ATOMIC CAKE INCIDENT AT 80

“…it still seems utterly shocking to me that an atomic explosion, containing thousands of incinerated human bodies, should be represented…by a gruesome concoction put together by pastry cooks.” – Rev. A. Powell Davies in a letter dated 11/12/1946.

“We intended the cake as something to eat.” – Lyman K. Stephens, baker, quoted in TIME, 11/18/1946.

THE PARTY AND THE SERMON

The celebratory event took place on Tuesday evening, November 5, 1946 at the Officers’ Club of the Army War College in Washington, D.C. The occasion was to mark the disbanding of Joint Army-Navy Task Force Number One, the body that organized and oversaw Operation Crossroads - the first post-war atomic tests in the Pacific. These highly publicized detonations on Bikini Atoll are best remembered today for displacing an entire indigenous population of islanders, inspiring a revealing line of swimwear for women, and for atomizing an ESQUIRE pin-up of Rita Hayworth.

Operation Crossroads was the biggest and most controversial media story of 1946, so it was only fitting that the dissolution of the team that produced the show would spark one final media storm. The entire affair might have gone unnoticed had it not been for a photograph published in the Washington Post and a local minister who was so outraged by what he saw, took his fury to the pulpit.

This is the story of the Atomic Cake Incident, eightieth anniversary edition.

The event was planned and put on by the Committee on Arrangements and the honorees were Joint Task Force commander, Vice Admiral William HP Blandy (aka The Atomic Admiral) and Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry (who was commander of the Rear Echelon and in charge of Joint Task Force One’s activities in the United States). Following the buffet dinner (with the special dessert), movies of the Operation Crossroads tests were shown. And later, attendees danced into the night to the music of the Navy Band Orchestra. The organizing committee had approved a request by the Washington Post to send a photographer to the function. The infamous picture of Admiral and Mrs. Blandy cutting into an incredible mushroom-shaped cake - with Lowry beaming beside them - was published November 7, 1946 atop the Post’s society page. The headline was “Salute to Bikini.” The picture is credited to Harris & Ewing, a prominent, now defunct, Washington studio.

The St. Louis Dispatch described the 45-pound cake thusly in its November 9, 1946 edition:

“(The cake depicted) the fifth stage of the second atomic bomb (ed.: named, appropriately, BAKER) explosion at Bikini...made of pound cake and angel food, the cake was in the form of the column of sea water and its mushroom cap, which marked the underwater blast. The column and mushroom, colored white and light tan to represent the water and the coral debris forced skyward by the explosion, stood on a base iced partly in blue to represent the Pacific."

The St. Louis Globe-Democrat added that the cake was created in an East St. Louis, Illinois bakery by Eugene Kuehn and Lyman K. Stephens and that it took a week to design and produce.

The British-born Arthur Powell Davies had been the minister at Washington’s All Souls Unitarian Church for just two years at the time of the cake incident. In September of 1945 he had preached about the danger posed to mankind by the atomic bomb and the need for international controls. Indeed, by the time of the cake controversy, he was no stranger to publicly addressing political issues. 

According to his biographer, Davies had already prepared his sermon for November 10, 1946 when he first saw the Post photo. He hurriedly added some notes to his type-written draft and carried a copy of the newspaper with him to the pulpit that Sunday. There, near the end of his “Lest the Living Forget,” sermon, the reverend let loose.

I have with me here in the pulpit this morning a page from a newspaper. From a very fine newspaper. It contains a picture—as it seems to me, an utterly loathsome picture. If I spoke as I feel I would call it obscene. I do not blame the newspaper for printing the picture, or the photographer for taking it. What fills me with bitterness is the fact that such an event could take place at all. It is a picture of two high naval officers and a very beautiful lady. They are in the act of cutting what is called an atom-bomb cake. And it is indeed a cake shaped in the form of an atomic explosion. The caption [in the Post’s photo] says it is made of angel food puffs. I do not know how to tell you what I feel about that picture. I only hope to God it is not printed in Russia—to confirm everything the Soviet government is telling the Russian people about how ‘American degenerates’ are able to treat with levity the most cruel, pitiless, revolting instrument of death ever invented by man.

