Alfred Watterson McCann
Alfred Watterson McCann was an influential journalist and advocate for food safety, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His academic journey began at Mount St. Mary's College and continued at Pittsburgh College of the Holy Ghost, where he later taught various subjects. McCann's early health struggles led him to emphasize the importance of nutrition and pure foods, catalyzing a career that combined journalism and advocacy for food purity. His notable work includes critical articles in The New York Globe, where he exposed the use of harmful additives in food and highlighted governmental shortcomings in food regulation. McCann also authored several books on health and nutrition, emphasizing mineral salts' benefits in the diet. In addition to his writing, he initiated “The McCann Pure Food Hour,” a radio program that aired health advice and investigative reports. His legacy includes a commitment to public health and an enduring influence in nutritional discourse. McCann passed away at the age of fifty-two, leaving behind a significant impact on food safety advocacy.
Subject Terms
Alfred Watterson McCann
- Alfred Watterson McCann
- Born: January 9, 1879
- Died: January 19, 1931
Journalist and pure-food crusader, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Michael McCann, a printer and engraver of Irish descent and Maria (Watterson) McCann, a native Pennsylvanian.
He attended Mount St. Mary’s College in Em-mitsburg, Maryland, and Pittsburgh College of the Holy Ghost (now Duquesne University), from which he received his B.A. in 1899, joining the faculty as an instructor of English, mathematics, and elocution.
McCann suffered from weak health as a young man and came to believe that careful diet and pure foods had enabled him to build his strength and live a normal life.
While teaching, he pursued his interest in nutrition and food, and the contacts that he made in this way led him into a second career. He was soon writing advertisements for various food companies, among them Francis H. Leggett & Company. McCann married Mary Carmody in 1905; they had five children, four of whom survived McCann.
McCann followed with interest the federal government’s involvement with regulation of food industries after the enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Passage of the act had been speeded by Upton Sinclair’s sensational novel The Jungle (1906), an expose of the Chicago meat-packing industry, but when Harvey W. Wiley, the bill’s chief proponent, resigned from the Department of Agriculture in 1912, McCann began to doubt that much would be achieved through any government action. Perhaps with the phenomenal public response to The Jungle in mind, McCann began to look about for an effective propaganda medium to arouse public support. He found one in The New York Globe. In October 1912 he presented his views and his program in “The Pure Food Movement,” a strongly written article critical of both industry and government. The Globe found that McCann’s brand of sensational journalism, which mixed outraged polemic with scientific reportage, sold papers, and from 1912 to 1922 McCann wrote a series of exposes and investigative articles for the paper. He attacked manufacturers who used coal-tar dyes, bleaches, fillers, and preservatives and other additives in food products, and he named the public officials who condoned these abuses. The Globe supported McCann’s efforts by supplying him with a laboratory for his research and by giving him legal support in the lawsuits his articles provoked. McCann was responsible for inquiries into the food served at the Ellis Island immigration center (1913), the New York City milk supply (1919), and the egg supply (1921), all of which were given detailed accounts in the Globe.
McCann also wrote books about health and nutrition. In 1913 he published Vital Questions and Answers Concerning 15,000,000 Physically Defective Children and Starving America. His Thirty Cent Bread, a volume dealing with emergency food problems during World War I, appeared in 1917. In this book he suggested the use of cornmeal instead of flour, dehydration instead of canning of fruits and vegetables, and the reduction of herds of grain-consuming beef cattle. These ideas formed the basis of an article in the Forum in October 1917 in which he criticized the U.S. Food Administration.
One of McCann’s strongest beliefs was in the value of mineral salts in food, and he returned to this argument in several of his works, notably This Famishing World (1918; revised in 1919 as The Science of Eating) and The Science of Keeping Young (1926). In 1922 he went beyond his pure-food proselytizing to publish a vehemently antievolution book, God—or Gorilla, subtitled How the Monkey Theory of Evolution Exposes Its Own Methods, Refutes Its Own Principles, Denies Its Own Inferences, Disproves Its Own Case. Following its publication, he received an honorary LL.D. from Fordham University in New York City.
The New York Globe suspended publication in 1923, and McCann began to write for the New York Evening Mail. At this time he was able to establish his own independent enterprise, the Alfred W. McCann Laboratories, Inc., in New York, and he thereafter used the laboratory not only to test his investigations, but also to provide endorsements for food products that met his standards; these ranged from major food products and produce to cigarettes and cigars.
In 1918 McCann initiated “The McCann Pure Food Hour,” a New York radio program that focused on exposes and health recommendations and that benefited from the energy and rhetorical ability that McCann effectively used in his journalism and advertising careers. He continued to broadcast the program for thirteen years, until his death of a heart attack at the age of fifty-two. One of his sons, Alfred W. McCann Jr., succeeded him as host of the radio show, and was succeeded in turn by his daughter Patricia.
Biographical sources include the Dictionary of American Biography (1933) and The New York Times, January 20, 21, 23, and 27,1931. See also National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 24 (1935).