Biblical Fundamentalism

The fate of the journal at the end of 1839 seems to have offered an answer to the lingering question over the aims of dietary reformers, indicating that total dietary reform had become preferable to Grahamism. After three years of weekly publication, the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity ceased production, with its last issue dated December 14, 1839. The journal had originally planned to release a fourth edition, promising potential subscribers seven free issues for the remainder of 1839 when opening a new account for the coming year.  This enticement to subscribe seems to indicate significant financial difficulty for Cambell and the journal.  

In the October 12 issue, the journal announced a merger with the Library of Health, edited by William Alcott, second cousin of the young Louisa May Alcott. The Library of Health began publishing in 1837, the same year as the Graham Journal, and offered similar articles focusing on physiology, temperance, and a natural diet, though without the shadow of a singular, dominant, and emblematic leader to define the movement. Alcott himself was a regular contributor to the Graham Journal and a passionate advocate for a vegetable diet. However, he was also an experienced medical doctor, symbolically indicating a shift in meatless dietetics toward part of total dietary reform rather than a goal unto itself. Given the synergies between the two journals and the apparent financial difficulties Cambell faced, the merger was unavoidable. The effort to detaching the meat-free diet from Graham’s shadow had begun. In the process a new movement began to emerge, one indebted to Graham for its birth but dependent on separation to continue to grow.

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In twenty short years, meat abstention had moved from the domain of a small, localized religious movement focused on spiritual ascension to a growing community throughout the United States attached to the scientific and moral reform principles of Sylvester Graham. Originally the realm of the Bible Christian Church, meatless dietary reform evolved into an all encompassing ideology that sought to negotiate the challenges and tensions inherent in a rapidly modernizing industrial and urban environment.  However, both groups were interested in the total reform possibilities connected to abstaining from meat.  

By the 1830s, Grahamism became the most recognized lifestyle attached to meat abstention in the United States, eliciting praise from its adherents and harsh criticism from its opponents. Dietary reformers opened Grahamite boardinghouses in urban areas to serve as moral guardians while creating a larger community of interconnected dietary reformers. The printed word, meanwhile, supported the continued growth of this new community, conjoining Grahamites from disparate geographic regions while providing a forum to offer scientific proof of the diet’s success. The group’s existence, however, would be relatively short-lived. But as Graham’s failing health pushed him into quasi-retirement, his community of meat-abstaining followers did not disappear. Rather, they continued to grow and reinvent themselves

The Graham Journal , in contrast, focused on dietetics as a vehicle for healthy living rather than as a product of a better lifestyle. At the center of the Grahamite journal was a structured reform regimen that hinged on avoiding meat. With the absorption of the Graham Journal , Library of Health shifted from a generalized physiological journal to one focused on meatless dietary reform. Library of Health supported the continued growth of a meatless, proto-vegetarian community, in the process pushing meat abstention further away from the sole terrain of Grahamites.  

The new focus on meat abstention was quickly and readily apparent by 1840. The year’s first issue advocated for the use of a vegetable diet for children. The article opened with a conversion story, relaying the life of “J. B.,” a three-year-old boy afflicted with large scabs all over his face. With the adoption of a vegetable diet, the author wrote, “a great change was manifest in the appearance of the child,” and the scabs “entirely disappeared.” The long-term benefi ts of dietary change were even more impressive, as the child seemed “to have known nothing about sickness or pain” since adopting the meat-free diet. This development was all the more remarkable given that J. B. had been “living, for the last year, in a region of the West, where, for months, almost all others were sick and dying.” The child enjoyed better teeth, smoother skin, and a general increase in mental capabilities.

  In another article, the author tackled the difficulties faced in challenging meat culture and the lack of thought average Americans gave to their dietary choices. The writer argued that the majority of the population believed “that flesh-meat is not only the kind of food on which they were intended principally to subsist, but . . . it is indispensably necessary to preserve their strength, and to enable them to perform their various avocations in life.” In order to gain converts it was essential to impress on the public that a “vegetable diet . . . by its mild but nutritive qualities, keeps the circulation in the human system regular and cool.” The legacy of the need to keep the humoral body in balance was clearly still apparent. When properly executed, a meatless diet prepared the body to “become an appropriate temple of the mind, and leads man to a more perfect mode of being.” Throughout 1840 the journal increased its coverage of dietary issues, even reprinting William Beaumont’s digestive experiments that had appeared in the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity. Library of Health made the connection between dietary choice and scientifi c discovery explicit.  

