Sylvester Graham

• Sylvester Graham
• Born: July 5, 1794
• Died: September 11, 1851

Pure food and health reformer, was born in West Suffield, Connecticut. His grandfather, John Graham, a Scots clergyman and physician, had emigrated to Boston in 1718; his father, also John Graham, and also a clergyman and physician, a graduate of Yale University in 1740, was seventy-two years old at the time of Graham’s birth. Graham was the child of his father’s second wife, Ruth, and after his father’s death in 1796, when Graham was two years old, Graham was raised by several different sets of relatives. He received little regular education, and developed weak health, including tuberculosis.

He worked at first in a variety of occupations, including farming, clerking and teaching, but in 1823, at the age of twenty-nine, he decided at a new threat of tuberculosis to begin preparation for the ministry, following in the steps of his father and grandfather. He spent one quarter, the autumn of 1823, studying languages at Amherst Academy, in Amherst, Massachusetts. He left the Academy, where he had been stigmatized as a “stage actor” in his attitude, with bad feeling between himself and both his fellow students and the faculty.

His departure occasioned a collapse into a long illness, probably tubercular, through which he was nursed by two sisters. Recovered in 1826, he married one of them; she bore him several children, and survived him.

Graham proceeded to become a minister in the Presbyterian Church, and by 1831 was preaching at Berkshire Valley, New Jersey. In 1830, however, he had been made general agent for the Pennsylvania Temperance Society, and although he remained connected with the Presbytery of Newark until 1834, from 1830 onward his attention and his time were increasingly given over to matters of health, diet, and purifying ways of living. In 1830-31 he gave a series of lectures on these topics in Philadelphia, and this launched him on a new career as a popular lecturer that kept him travelling throughout the Atlantic seaboard.

“The founder and untiring advocate of the vegetarian system of dietetics,” was how The New York Times referred to him at his death, but Graham’s philosophy and system encompassed a good deal more than simple vegetarianism. He gave in his lectures and writings directions for the making of health-giving bread (to be made of the whole of the wheat, unbolted and coarsely ground), creating a widespread following influential enough to earn him the enmity of bakers of the time, and to immortalize him in the eponymous “Graham cracker.” He went on from his dietary prescriptions, most of which—fresh fruits and vegetables, rough cereals, pure drinking water—would find support among health and nutrionists of today, to develop his system of how to live a healthy life in every specific detail. He lectured and wrote on the need for cheerfulness at meals, hard mattresses, open bedroom windows, and even, in his most popular work, the advocacy of chastity for young men (The Young Man’s Guide to Chastity, 1834). Graham’s wide-ranging views and determined proslyetising resulted in the flourishing of a Grahamite movement throughout the 1840s. This movement numbered Horace Greeley among its followers; Greeley brought some of Grahamism into his own speaking tours, as well as his influential newspaper, The New-York Tribune. Several of his works, notably The Young Man’s Guide to Chastity, were published in both England and Germany during this period.

The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity was published by one of his followers, David Cambell, between April 1837 and December 1839. Graham’s ideas were especially influential among other reforming groups, for instance, the abolitionist supports of William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830s and early 1840s. The Aesculapian Tablets of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1834, was a volume of personal testimonials by Grahamites.

The decade 1830-1840 was Graham’s most influential and most productive period. In 1832 he edited Luigi Cornaro’s Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life, and in 1833 he published his own lectures on cholera as A Lecture on Epidemic Diseases Generally and Particularly the Spasmodic Cholera. His volume on chastity was published first in London in 1834, and later appeared in both Germany and America. His energetic and outspoken determination to bring his views to the widest public attention, and to attract followers to his way of thinking and living, whether of bread-making or of chastity for young men, caused Graham to be attacked in the press, or even in person, on several occasions, recalling perhaps his experience at the Amherst Academy as a young man. His Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making (1837) caused the growth of a minor home industry in which millers began to barrel Graham flour, and there was public criticism of the adulteration practised by bakers; in 1847 a mob of bakers attacked a meeting at which Graham was speaking in Boston, and, the police having been ineffectual in intervening, were only repelled by the force of Graham’s followers themselves in attendance.

Graham himself followed his success in each aspect of human health and habit by expanding into a new area of concern where he might make his philosophy effective. During the 1830s he expanded his lecture material to cover comparative anatomy, and developed a set of lectures outlining his dietetic system for colored people in particular. In 1839 he published the most substantial collection of his lectures and philosophy, Lectures on the Science of Human Life, in two volumes.

Graham had always incorporated into his lectures references to the Biblical mention of the use of flesh and wine, and as he became more successful and more influential, he began increasingly to express his interest and his views on Biblical studies and questions. After 1840 his influence as a health prophet and popularizer waned, as his personal attention became increasingly focused on his Biblical and philosophic interests. In 1841 he began to publish his Biblical lectures in quarterly installments, and at his death he was at work on a four-volume projected Philosophy of Sacred History (of which one volume was edited and published by H.S. Chubb in 1855, after Graham’s death).

“His character evinced energy and decision, and his influence on the public mind was rather beneficial than deleterious,” said The Times obituary writer. “Of his theories, each will form his own judgment; the projector, at least, was undoubtedly honest and sincere in sustaining them.” Sylvester Graham died at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, at fifty-seven, after a period of failing health, having partaken of stimulants, Congress water (a soda water), and a tepid bath.

Graham’s own works include L. Cornaro, ed., Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life (1832); A Lecture on Epidemic Diseases Generally and Particularly the Spasmodic Cholera (1833); The Young Man’s Guide to Chastity (1834); Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making (1837); Lectures on the Science of Human Life, 2 vols. (1839; republished, with biographical sketch, 1858); H. S. Chubb, ed., The Philosophy of Sacred History, (1855; one of four projected volumes, posthumously edited by Chubb). A collection of testimonials by Graham’s followers is The Aesculapian Tablets of the Nineteenth Century (1834). Biographical information may be found in Dictionary of American Biography (1933); L. Filler, A Dictionary of American Social Reform (1963); National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1907); S. Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (1980); R. H. Shryock, “Sylvester Graham and the Popular Health Movement, 1830-1870,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, (1931). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times, September 18, 1851; and The Springfield Republican, September 12, 1851.