Veg*n ideology

Just as Graham claimed that the benefit of a vegetable diet was scientifically observable, his new followers attested to the natural life’s ability to ward off disease. These stories—often similar to Graham’s own account of his moral and physical ascension—presented common narratives of the evolution from darkness to light, all thanks to a meatless diet. They used language similar to that of the conversion narratives of born-again evangelicals swept up in the period’s Second Great Awakening. The difference was that the Grahamites’ conversions occurred at the table, rather than at a revival meeting or church.  

These narratives outlined a timeline of sickness, transformation, and finally conversion that led the individual to advocate for a Grahamite diet. Nicholas Van Heyniger, a promoter of Grahamism, explained: “For some time previous to my adopting your plan of living, my health was a good deal impaired; and I was afflicted with many bodily pains; and particularly troubled with impaired sight.” Conversion stories connected a wide variety of physical maladies with meat consumption, while a meat-free diet was claimed to produce instantaneous improvements. Van Heyniger adopted a Graham diet and reported that his “bodily pains are gone, and my sight is perfectly restored, so that I can read all the evening without the least inconvenience.” 

Asenath Nicholson presented her own conversion story, recounting that until age sixteen she consumed tea, coffee, meat, and alcohol to the extent that her “nerves became so completely unstrung that the sight of a book put me in an universal tremor.”  After attending a Graham lecture Nicholson was overcome by an almost spiritual rapture. She wrote that she “heard and trembled: the torrent of truth poured upon me, effectually convinced my judgment, and made me a thorough convert.” A regimen of fresh air, Graham bread, and vegetables cured Nicholson, making her “entirely exempt from pain or weakness.” In the process, everything from her sleep to her singing voice improved. Nicholson believed her life was saved: “Nearly four years have passed, and not the slightest indisposition, except a trifling cold, has ever returned, to remind me I was mortal. Good bread, pure water, ripe fruit and vegetables are my meat and drink exclusively.”  

Conversion narratives were oft en published in volumes of Graham’s writings. In the closing pages of A Defence of the Graham System of Living, a series of testimonials from “respectable individuals” is offered, all following the pattern of the conversion narrative. Years of abuse and woe were followed by multiple visits to doctors who did little to alleviate their suffering. But the adoption of a Graham diet cured all ills. Lavinia Wright, a teacher in New York’s rough Bowery neighborhood, reported the end of “physical and mental lethargy” caused by “the injustice and cruelty of destroying animal existence” and “the injurious eff ects produced by the undue stimulation resulting from the use of animal food.” 

Amos Pollard, a medical doctor, said that after living meatless for five years “my health is much better, and my strength far greater, than when I used a mixture of animal food.” Pollard used his personal example to encourage the universal adoption of a vegetable diet to benefit all of mankind. William Goodell, an influential abolitionist, suffragist, and early temperance reformer, claimed a vegetable diet cured him from chronic diarrhea that no doctor ever alleviated. Goodell also said that his “wife is relieved from her headaches, my child from summer complaints, and all of us in a good degree, from nervous irritability.”  An early conversion testimonial from December 13, 1834, came in the form of a letter that called for “a total abstinence from all artificial stimuli. . . . The general adoption of a vegetable diet would tend, in a remarkable degree to meliorate the condition of mankind, both physical and moral.” Included in the group of thirty-one cosignatories was Horace Greeley, who that year met his wife Mary Chency while living in the Beekman Street Grahamite boardinghouse in New York City. 

While much changed about movement vegetarianism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one constant feature was the use of the conversion narrative in order to justify the diet. Conversion narratives simultaneously reached out for converts and created a sense of community among dietary reformers. The conversion narrative also reflected the dedication and self-righteousness felt by Grahamites, compelled to share their personal stories of change. Grahamites also faced external social forces that reinforced feelings of inferiority, forcing meat abstainers to justify their life choices in order to gain credibility and create self-confidence.  

These competing forces of self-rectitude and external mockery pushed Grahamites to seek each other out, build communities, and formulate a common lifestyle around meat abstention. With boardinghouses in place in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, Grahamites created supportive, localized communities. It was the printed word, however, that expanded the community of Grahamites beyond the local and into a larger movement throughout the United States.

