Calming the System

ED: But first, we’re going a spend a few minutes examining the teachings of a man who was America’s first health food guru. His name was Sylvester Graham and he was a minister in New England who took his message to many thousands of people on the lecture circuit, which is sort of the cable television of its time.

Now Graham was hugely popular, thousands turned out to hear his lectures and he developed a devoted following. Some of those followers published journals to further disseminate his message. Others founded boarding houses where they could collectively follow a Graham-approved lifestyle.

PETER: Which we should say is pretty impressive. After all, the Graham-ite diet was kind of tough. A true adherent would sleep on a hard bed and take cold baths. He or she would eat lots of vegetables and plenty of hardy wheat bread. But there were also some pretty strict prohibitions. No alcohol, no tea or coffee, no sugar, no spices, and absolutely no meat.

ED: Now the first thing you need to understand about Graham, is that he wasn’t doing all of this so people could shave a few pounds off their figures. There was a lot more at stake than that. There was an epidemic sweeping the nation, he said, and food was key to stopping it.

What was this epidemic? Heart disease? No. Cancer? No. It was youthful masturbation. Here’s how Graham described the victim of this terrible affliction.

MALE SPEAKER: The wretched transgressor sinks into a miserable fatuity and eventually becomes a confirmed and degraded idiot who’s deeply sunken and vacant glossy eye, and livid shriveled countenance, and ulcerous, toothless gums and fetid breath, and emaciated, and dwarfish, and crooked body, and almost hairless head, denote a premature old age, a blighted body and a ruined soul. And he drags out the remnant of his loathsome existence in exclusive devotion to his horribly abominable sensuality.

KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS: From the 21st century, we think the idea of an epidemic of masturbation is completely nuts.

ED: This is Kyla Wazana Tompkins, who has written about the reasons Graham’s idea struck a cord in the young nation.

KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS: But we can think of it as a kind of early sex panic in the way that in the Cold War, there was also a kind of a homosexual panic, right?

ED: Yeah.

KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS: And it’s partly the result of major economic changes in the US, which is that all of a sudden there’s an enormous amount of single young people leaving family farms and moving to the cities and becoming involved in the industrialized life of the nation.

So all of these young people, men and women, are living on their own for the first time out of parental control. And so this is sort of a kind of massive anxiety about what’s going to happen to the reproductive energies of all of these young people. Are they not going to reproduce? Are all those energies not going to go towards the well being of the nation?

ED: So what’s striking to us is the fact that people are linking diet so explicitly to these fears they have of a population out of control, that’s going to end up as a population of blathering idiots. Why did diet emerge as both the metaphor and as the solution to this rampant problem?

KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS: What Graham is most worried about is over-stimulation. And for him, there’s a deep parallel between sexual over-stimulation and oral over-stimulation. So eating too many spicy foods, eating too many foods that will overstimulate your body, will result in a kind of weakening of the body. So the ways in which we, today for instance, talk about drugs like crack, that someone does crack for the first time and the feeling is so amazing they spend the rest of their addictive life searching for that first experience, is exactly the ways in which Graham is talking about diet and how he’s talking about sex.

Which is to say, the first time you have that over-stimulating experience is so good, you just keep trying to find that high again. But that over-stimulation, in fact, weakens you. And so you keep going out to try to find that exciting experience and the more you do it, the more you weaken yourself until you’ve entirely lost your strength.

MALE SPEAKER: All kinds of stimulating and heating substances, high-seasoned food, rich dishes, the free use of flesh, and even the excess of aliment , all more or less and some to a very great degree, increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital organs, and augment their influence on the functions of organic life and on the intellectual and moral faculties.

ED: So why such a sense of urgency that Americans might become lazy and debilitated by eating the wrong diet and behaving wrong sexually?

KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS: Well this has a lot to do with this period of massive US expansion into the Western states. I mean, I think it’s really important to understand that the United States is a young country and they’re engaged in what they see as this enormous social experiment. And part of that experiment is coming up with an idea of what the ideal citizen is.

The ideal citizen of the 1830s is a man, is European American, is land holding, is virile. Probably not a dissipated masturbator, alcoholic, but actually married and reproducing and directing their sexual energies towards making more American citizens. So he’s very worried that the citizens of this enormous imperial social experiment are going to consume themselves into weakness and thereby ruin the social project.

ED: So Graham does not merely define in what he believes in by what he’s against, right? He has a vision of what a healthy American diet should look like.

KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS: Yes.

ED: Can you describe what his dream would be that the American nation would be feeding upon?

KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS: Well, he believes that Americans should eat American food. In some ways, he’s the first locavore in American food history. So wheat, bread, potatoes, simple vegetables, rice, absolutely no stimulants, and interestingly, most of the stimulants that he wants to avoid are stimulants that would have had to be imported from either Asia or South America or the Caribbean. So–

ED: You know, there’s one food I didn’t hear you say that I would think of as a quintessentially American food and that’s corn. Where’s corn in the Graham diet?

KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS: You know, Graham’s word for his ideal foods is farinaceous. Any kind of food they can be made into flour is a farinaceous food, and that includes corn.

ED: I see.

KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS: But really, what he’s most interested in is wheat. And that’s really important because this period of American expansion is a period in which expansion into the west is being led by wheat agriculture and part of the expansion into the west is about pushing out native peoples and displacing native nations. And corn, of course, is the indigenous grains of the Americas and in many ways, essential food of indigenous peoples. So, corn is important to him, but he’s much more interested, kind of symbolically, in wheat.

ED: So that’s very strange. He’s a locavore who doesn’t want to eat an indigenous food.

KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS: Yes, isn’t that interesting.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, think about the phrase, American as apple pie, and then think about a figure like Johnny Appleseed. You know, the apple, like wheat, is another of food that’s brought over by European colonists and is planted as part of kind of the story of manifest destiny of Western progress of Anglo Europeans all the way to the Pacific.

So in many ways, this ascetic diet is a kind of imperial diet. It’s about transplanting Europeans into the Americas and making European Americans, in some ways, indigenous to the Americas. At a moment where there is widespread genocidal violence against indigenous peoples. So it’s not that he doesn’t believe in corn, it’s just that he’s very invested in the story of American progress into the west and wheat is at the heart of that story.

MALE SPEAKER: They who have never eaten bread made of wheat. Recently produced by a pure virgin soil, 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.

Rice, barley, oats, rye, Indian corn, and many other farinaceous products of the vegetable kingdom, may also be manufactured into bread, but none of them will make so good bread as wheat.

[MUSIC]

ED: Kyla Wazana Tompkins is an associate professor of English at Pomona College. She’s the author of Racial Indigestion; Eating bodies in the 19th Century.

MALE SPEAKER: It’s time for a short break. When we get back, how to get rid of slavery without a civil war. Try not eating meat.

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a moment.