Alfred W. McCann

McCann was born in Pittsburgh.[1] He was educated at University of Chicago and graduated in 1899 from Duquesne University.[1] After graduation he taught English and mathematics.[1] He married Mary Carmody in 1905, they had five children.[1] In 1922, Fordham University awarded McCann an honorary doctorate of law.[2]

McCann hosted the "Pure Food Hour" on the WOR radio station in the 1920s to expose practices of the American food industry.[3][4] His son Alfred McCann Jr. took over for WOR radio after his death in 1931.[5] His son died in 1972.[6]

McCann died on January 19, 1931, in his apartment at the Park Royal Hotel, New York City.[7][8] McCann gave an hour long radio broadcast on the dangers of acidosis.[9] After he had gone off air, he died from a heart attack.[2]

McCann was a Catholic and creationist, he authored the anti-evolution book God – or Gorilla in 1922.[10][11] The book was notable for attacking paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn.[12] McCann argued that there is no evidence for common descent and denounced the "ape-man hoax".[13]

McCann cited an alleged "Triassic shoe sole fossil" which he used as evidence that humans were walking around with shoes in the Triassic period.[14] Science writer Martin Gardner noted that the photograph "shows what is obviously a common type of rock concretion" and geologists do not take McCann's claim seriously.[14] McCann's book was criticized for plagiarizing material from Jesuit Erich Wasmann.[15] Atheist author Woolsey Teller wrote a rebuttal to McCann.[15]

Reception from the creationist community was mixed. Creationist Arthur Isaac Brown supported the book, stating it offered "the most scathing and unanswerable indictment ever published against this untenable hypothesis."[16] However, Catholic creationist Barry O'Toole criticized McCann for utilizing inaccurate arguments.[13] O'Toole described the book as a "reprehensible, extreme of biased antagonism, that is neither fair in method nor conciliatory in tone."[17] O'Toole noted that one of McCann's illustrations made the mistake of confusing the skeleton of an orangutan with a chimpanzee.[17] Hay Watson Smith a Presbyterian minister and theistic evolutionist commented that McCann and other creationists have "no standing whatever as scientists."[18]

McCann has been described as an "anti-white bread crusader", "food faddist" and "pure foods reformer."[2][19] He campaigned against chemical bleaching and artificial whitening of bread. He linked the consumption of white bread and bleached white flour with disease.[2][19] He believed that processed and refined foods poison people.[2][20][21] He urged people to lower their consumption of meat and avoid white flour and refined sugar which he linked to cancer and heart attacks.[2] Similar to John Harvey Kellogg, he promoted the consumption of bran in the diet.[21]

McCann argued that white flour "was the product of greedy industrialists and violated "the provisions of the Creator".[19] Historian Aaron Bobrow-Strain has noted that McCann espoused a combination of "Christian fundamentalist, white supremacy, and populist trust-busting".[22] For example, McCann commented that unless "the white races of all lands" return to a Godly diet of whole grains they would face "race suicide on a colossal scale".[22]

In 1912, The New York Globe printed McCann's first article on the pure food movement.[2] He wrote for the Globe for the next ten years making "frightening libels and wild statements" about food. The Globe gave McCann a laboratory to perform food tests and hired a team of lawyers to defend him from defamation suits. Because of his controversial articles, he spent much time in court.[2] McCann attacked publicly the makers of what he conceived as dangerous or inferior foods.[7] In 1923 after the Globe folded, he became director of the Alfred W. McCann Laboratories in New York City.[2] He was influenced by Harvey W. Wiley and crusaded for "pure food".[7]

McCann promoted pseudoscientific views about acidosis.[2] He claimed that Americans were suffering from an alleged acid overdose from improperly combined carbohydrates, proteins and processed foods. He stated that acidosis was the cause of "kidneycide" and heart attacks.[20] McCann was not a vegetarian. He advocated the slaughter of all cattle to reduce the price of grain.[20] He endorsed a low-protein diet. He argued that 60 grams of protein a day is all that is needed and 80 grams is dangerous to health.[2] McCann's articles appeared in many newspapers. He also argued against the use of distilled water.[23]

Food historian Harvey Levenstein has commented that McCann was a "pure food crusader and unabashed quack."[9] Historian of medicine James C. Whorton has described McCann as "America's most vociferous antagonist of processed foods."[21]

• Starving America (1912)
• Vital Questions and Answers Concerning 15,000,000 Physically Defective Children (1913)
• Thirty Cent Bread: How to Escape a Higher Cost of Living (1917)
• The Science of Eating (1919)
• Pasteur and God (1920)
• God — or Gorilla (1922)
• The Science of Keeping Young (1926)
• Greatest of Men: Washington (1927)

• Beatrice Trum Hunter
• The Pure Foods Movement

• Constance A. Clark. (2013). God―or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-1421407760
• Donna Kossy. (2001). Strange Creations: Aberrant Ideas of Human Origins. Feral House. ISBN 978-0922915651

• The Real McCann – National Center for Science Education