In 1835 Graham furthered his development of a unified theory of diet, publishing A Defence of the Graham System of Living. Poor diet was endemic in America, a result of the malevolent effects of “Luxury, soft enervating Luxury,” which had “lulled her victims into a fatal security” that would ultimately lead to self-destruction. Graham warned that the effects of a pernicious diet went further than just the individual. The nation itself was at risk of becoming degraded by overindulgence and luxury that had “destroyed our health, perverted our morals, debased our intellects, and, in its prevalence[,] . . . may foresee the downfall of a people, once famed for their intelligence, their virtue, and their freedom.” American opulence created moral and social ills, Graham argued, including “our diseases, our deformities, our poverty, and our slavery.”   

The city brought forth “the noxious effects of impure air, sedentary habits, and unwholesome employments,” all of which pulled individuals further from physical and mental health. The growing metropolises of antebellum America were fi lled with a variety of urban amusements that Graham viewed as threatening vices. Saloons, brothels, and dining establishments with their alcohol, sex for gratifi cation, and overly taxing foods all provided services that Graham warned against as causing moral and physical failure. These distractions not only led individuals to falter but also ensured that they would remain disconnected from their natural physical state.  

Graham’s attacks resonated in the rapidly developing industrial capitalist society of the Northeast, which freed individuals from the rigors of farm life yet at the same time destabilized the very social structures that had previously provided stability and comfort. The ascendance of the self-made man was contrasted among concerned politicians with the foppish aristocrats who purportedly composed the European ruling class, described by John Adams in 1819 as “producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly.”  Free individuals had the opportunity and ability to create their own identities and build their own lives; however, with this freedom came the opportunity to fail as well as succeed. The same stark choice, according to proto-vegetarians, applied to dietary practices, which could influence and even dictate moral and physical well-being.  

Animal foods were primarily to blame for personal vice, according to Graham, causing “a coarseness and ferocity of disposition” that rendered   “the temper irritable and petulant; the passion of anger is either induced or strengthened by its use.” Meat consumption made humans no better than the violent members of the animal kingdom that fed on the flesh of other animals. This distinction helps explain Graham and his followers’ lack of interest in animal welfare. Meatless dietary reform was predicated on the notion that humans had the ability and responsibility to use logic and analysis to make the best possible choices. Instinct and desire dictated the actions of lower animals rather than rationale and self-control. Evils such as poverty and slavery could only exist in a society where humanity exhibited animalistic qualities of cruelty and aggression.  

With the success of Graham’s lectures came a growing community of both devoted minions and frustrated critics. Detractors argued that Graham was antiscientific, a proud, vain, and demagogic speaker who offered exaggeration and blustery language rather than empirical proof. To his followers, Graham was a prophet who gave practical advice for improved health, spirit, and intellect.  

By the mid-1830s a distinct community was created by adherents to Graham’s diet. Known as Grahamites, these individuals attempted to apply Graham’s dietetic principles to everyday life. Many followers simply applied Graham’s principles to their own kitchens, baking Graham bread, drinking cold water, and eating a vegetable diet, particularly in places like the South where few other Grahamites existed. Others—mainly urban and northeastern residents—crafted a Grahamite community through building and living in public institutions aimed at gaining converts and saving lost carnivores. The boardinghouse, with its promises of room, board, and kinship, became the center of urban Grahamite living.

Not all attention was negative. In 1834, an advertisement for Graham bread appeared in New-York as 'It Is' , a manual and guide to living in New York City. The guide pointed interested parties to Pierce and Luke, bakers who sold the bread at their bakery located at the intersection of Broadway and Leonard Street. The first published recipe for Graham bread appeared in 1835, emphasizing the use of finely ground, pure wheat meal.  In that same year the Minnesota Farmers’ Institute’s Annual reported on the differences between Graham and white bread, recommending “the use of some graham bread in families of growing children,” though warning that the bran in the bread could be “irritating to a delicate digestive system.”

Asenath Nicholson—an abolitionist, writer, and former teacher— opened her first Graham boardinghouse in New York City at 118 Williams Street in 1835, following it up three years later with another home at 21 Beekman Street. The so-called Temperance Boarding House offered Grahamites the basics of boardinghouse living—a place to sleep, three meals a day, and social interaction—with the added supplies necessary to live a Graham-endorsed life. A vegetable diet was offered; and breakfast, dinner, and supper were served in a communal dining area to encourage interaction among the faithful. Cold baths, hard mattresses, and Graham bread were mandated in order to encourage health, circulation, and proper digestion. 

Located in an area filled with reform organizations—the American Anti-Slavery Society’s offi ces were down the block at 48 Beekman— Nicholson’s temperance boardinghouse served as a meeting place for New York’s reform-minded citizens. While dietetics may have been a central fi xation of the home’s residents, an all-encompassing attitude toward social reform prevailed. According to William Tyler, a professor of Latin and Greek at Amherst College and a resident of the Graham House on William Street, “the Boarders in this establishment are not only Grahamites but Garrisonites—not only reformers in diet, but radicalists in Politics. Such a knot of Abolitionists I never before fell in with.”