How would it seem in Hiroshima, or in Nagasaki, to know that Americans make cakes – of angel food puffs – in the image of that terrible, diabolical thing that brought sudden death to thousands of their friends, and a lingering, loathsome death to thousands of others. It is a crime – a crime against whatever may be left of decency here in America – to do this incredible thing. It is the most corrupt and rotten thing I have seen in eighteen years of living in this land I love – and which, to me, is the only hope for the human future on this globe.  The naval officers concerned should apologize to the armed service of which they are a part, and to the American people. No apology would be sufficient to efface what it may mean to the people of the world.

Among the members of the congregation that day were Supreme Court Justice Harold H. Burton and his wife, Selma. No word on what they thought of their minister’s remarks. But plenty of other people would soon share their impressions. Headlines, radio stories and letters followed almost immediately.

THE REACTION

The news of Rev. Davies’ sermon generated blaring headlines in Washington, DC, around the nation, and even, as the minister feared, in Moscow.

The Soviet newspaper Izvestia wrote that American “atomists” would “like to stew a big atomic kasha and make millions of peaceful people bear the consequences.” The story was illustrated with a picture of a portly gentleman in a morning coat cutting a cake.

In America, the sermon and the resulting news coverage prompted letters to the editor such as this one to the Washington Post:

A note on that delightful picture of Admirals Blandy and Lowry and attached dimpling woman all preparing to eat the charming and oh-so-divine “atom bomb” cake. On Armistice Day I was thinking of so many charming variations of this theme. We could have darling little cakes made in the shape of coffins, and the cutest little crosses pressed of angel-puffs. And a few drops of cherry extract could be—you guessed it—drops of blood.

History will not scorn us for our last-resort use of this most horrible of all weapons to end finally and completely the most terrible of all wars. But we will be damned as barbarians without vision or heart if we do not feel the deepest sadness at the necessity for authorizing such cruelness. And let no one toss such conscience pangs aside with easy thoughts about legitimate ends. Hitler ravished a continent because, having committed himself to “good ends,” he could tolerate any means.

I think the entire episode was a monument to poor taste, and The Post shares the guilt by printing such obscenities. 

EX-INFANTRYMAN, Arlington, Va.

The following letter, also to the Post, was co-written by the chairman of the committee that organized the party and the chief public relations officer for Operation Crossroads. The defensive letter reveals the remarkable irony that the Blandys had a deeply personal connection to the church in which Davies delivered his broadside. In fact, they were married at All Souls in 1914 and their children were christened there.

The recent picture of Admiral and Mrs. Blandy and Admiral Lowry cutting a cake made in the form of an atomic underwater explosion gave wide publicity to the unusual views of the Rev. A. Powell Davies, Unitarian pastor of a “fashionable Washington church.” As published, with accompanying errors of text, it did a great injustice to Admirals Blandy and Lowry, who have been tireless in their efforts to tell the citizens of the world of the devastating power and insidious poison of the atomic bomb.

For example, in October Admiral Blandy, at the New York Herald Tribune Forum and over a national radio network, said: “It is my earnest hope that all nations of the world join America in a straightforward march along the path leading to elimination of atomic weapons by an effective international control of atomic energy which will guarantee its development for exclusively peaceful purposes.”

Mr. Davies’ remarks also did a great injustice to Mrs. Blandy, who was brought up and married and whose children were christened in the same church of which Mr. Davies has but recently become the pastor.

Admiral and Mrs. Blandy were not the hosts (as stated in published accounts), but were the guests of honor at a party given by officers of the Crossroads staff. They had no part in the planning or procurement of the cake. The Post requested and was accorded the privilege of sending a news photographer to the party, and the picture was taken at the request of the photographer. In acceding to the request, Admiral and Mrs. Blandy and Admiral Lowry were acting as would any lady and gentleman.

To be publicly pilloried from the pulpit for this seems to be a strange reflection of the principles of Him who founded the Christian church.

DAVID H. BLAKELOCK, Colonel, United States Army; FITZHUGH LEE, Captain, Joint Task Force 1, Washington

A shorter version of the above was also published in TIME following the magazine’s coverage of the cake incident.

