Proclaim Liberty Throughout all the Land
Philadelphia's Centuries of Vegetarian Activism
By Vance Lehmkuhl
Paraphrasing 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Parker, Dr. Martin Luther King stated that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
In the case of human/animal relationships, there does seem to be a current trend in that direction. But the bending of the arc is something that's been accomplished by lifetimes of hard work by vegetarian advocates over centuries.
In Philadelphia, where the nation was founded, vegetarianism as a movement in America also began, and indeed much of the subsequent work to help animals was carried out by people living in Philly — many of them working for justice in other areas that they saw as overlapping ethical concerns. Here's a look at how social justice was pushed forward by a virtual parade of meatless advocates in the Delaware Valley prior to the Civil War.
Benjamin Lay
Benjamin Lay was doing his best to bend that arc during his years in Pennsylvania in
the early 18th century, hectoring his Quaker colleagues to renounce slavery and free
their own slaves and creating attention-grabbing street-theater protests to make his
message stick. His central thesis was that God's love should be expressed to all his
creatures, and for Lay that meant all humans and also nonhuman animals.
His magnum opus — the first abolitionist book in America — was All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, and within its wide-ranging scattershot arguments, alternating between passionately sweet pleas and fiery denunciation, Lay frequently and explicitly defends "All God's creatures" from capitalist violence. He also approvingly cites early reformers as "very temperate, not eating Flesh, Milk or Eggs."
Lay was heavily influenced by the writings of England's Thomas Tryon, but vegetarianism was not for him a "Way to Health." Rather, he worked to live in a way consistent with his ethical beliefs, and although he did not exclude milk from his diet, others of Lay's behaviors are proto-vegan. Just as he refused dinner invitations where slaves would be the servants, he also refused to ride horses or be pulled in a carriage by them, as he didn't deem it right that a horse should have to work to transport him when he could walk. He also eschewed wool and leather and sewed his own plain clothes from flax he grew near the cave he lived in just outside of Abington. He grew his own food, so he was almost completely "off the grid" of mainstream society.
Anthony Benezet and John Woolman, the two most celebrated early pillars of the American abolitionist movement, showed Lay's influence: Philly's Benezet went vegetarian and refused to consume products of exploitation, wearing undyed clothing — blue dye, after all, was a slavery product, and red dye came from crushed beetles. South Jersey's Woolman also was vegetarian and avoided wool and horse carriages.
Benjamin Franklin
Meanwhile, occasional vegetarian Benjamin Franklin was responsible for introducing
one of America's most important protein-packed "meat substitutes," tofu, to America.
This Benjamin, whose occasional vegetarianism also was influenced by Thomas Tryon
(the title of Franklin's "The Way to Wealth" seems an intentional play on that of
Tryon) was also the (uncredited) printer of Lay's book mentioned above.
Franklin's first lapse from vegetarianism, as detailed in his autobiography, is often cited: While traveling by boat, he smelled fish being cooked and got a craving. While casting about for an excuse to partake, he recalled that he had seen smaller fish in the stomach of a larger fish being butchered. His words at this point are widely quoted: "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you."
What's usually forgotten is his immediate follow-up: "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." Franklin acknowledged his hypocritical attachment to "convenience" but still indulged in it.
As for tofu, he didn't make it himself, but sent soybeans, along with a recipe, from England to John Bartram, the era's most significant horticulturist. Franklin's January 1770 letter reads, in part: "My ever dear Friend: I send Chinese Caravances. Cheese is made of them, in China, which so excited my curiosity. Some runnings of salt is put into water, when the meal is in it, to turn to curds. These are what the ?Tau-fu' is made of."
Historians are unsure whether Bartram planted the "Chinese Caravances," much less made tofu from them, but if so there was not much immediate impact: It would be more than a century before the first documentation of tofu being commercially available. Still, Franklin's gregarious global spirit puts him at the forefront of Americans who have worked to diversify our nation's white-bread diets.
The Bible Christians
In 1817, members of a British sect called Bible Christians arrived in Philadelphia
and set up a church in rented rooms, preaching abstinence from alcohol and from
meat. Neither message was particularly welcome, and according to Adam Shprintzen,
author of "The Vegetarian Crusade," they were routinely scorned by passersby in the
street who hissed "Heretics!"
Nevertheless, they persisted, arguing for a religious worldview in which God's love was extended to all creatures. Members were particularly fond of Genesis 1:29, in which God clearly assigns plants as humans' food, to the point that they had it printed on banners.
By the late 1820s they'd established their own church building and broadened their influence throughout the bustling city, soon becoming well-known. Confident in their mission, the members persevered, publishing pamphlets, organizing promotional events, building a new church just north of Girard Avenue, and essentially creating a template for what would become vegetarian and vegan advocacy in the States.
