White Bread (14 page)

Under the influence of increasingly popular critics of early nineteenth-century “heroic medicine,” with its affection for bloodletting and mercury purgatives, Graham believed, not without cause, that health was best achieved by avoiding doctors. As part of a larger religious current sweeping Jacksonian America, Graham combined evangelical revival with scientific study of the body. Called “Christian physiology” by historians of religion, this was not faith healing, but rather a conviction that all disease arose from a failure to conform one's bodily habits to the Laws of Nature, a scientific order designed by the Creator.
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Under the influence of the celebrated French physiologist François Broussais's “gastroenterological theory,” Graham's particular version of Christian physiology located humans' primary connection to Nature and Creator in the alimentary tract.

More specifically, Graham imagined the body as a network of fibers radiating out from the intestines, connecting and feeding every organ. Ingesting “stimulating” food and drink—particularly animal flesh, white bread, alcohol, caffeine, and spices—irritated and inflamed those fibers from the gut outward, producing overall ill health. On the other hand, because all health was connected to the gut, cooling the body's fibers through bland, disciplined eating could cure any ill. Avoiding stimulating foods was, Graham proclaimed, “nothing less than the application of Christianity to the physical condition and wants of man … the means which God has ordained for the redemption of the body.”
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Even the worst cases of bodily derangement could be eased by an ascetic diet of whole wheat bread and water.

For Graham, health and bodily inflammation were more than physiological. Central to Christian physiology was the conviction that careful study of scientific law would inevitably confirm biblical law and vice versa. God created Nature, therefore Nature—the workings of human physiology—must logically work according to the laws of God. And because particularly vital fibrous connections linked the intestines, genitals, and brain together in “morbid sympathy,” intestinal inflammation also held the key to the nation's moral health. In this holistic view, the maintenance of individual health and moral virtue went together. Thus, Graham's best-selling
Lecture to Young Men on Chastity
famously blamed masturbation for a long list of civic woes. But the compulsion to masturbate itself arose out of poor physical hygiene and diet. Even chaste youths resisting “the solitary vice” with all their might could not triumph against “involuntary nighttime emissions” unless they harmonized their bodies with Nature through austere eating.
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In a social milieu crowded with competing health gurus, Graham's big break came in the form of a global cholera pandemic that reached the United States via Canada in 1832.
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As the disease radiated out from the East Coast's crowded cities and claimed lives with awe-inspiring speed, the nation panicked. Roads out of affected areas were choked with refugees fleeing quarantine. Business in New York City came to a standstill that summer, and public health officials around the country flailed to find ways to slow the disease's spread. Health officials shoveled chloride of lime on every surface they could and in some towns burned tar pitch to “purify the air”—efforts that may have reassured the public, but did little against cholera. In New York, city officials banned the sale of nearly all fresh fruits and vegetables. This draconian measure may, in fact, have helped slow food-borne cholera, but it also took a terrible toll on the poor's already meager diet and livelihoods.

Medical authorities, for their part, offered even less help. Some of their prophylactic recommendations—heavy doses of port wine and the opiate laudanum, for example—may have dulled the senses, but probably helped cholera kill. Others, like calomel, a toxic mercury compound prescribed to children in doses “fit for a horse,” needed no help from King Cholera.

The impotency of medical treatment only confirmed the widespread popular sense that cholera had been sent by God to strike down the wicked and test the virtuous. In this desperate context, Graham, speaking to breathless audiences up and down the East Coast, offered a hopeful message of personal empowerment. For Graham, cholera was not a punishment sent from on high. Nor did he give much credence to the nascent ideas of sanitation science, which blamed the epidemic's spread on miserable tenement conditions, the poverty of the country's new industrial working class, and corrupt city political machines' inability to remove urban waste or protect the food supply. Further still from his mind was the minority view that economic inequalities might play a role in the spread of disease. Despite the fact that poor New Yorkers drank dangerous city water while wealthy residents, who could have pressured for better infrastructure, simply bought expensive clean water from private contractors, Graham proclaimed that cholera—and all other diseases, for that matter—stemmed from a lack of what we today might call “personal responsibility.”

