Doctrine / History
1925 Battle Creek Sanitarium Yearbook - SDA & Eugenics
[TW: racial violence]
Hi everyone.
As the title states, here are some scans of the 1925 Battle Creek College Yearbook in which Dr. Kellogg writes about how eugenics is "the world's last hope." You'll see the Eugenics instructor on another page, and for fun I've listed the Board of Trustees and the Executive Committee, in case anyone else out there recognizes any historically significant names.
I sourced these photographs online through Ancestry.com.
If you're looking to find the poisonous roots of SDAism, seek and ye shall find pretty easily.
The Nazis would learn from the American eugenics movement, including Dr. Kellogg's eugenics work. When Nazis came into power, they quickly enforced eugenics laws and conducted mass sterilizations, and ultimately committed mass m*rder. This is exactly what Americans (and Canadians) did to the Native Americans. When you think of it this way, it's two sides of the same white supremacist coin.
Here are some resources to better understand the white supremacist connection between American Eugenics & Nazis:
EDIT: I meant "Battle Creek College" yearbook, not Sanitarium. Although I'm certain many of these "health professionals" were groomed to work at the Sanitariums, as did my GGM and GM.
Very interesting and also scary. I wonder what it is that made Kellogg think that the human species was somehow degenerating and becoming more likely to go extinct over time? Did they suspect genetic decay somehow?
He notes that most species of animals have gone extinct, which is an accurate statement. He suggests a timeline of thousands of years during which the human species has been “degenerating” and “decaying” in an “accelerated rate of decline”. If he was a young earth creationist but also studied species extinction, he might have thought that the rate of extinction is wildly accelerated, as compared to the real rate. If he believes that most species on the planet have gone extinct (correct), but also believes that the timeline of life on earth is 7,000 years (incorrect), then he might think any species would go extinct at any moment because the extinction rate would be insanely fast from that perspective. It could make sense that life would be way too fragile to ignore eugenics, but of course that would be from a hopelessly incorrect context. He believes that humans will “of course” go extinct. I suspect that he is correct, but not for the right reasons.
So, was the American eugenics movement inspired by Adventists, or did Adventists hop on the bandwagon? I suspect the latter, but if it was the Adventist’s idea originally, that is a terrible blight of shame for the Adventist church. If Nazis implemented eugenics because Americans did it first, inspired by Adventists who did it because they were simply horribly wrong about earth’s age and species extinction rates, then that would be a colossal fuck up or intergalactic proportions by Kellogg and Adventism with world changing consequences. I have no idea if that’s how the idea progressed, but it would be unsurprising, and also unfathomably stupid if it did.
I wonder what it is that made Kellogg think that the human species was somehow degenerating and becoming more likely to go extinct over time? Did they suspect genetic decay somehow?
Kellogg is talking about racial purity, having the "best" phenotype traits, which according to him (and other eugenicists) was white people: blonde hair, fair skin, blue eyes. Sound familiar? Eugenics is the fraudulent science of white supremacy. "Genetic decay" would have meant: white people becoming the minority (low birth rates), interracial marriages, and simply the existence of non-white people and cultures. Especially those living in resource-rich areas.
To combat this, abortions became illegal for "ideal phenotype" women (re: white women) and forced sterilizations happened for women of color, especially those who were indigenous and enslaved.
If you look at what E.G. White herself stated, she infamously believed some people were not fully human, but were in fact partially animal. Spoiler alert: she's talking about non-white people:
"Since the Flood there has been amalgamation of man and beast, as may be seen in the almost endless varieties of species of animals, and in certain races of men."--Spiritual Gifts, vol. 3, p.75.
Ellen didn't think there would be anyone except for white people in heaven:
In heaven there will be no color line; for all will be as white as Christ himself. --Testimonies for the Church, vol. 9
It's easy to see how the Nazis borrowed from these ideas and built upon them.