Most important, the boardinghouse ensured interaction between Grahamites, who shared experiences, meals, and ideologies. Grahamites were no longer content to share their dietary theories solely in lecture halls. Reformers also desired to live in communities of like-minded individuals within the urban landscape. The boardinghouse provided inhabitants meatless fare and the opportunity to discuss the important issues of the day—dietetics, slavery, suff rage, and temperance.  

Sylvester Graham himself was not directly involved in the day-to-day operations of the boardinghouses he inspired. As much as Graham was responsible for the spreading of early proto-vegetarianism, practitioners morphed the ideology into a variety of life experiences. As Nicholson noted, while Graham served as an inspiration, his lectures and writings were merely “a starting point to be enlarged and improved as practice might suggest.” Graham’s dietary principles served as the backbone for boardinghouse life; how these ideals were enacted depended on a variety of local forces including geography, economics, and demographics. Despite this disconnect, during the 1830s and 1840s proto-vegetarians were largely labeled Grahamites, by themselves and others, because of Graham’s prominent public persona.  

But why the need for Grahamite boardinghouses in cities rather than the private practice of a Grahamite lifestyle? Urban areas, stricken with perceived vice and degradation, were seen as both morally and physically dangerous by reformers. New York City, with its commercial sex districts and visible brothels, was seen as particularly threatening to young, middle-class men living on their own, renting rooms throughout the city. One publication remarked on the Beekman Street home’s demographics, finding it “truly surprising to see how many temporary sojourners in the city, from different parts of the country, take lodgings at the Graham House, in order to be accommodated with the plain mode of living they practise at home.”  

Nicholson recognized the existence of these threats, believing that a Graham lifestyle provided moral clarity to her boarders and encouraged positive dietary habits by creating a small community of Grahamite practitioners.  Noting that “flesh-eating produces a moral obtuseness and irritableness of spirit,” Nicholson offered Graham bread, fresh vegetables, and cold baths in order to produce a “firmness of nerve, and clearness of intellect” to better prepare her residents for the dangers of city life. The proof of the diet’s success, Nicholson pointed out, was in the level of health of the houses’ residents, who exhibited “not a shadow of cholera . . . and the prevailing influenza, which has taken the lives of many.” With a proper, natural diet and a little exercise and fresh air, boardinghouse residents were able to overcome any illnesses that might appear. 

All boardinghouses had house rules prescribing meal times, visitor policies, and cost. Nicholson’s Grahamite home was guided by a litany of regulations, thirteen principles of the natural life inspired by Graham and his lectures. Visitors agreed to abide by these rules in order to remain in good standing as residents of the boardinghouse. Democratic principles allowed for some amendment of the regulations, relying on boarder votes to change prescribed dinner and supper times. Feather mattresses were banned, as Graham lectured that soft beds diminished “physiological powers.”  Exercise was mandated for residents, either a thirty-to-sixty-minute walk or a slow horse ride, though guidelines encouraged residents to avoid “all violence and excess” in their efforts. Lastly, during a time when regular bathing was rare, residents were required to take a daily sponge bath and at least one full bath per week.

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In 1835, Nicholson authored the first American vegetarian cookbook, Nature's Own Book.[5] Nicholson stated that "good bread, pure water, ripe fruit, and vegetables are my meat and drink exclusively." The book utilized some recipes with dairy, but Nicholson personally advocated against its use.[6]

Nicholson also authored, Kitchen Philosophy for Vegetarians.[7] The book was published by William Horsell in 1849. A review in the Vegetarian Advocate, noted that "butter and eggs are excluded" from the recipes.[8] The Vegan Society have cited the book as the first vegan cookbook.[9]

