Veg*n ideology

Similar rules prevailed at Boston’s first Grahamite boardinghouse, though without the flexibility of democratic decision making for meal times. The home opened at 23 Brattle Street near Harvard Square in April 1837.  The Boston Grahamite home was run by David Cambell, an abolitionist who in 1840 spread the gospel of Graham to reform-minded students at Oberlin College in Ohio. Students embraced the lifestyle, and the college briefly banned meat from all of its dining halls.  Boston’s Grahamite boardinghouse purportedly drew a mixed crowd as well, ranging from “the most laborious to the most sedentary,” and from the permanent to the “transient or occasional.” The home reported housing between twenty and thirty permanent boarders at a time, consistently throughout the year. Advocates for the Boston house emphasized that it sought to draw healthy, vigorous individuals already acclimated to the Graham diet, rather than “invalids” who were “pale and sickly.” Homes that drew unhealthy boarders had another name, one that Grahamites wanted to avoid being connected with: hospitals.  Boston’s Grahamite boardinghouse was also utilized as a meeting place for dietary and social reformers.  

Animal flesh was barred from the New York Grahamite home, as were other poisons such as caffeine and alcohol. Toasted, stale Graham bread brewed with water was off ered to those who craved a cup of morning coffee.  The simple meals furnished centered on vegetables and whole grains. Breakfast consisted of the omnipresent Graham bread, along with a variety of fresh fruits, including apples, peaches, cherries, and strawberries.  

Interestingly, eggs were allowed at the breakfast table, and were even considered an important component of Grahamite diets, despite being animal-based. Eggs were not directly connected to death or suffering. As a result, Grahamites found them to be acceptable for consumption. Dinner— served in the afternoon and the largest meal of the day—consisted primarily of hominy, rice, porridge, and a variety of seasonal vegetables including beets, potatoes, carrots, turnips, and squash. Supper was a simpler, lighter meal and included Graham bread, milk, oatmeal, hominy, barley gruel, or mashed cornmeal. 

Grahamites represented a cross-section of moral and scientific reformers in the United States. The group’s message eventually reached as far as the South and West, as evidenced by letters and articles that appeared in group’s publication, the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity.  Grahamism, however, was most organized and popular in the Northeast, where Grahamite boardinghouses proliferated.  

The houses drew a mix of urban middle-class reformers. Similar to abolitionists of the period, Grahamites were primarily skilled artisans or trade workers, including housewrights, piano makers, grocers, merchants, bookbinders, and cabinetmakers. These were individuals with respectable occupations, and the boardinghouses provided structure and moral guidance. Residents were often interested in the total reform ideology associated with Grahamism. The boardinghouse on Beekman Street, for example, housed at various times such well-known New York reformers as New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, pacifist Henry Clarke Wright, abolitionists Lewis Tappan and Theodore Weld, and future president of the American Anti-Slavery Society Arthur Tappan. Transcendentalist author Ralph Waldo Emerson— though not a Grahamite—did visit once to dine with Greeley and utopian socialist Albert Brisbane in March 1842.

In April 1837, the fi rst issue of the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity became available to the public. The journal served as a catalyst for a significant shift in the development of proto-vegetarianism. The new journal promoted Sylvester Graham’s diet as well as his writings, lecture tours, and other public appearances, helping to expand the diet’s prominence and reputation. Graham regularly contributed to the journal, providing both new essays as well as excerpts from his previously published books and pamphlets. However, the journal—despite bearing the name of the movement’s founder—was published independently of Sylvester Graham, who was not directly involved in its production. Thus while the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity helped further expose the masses to Sylvester Graham and his ideology, it also emphasized that the actions of individuals helped determine its success. The journal helped further develop a nationwide community that, for the time being, bore Graham’s name. However, the journal relied on the work of other writers, editors, and reformers to accelerate the spread of meatless dietetics.  

The publisher of the new journal was David Cambell, owner of the first Graham boardinghouse in Boston. The journal quickly spread its reach throughout the United States. During its first three months of publication, only thirty-eight local agents were listed as selling the Graham Journal in twelve states. By October of the same year, 108 agents were selling the journal in fift een states, as far west as St. Louis; south to Macon, Georgia; and throughout all of New England. 123 In 1839, its final year of publishing, New Jersey was added to this list of states, and the journal was sold by a total of 140 agents.  

