“Sweetness Is Death” is clearly about more than diabetes.
It is also Emerson’s denunciation of so many of the changes taking place in the years following the Great War.
Labeling diabetes “a great luxury disease,” he expressed deep anxiety about the transformation of fundamental aspects of American life: the economic prosperity that stemmed from the mass production of consumer goods, including clothing, radios, cars, and magazines; the rise of print culture and advertising, which encouraged citizens to support the new consumer culture; and a credit economy that allowed working-class and middle-class individuals to participate in new leisure activities, whether they had the means or not.
New cultural activities also took shape during the “roaring twenties,” with the proliferation of dance halls, movie theaters, and jazz clubs, offering venues where traditional gender roles and staid sexual mores could be flouted publicly.
To Emerson, diabetes was symbolic of all that he loathed; “a disease of wealth and feeding and fatness,” it provided physical evidence of what was, in essence, moral turpitude.
And nowhere, he added, is this “better shown than in the story of the races.”
This was Emerson’s segue to his discussion of diabetes’s prevalence among Jews.
In support of his argument that diabetes and wealth went hand in hand, he claimed that tuberculosis, “a disease always fostered by poverty, low standards of living and food shortage,” barely affected Jews, whereas diabetes ran so rampant among them that it was “commonly known in Europe as the ‘ Judenkrankheit.’ ” Yet Emerson’s explanation for this proclivity did not fit the picture he had just painted, for he described Jews as “merchants, storekeepers, [and] needle workers,” who were “abundantly though cheaply fed.” In other words, by his own account they were not the “idle rich.” Still, by defining Jews as the most at risk of developing “this luxury disease,” and by linking the disease to “wealth and feeding and fatness,” Emerson reinforced an image of the rich and fat Jew, hoarding his money and indulging himself while the rest of the world struggled with hunger and deprivation.
This image was finding particular resonance in the early decades of the century, when the “fat Jew” became a potent symbol, in one historian’s words, of “the potential for disease and decay” associated with modernity.
The fears to which Emerson gave voice in his essay, that self-indulgence and hedonism were replacing self-discipline and asceticism as the social values to which one should aspire, and that the “American way of life” was rapidly coming to an end, reflected the changing meaning of fat from a marker of affluence and influence to a symbol of gluttony and decadence. In this context, the fat, and diabetic, body of the Jew became one important site where these anxieties played out.
It is possible that Emerson painted this picture unintentionally. Indeed, he specifically added that “it is not money in the bank, nor being a Jew . . . that determines the excess of diabetes deaths.”
At least in theory, he seemed to be writing, anyone who had “the means to grow fat,” and who then chose “self-indulgence” over “self-control,” ran the risk of developing the disease. But by attacking the character of those who had diabetes, while naming Jews as the “race” with the highest rate, he rendered them guilty by association.
A clear link between fat, Jews, and diabetes is also evident in the writings of Joslin.
As the leading diabetes specialist in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, and a physician of considerable international fame, Joslin may have shaped the conversation about Jews and diabetes more than any other individual of his day.
Author of the widely read textbook The Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus , which first appeared in 1916 and went through ten editions before his death in 1962, Joslin specialized in diabetes care decades before medical specialization became popular.
Why he chose this specialty is unclear, although his experiences with his mother and his aunt, both of whom developed the disease when they reached middle age, may have influenced him.
By 1916, when the textbook’s first edition came out, he had examined a thousand individuals in his clinic.
According to one physician, this was “the largest number of diabetic cases in the literature observed by one man.”
Like other physicians, Joslin noted early on that the high rate of diabetes among Jews was “proverbial,” but he did not weigh in on whether race had anything to do with it until 1924, when he declared unequivocally that “diabetes [is] not a congenital stigma of the Jewish race.” Were that the case, he reasoned, “it should be manifested from youth to old age.” But that is not what he observed in the Jewish patients he had treated in his clinic over the previous quarter of a century.
Comparing them with the rest of his patients, he found that the rate was unusually high only when they entered the fourth and fifth decades of their lives, a time, he claimed, when Jews packed on the pounds.
In fact, Joslin found that 85 percent of his Jewish diabetes patients were overweight in comparison to just 70 percent of Gentiles. “The Jew,” he concluded, “in my opinion, is not prone to diabetes because he is a Jew, but rather because he is fat.”
Why Joslin chose to speak out in 1924 against a link between Jews, race, and diabetes can only be surmised.
Perhaps he was troubled by the anti-immigration sentiment that had resulted in the recent passing of the Johnson-Reed Act.
He may also have been watching with apprehension the rising anti-Semitism at home and abroad and felt that he should speak out.
Yet like Emerson, and despite his best intentions, Joslin continued to play into negative stereotypes, this time of the fat Jew, effectively replacing “the stigma of a congenital tendency” with the stigma of obesity.
Just three years earlier, Joslin had labeled diabetes “a penalty of obesity,” encouraging his colleagues to think of the fat diabetic as akin to the alcoholic.
Neither, he insisted, deserved pity.
Indeed, he recommended shaming them into making a change. “It is all nonsense,” he declared, “to use polite terms for being ‘just fat.’ It is generally prudent and always far more effective to say to the patient: ‘You are too fat,’ than cautiously to remark: ‘You are a trifle obese.’ Fat diathesis!,” he exclaimed, using a word common at the time that referred to a constitutional predisposition. “Granted there is one person in a thousand who has some inherent peculiarity of the metabolism which has led to obesity, [but] there are 999 for whom being fat implies too much food or too little exercise, or both combined.”
Again, as with Emerson, Joslin was not targeting Jews alone.
Indeed, he even claimed that his Jewish patients were beginning to understand the importance of losing weight, realizing sooner than most that in the near future “one may be almost ashamed to have diabetes.” But the admiration he may have felt for those who heeded his message did not prevent him from employing language that propelled the image of “the fat Jew” as a health threat to the nation.
This is vividly evident when Joslin tried to convince his colleagues that diabetes could be eradicated if it were approached with the same logic and energy that had been employed to eradicate infectious diseases. “To stamp out a pestilence,” he explained, “one studies and attacks it where its ravages are worse.
Yellow fever was investigated and prevention found in Cuba, not in the United States.
The pathway is equally plain in diabetes.
First, this disease is known to be fifteen times as frequent among adults; second, this disease is ten to twenty times as common among the fat; third, this disease is two and a half times as common among Jews and slightly more so among Jewish females.
Any campaign to eradicate diabetes, therefore, should yield maximal returns if directed toward its prevention and discovery in adult, fat females, and particularly in Jews.”
This passage is remarkable in many ways, beginning with the jingoism in Joslin’s language as he suggests that diabetes, like yellow fever, may have foreign roots. Whether he intended it or not, this assertion would have resonated with individuals like Wilson who blamed Eastern European Jews for rising rates of diabetes in the United States. Comparing diabetes to a “pestilence,” situating it in the body of Jews, and encouraging his colleagues to “stamp it out” also brings to mind the radical measures favored by eugenicists (although, as we will see in