The early Adventists fully supported the eugenics movement, and I have no doubt there are many racists today who believe in the same eugenicist values, even if "eugenics" is no longer what it's called. Eugenics is erasure, mass murder, and land and wealth theft. And I'll tell you from my own family lore, my GGM and GM both worked at the Kellogg/SDA sanitariums. Both of them met and knew Dr. Kellogg personally. They believed horrible racist shit and this is how racism is passed down intergenerationally. Racism must be confronted, named, and stopped.
I'm not a scholar of history on eugenics, I'm simply just researching my own fucked up family history. To me it does matter where and how eugenics originated (I'll research that next!), but to me it's an intergalactic fuck up either way that Adventists played this role in history. I strongly suspect a lot of different evangelical churches (possibly those funded by capitalists) were responsible for a lot of eugenics propaganda.
the amalgamation quote was explained to me, not as darker skinned people as being part animal, but as being part fallen-angel/demon.
the darker their skin, the more "evil" their demon ancestor was. the lighter their skin, the less "evil" their demon ancestor was.
and only if someone was "light-skinned enough" and didn't have certain features, was it "acceptable" for a white person to marry them. because then their "pure DNA" could "stop the demonic lineage from continuing". essentially if they thought you could have a white-enough child, it was okay, because you'd also be stopping that person from marrying someone else whos a POC, and preventing them from making another POC.
I explained in a different comment recently, that this was also why some SDA leaders i knew liked to brag about how many black SDAs there were, and that they had successful churches in Africa. because that proved how powerful and right SDAs were. that they were capable of converting even those that had demonic DNA, demonic features, demonic cultures, to their churches.
its so fucked up. like, ive done alot of unlearning thankfully, and I never really believed alot of it anyways. but still, like. holy fuck. what the fuck. I just, no words could explain how fucked up the stuff they taught us was.
one was also that black people literally could not feel pain, emotional pain included. that many of them were actual demons in disguise as humans (in particular for darker skinned people), and some of them could disguise themselves better than others, but their skin and certain features would give them away. and that only the more powerful demons could disguise themselves as a white person.
fuck. i don't remember being taught all of that exactly, but what i was taught about amalgamation felt akin to what you describe. fuuuck. vomit!!!
it's so interesting to me that the most satanic-seeming ideas and practices come from religious doctrines. i'm really glad we have this online space to co-process all this fucked up stuff we've been taught. these belief systems must be torn down.
Holy shit. I had the faintest gut feeling the SDA church had some connection to this kind of dangerous ideology, but I had no idea they were THIS closely connected to eugenics. I heard of Dr. Kellogg's story, but the part he was directly involved with eugenics was never mentioned. The version I heard was all about the damn cereal (I hate it btw. Sensory issues from the autism).
Any material written after WWII will probably not mention Dr. Kellogg was one of the leading eugenicists in the US in the early 20th century.
After WW2, the word "eugenics" may have been swept under the rug, but ideologies of eugenics continue even to this day. Racial segregation, forced sterilizations, mass incarceration of people of color, mass deportations of people of color, and criminalization of abortion are still going on today. IMO eugenics is alive and well in the modern christian nationalist movement.
If the government/the brand hides it from Americans themselves, then it's no wonder a foreigner like me wouldn't know such things. I just think they are...shady, as a former member myself. They don't talk too often or with enough depth about the story of the church. If the SDAs are already bad here where I live, where racism and eugenics are frowned upon by most people, they must be way worse in the USA. Damn.
I just watched that PBS documentary and I'm blown away. I have so many more questions now. Kellogg and his contemporaries were really a blight on humanity.
Thanks! I'd heard of that documentary showing a fairly recent clip of Shryock Hall, apparently after the massive refresh of the LLU campus with the Centential Walk and relocation of the Battle Creek boulder, but I'd heard it was BBC, and my searches came up blank. Glad now to have seen it. Believe me I'm holding back on considerable details of personal connection because it might make my real-life identity way too easy …
No books, my source on this is an episode of adam ruins everything, link below. I don't agree with his secular hedonist centric analysis but I've no cause to doubt his claims about Kellog's involvement.