As historian of religion Catherine Albanese writes, “No longer was disease the result of God's punishment. … Rather, it was one's own decision.”
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People brought disease upon themselves by yielding to the temptation of physiological stimulation and they could banish it just as easily. Instead of framing cholera as a righteous force inevitably clearing out “the scum of the city,” Graham offered a relatively simple and practical defense against the disease. In theory anyone could follow Graham's prescription and, he argued, it worked not just for cholera, but for all ailments, from headaches and cancer to
ennui
and anxiety. In an era when mainstream medicine harmed more than it helped, his prescription may have seemed prudish, but at least it didn't kill: no meat or white bread, less worry about what doctors say, sexual abstinence, more exercise, temperance, and lots of pure water (assuming you could afford it).

While Graham's conclusions went against conventional medical wisdom, they left dominant assumptions about society unquestioned. Indeed, the fact that cholera struck first in cities' poorest quarters seemed positive proof to him that moral failings fueled the outbreak. This view resonated with East Coast elites eager to wash their hands of responsibility for the poor's suffering, but Graham didn't limit his criticism to the poor Irish and blacks at the heart of the outbreak. Instead, he assailed all Americans' addiction to debilitating foods. Meat eating was human violence and bestiality incarnate, he argued—the embodiment of blood-dripping depravity. But the country's seemingly unstanchable craving for refined flour was almost equally abhorrent. Although Graham grasped the importance of dietary fiber long before it was scientific common sense, his critique of white flour aimed much higher. Separating white flour and bran, he preached, epitomized civilization's degenerate impulse to undo God's natural goodness. All food processing “put asunder what God has joined together,” in Graham's eyes, but refining wheat ruptured God's perfect food. Refined wheat was a shattered covenant—the estrangement of humanity from its biblical staff of life. Because white flour was so de-natured—so out of harmony with Creation—it took a particularly devastating toll on the bodies and souls of those who ate it, inflaming every joint and fiber and unhinging every rectitude.
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In contrast to debased diets of meat and white bread, Graham preached the perfect meal, “highly conducive to the welfare of bodies and souls”: locally grown whole wheat, recently ground and baked into bread by a loving wife, accompanied by fresh fruit and vegetables grown in virgin, unfertilized soil, and washed down with pure water. “They who have never eaten bread made of wheat, recently produced by a pure virgin soil,” he proclaimed, “have but a very imperfect notion of the deliciousness of good bread; such as is often to be met with in the comfortable log houses in our western country.”
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In this evocation of local wheat, loving wives and mothers, log cabins, and virgin soil we begin to get a glimpse of the politics of Graham's vision of good bread. During the early nineteenth century, the country had begun to urbanize and industrialize. Although these changes would not really reach breakneck pace until the end of the century, Graham, like many Americans, perceived an erosion of hearth and home. Corrosive pressures of the rapidly expanding national market seemed bent on destroying independent agrarian households as the country's primary units of social life and economic production. The explosive industrialization and commodification of food provisioning would happen later, but Graham had glimpsed the future and didn't like it. Changes in family sustenance were harbingers of moral decline.

