Edward Atkinson

• Edward Atkinson
• Born: February 10, 1827
• Died: December 11, 1905

Businessman and reformer, was a prominent protagonist in post-Civil War debates over economic and social policy. Although renowned for his views on tariff and monetary reform, his most original contribution lay in his attempt to change the cooking and eating habits of American workers.

The fourth of six children born to Amos Atkinson 2d, a well-to-do merchant in Brookline, Massachusetts, and Anna Greenleaf (Sawyer) Atkinson, both of whom traced their ancestry to mid-seventeenth-century English immigrants, Atkinson attended private schools in Brookline and Boston. When he was fifteen, his father’s financial difficulties forced the abandonment of plans for him to attend Harvard. Instead, he entered the world of business, learning accountancy at a cotton textile brokerage. In the 1850s, he was appointed treasurer of a number of Boston cotton syndicates, often directing the day-today operations of their mills.

Atkinson’s progress through the ranks of the Boston merchant community could not have been harmed by his marriage in 1855 to Mary Caroline Heath, only daughter of a wealthy Brookline landowner. By this time, Atkinson echoed many of the political and social views common to the more advanced sectors of his class, adhering doggedly to the ideas of abolitionism and free soil. But the responsibility of providing for two young children enabled the young businessman to avoid in good conscience having to bear arms to defend these principles in the Civil War.

The hectic ups and downs of the cotton market during the war helped to turn Atkinson into a self-taught economist and statistician. Armed with batteries of statistics, he encouraged wartime investments in cotton grown by free labor. Peace brought embroilment in controversies over where cotton textiles should be manufactured and whether they should be protected by tariffs. In the mid-1870s, when the cotton mills he oversaw began to fail, he turned to railroads and then to the mutual insurance business as the major outlets for his business energies. Insurance provided the bulk of his business income from 1877 until his death.

It was in the late 1870s that Atkinson rose to public prominence, becoming well known as a contributor to the major magazines and as a prolific pamphleteer. Although he was regarded as a zealous reformer, in fact few of Atkinson’s views strayed very far from the conventional wisdom of his class, as opposed to his region. His advocacy of free trade raised many an eyebrow, but only because he was closely associated with the New England manufacturers who were so solidly behind protective tariffs. Even then, his fear of Greenbackers, Free Silverites, Populists, and any others who demanded currency expansion was always much stronger than his antipathy toward protective tariffs. His main consideration in deciding which political parties and candidates to support was usually the question of “sound” money. Moreover, by the mid-1880s, he had tailored his views on the tariff to harmonize better with New England manufacturing interests. Thereafter he called for the immediate abolition of import duties on raw materials but only their gradual removal from manufactures, especially those of New England.

Atkinson was often called a pacifist, but his opposition to large military establishments stemmed not from deep religious or philosophical principles but rather from the conviction that nations with large military establishments created insoluble economic problems for themselves. His membership in the Anti-Imperialist League and opposition to the annexation of the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War stemmed primarily from his fear that colonies would be used to justify large armies and navies and that uneducated Filipinos would have to be granted the rights of American citizens.

Atkinson’s reputation as a major reformer was based as much on style as on substance. He wrote like the quintessential Victorian reformer, his work oozing faith in American material and social progress. He had great confidence in science, especially of the applied variety. He presented himself not as a person who originated new scientific ideas, but as someone who could apply and disseminate them. It was on this basis that his claim to be an economist rested. Extracting theories and statistics from a variety of sources, he assembled a hotchpotch of ideas, which, he claimed, disproved the gloomy prognoses of Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, James Mill, and other second-generation laissez-faire economists. Still swearing fealty to Adam Smith, he tried to show how free competition, rather than maintenance of the working class at a subsistence level, would lead to the elevation of the standard of living of the working class by improving productivity and lowering prices.

It was his concern with breaking out of the Ricardian and Malthusian straitjacket and finding hope for the working class in the future of capitalism that led Atkinson into food reform. In 1884 he came across statistics indicating that working-class families in Europe and America tended to spend over fifty percent of their income on food. If, he now thought, the immutable laws of economics meant that the condition of American workers could not be improved through higher wages, especially if procured through artificial means such as trade unions or legislation, their standard of living could certainly be enhanced by teaching them how to spend their income more efficiently. If they could reduce the enormous proportion of their incomes devoted to food they would have more to spend on housing and the problem of the slums would soon disappear.

Atkinson now applied the knowledge of heat and heat-resistant materials gained in his fire insurance business to the problem. Appalled by the number of workmen he noticed who ate cold lunches at work (thereby, according to the physiological theories of the day, burning up much of the food’s energy merely to bring it up to body temperature to enable digestion), he tried to invent a heatable lunch pail, which would cook the worker’s lunch slowly during the morning.

