactics of steel barons that defined his career. William began to rise in the company after his father died in 1915, and, by the early 1920s, he had muscled aside an uncle and assorted nephews to consolidate control. Wildly ambitious and often accused of stock swindles, boardroom thuggery, political corruption, and violent anti-union activities, all glossed with the sheen of high-profile charity work and benevolent paternalism, William put into motion the most audacious plan ever seen in American baking. Between 1921 and 1926, from his office in the company’s New York flagship bakery, he executed a stealthily choreographed series of steadily larger mergers leading toward one final merger to end all mergers in which Ward would combine multiple giant bakery companies into a single firm with dominant positions in every bread market in the country.

  It almost succeeded. By 1925, using millions of dollars staked by stock speculators, William had consolidated much of the industry into three massive companies: the Ward Baking Company, the General Baking Company, and Continental Baking. The General Baking Company, itself the product of several previous combinations, had dominant positions in some twenty-five hundred towns. Continental was even bigger. The Wards’ first bakery in Pittsburgh had used 15 barrels of flour a week. Continental’s forty massive plants spread out in thirty-five cities across the country consumed 57,500.

  Most consumers hadn’t yet noticed the changes, but Wisconsin’s great Progressive politician Robert M. La Follette attacked the “Ward Bread Trust” in his presidential campaign rhetoric. Bakery workers’ unions, bearing the brunt of Ward’s growing power, railed against the “Ward Bread Octopus.” And, for once, workers found common cause with many independent bakery owners, who decried the dirty tactics Ward’s merger managers used to drive small firms out of business. Democrats in the House and Senate introduced resolutions against Ward, and federal regulators filed an antitrust complaint against Continental.

  Unfazed, William Ward moved ahead without pause. In January 1926, he announced the formation of the Ward Food Products Corporation (WFPC), which would absorb General, Continental, and the family’s New York flagship Ward Baking Company along with sundry interests in flour milling, yeast production, bakery equipment manufacturing, and transportation companies acquired over the years. In 2011 terms, the WFPC would be a $25-billion company, but more importantly, it would have a dominant presence in every important bread market in the country. Its gorilla weight and market presence would give it unprecedented power to determine the price of flour and bread. One company would, effectively, dictate the terms of access to the country’s single most important food.

  President Coolidge’s pro-business administration was not known for its enthusiastic enforcement of antitrust laws, and Ward had actively supported the president’s campaign—but the WFPC went too far. A month later the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed an injunction against the merger, ruling that the General, Continental, and Ward Baking Companies must remain independent.

  The precise choreography of Ward’s undertaking had come unglued. The pieces had begun to spin away from him. Faced with this, Ward retreated to home turf: the Ward Baking Company’s flagship bakeries in Brooklyn and the Bronx. There, on February 6, 1929, almost three years to the date after the WFPC’s incorporation, Ward’s secretary found him slumped at his desk, dead of a heart attack three days short of his forty-fifth birthday.

  Today, baseball buffs, interested in the Wards’ short-lived Brooklyn Tip-Toppers major league franchise, are more likely to remember the Ward family than food historians. But the Wards’ imprint lingers on our loaves and in our bakery aisles. The family revolutionized the technology of modern baking and created its business model. For, while the FTC balked at one company controlling the country’s bread, it left untouched the larger structure of mini-monopolies. The giants General and Continental emerged from the fracas unscathed, living to combine and grow larger. Continental survived into the 1990s, when it was absorbed by Interstate Bakeries Corporation, an even bigger company—evidence that an impulse to combine and monopolize still dominates the industry. In his last year of life, however, William Ward gave us a more palpable icon to remember him by: probably hoping to distance the company from the scandalous taint of his last name, he adopted the brand name of an Indianapolis bakery he had acquired. In 1929, a new sign went up over many of his factories: although Ward’s Tip-Top bread would continue to be made into the 1950s, the Ward Baking Company would henceforth and forever be better known as the Wonder Bakeries, makers of Wonder bread.