Raised by an affectionless mother, he pined for “mother's bread” as edible proof of love and kindness. Like so many food reformers today, he longed for a mythical time when mothers, kneading bread, firmly anchored in the home, held the nation's moral fabric in place. Graham railed virulently against urbanites' emerging taste for bakery bread because professional bakers lacked mothers' moral sensibility. Though he moved in the social circles of suffrage activism, Graham's elegies to “good bread” rested on a resoundingly conservative bedrock of traditional family values. As
Little Women
author Louisa May Alcott trenchantly observed in an account of the Graham-inspired commune Fruitlands founded by her father, Bronson Alcott, men sat around discussing the ethics of eating and farming, while women did all the work.
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In time, the cholera epidemic extinguished itself, vanishing as quickly as it had come. Graham's message, on the other hand, proved more long lasting. By 1839, noted cookbook author Sarah Josepha Hale could confidently declare that whole wheat bread was “now best known as ‘Graham bread,' ” thanks to his “unwearied and successful [work] in recommending it to the public.” Graham-inspired banquets serving “simple farmer-like repast[s]” attracted East Coast luminaries such as the influential newspaper editor Horace Greeley, an early and ardent convert, and key abolition and suffrage activists like Lucy Stone, Frances D. Gage, and the Reverend John Pierpont.
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As Graham's fame grew, he teamed up with the charismatic and influential reformer William Andrus Alcott to spread the word. Indeed, William Alcott deserves much of the credit for popularizing Grahamism. Together they lectured across the country, edited health magazines, and founded the United States' first health food store, providing Bostonians with whole wheat bread, fresh fruits, and “vegetables grown in virgin, unfertilized soil.” They created the American Physiological Society to promote Grahamism and supported the establishment of “physiological boardinghouses,” where unmarried or traveling male Grahamites might find appropriate food and a pure moral climate. By 1854, four years after his death, the
New York Daily Times
could depict Grahamism as a ubiquitous form of youth rebellion found on college campuses.
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For many followers, Graham's prescriptions simply offered a route to individual health. In an age when meals were gargantuan and greasy, vegetables brutalized by endless boiling, and constipation a national plague, Graham's dietary recommendations must have offered some relief to stuffed diners. But this was not the end point Graham intended. Bountiful energy, set into motion by physical discipline, was to be used for something greater—full-scale social transformation.

It wasn't just that the ranks of the abolition, suffrage, temperance, and antivivisection movements overlapped extensively with Grahamism; for true Grahamites, good society and good diet were inseparable. Progressive educator and Grahamite Bronson Alcott would have argued, for example, that his unpopular decision to subsist on bran bread and raw fruits arose from the same place as his scandalous decision to allow a black girl to attend classes at his school. Grahamites hated sugar for its enervating effects
and
its origins on slave plantations. As Horace Greeley challenged a New York audience of abolitionists, temperance activists, and suffragists: imagine how righteous our efforts would be if we could each mobilize more vital energy by shedding our violent attachment to animal flesh.
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This was heady stuff. After following a strict regimen of coarse bread and rigorous exercise, one convert, Thomas Ghaskins, wrote, “My mind underwent a most surprising change, and a flood of light was poured upon it. It appeared to me that I could see into almost every thing, and I was constantly led to their true causes. I was able to see into the real nature and moral bearing of the various institutions of Society, and the domestic and religious habits and practices of the busy world around me. … I was a new creature, physically, morally, and spiritually.”
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Not surprisingly, many members of “Society” were less than excited about this kind of scrutiny into their institutions, domestic habits, and religious practices. High-strung testimonials like Ghaskins's made easy targets for satirists. As critics were quick to note, for a movement premised on the avoidance of stimulation, Grahamites sure seemed to get worked up about diet.

While critics reserved their strongest vitriol for Graham's vegetarianism, bran bread came in for considerable derision. Medical authorities lined up to testify that bran itself was indigestible—an inflammatory agent, scouring intestines and stimulating gastric nerves, the opposite of what Graham desired. His diet was naught but “sawdust and sand” the
Wisconsin Herald and Grant County Advertiser
declared. And the
Chicago Daily Tribune
humor column quipped: “Graham bread is said to be excellent food for the children on account of its superior bone-giving qualities. You can feed a child on that bread until he is all bones.”
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Capturing the tenor of anti-Grahamite sentiment perfectly, the writer J. J. Flournoy predicted that Graham's diet would produce “a nation of pigmies to be warred upon by cranes,” whereas meat and white bread generated “strong, large, hale men … better sailors, workmen, and soldiers, and majestical Christians.”
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