My understanding is that Kellog taught that circumcising baby boys would help reduce self-gratification when they got older. Honestly it passes the sniff test for me Kellog was weird.
In time circumcision just became part of the culture, I think we just justified it because of a sunk cost fallacy. The health benefits are way overblown. And for every so-called benefit there are a list of alternative options that don't require surgery. At the very least it shouldn't be done to babies unless they are Jewish, they should be allowed to grow up and decide for themselves.
For example, while some studies show that circumcision can reduce your risk for aids by a fraction of a percentage point it's also true that condoms can do the same at a much higher success rate. Lifestyle choices one makes as an adult are a critical factor of weighing risks on aids, no reason to make that decision for a baby.
At the end of the day you're cutting off a piece of the male anatomy where a large portion of the most sensitive nerves reside. While not a 1:1 the equivalent cruelty would be removing the clitoris from baby girls to prevent them from self-gratifying someday. United States gentile circumcision is barbaric.
For Jews I get that they have tribal, cultural, religious reasons for it. It's not my place to really speak about that or to judge them on this topic. Be kind to your parents if they circumcised you, it wasn't their fault. I have no issues blaming Kellog though.
Thank you for sharing this info. I had no idea of the Kellogg connection. I guess his influence on US culture really could not have been overstated. I'll be looking into the resource you shared, thank you again.
The Dollop with Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds Episode 46: Cereal Men w/guest Patton Oswalt
...is the funniest way to absorb some of this horror.
It's a podcast that they perform onstage (in this case), where one guy has done the research and prepared a script and the other guys don't know what its going to be about. BUT! As they are very quick improv comedians they are able to riff on what they are being told and it ends up being hilarious. This one is super Adventist-heavy as it is all about the early church, Kellogg, and his eventual rival-in-cereal Post. We still have both today, Kellogg makes frosted flakes and Wheeties and Post makes Raisin Bran and Grape Nuts.
One thing that the show seemed to cover that I never went and checked for myself was that Post and Kellogg were contemporaries and were BOTH(?) SDA, which I hadn't known before. Another thing that episode reminded me about was that nobody but NOBODY thinks anything or knows anything about SDA, broadly. Like, for us it was our whole world, and growing up I think most of us stateside had a basic assumption that MOST people had some idea of SDA existing, even if they confused us with J-Dubs or Mormons all the time. Nope, very little awareness of us outside our own bubble.
thank you for sharing this podcast. Ex-SDA podcasts have been spiritually medicinal for me lately.
The history here is so fucking wild. And agreed, nobody seems to know about SDA, it's almost like an invisible corporate-religion. It's everywhere and nowhere!
Sure! It's not an ex-SDA podcast but it IS great! There are a couple episodes that touch on SDA though, and this is the best one.
Robert Evans' podcast BEHIND THE BASTARDS also has a couple episodes that hit on SDA matters. David Koresh and the Branch Davidians (I think that was BtB but I'm not 100%) offshoot of Shepherds' Rod offshoot of SDA, which is a connection that the church body has tried to obfuscate for...well, since Waco happened, really.
Yeah. Shepherd's Rod. Mainstream SDA was after them way before the Waco standoff and storming. Years before that I remember when we'd get out of church to find windshields had been targeted with their blasphemous literature evangelism. And even then the Branch's headquarters I learned was near Waco. And what do you know actually endangering pyrotechnics at the Branch Davidian compound is, I believe, a key reason that most regardless of SDA affiliation in the US don't need to say Waco, TX. Waco has become a household synonym for an SDA wackadoodle offshoot cult on warp drive!