The journal featured a wide variety of articles and followed a similar structure in each of its biweekly issues. It opened with a series of letters and endorsements, offering the familiar conversion narrative structure of redemption. Nathaniel Perry of Boston, writing in the first issue, recollected that soon after marrying he “began to indulge in what is called by most people, good living,” consisting of “roast and fried meats, of all kinds, and poultry with their rich gravies.” Meat and alcohol led to a battle with rheumatism, constant headaches, canker sores, and tooth decay.  

Perry hit bottom when a dyspeptic stomach left him unable to attend to his business dealings or even leave his house. After hearing Graham lecture in Boston, Perry “became interested in the principles he taught; and finally adopted them in diet and regimen.” The results were nearly immediate, Perry reported, with all maladies gone within a month. He slept soundly, and at fifty years of age could attest to “good health,” “the keenest relish for my food,” and an “elastic, energetic, untiring” ability to labor.  Both lay Grahamites and professional medical doctors wrote testimonials, attempting to lend populist and professional credibility to the cause. 

In each issue Sylvester Graham himself was represented by an article, often a summary, excerpt, or reworking of themes and arguments made in lectures and published works on the science of human life or bread making.  The journal also included articles focused on anatomy and the inner workings of the human body as proof of the benefits of a meatless diet. Charts, figures, and drawings frequently accompanied these articles, attempting to make scientific arguments accessible to the average reader.  

In a series of articles appearing in the journal, William Beaumont—a famed U. S. army surgeon—wrote on his observations of human digestion. Beaumont’s research was based on fi rsthand observation of Alexis St. Martin, a patient who had been accidentally shot in the stomach. This wound caused a fistula, an observable hole in St. Martin’s stomach leading to the digestive track. Beaumont placed various foods on a string in order to observe how food stuff s were broken down, leading to the observation that stomach acids helped digest food into various nutrients. Beaumont’s experiments illustrated that vegetables were easily broken down by stomach acid, in contrast to various meat products, which were “partly digested,” observable proof of Grahamites’ claims that meat was difficult to break down into digestible matter.  

Issues also included recipes, further linking Grahamites through common gastronomy. The recipes expanded the Grahamite diet beyond cold water and Graham bread, teaching meatless epicures how to properly prepare vegetables, bake pies, and prepare grains. By expanding the repertoire of meatless cookery, the Graham Journal ironically further shifted proto-vegetarianism away from Graham. The publication closed with an advertising section, offering information on where to buy the journal and find Grahamite boardinghouses, literature, and dietary products.  

Health advocates frequently wrote letters to the journal, though not always in support of meatless dietetics. One concerned reformer wrote with the desire to express a few “hasty remarks” regarding the journal’s advocacy for a vegetable diet. Not all advocates of dietary reform were followers of Graham, he argued. While admitting that Graham’s diet had beneficial effects, the writer said he would call “no man master” and was writing to the journal to “protest against the common notion that the efforts of the advocates of physiological reform are designed solely or mainly to bring about the disuse of animal food.” The writer believed that “there are far worse articles of food in common use than healthy flesh-meat. . . . A man may be a pure vegetable liver, and yet his diet be far less favorable to health than a diet of animal food might be.” The letter concluded with a call for further scientific study into the eff ects of all dietary practices, stating that “we do not aim at dietetic reform solely—we advocate physiological reform.”  The anonymous writer raised an important question for those interested in dietary reform to consider: Should the movement focus on a dogmatic dedication to a meatless diet or advocate for scientific study to continually redefi ne the most benefi cial diet?  

The fate of the journal at the end of 1839 seems to have offered an answer to the lingering question over the aims of dietary reformers, indicating that total dietary reform had become preferable to Grahamism. After three years of weekly publication, the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity ceased production, with its last issue dated December 14, 1839. The journal had originally planned to release a fourth edition, promising potential subscribers seven free issues for the remainder of 1839 when opening a new account for the coming year. This enticement to subscribe seems to indicate significant financial diffi culty for Cambell and the journal.

The fate of the journal at the end of 1839 seems to have offered an answer to the lingering question over the aims of dietary reformers, indicating that total dietary reform had become preferable to Grahamism. After three years of weekly publication, the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity ceased production, with its last issue dated December 14, 1839. The journal had originally planned to release a fourth edition, promising potential subscribers seven free issues for the remainder of 1839 when opening a new account for the coming year.  This enticement to subscribe seems to indicate significant financial difficulty for Cambell and the journal.  