Davies’ local brethren of the cloth sought to minimize their colleague’s position while at the same time getting their own names in the papers. Reverend J. Warren Hastings of the National Christian Church of Washington, D.C. told the Associated Press: “If we can only learn to go no further with the atomic bomb than making the likeness of its explosion into a cake we shall be all right.” Reverend Peter Marshall of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, also in D.C., remarked to the same reporter: “I don’t see anything loathsome about it at all.”

Rev. Davies received hundreds of pro and con letters regarding his sermon. One letter was from civil rights activist Bayard Rustin who would later become the principal organizer for the March on Washington in 1963.

Dear Rev. Davies:

I was very happy to read your protest concerning angel food cake and the atomic bomb.

Surely the time has come when the very stones themselves will cry out unless Ministers of the Christian Gospel speak out against such levity in the face of tragedy that the use of nuclear fission for destruction represents.

Be assured, sir, that I sincerely believe that you have done us all a great service.

Sincerely,

Bayard Rustin

One of the negative letters addressed Davies as an “ignorant son of a bitch” and expressed the wish that he had had a “daughter or son made into soap in Germany” because that would have tempered the minister’s criticism of Vice Admiral Blandy. For good measure, the letter writer reiterated that Davies was an “ignorant nin-com-poop” and signed it “Yours Disrespectfully.”

Another letter that took issue the atomic cake photograph made its way to the Truman White House and now resides at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. In her note to the president, Eva Hill of Chattanooga, Tennessee said that she was “horrified and embarrassed for our country that men in such high and important positions could be guilty of such an atrocity, commemorating with levity the destruction of thousands of human beings.” She goes on to suggest the president should “make a statement denouncing this thoughtless act.”

THE BAKERS

Rear Admiral Lowry, the third person in the cake photograph, attempted damage control by stating that Reverend Davies didn’t fully understand the situation. Lowry explained, erroneously, to the Associated Press that the cake was made by bakers in St. Louis who wanted ‘to show their appreciation to the Army, Navy and Air Corps for their efforts to find out what the atom bomb could do and toward the end that we might have peace and certainly not encourage war.”

One of the two bakers, Lyman K. Stephens, contradicted the admiral when he told his local newspaper that “he was approached by a member of Blandy’s Bikini staff (St. Louis, Missouri native, Lt. John Holloway) and asked if he could design a cake, in the shape of the atom bomb explosion.” The other baker, Eugene Kuehn, confirmed that the transaction was “strictly a business proposition.”

Admiral Lowry may have thought the bakers were convenient scapegoats since they were barely referenced in national press articles written about the atomic cake. So, who were these men who made the controversial cake?

Lyman K. “LK” Stephens, of Normal, Illinois, had been a baker since 1918. His granddaughter, Rebecca Stephens, told CONELRAD that he received his formal bakery training at Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis. The Stephens family believes he was sent to the college by the Pillsbury company. By 1937, Stephens was superintendent of Purity Bakery in Bloomington, Illinois. One local newspaper feature on Stephens stated that he “traveled throughout the Midwest demonstrating baking procedures.” A Bakers Weekly trade story from 1946 refers to him as a “bakery supply house man.”

Stephens’ son, James R. Stephens, started Mrs. Stephens Fine Pastries in 1950 at a farmer’s market that expanded into local supermarkets at three locations. Lyman Stephens supported his son’s business while continuing his traveling bakery supply career. Lyman died in 1974.

Eugene H. Kuehn, of East St. Louis, Illinois, was an engineer according to his granddaughter, Sheron Meyer in an interview with CONELRAD. Ms. Meyer added that her grandparents started baking during the Great Depression as a way to make ends meet. “They started it in the basement of their house.” Kuehn left baking behind to return to his previous career sometime after the atomic cake incident. His 1977 obituary notes that he was a retired construction supervisor at a company in East St. Louis.

Neither Rebecca Stephens nor Sheron Meyer know exactly how their grandfathers first met, but it seems likely that they became acquainted during Lyman K. Stephens’ business travels. It is also unknown which baker did what in the creation of their collaborative masterpiece. Newspaper accounts from 1946 state that the cake was the result of the bakers’ week-long “experiments.”

