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Graham, Sylvester

1794–1851

Health Reformer and Minister

Sylvester Graham, Presbyterian minister and antebellum health reformer, addressed medical, dietary, and sexual aspects of manhood. Graham's emphasis on restraint in those areas meshed well with Victorian concerns about physical purity and bodily discipline in all aspects of life.  While Victorian Americans valued self-control and bodily discipline in general, they were particularly inclined to identify these with ideal manhood.

Ordained in 1830, Graham began lecturing that same year for a temperance organization, the Pennsylvania Society for Discouraging the Use of Ardent Spirits.  Graham was suddenly propelled into a position of cultural influence in 1832, when, amid fears of a cholera outbreak, he advised Americans of the preventative value of proper eating habits and food preparation.  The physical self-restraint that Graham preached represented for him the essential quality of middle-class Victorian manhood.  Graham began to consider the subject of sexuality in his 1835 talk "A Lecture to Young Men, on Chastity."  Graham advised his audiences, consisting largely of Northeastern white middle-class men, against any form of sexual indulgence, especially masturbation.

Graham feared that a loss of male self-control threatened Victorian society and therefore he urged men to avoid any form of excitement.  To cleanse the body and prevent debilitating overstimulation of the nervous system, he encouraged physical exercise, sleeping on a hard bed, avoidance of meat and spicy foods, and consumption of water and a coarse bread made of unsifted flour.  (His original bread recipe eventually found a more appealing successor in the Graham Cracker.)  Most importantly, Graham urged the utmost sexual restraint—even in marriage.

Influenced by the perfectionist impulse of the Second Great Awakening, which emphasized the possibility and duty of achieving total freedom from sin, Graham cast sin in a physical framework by defining it in terms of bodily appetite and desire.  He urged men to embrace an anti-erotic, anti-libidinal definition of manhood, identifying bodily self-restraint as the way to salvation.  Graham’s male ethos reflects the contradictions of an age that witnessed the first wave of industrialization and the emergence of a national market economy.  On the one hand, his resistance to sensual indulgence can be interpreted as a critique of the materialism he feared would result from the nascent industrialization and market capitalism of the 1830s.  On the other hand, his condemnation of self-indulgent behavior reflected a quintessentially capitalist ethos of delayed gratification.

A highly sought after speaker in the Northeast, Graham was very influential.  In 1837, his followers formed the American Physiological Society with William Alcott, author of The Young Man’s Guide (1846), as its first president.  The society published the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, which ceased publication in 1839.  While the society used his name and ideas, which became widely shared among contemporary reformers, Graham himself played no leading role in it.

Although Graham’s best known legacy might be the Graham Cracker, his ideas also anticipated and shaped later shifts in cultural constructions of masculinity in the United States.  His emphasis on bodily self-restraint and suppression of libidinal impulses helped to lay the foundation for the body-centered understanding of manhood that emerged later in the nineteenth century.

Bibliography:

Nissenbaum, Stephen. Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982.

Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Sokolow, Jayme. Eros and Modernization: Sylvester Graham, Health Reform, and the Origins of Victorian Sexuality in America. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983.

Walters, Ronald G. American Reformers, 1815-1860. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

Further Reading:

Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Haller, John S., and Robin M. Haller. The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974.

Walters, Ronald G., ed. Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America. Updated edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Selected Writings:

Graham, Sylvester. A Lecture to Young Men, on Chastity, 1834. From Walters, Ronald G., ed. Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America. Updated edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

———. Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making, 1837. From Walters, Ronald G., ed. Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America. Updated edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

———. Lectures on Science and Human Life, 1839. From Walters, Ronald G., ed. Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America. Updated edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Related Topics:

Body; Capitalism; Health; Heterosexuality; Industrialization; Market Revolution; Marriage; Masturbation; Middle-Class Manhood; Reform Movements; Religion; Spirituality; Temperance; Self-Control; Victorian Era

—Thomas Winter