William Alcott was one of the founding and leading members of the APS and lent credibility to the growth of the meatless cause. He began advocating for a vegetable diet by the early 1830s, the heyday of Grahamism. Unlike Graham, however, Alcott was a formally trained physician, graduating from Yale University in 1836. He began publishing a series of treatises attacking such vices as alcohol, tobacco, and sexual intemperance. Alcott’s advocacy of a meatless diet gained mass exposure for the first time in a letter supporting the Graham system, which he published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in May 1836.  A war of words had broken out in the journal between Sylvester Graham and Thomas Lee, superintendent of the McLean Asylum in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Lee claimed that Grahamism was “destructive in its operation,” a cause of insanity and “emasculation.” Graham, charged Lee, was “an intolerable impostor.” Further, Lee claimed, Graham believed that it would be better for a patient to starve to death rather than dine on flesh foods. Graham, in response, defended himself and his dietary system, accusing Lee of being driven by “a morbidly excited imagination” and producing a “most dangerous article to be thrown before the public.” Graham concluded that Lee was threatened by new ideas, part of a medical establishment apt to treat its patients with “flesh, wine and opium.”  A month later, William Alcott entered the fray. Writing to the journal in defense of the Graham system, Alcott emphasized his own credentials as a trained medical professional. Alcott claimed that doctors like Lee were driven by “prejudice” and “supposed facts.” Medical doctors were usually reasonable and rational. When it came to the Graham system, however, established medicine was “exceedingly lame” in its observations. Alcott argued that millions of laborers worldwide—particularly in northern Europe—had subsisted on vegetable diets for years and did not go insane. The letter closed with Alcott’s own conversion story, claiming to have “abstained suddenly, about six years ago, from animal food, and from all fermented, narcotic, and alcoholic drinks; and have confi ned myself, to this hour, to vegetable food and water.” The results were immediately observable to himself and those around him, causing “great gain” in mind and body. Alcott ended his missive by asking the public at large to judge whether or not he—a medical doctor, aft er all—was in the throes of insanity. 

This debate illustrated a larger change for proto-vegetarianism as the movement began shifting. Graham and his followers were harsh critics of doctors and established medical science. However, in the late 1830s food reformers began emphasizing meatless fare’s legitimacy based on the scientific principles of physiology. Proto-vegetarians during this period defi ned themselves by proclaiming their medical expertise rather than their perspectives as outsiders. Organizations such as the American Physiological Society used medical credentials to support their controversial calls for dietary reform.  

The closing of the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity at the end of 1839 enabled Alcott’s Library of Health to emerge as the new public voice of meat abstention in the United States. Although not an official voice of the APS, Library of Health frequently reported on its activities. Originally published in 1837, Alcott’s journal was similar to the Graham Journal in structure. However, Library of Health touted its writers’ credentials as medical experts, advocating a vegetable diet as one component of healthy living. The journal hoped to take advantage of Alcott’s medical pedigree, assuring readers that “we began the following volume with the full intention of striking a heavy blow at quackery. . . . Quackery is not confined to the venders of nostrums, nor to any one class of citizens; it is rife everywhere.” Library of Health sought to distance itself from the claims of pseudo-science and religious heresy that traditionally followed meat abstainers, arguing that dietary reform “is indeed nothing less than the application of Christianity to the physical condition and wants of man.”

Library of Health featured medical experts in its defense of a meat-free diet, further diff erentiating itself from the Grahamites’ more personal notion of medical care, a view that attacked mainstream medical practitioners. Amariah Bringham, superintendent of the Retreat for the Insane in Hartford, Connecticut, argued that flesh foods caused “an inflammatory fever of an unusual character for children” and that “infants who are accustomed to eat much animal food become robust, but at the same time passionate, violent and brutal.” Alcott noted the efforts of one medical doctor who opposed the use of emetics to induce vomiting. The doctor’s opinion was reached through years of observation, viewing irritated, expanded stomachs that suffered from poor digestion for years afterward.  Reuben Mussey, a medical doctor, dietary and health reformer, and future president of the American Medical Association, frequently contributed to the journal. Mussey was regarded for his work exposing the poisonous nature of tobacco, which he claimed caused dizziness, stomach pain, and swollen feet. Another medical expert reported that hot drinks and foods made individuals more apt to catch a cold because extreme temperatures acted as a stimulant on the body. Alcott emphasized scientific credentials in appealing to the masses, subtitling a treatise on the merits of a vegetable diet “ As Sanctioned by Medical Men .”

 Library of Health warned against the perils of dietary intemperance in all its forms. Poisoned cheese was widely available in the marketplace; an article claimed that small amounts of arsenic were used to tenderize curds, an assertion similar to Graham’s criticisms of the bread making industry. Late, heavy suppers were described as being “prejudicial to health,” leading to digestive problems and poor sleep. Condiments and sweets were condemned, as were complex, diversified diets; simplicity was far more advantageous and less stimulating. These criticisms were similar to Graham’s but were expressed through the language of medical expertise. Through 1839, the journal dealt with dietary issues in a generalized manner, rather than advocating the specific advantages of a meatless diet.