In the October 12 issue, the journal announced a merger with the Library of Health, edited by William Alcott, second cousin of the young Louisa May Alcott. The Library of Health began publishing in 1837, the same year as the Graham Journal, and offered similar articles focusing on physiology, temperance, and a natural diet, though without the shadow of a singular, dominant, and emblematic leader to define the movement. Alcott himself was a regular contributor to the Graham Journal and a passionate advocate for a vegetable diet. However, he was also an experienced medical doctor, symbolically indicating a shift in meatless dietetics toward part of total dietary reform rather than a goal unto itself. Given the synergies between the two journals and the apparent financial difficulties Cambell faced, the merger was unavoidable. The effort to detaching the meat-free diet from Graham’s shadow had begun. In the process a new movement began to emerge, one indebted to Graham for its birth but dependent on separation to continue to grow.

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In twenty short years, meat abstention had moved from the domain of a small, localized religious movement focused on spiritual ascension to a growing community throughout the United States attached to the scientific and moral reform principles of Sylvester Graham. Originally the realm of the Bible Christian Church, meatless dietary reform evolved into an all encompassing ideology that sought to negotiate the challenges and tensions inherent in a rapidly modernizing industrial and urban environment.  However, both groups were interested in the total reform possibilities connected to abstaining from meat.  

By the 1830s, Grahamism became the most recognized lifestyle attached to meat abstention in the United States, eliciting praise from its adherents and harsh criticism from its opponents. Dietary reformers opened Grahamite boardinghouses in urban areas to serve as moral guardians while creating a larger community of interconnected dietary reformers. The printed word, meanwhile, supported the continued growth of this new community, conjoining Grahamites from disparate geographic regions while providing a forum to offer scientific proof of the diet’s success. The group’s existence, however, would be relatively short-lived. But as Graham’s failing health pushed him into quasi-retirement, his community of meat-abstaining followers did not disappear. Rather, they continued to grow and reinvent themselves

The Graham Journal , in contrast, focused on dietetics as a vehicle for healthy living rather than as a product of a better lifestyle. At the center of the Grahamite journal was a structured reform regimen that hinged on avoiding meat. With the absorption of the Graham Journal , Library of Health shifted from a generalized physiological journal to one focused on meatless dietary reform. Library of Health supported the continued growth of a meatless, proto-vegetarian community, in the process pushing meat abstention further away from the sole terrain of Grahamites.  

The new focus on meat abstention was quickly and readily apparent by 1840. The year’s first issue advocated for the use of a vegetable diet for children. The article opened with a conversion story, relaying the life of “J. B.,” a three-year-old boy afflicted with large scabs all over his face. With the adoption of a vegetable diet, the author wrote, “a great change was manifest in the appearance of the child,” and the scabs “entirely disappeared.” The long-term benefi ts of dietary change were even more impressive, as the child seemed “to have known nothing about sickness or pain” since adopting the meat-free diet. This development was all the more remarkable given that J. B. had been “living, for the last year, in a region of the West, where, for months, almost all others were sick and dying.” The child enjoyed better teeth, smoother skin, and a general increase in mental capabilities.

  In another article, the author tackled the difficulties faced in challenging meat culture and the lack of thought average Americans gave to their dietary choices. The writer argued that the majority of the population believed “that flesh-meat is not only the kind of food on which they were intended principally to subsist, but . . . it is indispensably necessary to preserve their strength, and to enable them to perform their various avocations in life.” In order to gain converts it was essential to impress on the public that a “vegetable diet . . . by its mild but nutritive qualities, keeps the circulation in the human system regular and cool.” The legacy of the need to keep the humoral body in balance was clearly still apparent. When properly executed, a meatless diet prepared the body to “become an appropriate temple of the mind, and leads man to a more perfect mode of being.” Throughout 1840 the journal increased its coverage of dietary issues, even reprinting William Beaumont’s digestive experiments that had appeared in the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity. Library of Health made the connection between dietary choice and scientifi c discovery explicit.  

By the middle of 1840, Library of Health started featuring vegetable diet stories at the beginning of each issue, proof that the publication’s conversion to a natural dietetic journal was complete. The first volume of the year featured an article titled “Nutritive Properties of Various Kinds of Food,” where vegetables, grains, and fruits were presented as easily digestible and nutritious, whereas meat was difficult to assimilate into the bloodstream and thus of little dietary value. Of the fifty most nutritive food products listed, forty were vegetables, grains, or fruits. By including flesh foods on the list—though farther down in the rankings—the journal hoped to illustrate its scientific accuracy and rigor, advocating for a vegetable diet through study and observation.  The same issue advocated for the use of vegetable foods to ensure productive work, relaying the story of a young laborer who gained mental and physical strength from his dietary change. With the new meatless diet, the article claimed, it was possible to work “on an average, twelve hours a day at hard labor.” Physical labor had previously made the worker unable to “relish for close study” because his “mind would shrink from it.” However, with the support of a meatless diet, the young man reported becoming “perfectly calm, my mind clear, and delighted with close study and patient thought.” Dietary conversion made him not only a better worker but also a sharper, more complete citizen, a model of the republican self-made man.

