The Case for Sunny Jim:
An Advertising Legend Revisited

Eileen Margerum

Early in 1943, the death of Mrs. Minnie Hanff Ayers caused the American advertising world to remember
briefly an event that had happened four decades earlier. Minnie Maud Hanff, then a young free-lance writer, had created the trade character Sunny Jim to advertise Force, the first commercially successful wheat flake cereal. In advertising circles, the campaign was remembered as a classic example of a costly failure, one in which the advertising created great interest in the trade character but failed to sell the product. At the time of Minnie Hanff Ayers’ death, a commentary in Printer’s Ink concluded:

Advertising historian Steven Fox repeated the story of the Sunny Jim campaign in The Mirror Makers, his 1984 comprehensive study of the origins of American advertising practices. All versions of the Sunny Jim story agree in certain basic details: that the campaign was wildly successful in getting attention for the trade character but failed to generate sales of Force cereal, and that this failure resulted in the Sunny Jim character being abandoned after a short time.

This version of events, however, was no more true in 1984 or 1943 than it had been in 1902. In fact, the Sunny Jim campaign had created a dramatic increase in sales of Force cereal. Even more remarkably, from 1902 until the present, Sunny Jim has been almost continuously linked with Force cereal. This serious disconnect between reality and reportage is no mere misunderstanding. Its roots are in the history of the American advertising industry at the turn of the twentieth century and its flowering is a consequence, at least in part, of an often-repeated pattern of American commercial development during the following decades.

It turns out that advertising and breakfast cereal-making in America have several things in common: both developed in the later decades of the nineteenth century, each had its origins in practices (and people) that ranged from the merely colorful to the absolutely larcenous, and both fit well into the developing consumer culture that relied on mass marketing and mass production.

The Origins of Cereal as Breakfast Food
The first strong advocate of a meat-free, grain-based diet was Dr. Sylvester Graham, whose writings and preaching in the eighteen-thirties are now forgotten; he is remembered, if at all, only as the creator of the Graham cracker. For Graham, and later for Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who took over the Medical and Surgical Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan in the mideighteen-seventies, the primary reason for avoiding meat was to reduce sexual appetites. At “the San,” as it was called, Dr. Kellogg instituted a curative program with a diet of grains, the use of mild exercises, mechanical pummeling, electric shock, hot and cold baths, douches and purgations.

Fortunately for Dr. Kellogg and the finances of his institution, a large group found itself in need of such attention. Sensitive people—wealthy women and men, along with artists, and “brain workers,” who belonged to the new professional-managerial class—found the increasing pressures of modern life during the Gilded Age unbearable. When accelerated changes in the economy and society, along with the proliferation of new technologies, overcame them, it became fashionable to have a nerve attack and to recuperate under a doctor’s care. This became the mark of a superior person; only the truly brutish (laborers and members of the lower classes) could withstand the daily assaults unscathed. Based on Dr. Kellogg’s fame, Battle Creek became the epicenter of health cures, most based on eating only grain. It was only a short step from that to breakfast cereals.

The person who made the step most successfully was C. W. Post. Post, a salesman, had arrived in Battle Creek in 1890 in deep nervous exhaustion. He sought a cure under Dr. Kellogg’s regime but left after less than six weeks, uncured and unsatisfied. In his autobiography, he claimed that he then cured himself by sheer force of will. Post combined his entrepreneurial skills with what he had observed at the San and established a rival facility. It was little different from Kellogg’s, except that he added the new
element of positive thinking. Ever the salesman, he wrote The Road to Wellville as a way to publicize his treatment ideas and his sanitarium. Then he parlayed the success of the sanitarium and the book into a fortune by creating the first two grain-based products that were sold widely to the American public. He advertised both products aggressively, writing most of the lurid copy himself and always signing his ads. In his ads for Postum, a coffee substitute made from grain, Post waged war against the evils of drinking coffee, even claiming it caused “coffee heart,” “brain fag,” and “coffee rheumatism”—a disease he had concocted. To sell Grape-Nuts, a barley-based food product containing neither grapes nor nuts, he conjured a wide range of diseases that arose from eating less wholesome (but unspecified) foods while extolling the virtues of eating natural grains. By 1900, he had a personal fortune worth a million dollars.

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