By the middle of 1840, Library of Health started featuring vegetable diet stories at the beginning of each issue, proof that the publication’s conversion to a natural dietetic journal was complete. The first volume of the year featured an article titled “Nutritive Properties of Various Kinds of Food,” where vegetables, grains, and fruits were presented as easily digestible and nutritious, whereas meat was difficult to assimilate into the bloodstream and thus of little dietary value. Of the fifty most nutritive food products listed, forty were vegetables, grains, or fruits. By including flesh foods on the list—though farther down in the rankings—the journal hoped to illustrate its scientific accuracy and rigor, advocating for a vegetable diet through study and observation.  The same issue advocated for the use of vegetable foods to ensure productive work, relaying the story of a young laborer who gained mental and physical strength from his dietary change. With the new meatless diet, the article claimed, it was possible to work “on an average, twelve hours a day at hard labor.” Physical labor had previously made the worker unable to “relish for close study” because his “mind would shrink from it.” However, with the support of a meatless diet, the young man reported becoming “perfectly calm, my mind clear, and delighted with close study and patient thought.” Dietary conversion made him not only a better worker but also a sharper, more complete citizen, a model of the republican self-made man.

In a January 1841 editorial focusing on the United States’ growing population of meat abstainers, the article’s author reflected on the current state of meatless dietetics in the United States. The writer proclaimed that “if the public choose to call us . . . Grahamites . . . we care very little. . . . Those to whom we may have the happiness to do a little good . . . will not care to inquire whether we bow at the shrine of any leader, ancient or modern.”  The article was featured in the physiological journal Library of Health , which by the turn of the 1840s had supplanted the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity as the main published voice of meatless dietetics. At the risk of alienating its newly acquired readership, Library of Health touted the notion of individuals’ choices and scientific study, rather than the works of a single individual.  

As 1840 began, American meatless dietary reform had grown from a small group of renegade church members in Philadelphia to a full-fledged, recognizable movement that spread across geographic boundaries, connected by the common bond of Sylvester Graham’s teachings. But now that a visible community of meatless dietary reformers had formed, a question remained: How would this group continue to grow? Public lectures and the printed word had served proto-vegetarians well, yet these methods were also limited, since they emphasized the growth of group leaders’ popularity while leaving practitioners around the country somewhat disconnected. Through the 1840s a variety of reformers experimented with the social and political reform possibilities connected to abstention from meat. While these reformers remained somewhat fractured through the decade, by its end a variety of groups began to coalesce and become a single movement.  

During this transitional period, reformers further developed their principles, fusing the realms of health and science with dietary and social reform. In order to continue growing they needed a centralized voice to unify the spectrum of dietary reformers. With the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity ending publication in December 1839, William Alcott’s Library of Health filled the void. Other attempts, including a utopian experiment at Fruitlands and the use of water cure, linked dietary choice directly with social reform, expanding the motivations for adherence to a meatless diet. 

The process of disconnecting proto-vegetarianism from Grahamism began, ironically, during the height of Graham’s popularity. The interest that Graham sparked in dietetics and personal scientific and health study led to the establishment of other, more broad-based organizations. The American Physiological Society (APS) was a Boston-based group founded in 1837. Practitioners of a Graham diet began the society by integrating a Grahamite lifestyle into a larger physiologically focused ideology. The APS’s constitution reflected this desire, welcoming those interested in learning about the “influence of temperature, air, cleanliness, exercise, sleep, food, drink, medicine, &c., on human health and longevity.”  The organization sought to democratize the study of health, making this knowledge accessible to “every citizen,” since it was “the duty of every person, of good sense, to make [health] a subject of daily study.”  Unaffiliated with any particular religious group or leader, the APS also moved meat abstention away from religious, doctrinal structures and placed dietary reform fi rmly within the realm of scientific study.  

