Graham, Sylvester

1794–1851

Health Reformer and Minister

Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister and antebellum health reformer, addressed medical, dietary, and sexual aspects of manhood. Graham's emphasis on restraint in these 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 preventive 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 1834 A Lecture to Young Men. 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 he therefore 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 antierotic, antilibidinal 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, the 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.

[Page 193]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.

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