White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

Middle- and upper-class women, in particular, found a place for themselves in public life through campaigns and crusades aimed at bringing progress to the needy. Careful regulation, scientific expertise, and technological innovation, it seemed, could reknit the fractured nation and stave off class struggle.

the two impulses of the time—fear and optimism—did not cleave around opposed “good guys” and “bad guys”—they were two faces of the same coin. In reckoning with Progressive Era reforms, we must live with ambiguity.

Second, we must appreciate the way concern over the purity of bodies—and, by extension, the purity of the food and drink consumed by those bodies—underpinned and unified nearly all of the diverse commitments that made up Progressivism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1890, 90 percent of American bread was baked at home by women.

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.

By 1930, 90 percent of the country’s most important staple food was baked outside the home by men in increasingly distant factories.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 ovens,” assembly-line style.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

For Coolidge this is saying a lot.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Ahahaha

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?

Food writers selling a particular dream of “great-grandmother’s kitchen” rarely concern themselves with real people.

“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.”

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.

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 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.

Instead, something remarkable happened during the first decades of the twentieth century: per capita bread consumption increased.17 Modern factory bread wasn’t just a more convenient version of the ancient staple—it was something new.

Bakers worked hard for that increase, advertising relentlessly, doing everything possible to distinguish more or less identical loaves from one another through branding.

none of that would have saved bread if bakers hadn’t capitalized on a new ethos of scientific eating spreading through the country. Scientific eating had several different facets, which we’ll revisit in later chapters. For now, I’ll argue that the appeal of modern bread lay in the way it resonated with a growing cultural embrace of science and industrial expertise as a buttress against rapidly escalating fears of impurity and contagion.

When Florence Farrell came of age at the turn of the century, the ability to make good bread was the mark of a good bride—her highest art. It was, in Victorian domestic ideology, “the very foundation of a good table” and “the sovereign” of the true housewife’s kitchen, as Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe declared at the start of one of the century’s best-selling books, The American Woman’s Home.

Powerful visions of expertise and efficiency were colonizing every corner of daily life, from how babies were born (with doctors, not midwives, in attendance) to fashion (hemlines raised for sanitary reasons) and interior design (smooth, easily cleanable surfaces, not Victorian fringe and ruffle). This fervent new belief in science, social engineering, and industrial efficiency aimed to sweep away old forms of knowledge and authority perceived as grounded in craft, intuition, and tradition.

In the eyes of nearly every branch of this new army of professional experts, mothers stood on the frontlines of the battle for national hygiene and efficiency. They conducted the care, feeding, and education of the population, and they governed the most intimate spaces of everyday life.

Scientific housekeeping, domestic hygiene, research-based meal planning, and efficient child rearing were supposed to liberate women from drudgery, but home economics aspired to even greater goals: by eliminating contagion, moral weakness, and inefficient energy use that sapped the stamina of the population, scientific household management would improve the very fabric of society from the hearth up.

For the mostly middle-class women who pioneered the field of home economics, the professionalization of domestic labor meant liberation and recognition.

This professionalization of housework was, in theory, a way to place all women’s work on par with that of men. In practice, however, it was primarily a way for women social reformers to gain respect for their work.

Thus, for the bulk of the nation’s mothers, the ascendance of home economics meant less that their work would receive recognition as a vital contribution to the nation and more that their perceived backwardness and resistance to expert advice would be seen as threats to the nation.

It’s not hard to understand the fervor with which early twentieth-century social reformers approached the question “What to eat?” Cholera, botulism, typhoid, and other food-borne diseases killed in large numbers across class and race lines. And while historians disagree whether America’s food supply actually grew more dangerous as it industrialized after the Civil War, one thing is clear: starting in the 1870s, Americans strongly believed that their food system was getting less safe.

26 In the face of looming danger, social reformers’ visions of food purity cross-pollinated easily with nativist politics and ideologies of racial purity.

Food-borne diseases were widely associated with eastern and southern Europeans, Mexicans, and other “dirty” groups.

Jacob Riis’s widely read 1890 exposé, How the Other Half Lives, gave most comfortable Americans their first glimpse of this looming danger. The book took readers on a tour of New York’s tenement slums filled with the babble of foreign tongues, ragged children, tubercular parents, and “queer [dietary] staples found nowhere [else] on American ground.”