The APS sought to empower its members by diff using “a knowledge of the laws of life, and of the means of promoting human health and longevity.” In this sense the APS’s goals were similar to Graham’s. However, through its organizational-based structure, the APS formed a body that emphasized the collective work of its membership rather than the deeds and words of a leader. The organization met on the first Wednesday of each month and held a larger annual gathering each May. All members in attendance at the annual meeting voted for organizational officers.  The APS at its founding had 206 members; nearly 40 percent were women.  The group’s membership grew to 251 by 1838, though the organization estimated that closer to 400 individuals (including the family members of APS members) followed its dietary recommendations.  The large presence of women in the APS, while challenging some existing social structures in terms of promoting scientific knowledge, also reflected predominant notions of food and family. Women were, after all, most often in charge of craft ing family diets.

The APS thus also included a Ladies Physiological Society, which met separately from the larger group throughout the organization’s three-year existence. The group organized public lectures and met regularly to discuss meatless living, building a small community of like-minded reformers who wrestled with the most practical ways to live a reform lifestyle.  Members of the APS lectured against the effects of flesh foods, which caused “the most horrid, blasphemous thoughts” among its consumers. However, the APS was careful to not appear doctrinal in its beliefs, guided by scientific study rather than adherence to a preconceived philosophy. The organization urged members to pay “strict attention to the importance of air, temperature, clothing . . . and a thousand other things besides diet and drink.” However, “as to imposing on the world any system, even the ‘Graham System,’ excellent as we believe that to be[,] . . . we have never intended it.” The APS and its members largely believed in the efficacy of Grahamism, but they also believed in the need to free meatless dietary reform from the shadow of Sylvester Graham.

One missionary whom I knew set himself seriously to combating the new and strange doctrines which he found springing up among his flock. This was Dr. Marsh, the medical missionary of the Pres byterian Church at Point Barrow. No doubt he knew some of these remarkable phases of Eskimo Christianity before, but certain things which he found astounding were brought to his attention in the winter of 1908–09, after living some time with the Colville Eskimo. In his next Sunday's sermon he took up two or three of the peculiar local beliefs I had called to his attention, and denied explicitly that there was any authority for them. I heard Eskimo discussions of these sermons afterward, and the point of view was this : 

In the old days one shaman knew what another shaman did not know, and naturally among the missionaries one of them knew things of which another had never heard. In the old days they had looked upon a shaman who knew a taboo that another did not know as the wiser of the two, and why should they not similarly look upon him as the wiser missionary who knew commands of God of which another missionary had never heard ? Was it not possible, was it not, in fact, altogether likely, that there were wiser missionaries than Dr. Marsh from whom these teachings might have originally come? 

As a matter of fact, most of these peculiar beliefs we are discussing were supposed to have originated in Kotzebue Sound, and were credited by the Eskimo to the white missionaries there, who are held in high esteem in all of western Arctic America as authorities on religious matters. Dr. Marsh told me that every summer, after members of his congregation visited the Colville River, they brought with them large numbers of new doctrines which were entirely strange to him. At first I believe he imagined he could disabuse the minds of his congregation of these new beliefs; later he realized that he could not, and the net result of all his efforts was that the Eskimo became thoroughly dissatisfied with him as a religious teacher and asked to have him replaced by another. 

The story of how Dr. Marsh eventually left his field of work at Point Barrow is of considerable interest. The way in which I tell it may not give the complete story, but I believe that such facts as I state are to be relied upon; at any rate, I give the version which is believed by the white men and Eskimo alike at Point Barrow. 