In a January 1841 editorial focusing on the United States’ growing population of meat abstainers, the article’s author reflected on the current state of meatless dietetics in the United States. The writer proclaimed that “if the public choose to call us . . . Grahamites . . . we care very little. . . . Those to whom we may have the happiness to do a little good . . . will not care to inquire whether we bow at the shrine of any leader, ancient or modern.”  The article was featured in the physiological journal Library of Health , which by the turn of the 1840s had supplanted the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity as the main published voice of meatless dietetics. At the risk of alienating its newly acquired readership, Library of Health touted the notion of individuals’ choices and scientific study, rather than the works of a single individual.  

As 1840 began, American meatless dietary reform had grown from a small group of renegade church members in Philadelphia to a full-fledged, recognizable movement that spread across geographic boundaries, connected by the common bond of Sylvester Graham’s teachings. But now that a visible community of meatless dietary reformers had formed, a question remained: How would this group continue to grow? Public lectures and the printed word had served proto-vegetarians well, yet these methods were also limited, since they emphasized the growth of group leaders’ popularity while leaving practitioners around the country somewhat disconnected. Through the 1840s a variety of reformers experimented with the social and political reform possibilities connected to abstention from meat. While these reformers remained somewhat fractured through the decade, by its end a variety of groups began to coalesce and become a single movement.  

During this transitional period, reformers further developed their principles, fusing the realms of health and science with dietary and social reform. In order to continue growing they needed a centralized voice to unify the spectrum of dietary reformers. With the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity ending publication in December 1839, William Alcott’s Library of Health filled the void. Other attempts, including a utopian experiment at Fruitlands and the use of water cure, linked dietary choice directly with social reform, expanding the motivations for adherence to a meatless diet. 

The process of disconnecting proto-vegetarianism from Grahamism began, ironically, during the height of Graham’s popularity. The interest that Graham sparked in dietetics and personal scientific and health study led to the establishment of other, more broad-based organizations. The American Physiological Society (APS) was a Boston-based group founded in 1837. Practitioners of a Graham diet began the society by integrating a Grahamite lifestyle into a larger physiologically focused ideology. The APS’s constitution reflected this desire, welcoming those interested in learning about the “influence of temperature, air, cleanliness, exercise, sleep, food, drink, medicine, &c., on human health and longevity.”  The organization sought to democratize the study of health, making this knowledge accessible to “every citizen,” since it was “the duty of every person, of good sense, to make [health] a subject of daily study.”  Unaffiliated with any particular religious group or leader, the APS also moved meat abstention away from religious, doctrinal structures and placed dietary reform fi rmly within the realm of scientific study.  

The APS sought to empower its members by diff using “a knowledge of the laws of life, and of the means of promoting human health and longevity.” In this sense the APS’s goals were similar to Graham’s. However, through its organizational-based structure, the APS formed a body that emphasized the collective work of its membership rather than the deeds and words of a leader. The organization met on the first Wednesday of each month and held a larger annual gathering each May. All members in attendance at the annual meeting voted for organizational officers.  The APS at its founding had 206 members; nearly 40 percent were women.  The group’s membership grew to 251 by 1838, though the organization estimated that closer to 400 individuals (including the family members of APS members) followed its dietary recommendations.  The large presence of women in the APS, while challenging some existing social structures in terms of promoting scientific knowledge, also reflected predominant notions of food and family. Women were, after all, most often in charge of craft ing family diets.

The APS thus also included a Ladies Physiological Society, which met separately from the larger group throughout the organization’s three-year existence. The group organized public lectures and met regularly to discuss meatless living, building a small community of like-minded reformers who wrestled with the most practical ways to live a reform lifestyle.  Members of the APS lectured against the effects of flesh foods, which caused “the most horrid, blasphemous thoughts” among its consumers. However, the APS was careful to not appear doctrinal in its beliefs, guided by scientific study rather than adherence to a preconceived philosophy. The organization urged members to pay “strict attention to the importance of air, temperature, clothing . . . and a thousand other things besides diet and drink.” However, “as to imposing on the world any system, even the ‘Graham System,’ excellent as we believe that to be[,] . . . we have never intended it.” The APS and its members largely believed in the efficacy of Grahamism, but they also believed in the need to free meatless dietary reform from the shadow of Sylvester Graham.