Meatless Moralism

PETER: We’re back with BackStory, the show that looks to the past to understand the America of today. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. We’re talking today about our definition of healthy eating and how that definition has changed through time. In the first part of our show, we heard about Sylvester Graham, the godfather of American health food and about how for Graham, healthy eating was integral to what it was to be a good American.

We’re going to focus in now on one aspect of the Graham diet that, for many of his followers, was especially tied to their civic identity. Vegetarianism. By the time the American Vegetarian Society, or the AVS, was founded in 1850, vegetarianism had become intimately tied to another reform movement, abolitionism.

To the members of the AVS, the connection between the two wasn’t subtle. Here’s AVS founder, William Alcott, speaking to the group’s members in 1850.

WILLIAM ALCOTT: There is no slavery in this world like the slavery of a man to his appetite. Let man but abstain from the use of the flesh and fish, and the slavery of one man to another cannot long exist.

ADAM SHPRINTZEN: It sounds totally bizarre, but they wholeheartedly believed in this notion that slavery was only possible in a violent and corrupt society.

ED: This is Adam Shprintzen, who has written about the history of vegetarianism.

ADAM SHPRINTZEN: And what was the cause of a violent and corrupt society? Well for vegetarians, it was meat, because meat caused individuals to become violent and corrupted.

ED: In other words, if Americans stopped eating meat, slavery would eventually die. In 1854, the Kansas Nebraska Act gave vegetarians a chance to accelerate that process. The decision to make those territories slaves or free would be put to a vote by the settlers there. And so members of the American Vegetarian Society flocked west, eager to make the territories a model for the rest of the country. Adam Shprintzen told me that they were led by an atheist member named Henry S. Clubb.

ADAM SHPRINTZEN: Clubb’s idea is to kind of take these principles, especially the principle of vegetarianism connected with abolitionism, and put it into practice. So he decides that they’re going to form a colony in pre-state Kansas, understanding that soon enough there’s going to be a vote on the territory’s status within the union, whether it would go slave or free state. So it’s part of a larger movement of groups going out from the northeast to try to make a demographic flood in favor of a free state.

ED: As a way to bring slavery to an end, I have to admit that seems like kind of a long way around, doesn’t it? That–

ADAM SHPRINTZEN: It is kind of involved.

[LAUGHTER]

So what they’re essentially trying to do is settle this land and build their own small city. The first group of settlers arrived, they were very enthusiastic about their cause of course. But then when the next wave of settlers come from the Northeast, the settlement itself is rickety, there’s maybe some old sheds with barely with roofing on it. Henry S. Clubb, himself, is living in an abandoned Native American wigwam.

There’s a significant disenchanted really quickly and within three to four months, especially as mosquito season really starts to hit and people suffer, certainly diseases that are associated with that– again, they’re right on the banks over river– a lot of the reformers end up kind of turning around and heading back east. But what also happens is that these settles that remain end up taking up arms themselves and joining the Union Army, including Henry S. Clubb.

ED: Yeah, because all of this just happens in 10 years. So they come out there in the early 1850s and pretty soon war descends upon them, so–

ADAM SHPRINTZEN: Exactly.

ED: What difference does the Civil War make? I mean, as you think about something that seems to be the direct opposite of everything that these people believe in, the Civil War would seem to embody that, wouldn’t it?

ADAM SHPRINTZEN: Yeah, absolutely, it’s a real sort of contradiction in terms for the vegetarians whose background is indelibly intertwined with the ideology of pacifism. Remember again, the idea is that if you eat meat, you’re going to be violent and aggressive. Henry S. Clubb, who was the original founder of the settlement, is sort of the living embodiment of this dichotomy between abolitionism and vegetarianism.

So Clubb joins the Union army, he serves as a Quartermaster. So he’s literally arming soldiers, providing strategic and material support, but Clubb himself refuses to carry a weapon during the war. So clearly he’s really kind of wrestling with these two values that he finds to be of equal importance.

ED: So on one hand, the war obviously bring slavery to an end and seems to be the culmination of the things that the American Vegetarian Society and their fellow travelers most believed in. Does this seem like, OK now, the way is prepared for the efflorescence of vegetarianism in the United States? Does it really take off after the war?

ADAM SHPRINTZEN: Vegetarians in the immediate post Civil War years have lost their distinctiveness and their focus on vegetarianism as a center of social reform. The American Vegetarian Society dissolves. Part of that is because vegetarians are far more concerned with and intertwined with these larger issues facing the union, abolitionism being at the very top of that list.

So vegetarianism, which became more prominent and popular precisely because it links to these other ideologies and movements, ends up dissolving essentially as an organization by the late 1860s. So vegetarians are fractured from each other, but because there is no organization, this allows for a new vegetarianism to crop up that focuses on the diet for its health benefits for the individual and that those health benefits will then also help the individual advance socially and economically. And this is a real difference from the previous vegetarians, who saw their diet as a way to help others rather than only themselves.

ED: So how much of a sense of a reforming zeal is still in the vegetarian movement, say at the turn of the century?

ADAM SHPRINTZEN: There’s definite enthusiasm for reform, but it’s the reform of the self. And it’s the reform of the self as a way to compete in society. At the end of the 19th century, vegetarianism is touted as a way for the individual to become socially successful, to advance in business, to advance physically even so that vegetarianism comes attached to athletics, bodybuilders during this time period.

So it’s literally the physical manifestation of the ways in which vegetarianism helps the individual succeed, by building muscular strong bodies, best ready to compete in the world.

ED: So in 50 years, vegetarianism reorients itself from a collective purpose to an individual purpose. Is that the shortest way to explain what happens?

ADAM SHPRINTZEN: Absolutely. And for such a relatively short time period, that is a fairly remarkable shift in this ideology and within this movement. And its embraced. So that the good old veteran of vegetarianism, Henry S. Clubb, enthusiastically embraces the new vegetarianism as a way for individuals to succeed.

THE BEACH BOYS: (SINGING) I’m going to be around my vegetables. I’m going to chow down my vegetables. I love you most of all.

ED: Adam Shprintzen is the author of The Vegetarian Cruside– The Rise of an American Reform Movement, 1817 to 1921.

THE BEACH BOYS: (SINGING) If you brought a big brown bag of them home, I’d jump up and down and hope you’d toss me a carrot. I’m going keep well, my vegetables. Cart off and sell my vegetables. I love you most of all. My favorite vegetables.