Against Sex: Identities of Sexual Restraint in Early America by Kara M. French

Author:Kara M. French [French, Kara M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781469662138
Google: UhTYzQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2021-11-15T23:54:29.382262+00:00

The Graham System as a Religious System

Sylvester Graham’s prescriptions for diet and regimen perhaps most clearly form the link between sexuality and “brand.” Graham’s name itself became synonymous with the system of health he created, from books and lecture series to “Graham bread,” “Graham flour,” and “Graham boarding houses.” Devotees of Graham were commonly called, often mockingly, “Grahamites,” though the followers themselves preferred the term “pure livers.” Grahamism, with its rules for sleeping, eating, bathing, and sexual relations, was much more than just a diet—it was an entire way of life.

Grahamites, too, walked a fine line between capitalism and benevolence. As with the Graham Journal, Grahamite publications were often not intended to be money-making enterprises. For editors like David Cambell, it was more important to spread the gospel of pure living on the Graham system than it was to turn a profit as a journal editor. Graham himself, often sponsored by a group of citizens for a given lecture series, did not charge for his lectures in Portland, Maine, in 1834. The Christian Mirror reported Graham’s “free lectures are generally thronged and his course is somewhat numerously attended.”74 And yet, Sylvester Graham, William Andrus Alcott, Mary Gove Nichols, and other reformers certainly were entrepreneurial as authors. Despite the philanthropic impulses within Grahamism, Graham’s revolutionary system created a demand for products and services that had not previously existed in the marketplace.

Where was one to obtain the “Graham” flour to make “Graham bread” and the potatoes and fresh vegetables that were the staples of the Graham diet? Where could a young Grahamite find an establishment free of forbidden foods and stimulating drinks? Some leading Grahamites such as merchant Nathaniel Perry, publisher Bela Marsh, and boarding-house keepers David Cambell and Asenath Nicholson were only too happy to seize upon these enterprising opportunities. Only a week after Graham began his lecture series in Portland, an enterprising baker, John Pearson, ran an advertisement for “Graham Bread” in the Daily Evening Advertiser, encouraging the newly converted to stop by his Casco Street bake house. But it was not always business men and women looking to capitalize on the newest trend; often the demands for these products came from Grahamites themselves. One of Boston’s young clerks wrote to Dr. Alcott, suggesting the need for a “Graham Restorator,” a restaurant on the Graham system in a central location where the young men of the city could obtain a healthy, cheap meal. Alcott, however, disapproved of “restorators” and “refectories” of any kind, even Graham ones. Such places encouraged young men to mix with strangers of dubious morals. He suggested the young man either purchase bread and milk for his supper or return to his boarding house for dinner rather than indulge himself in the decadent practice of taking meals outside the safety of the home.75

The presence of local societies, boarding houses, and businesses that catered to Grahamites created sites and places where Grahamism could be performed and enacted. In this sense, Grahamism functioned in a way that was very similar to a religion.

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