The chief occupation of the people at Point Barrow and Cape Smythe is bow -head whaling, and the harvest season is in the spring. Throughout the winter the ice has lain thick off the coast, unless there have been violent offshore gales. In the spring a crack, known as a lead, forms a mile or it may be five miles offshore, parallel to the coast, from Point Barrow running down southwest toward Bering Strait. This lead may be from a few yards to several miles in width, according to the direction and violence of the wind that causes it, and this forms a pathway along which the bow-head whales migrate from their winter feeding- grounds in the Pacific to their summer pastures in the Beaufort Sea. About the first of May the whales will begin to come. At that time the Eskimo whale men, and during the last few years the white men also, take their boats and their whaling-gear out to the edge of the land-fast ice (called the floe), which, as we have said, may be from a mile to five miles off shore, and on the edge of the ice along the narrow lane of open water they keep watching day and night for the whales to appear. There is no regularity about the migration; there may be a hundred whales in one day and then none for a whole week, and, according to the point of view of the white men, the day upon which the whales come is as likely as not to be a Sunday. 

Dr. Marsh was stationed at Cape Smythe for something like nine years, and then he went away for four or five, after which he returned to Cape Smythe again (in 1908). When he was there before, the Sabbath had not been kept, but upon his return he found that during the whaling season the Eskimo whalemen would, at about noon on Saturday, begin to pull their boats back from the water and get everything ready for leaving them, and toward evening they would go ashore and remain ashore through the entire twenty - four hours of what they considered the duration of Sunday. They would sleep ashore on Sunday night and return to their boats Monday forenoon, with the result that they were seldom ready for whaling until noon on Monday. This was wasting two days out of seven in a whaling season of not over six weeks. 

This seemed to Dr. Marsh an unwise policy, and he expostulated with the people, pointing out that not only might the whales pass while they were ashore on Sunday, but it was quite possible that a northeast wind might blow up any time, breaking the ice and carry ing their boats and gear away to sea, which, if it were to happen, would be a crushing calamity to the community as a whole, for the people get from the whales not only the bone that they sell to the traders, but also tons of meat upon which they will live the coming year. “But,” they asked Dr. Marsh, “couldn't you ask God to see to it that the whales come on week days only, and that a northeast wind does not blow on Sunday while we are ashore?” 

Dr. Marsh replied by explaining that in his opinion God has established certain laws according to which He governs the universe and with the operation of which He is not likely to interfere even should Dr. Marsh entreat him to do so. We can tell by observation, Dr. Marsh pointed out, approximately what these laws are, and we should not ask God to change them but should arrange our conduct so as to fit in with things as we find He has established them. 

Thinking back to their old shamanistic days, the Eskimo remembered that some of the shamans had been powerful and others inefficient; that one shaman could bring on a gale or stop it, while to another the weather was quite beyond control. I have often heard them talk about Dr. Marsh and compare him to an inefficient shaman. Evidently his prayers could not be relied upon to control wind and weather, but that was no reason for supposing that other missionaries were equally powerless. They inquired from Eskimo who came from the Mackenzie district and from others who had been in Kotzebue Sound or at Point Hope, and these Eskimo said ( truthfully or not, I do not know ) that they had missionaries who told them that whatever it was they asked of God He would grant it to them if they asked in the right way. Hearing this, the Point Barrow Eskimo grumbled, saying it was strange that other less important communities should have such able missionaries and they, the biggest and most prosperous of all the Eskimo villages, should have a man whose prayers were of no avail —that they were of no avail there was no doubt, for he himself had confessed it. They accordingly got an Eskimo who had been in school at Carlisle to write a letter to the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions in New York. This letter, no doubt, made various charges the details of which I do not know. 

We have already discussed the foundation for the first two of these charges. The foundation for the third is that in extremely cold winter weather the only sensible and comfortable way of dressing, as I know as well as Dr. Marsh, and as every one knows who has tried it, is to wear a fur coat next to the body with no underwear between. This is the way the Eskimo always dressed until recently, and a man who dresses so has naturally to take off his coat as soon as he comes into their overheated dwellings. It was, until two or three years ago, the custom of both men and women to sit in the houses stripped to the waist. There was nothing immodest about it in their eyes. They did not know that the human body is essentially vile and must be hidden from sight, until they learnt that fact from white men recently. It seems it has been certain missionaries chiefly that have warned them against the custom, and they therefore consider “ You shall not take off your coat in the house ” as one of the precepts of the new religion, to be broken only at the peril of one's immortal soul. 

