Analytic Suggestions About Alfred W. McCann

Newspapers described the death of Alfred W. McCann as inexplicable. He had been seemingly so well. Mr. McCann, sponsor of pure food, was a crusader. Like all real crusaders, Mr. McCann's approach to his work was an emotional one. Like all successful crusaders that emotional approach was added to by knowledge and skill. But was Mr. McCann, dying at fifty-two years of age, as successful in relation to himself as he was in his work? For though his work had to do with health he died in the prime of his days.

In early life Mr. McCann had done laboratory work in chemistry and physiology. This work he continued as he grew older in the research and industrial laboratories where foods are analyzed and prepared. He studied sources of food, the earth and the sea. He investigated food markets. Direct contact with both sources and markets he continued till the day of his death. All this knowledge and experience were vital factors in the work he created for himself. And both in youth and maturity he included in his other interests close attention to the living laboratories of the body where food is digested, assimilated and used.

Mr. McCann became a writer and speaker aiming to procure for the public good food and cheap food as well. He had deep emotion about food. It was this emotional factor in his chosen field which drove Mr. McCann day and night to such tireless working as no man could have done for personal financial gain and honor or for the sake of earning money and a name to leave his family. Was it some inner unconscious urge which made Alfred McCann work so many hours a day at white heat? At one time in his career he had on hand at least three jobs. Besides a daily article in the New York Globe on the adulteration of foods, he had in the same newspaper a daily article on the way the supply of sea food for New York was mishandled, causing increase in price and decrease in desirability. But more arduous than either of these was his third job at that same time. To show how u