THE STAFF OF DEATH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 41

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 insep-
arable. 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 ab-
olitionists, 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. 26
This was heady stuff. After following a strict regimen of coarse bread and rigorous exercise, one con-
vert, 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.” 27
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 con-
siderable derision. Medical authorities lined up to testify that bran itself was indigestible—an inflam-
matory 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 de-
clared. 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.” 28 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.” 29
Faced with such widespread opposition and torn apart by its own fundamentalism, Grahamism waned
after the 1850s, although it never quite disappeared. By 1874, a columnist in the Chicago Daily Tribune
could state confidently that Graham would have been hard pressed “to muster a baker's dozen of fol-
lowers.” 30 But this wasn't quite true. Enclaves of Grahamism appeared here and there until the end of
the century. Bronson Alcott's short-lived Fruitlands experiment was just one example. Equally ill-fated
but far more ambitious, the Vegetarian Settlement Company tried to build an entire city in Kansas sup-
ported by sales of Graham flour and Graham crackers. During the 1860s, the founders of the Seventh-
Day Adventist Church adopted Graham's dietary prescriptions almost exactly. Eight million Adventists
around the world today live out Graham's legacy. The church also gave rise to Grahamism's most fam-
ous twentieth-century preacher: John Harvey Kellogg, the breakfast cereal king. Harder to trace directly,
but still palpable, Grahamism, channeled through 1960s counterculture, lingers in tens of millions of
Americans' instinctive belief in the virtues of “natural food.” 31
So what are we to make of this legacy? It would be easy to make a joke of it, as many have: to laugh
at Graham's sexual prudery and loathing of sensual pleasure. I prefer to stress the more complicated