  GREAT-GRANDMOTHER’S BREAD

  An Irish American in Robert Ward’s Pittsburgh, my great-grandmother Florence Farrell made twelve to sixteen loaves of bread a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for ten kids and assorted neighbors. Her husband, P. T., a small-time Democratic politician and self-taught draftsman, insisted on homemade bread. The store-bought stuff, he proclaimed, was just “sacks of hot air”—and he was not alone in this feeling. Yet, by the 1930s, like nearly everyone in America, the Farrell family no longer ate homemade bread every week. Even in the 1920s, the seeds of that shift were in place; as my great-aunt recalled, “It sounds like we [kids] appreciated [our mother’s] homemade bread, but the truth is we loved any bakers’ bread, in our contrary way.”

  At the start of the twenty-first century, a wave of neo-traditional food writers urged Americans to eschew anything “your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” If your great-grandmother wouldn’t have eaten it, they argued, it wasn’t real food. This rule of thumb raised a few complications: I’m pretty sure my great-grandmother wouldn’t have recognized Ethiopian doro wat or Oaxacan huitlacochtle as anything a human would eat, and yet they’re two of my favorite foods. Neo-traditionalist’s dreams of “real” food have racial and nationalist undertones, it seems. More importantly, they ignore the complexities and ambiguities of early twentieth-century Americans’ relation to food: which version of my great-grandmother’s bread am I supposed to treasure? The laborious homemade one her husband demanded, or the factory-baked one she eventually came to love? Food writers selling a particular dream of “great-grandmother’s kitchen” rarely concern themselves with real people. What I want to know is how and why my great-grandmother’s generation came to desire the store-bought staff of life.

  “Convenience” is an easy answer, and certainly part of the historical explanation. While American preachers and social reformers (mostly male) had invoked “Mother’s bread” as a symbol of all that was good and pure going back to the early 1800s, actual mothers had decried the relentless tedium of daily baking for just as long. Baking was arm-breaking work, complicated by fickle ovens and inconsistent ingredients. It kept women bound close to the home, tethered by the slow schedule of rising dough. As George Ward liked to brag, just one of his company’s mixing machines “saved 1,600 women from tedium every fifteen minutes.” Or, as a Polish immigrant put it more bluntly, bakery bread was a “godsend to the women. It saved their strength and t
ime for work in the mill.”15

  Store-bought bread was a godsend, particularly in households without servants, and as economic pressures and new opportunities moved more women into the labor force. But convenience offers only a partial explanation for the popularity of store-bought bread. Florence Farrell never took a job outside the home, and her children recalled that she loved the sense of community created on baking days. Thanks to Florence’s unpaid labor, homemade bread would also have been less expensive than even the most efficiently produced industrial bread until well into the 1930s. For the Farrells to have switched their allegiances, modern bread must have had some other appeal. None of my relatives remember exactly what that was, so we’ll have to move from family lore to the terrain of history. To understand the attractions of modern bread more fully, we need to view it in a broader social context.

  For bakers in the 1910s and 1920s, ever more efficient production of ever-greater quantities of bread was a decidedly ambiguous kind of progress. While consumers might buy newer, better automobiles as their prices fell thanks to industrial efficiency, they were unlikely to increase their consumption of bread, no matter how cheap and plentiful it got. Even worse, falling bread prices (or rising incomes) freed money in household budgets with which consumers could introduce more variety into their meals, displacing bread from its dominant place in the American diet. “Bread must compete with other foods for its place at the table,” one industry observer wrote, capturing a widespread anxiety, but it had few advantages in that fight: lacking the movie star looks of newfangled fruits arriving by refrigerated train from California, the novelty of modern wonders like Jell-O, or the exotic appeal of tropical sweets steaming in from Central America, bread was just basic. “Declining consumption” was every baker’s nightmare, and it was assumed to be inevitable.16