This experiment led to a more ambitious project, the invention of a slow-cooking oven for use in workers’ homes. Dubbed the “Aladdin Oven,” it consisted of a wood or fiberboard box enclosed in tin with holes for one or more kerosene lamps in the bottom. Its contribution to lowering the cost of food for the masses was to be twofold: Because it was built of heat-retaining materials (later models used asbestos as well) rather than the heat-conducting iron and steel of conventional stoves, it lowered the cost of cooking food. Also, because it could not fry, broil, or roast meats at high temperatures, it was suited only for long, slow cooking—exactly the kind of cooking best suited for cheaper cuts of meats.

One of Atkinson’s problems was that it seemed that the American workingman did not take to stews of cheap cuts of meat, rejecting them, Atkinson said, as “bone soup” and “pig wash.” In 1889 he joined with two women, Mary Hinman Abel and Ellen H. Richards, in an attempt to solve that problem. Abel had just written a prize essay on how to teach nutrition to low-income families and had devised sample recipes and menus for cheap, nutritious food. Richards was a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was influenced by Abel’s description of the “people’s kitchens” of Germany, which served cheap, wholesome food to workingmen.

Atkinson, Abel, and Richards set up the New England Kitchen in a working-class section of Boston, using Aladdin Ovens in an open kitchen that sold a number of take-out dishes. Shortly thereafter, branches or related kitchens were set up in other parts of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and at Hull House in Chicago. In 1893 the enthusiastic reformers set up an Aladdin-equipped lunchroom and a model working-man’s cottage at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, demonstrating how, by cooking low-priced food, workers could live well on $500 a year.

The reformers’ hopes soon dimmed. Among other things, they had underestimated the pull of ethnicity on the working class of the cities, most of whom were immigrants who rejected the New England Kitchen’s dishes in favor of zestier fare from their homelands. Moreover, the Aladdin Oven, the focus of Atkinson’s interest in the project, was a failure. Special recipes and techniques had to be mastered to use it, and it took many hours merely to heat up. Because it was well insulated, it could not fulfill one of the main functions of conventional stoves of the time: home heating and clothes drying in winter. It could not be left unattended since it had a disturbing propensity to burn through the wooden table it stood on and cause a fire.

By 1897 the last of the New England Kitchens to survive in its original form, the one in New York City, had closed, but by that time Atkinson had lost faith in the working class’s ability to see what was good for it when it came to food. Labor leaders such as Eugene Debs had derided him as “Shinbone Atkinson,” accusing him of being a union-buster intent on lowering the standard of living of the American worker. He abandoned his drive, bringing out the Aladdin only occasionally for dinner guests in his own home and lamenting that he had gone about his crusade to change life at the bottom in the wrong way. He should have started at the top, he said, cooking the finest delicacies in his oven for the wealthy. Once the new way of cooking had been accepted in the upper reaches of society, man’s (and especially, he said, woman’s) inclination to emulate those better off would have led to the filtering down of the new ideas to those at the bottom.

The setback could not, of course, contain Atkinson’s boundless optimism in the future. Articulate, forceful, and brimming with confidence in his own arguments, he played an active role in business and public affairs until December 1905, when he was struck down by a heart attack on his way to his Boston office. “I hope that God has a lot of things for me to do up there,” said the Victorian liberal as he lay dying; “I shouldn’t be happy if He didn’t.”

The Edward A. Atkinson Papers are on deposit at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. Although somewhat sketchy regarding his earlier years, the files for the later years are extensive and include a substantial amount of correspondence, incoming and outgoing, with many of the prominent reformers of the day. They also contain an unpublished autobiographical sketch entitled “Edward Atkinson, His Egotistography.” The only full-length biography of Atkinson, H. F. Williamson, Edward Atkinson; The Biography of an American Liberal (1934), lists 291 publications by Atkinson. Among the more significant books and pamphlets are On Cotton (1866); Labor and Capital: Allies not Enemies (1879); The Margin of Profit (1887); The Industrial Progress of the Nation (1890); and The Science of Nutrition (1896). Williamson’s rather reverential biography concentrates on Atkinson’s economic ideas and political activities. Atkinson’s role as a food reformer is treated in H. A. Levenstein, “The New England Kitchen and the Origins of Modern American Eating Habits,” American Quarterly, Fall 1980. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1928) and M. B. Dalton, Edward Atkinson (1827-1905): Patron of Engineering Science and Benefactor of Industry (1950).