White Bread Read online

  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 1832.19 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.”20 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.21

  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.”22

  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.23

  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.24

  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.25

  For many followers, G
raham’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.26

  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.” 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 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.”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 followers.”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 supported 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 famous 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 politics smuggled in with calls for “simple repast.” The disparity between suffragist ideals and a diet dependent on unremitting female labor was just the tip of the iceberg.

  Under the guise of good bread, Graham peddled a sentimental utopia of rural simplicity that conveniently ignored the many forms of exploitation, debt bondage, and global connections that had always plagued supposedly “independent” frontier households—not to mention the human and environmental costs of the conquest of Indian Territory. Calls for local wheat sound pleasant today, but, in the 1840s, Graham’s exaltation of “virgin soils” and “comfortable log houses” would have clearly read as a warrant for westward expansion. For Graham and his followers, building the Kingdom of God on Earth from the stomach out was inseparable from the emerging imperial ambitions of their young Republic. As Kyla Tompkins, a scholar of nineteenth-century food movements, has explained, whole wheat bread, locally grown and produced by whites, “signified domestic order, civic health, and moral well-being; ingesting more [good] bread, [Graham] promised would … ensure America’s place in the pantheon of civilized nations.”32 Strange as it may seem, for Graham, the destruction of Native American peoples and their indigenous food-ways represented a necessary step in the country’s quest for harmony with nature.

  This raises awkward questions about the power to declare things “natural” or “unnatural.” If we honestly and passionately love the taste of store-bought white bread, why isn’t that a natural craving? More disturbingly, Graham’s assumption that property-owning, small-scale farmers living in white, male-headed, heterosexual households and grinding their own “local” wheat were the most “natural” Americans—the ultimate expression of moral virtue, democratic spirit, and natural harmony—still resonates strongly today. But what—and who—gets left out of this picture?

  We might, like some contemporary vegetarian activists, forgive these elements of Grahamism as unfortunate but understandable products of their time. But we would do better to appreciate the tensions inherent in the movement. Grahamism demanded justice for animals and slaves, while longing for land cleared of Native Americans. It challenged the abuses of an industrializing food system in ways that reinforced women’s subordination. And it questioned the entrenched authority of medical experts, while reinforcing divides between “virtuous” elite eaters and the “intemperate” poor.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, however, America’s utopian impulse to perfect society from the intestines out would lose some of the radical social critique that makes Grahamism attractive. Early twentieth-century bread critics drew heavily on Graham’s coupling of bodily health and civic virtue, but theirs was a more worldly approach. As debates about the effect of modern bread came once again to prominence between 1910 and 1930, all sides would rely on the unsavory premises of social Darwinism and racial eugenics. Concerns about white bread’s effects on bodies would increasingly channel earthly anxieties about the survival of the fittest. Christian physiologists’ spiritual dreams of social and inner harmony, for all their flaws, would give way to obsessions with external appearance and material success. Two early twentieth-century food gurus, Alfred W. McCann and Bernarr MacFadden, epitomized the evolution from Christian physiology to more ruthless dreams of social fitness demonstrated through bodily discipline.

  MCCANN’S PARABLES OF WHITE BREAD POISONING

  In the late 1920s, just two miles away from the Ward Baking Company’s Brooklyn factory, another family was making its fortune selling a very different kind of loaf. The Dugan brothers began baking bread in 1875, as a complement to their pushcart grocery business. By the 1920s, their business had outgrown a series of ever-larger bakeries, and was likely the country’s largest producer of 100 percent whole wheat bread. 33

  Large-scale production of whole wheat bread faced technic
al challenges that had long dissuaded most manufacturers from attempting it: whole wheat flour spoils quickly compared to white and its tiny bran particles slice gluten strands to pieces, making it hard to raise a light, airy loaf. As a result, even bakers producing “whole wheat” breads frequently used blends of white and whole wheat. David H. Dugan, on the other hand, insisted on 100 percent whole wheat—even when his own workers protested that it couldn’t be made by machine.

  Even more challenging, however, whole wheat bakers had to convince a skeptical public to eat the stuff. And in this, the Dugan Brothers Bakery received invaluable assistance. It came in the form of one of the country’s most popular dietary advisors, Dr. Alfred W. McCann, who pitched Dugan Brothers bread daily on his WOR radio show. The Dugan brothers were known for the religious roots of their health bread empire, and McCann’s daily fulminations against processed foods likewise drew heavily on Graham and the Christian physiologists. McCann’s arguments and examples, however, would eventually provide the foundation for a wide range of decidedly secular attacks against white bread.34

  As the longtime food editor of the New York Globe and head of his own pure food laboratory, McCann was a bottomless source of studies, experiments, and anecdotes. He packed his broadcasts and books with accounts of tests in which dogs, chickens, pigs, and even orphans or refugees were fed nothing but white bread for weeks, their declining health meticulously observed. More importantly, he had a genius for parables of “white bread poisoning.”

  Two such stories in particular captured the early twentieth-century imagination: in “the Madeira-Mamore case,” purportedly conveyed to McCann by the survivor of a South American railroad project gone awry, four thousand tracklayers were said to have perished on the Brazil-Bolivia border after subsisting on nothing but white bread rations for months. Actual evidence for the Madeira-Mamore deaths was secondhand and scant, but McCann himself played an eyewitness role in the second story, which he dubbed “the Kronprinz Wilhelm incident.”