Shortly before Stephens and Kuehn and their wives left by car to deliver the cake to Washington (they also attended the party), three-year-old Sheron posed for a photograph beside the soon-to-be-infamous pastry creation.

Following the November 5^th party, but before Rev. Davies’ sermon, the committee chairman mailed Lyman K. Stephens a thank you note on Joint Task Force One letterhead. The chairman, Colonel David H. Blakelock, sent the letter in care of Lt. John Holloway’s parents at the Fairgrounds Hotel in St. Louis. He thanked Stephens for his skill and ingenuity in replicating the “Baker Day atomic bomb explosion” which was “greatly admired by all the guests.” The exact nature of the relationship between Stephens and the Holloway family is not known, but based on the direct cake order and the routing of the thank you note, there seems to have been an existing connection.  

 

THE COLUMNIST AND THE SECRETARY

During the unfolding cake controversy other powerful people were taking note of the implications of the debate and—behind the scenes—they were strategically siding with Rev. Davies’ point of view. On November 11, 1946, the influential columnist Walter Lippmann wrote to the Secretary of the Navy, James V. Forrestal to voice his concern:

3525 Woodley Road, N.W.
Washington 16, D.C.
November 11, 1946

Dear Jim:

The outburst of Reverend A.P. Davies about the atomic bomb cake is, I feel sure, a sign of the times, which I feel should not be ignored.

Public relations officers of both the War and Navy Departments have been out of hand for some time, and I have detected for some months a growing undercurrent of feeling that will affect the whole military establishment if something isn’t done about it.

I have compiled a list of new and terrifying weapons announced by the War and Navy Departments, and of other stories originating there which are boastful or threatening. The total effect was bound to produce a popular reaction, and I really feel that you and Bob Patterson ought to look very seriously into this business.

You are going to have a very hard time with the next Congress getting appropriations, and if the large church-going population of this country with its pacifist leanings gets the idea that the Services are out of hand, it will have a bad effect in the fight for adequate appropriations.

I am sure you appreciate the spirit in which I am writing this.

Yours.

Walter Lippmann

Honorable James V. Forrestal
Secretary of the Navy
Washington 25, D.C.

Forrestal, who was of the same mind as Lippmann, wrote him back the next day:

12 November 1946

Dear Walter:

Your letter of yesterday:

I am in complete agreement. So is [Secretary of War] Bob Patterson with whom I have just talked. We are both acting accordingly. As a matter of fact I had started something in this direction about ten days ago but at that time it was on the thesis that people were becoming bored with such adolescent competitive publicity. I think your point if of deeper importance.

 

Vice Admiral Felix Johnson, who is now in charge of the general policy of Public Relations, is a most intelligent man and some day I will ask you to come over and talk with him.

Sincerely yours,

James Forrestal

Walter Lippmann, Esq.,
3525 Woodley Road N.W.,
Washington 16, D.C.

The impact that Forrestal and the Navy’s public relations apparatus had on subsequent matters involving atomic testing appears to be limited to their success in preventing an immediate recurrence of embarrassing celebratory parties. And Lippmann, the writer frequently credited with popularizing the term “Cold War,” evidently steered clear of the cake issue in his columns from this period. But even if the efforts of these two powerful men remained largely confined to their archives, something more public was about to happen…

THE HIROSHIMA DRAWINGS

The most significant result of Davies’ “outburst,” as Lippmann called it, was that reports of his anger reached the eyes of Howard M. Bell, an appointee in General Douglas MacArthur’s provisional government in Japan. Bell, who was also a member of All Souls Church, wrote to Davies and playfully admonished him for not using stronger language in expressing his indignation, but conceded that the minister “had to make some concessions to the proprieties of pulpit utterance.” He went on in his letter to describe the hardship of Japanese school children—particularly in Hiroshima—and suggested that American school children should clean out their desks and send spare school supplies like pencils and notebooks to their Japanese counterparts.