Dr. Marsh several times spoke to me of these things, and remarked that when in college he had stripped a good deal more for rowing and for other exercises; that the natural and unstudied taking off of one's coat for comfort in a house could not possibly be considered immodest, while there might be an opening for argument in the matter of the evening dress of our women, where the exact degree of exposure is studied and the whole complicated costume is planned with malice aforethought. 

This he explained to the Eskimo also, and tried by his own example to get them to go back to the sensible way which they had practiced until a few years ago. But with them it was not a question of modesty or the reverse; it was merely that they understood that God had commanded them not to take off their coats in the house, and they meant to keep His commandments. If Dr. Marsh did not know that there was any such commandment, that was merely a sign that he was not well informed. On the other hand, if he really knew of the commandment and chose to break it for the sake of bodily comfort, then that might be a risk which he was willing to take, but one which they did not care to run. 

These men who had come to me now explained that while they were still of the opinion that Dr. Marsh was not very orthodox and that there were other missionaries better than he, they had only now begun to realize what hard straits they should be in if they or their families became sick. They had been thinking, they said, of how much they had profited in the past by Dr. Marsh's care of their sick, and of how many of the lives of their women he had saved at child birth. In reply to all of this I had to explain to them, of course, that Captain Ballinger had nothing to do with Dr. Marsh's leaving, and that all I could do was to go down to the office of the Presbyterian Mission Board sometime the following winter and have a talk with them about the situation.

From Slave Lake north to the Arctic Ocean there are no interrup tions to navigation and our travel proceeded smoothly and without adventure. Here and there we passed Indian lodges on the shore and Indian cabins, and on an average every two hundred miles a Hudson's Bay post, where a mission is also located. 

The two churches that have workers in the field are the Roman Catholic and the Church of England, both of them doing considerable useful work. The Church of Rome has a much stronger hold upon the people, partly, no doubt, because of its earlier introduction into the country, and because also of its greater resources it is doing more work. After many years of observation of the labors of missionaries I am inclined to the view that with the other churches the excellence of the results depends primarily upon the individual at any particular place, but that the Church of Rome has a system which produces results to some degree independent of the personality of the man. One weakness of other missionaries in general is that they come from cities and other places with crystallized notions of exactly what must be done and exactly how every one must live and act under no matter what conditions. The fundamental precepts of Christianity apparently seem to many of them to be linked with certain purely local customs of the city from which they happen to come, and they emphasize both equally. The three commandments, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy,” and “Thou shalt eat thy potatoes with thy fork,” impress themselves with equal vividness upon the aborigines and are likely to be considered by them to be means of grace of coordinate value. But the missionaries of the Church of Rome seem less concerned about these inessentials. They are no less concerned than the missionaries of other churches about getting the Indian to change his religious views, but they seem less inclined to waste their strength in trying to persuade him to change the color of his coat. The net result of this difference is shown to be entirely in favor of the Roman Church. These natives have, through the evolution of centuries, been ground into such perfect adjustment to their environment that the more you disturb this adjustment the more disastrous the result will be to the physical welfare of the native. 

Both the English Church and the Roman have schools in the Mackenzie district the English at Hay River and the Roman at Fort Providence. At both places are men and women doing conscientious and self-sacrificing work, and at both places numbers of Indians are learning to read and write, but nevertheless it seems to most observers that the labor and expenditure of money are scarcely justified by the results. You have everywhere the Indians of the old type, who are ignorant of book learning but who still retain some of the integrity and self-respect of their ancestors. These men on the whole seem to be more self-confident and self-reliant than the educated ones, and are more likely to be making not only a living but also an honest living. Somehow it seems that one of the first things an Indian learns in school is contempt for the ways of his ancestors; but after all, the ways of his ancestors are the only ways that can prevail in that country. Hunting and fishing are the necessary occupations of every man, and the sewing of clothes and the preparation of food are equally the inevitable work of the women. When a man who has no occupation other than that of hunter open to him gets to feel that he is above that occupation, the community has lost much and no one has gained anything.