Sylvester Graham
Sylvester Graham came to Philly in 1829 to preach temperance for the Pennsylvania
Society for Discouraging the Use of Ardent Spirits, whose members often saw an
analogy between promoting water over liquor as a drink and promoting vegetables over
meat as a food. It may have been members of this organization, or that of the Bible
Christian Church, who influenced Graham's development into a vegetarian/proto-vegan
advocate — evidence for the cause is hazy.
In 1830 Graham developed a series of lectures at the Franklin Institute that increasingly promoted a meat-free, nearly vegan diet. Whether or not Graham was directly "converted" to vegetarianism by the Bible Christians, his advocacy and his growing national profile supplied a megaphone to the cause.
It's hard for a lot of people today to grasp how widespread "Grahamism" became throughout the 19th century. In addition to his lectures and books, there was a magazine devoted to his ideas and special vegetarian boarding houses where "Grahamites" could share the lifestyle.
Even though "vegetarian" became the more common term by the turn of the century, a newspaper article written in 1909 uses "Grahamite" without any additional explanation, indicating readers were expected still to know the word. His name now lives on in the Graham cracker, an ironic junk-food parody of Graham's eponymous healthful whole-wheat bread.
Bronson and Louisa May Alcott
Philadelphia is also where Louisa May Alcott was born, and it's where her father
Bronson Alcott, after working in several progressive schools in the suburbs and then
in the city, got to read a lot of European philosophy for the first time, at the
Loganian Library across from Independence Hall. Back in New England soon after, he
adopted what we now call a vegan diet, and with his longtime fan Ralph Waldo
Emerson, essentially founded Transcendentalism. Alcott also created a new kind of
school in Boston that inspired a British institute called "Alcott House," which is
where the first instance of the word "vegetarian" is documented.
Together with one of his British admirers, Alcott founded a proto-vegan commune called Fruitlands, where not only animal foods were banned, but all work animals, leather shoes, wool clothing, cotton cloth (a slave-labor product), and manure fertilizer. The group had sky-high ideals brought crashing to earth by simple logistics and complicated relationships, and disbanded in less than a year.
As a wage-earning father, Alcott was a decided failure. And his daughter treated vegetarianism much as Franklin had, as an off-again, on-again fashion. But the love of reading and writing that Bronson instilled in Louisa paid off with one of the most popular and influential books of all time.
Although Fruitlands failed as a viable community, its ambitious attempt to tie together so many moral reforms had ripples in the larger culture, not least in the words of frequent Fruitlands visitor Theodore Parker, the "arc of the moral universe" guy.
Angelina and Sarah Grimke
Meanwhile, back in the Quaker city, Angelina and Sarah Grimke moved from South
Carolina to Philadelphia and distinguished themselves as some of the most powerful
speakers on the abolition of slavery, leveraging their lineage as daughters of the
South to slam the institution still defended by their family.
Angelina married abolitionist leader and confirmed Grahamite Theodore Weld in May of 1838. The day after their wedding saw the opening of Pennsylvania Hall, an ambitious gathering spot for abolitionists and the reform groups that coalesced around them, including women's rights, temperance, and vegetarianism. Angelina said a year earlier that "I fully believe that so far from keeping different moral reformations entirely distinct that no such attempt can ever be successful. They are bound together in a circle like the sciences; they blend with each other like the colors of the rainbow; they are the parts only of our glorious whole." Frederick Douglass later offered a simpler version, "All great reforms go together."
The American Vegetarian Society
Drawing inspiration from England's Vegetarian Society, the American Vegetarian
Society was founded by a group including William Metcalfe, Sylvester Graham, and Dr.
William A. Alcott (Bronson's cousin), with Alcott as President and Metcalfe as
Corresponding Secretary. In the latter role, Metcalfe edited the American
Vegetarian and Health Journal, in which role he helped to shape national
thought on vegetarianism via the official organ of the nation's official vegetarian
society. For several years, this periodical was ground zero for Americans looking
for and sharing information, often in the form of letters about vegetarian eating,
including some who explicitly advocated abstaining from all animal products.
As a coalition of somewhat diverse constituencies, the American Vegetarian Society brought together health, moral, and ethical concerns as in Dr. Alcott's remark at the founding meeting in New York that he wanted to see "bread in the middle of the table, not the mangled corpses of murdered animals."
The first official meeting of the society, and most subsequent meetings, were held in Philadelphia.
Vance Lehmkuhl is a vegan journalist, and author of V for Veg and Eating Vegan in Philly. He lives in Pennsylvania.