Reverend Davies took Mr. Bell’s idea to heart and on February 13, 1947 he delivered a sermon entitled “In Reply to a Letter from Japan” asking his flock for action. In the period that followed, the youngest parishioners of the church collected over a half ton of paper, pencils, crayons, erasers, paste and other items. The material was then shipped to Japan where it arrived in December of 1947—just in time for Christmas. The supplies were distributed to two schools and an orphanage.

The recipients of this remarkable gift from American schoolchildren responded with immense gratitude. The most touching and enduring gift that the U.S. students received for their efforts were crayon drawings and watercolor paintings from the youthful artists at the Honkawa Elementary School in Hiroshima. The art work depicted many different scenes from the home country and themes such as “Friends of America” and “Peace – Japan.” At some point over the years, the art pieces were seemingly lost.

According to the website for the documentary, PICTURES FROM A HIROSHIMA SCHOOLYARD, the art work was rediscovered in 1995 in a box in the home of a parishioner of the All Souls Church. The nearly fifty drawings and paintings were then moved to the church’s vault where they would periodically be displayed for visiting Hibakusha (atom bomb survivors). In 2007, the pictures were restored and sent back to their place of origin—the Honkawa Elementary School—for exhibition.

So, what had started out as a trivialized media story about an “atomic cake,” had, in the end, led to a lasting expression of peace.

POSTSCRIPT: THE FBI FILE

Around the very same time as the cake controversy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover asked his domestic intelligence chief, D. Milton Ladd about Reverend Arthur Powell Davies. The minister’s FBI file contains Ladd’s November 27, 1946 response: “In accordance with your request, there is submitted a summary of the available information concerning the Reverend Arthur Powell Davies. The Bureau has not conducted an investigation concerning the activities of Reverend Davies and, therefore, the information concerning him is limited.”

From that point forward, the file – which contains a number of redactions – continued to grow. Rev. Davies’ vocal opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy is noted as is his commitment to end racial segregation. And in 1953, the atomic cake makes a final cameo appearance in a summary of the reverend’s activities:

“Bureau files reflect that during 1946, 1947 and 1948 Dr. Davies was very active as a speaker, moderator and member of the Executive Committee of the National Committee on Atomic Information…According to an article in The Daily Worker dated 11-12-46, Admiral W.H.P. Blandy and his associates at the War College Officers Club had a reception and the cake was made in the shape of an atomic bomb explosion…According to the article, the cake was criticized at Washington by Reverend A. Powell Davies, Unitarian minister who challenged ‘such an obscenity.’”

The file ends with newspaper clippings announcing Rev. Davies’ death on September 26, 1957 at the age of 55. He died of a pulmonary embolism caused by a blood clot in one of his legs. He had been working in his study.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article would not have been nearly as thorough without the assistance of the Meadville Lombard Theological School Library archives where most of Reverend Arthur Powell Davies’ papers are stored. I am also grateful for the help of Rebecca Stephens and Sheron Meyer who provided invaluable insight into the lives of the bakers who created the Atomic Cake. The snapshot images of the bakers used in this post are the property of the Stephens family and are used with permission.

George N. Marshall’s 1990 biography A. POWELL DAVIES AND HIS TIMES [Skinner House Books, Boston] was extremely helpful in learning about the life and career of Rev. Davies. And OPERATION CROSSROADS: THE ATOMIC TESTS AT BIKINI ATOLL [Naval Institute Press, 1994] by Jonathan M. Weisgall remains the definitive book on the 1946 tests and their aftermath.

The 2012 documentary PICTURES FROM A HIROSHIMA SCHOOLYARD by Bryan Reichhardt and produced by Shizumi Shigeto Manale is currently available for free on Kanopy (registration via your public library required).    

Arthur Powell Davies’ FBI file might have been lost to history had it not been for a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by minister Rev. William F. Schulz and Muriel Davies, Davies’ widow. Schulz requested the FBI file in 1976 and received it the following year. He subsequently donated it to the Davies collection at Meadville. In 2026, the FBI informed CONELRAD that they had transferred their Davies file to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). However, NARA told us that they had only one FBI document that mentioned Davies in passing. It appears that the Schulz copy at Meadville might be the only version of Davies’ FBI file to have survived.