The Advisory State World War I Made: Scientific Nutrition and Scientific Mothering

      Dr. Wilbur Olin Atwater was best known for his calorimeter tests—dietary experiments in which he kept graduate students in sealed chambers while they burned up energy performing various tasks. He then measured the energy they exerted with an aim of understanding the physiology of calorie expenditure. Atwater ultimately dispensed dietary advice based loosely on these findings. In an 1888 treatise on nutrition science, this man sometimes described as the “father of American nutrition” expressed a paternalistic concern over women’s food-shopping habits. “The good wife and mother does not understand about protein and potential energy,” he wrote. Nor did she understand “the connection between the nutritive value of food and the price she pays for it.” Atwater believed that improving American diets required his scientific approach. Once this nutrition science spread, once it was available to doctors, public health workers, and settlement house professionals, Atwater argued, it would become the new American way of nutrition.¹ Atwater’s research was the vehicle through which concerns over American strength, vigor, and vitality began to receive direct federal research attention and funding. This federal attention, well positioned amid Progressive Era attention to health and better living through science, marked the growth of the modern advisory state.

      Economic, racial, and national divisions produced anxiety in late nineteenth-century America, especially for the middle to upper classes. The Plessy v. Ferguson case codified racial segregation. European immigrants worked twelve-hour days in dirty, dangerous northern factories.² In response to a society that seemed out of control—and poised to erupt at any moment—a number of Americans sought to reorganize the nation in ways that promised to reestablish order.³ Against big banks and big railroads, against monopolies and trusts, against rampant political corruption, a middle class sought to respond to these end-of-century social problems through expertise and scientific management.⁴ Food reformers most famously embraced pure food and drug standards and meat inspections in this era.⁵ In fact, reformers interested in dietary management positioned themselves as central to this larger Progressive agenda.⁶

      Wilbur Atwater and his Progressive-minded supporters pushed for food reform that went far beyond safer foodstuffs for the middle classes. Instead, they argued that scientific nutrition could help immigrants Americanize, ease the problems of the working poor, and prepare the nation for continued industrial progress. This approach reverberated loudly for Progressives. Nutrition education promised a “sound and economical basis” for human health.⁷ Atwater, for instance, referred to dietary plans as the “pecuniary economy” of food.⁸ Women—wives, mothers, and household managers—stood at the forefront of everyday American decisions about nutrition. Progressive nutritionists, through the wives and mothers of laborers in particular, held the key to industrial progress by using home economics to literally strengthen the nation’s men. Through scientific nutrition, activists like Atwater and his supporters hoped the workingman’s wife might improve American physique. In the process, Atwater, home economists, and the later federal agencies who sought to assess these women’s progress, all suggested that women had the responsibility of ensuring male labor power through educated consumer choice. The Progressive nutrition agenda included this understanding of familial responsibility for a manageable and malleable human body, alongside the belief that such responsibility required scientific education and training rather than intuition or tradition. Proper discipline would make an ideal citizen inside and out. Less-than-ideal bodies, by extension, must be the product of ignorance or bad choices.

      The emphasis on advising women on nutrition, and then expecting their compliance, played a key role in shaping women’s Progressive reform work. Then the emerging public health work of middle-class female reformers fueled a 1910s and 1920s effort to improve a new generation of workers by focusing on children’s bodies. The Children’s Bureau’s voluntary networks reshaped the public discourse around child health and physique through height-weight measurements, maternal education, and conferences and other events. These women’s adaptations of scientific nutrition and public health measures offered a subtler approach than contemporaneous eugenics efforts. They placed responsibility for children’s health—typically quantified as appropriate weight and height—on mothers rather than genetic inheritance. The reform projects also avoided most controversy by emphasizing maternal approaches to distinguish themselves from medical projects, and by relying heavily on the use of quantification and standards that promised an objective approach to health concerns.

      Calorie counts and dietary studies in the 1890s and 1900s, and child weighing and measuring efforts in the 1910s and 1920s, all offered neatly scientific, quantified methods of addressing otherwise overwhelming social problems. Notably, it was at the height of the Great War when American male strength seemed most embattled, that federal nutrition experts moved from the laboratory setting into the health clinic setting. World War I provided an opportunity for reformers to expand federal advisory state body projects. The advisory state of American physique was built in late nineteenth-century nutrition research, and then deployed in World War I–era child health programs. The World War I and post–World War I state enlisted women’s labor and allegiance without apparent federal overreach to construct a narrative of individual responsibility around food choices being beneficial to the civic whole.

      Wilbur Atwater and Scientific Nutrition

      Chemist Wilbur Atwater, inspired by a few years of study abroad, pursued federal funding for his research on which U.S. agricultural feeds were most effective.⁹ Federal government money for nutrition research was new, but money for agricultural research dated back to land grant institutions and the Morrill Acts of 1862, making the transition possible. In the early 1870s, he helped found the first federally funded Agricultural Experiment Station in the country in Middletown, Connecticut.¹⁰ Then, in 1877, an opportunity from the United States Commission of Fisheries pushed the professor’s study from the food composition of animal feed to the food composition of animals themselves. For the next three years, Atwater and his students analyzed fish that might be part of a typical American diet. These “human feed” studies made his name. The study shifted Atwater’s interest in the composition of animal feed toward work on the composition of food eaten by humans. After determining the amount of crude protein, ash, and carbohydrates in each of these fish, Atwater began to direct experiments on a diversity of human-consumed foods. By 1879 he had analyzed the composition of 1,300 foods.¹¹ Following the influence of human nutrition studies across the Atlantic, Atwater also became absorbed in research on calories. European calorie studies emerged from projects that attempted to understand the human body, especially to understand how it compared to other machines. As American and European physiologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century began to analogize the human body to a machine, a system of interlocking parts, they also came to understand the body as something improvable. Like other technologies of the moment, a human-machine could be assessed and managed piece by piece.¹² As German and French