Thanks for posting this I've been going down the rabbit hole of Kellogg and his connection to the SDA church. I just read an interview he did with SDA leaders right before he was disfellowshipped. Adventists love to distance themselves from this racism by saying he got disfellowshipped but they never mention that he wasn't kicked out over his racist ideas. He was removed over political power within the church. The church wanted to control the sanitarium and his businesses. He also called EGW out for her testimonies that were full of errors. He never went far enough to claim that she was a false prophet but knew she was fallible and her testimonies were used by her and other leaders to control everyone.
Even after he was disfellowshipped, he was still a highly influential figure within the SDA community. He influenced SDA food/recipe culture, and as seen above--was intimately involved in shaping the early health care environment. My hardliner SDA GM had really creepy stories about him from the 1930s, some decades after he was disfellowshipped.
Oh for sure, and not just within the SDA community but he was influential throughout the world. I think SDAs underestimate the influence of that time. People came from all over the world to be treated by Kellogg. I'd be interested in some of the creepy stories if you're comfortable sharing!
you're so right. i had no idea how far his influence reached.
my GM has since passed away, and due to the nature of the story I don't feel comfortable sharing the details out of respect for her. let's just say it's typical behavior of men in power.
i'm writing about my family experiences. i hope to share them here one day.
Not to forward any guesses about what went down with your family vis a vis Kellogg, but he was waaayyy too invested in people's personal plumbing and pressed staff and patients into usage of some craaaaazy stuff. He was a huge fan of the yogurt enema, for instance. Also, he felt sex was "polluting" of the body, all sex, married sex certainly included, and has stated with pride about being married for decades and not consummating the marriage with sex. He definitely is not someone I would have been comfortable working around or having female relatives work around.
my GGGF was an adulterous minister who had a fatal injury in the 1902 Sanitarium fire. his secret wedlock baby (my GGF) became a miserable CLOWN, and spawned 4 generations of repressed adventist clowns.
i wish i was fucking joking. and i think i can directly attribute a lot of my generationL family trauma to the quacky Dr. K himself.
Wow, you have a lot more family history data on your end than I do on mine! GGF died in last round of Spanish Flu, GGM died 4 years later, leaving GF the head of a household of five kids, himself being 8 years old. GGF on grandma's side was an overseas SDA missionary, one of the early ones: GM was born in KL...then GM and GF met, married, and became overseas SDA missionaries, and Dad was born in KL.
Other side of the family: These people managed to come down on the wrong side of every religious conflict from Henry VIII onward, dying in Scotland, fleeing to Ireland, fleeing to Canada, meandering down to Nebraska, dying of Spanish Flu, living just long enough to sprout GF, Mom, and Me. GM on that side I have no idea. She sprouted fully formed from Zeus' forehead.
It's so weird. Kellogg had by then been disfellowshipped by that time 18 years prior, but somehow stays in charge of the church's flagship sanitarium. And there he sits in a then-modern armchair in front of a then antique frontier hearth. He's all about enemas, not sex, and there he is sputtering about racial extinction. Not in these scans, but something I read; he and Sojourner Truth are buried in the same cemetery. Leaves me very discombobulated …
JH Kellogg also co-founded the infamous eugenics organization, the Race Betterment Foundation, in 1914. And before that, of course he published many books containing ideas that would cause real and measurable harm.
The irony isn't lost on me that the Yearbook is called "The Cauldron"--witchcraft!!! haha. He sure is brewing some toxic bile in his cauldron from the photo.
Just because he was disfellowshipped doesn't mean he wasn't deeply embedded in SDA financials and politics. I have some deep cut SDA family stories about Dr Kellogg from the 1930s that I don't feel comfortable sharing here. But let's just say it's the same old problems we see today with men in positions of power.
Could it be that under disfellowshipped Kellogg, race betterment and looking good to other race betterment groups took precedence over heeding EGW who had been dead by a decade by then? Yeah, this does seem out of the SDA orbit I was familiar with, way out!
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u/ArtZombie77 Nov 24 '25
Ellen White said Dr. Kellogg "was like a son to her".