Ohio History Journal

BREAD AND DOCTRINE AT OBERLIN*

 

By ROBERT SAMUEL FLETCHER

 

"Reform is manifold and yet it is one," declared President

Asa Mahan of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute in an address

before the American Physiological Society in Boston in 1839.

The true Christian reformer, he said, was a universal reformer,

seeking the correction of all evils. No man could consistently

be a temperance advocate and not an opponent of slavery nor an

enemy of war and not a sponsor of moral reform. He recognized

that the "great reformatory movement of the age" was legitimately

divided into special departments, but insisted that it was equally

true that all real reforms were "based upon one and the same

principle, to wit, that whatever is ascertained to be contrary to the

rights, and destructive to the true interests of humanity, ought to

be corrected." Among the evils deserving the attention of the

reformer he listed "intemperance, licentiousness, war, violations

of physical law in respect to food, drink, dress, and ecclesiastical

civil and domestic tyranny."1

In the years 1833 to 1835 the Reverend Charles G. Finney

and a group of his followers, including Asa Mahan, had founded

the Oberlin Collegiate Institute in the woods of the Connecticut

Western Reserve in northern Ohio as a training school for Christ-

ian crusaders.2  Here in the controlled environment of the pious

colony established "for the express purpose of sustaining this

Seminary" youth of both sexes were trained to become "gospel

ministers and pious school teachers" and ministers' wives and in

these capacities to spread the gospel of personal salvation and of

Christian reform. This was the means by which Oberlin was to

become, as one of the founders put it, "the burning and the shin-

ing light which shall lead on to the Millenium."

 

* A paper read at the April, 1938, meeting of the Mississippi Valley Historical

Association at Indianapolis under the title "Grahamism at Oberlin."

1  Advocate of Moral Reform (New York), June 15, 1839.

(58)

• 1
 

FLETCHER; BREAD AND DOCTRINE AT OBERLIN               59

 

The antislavery movement and Oberlin's activities in this

field received extensive though not wholly satisfactory treatment

by historians at an early date, but only in recent years has much

attention been paid to the great, central, federated, Christian re-

form movement as envisaged by Mahan, Finney, Theodore Weld,

the Tappan brothers, Gerrit Smith and others. Of course, the

antislavery, temperance, pacifist and feminist phases of the move-

ment were historically perhaps more important, but there were

other full-fledged reform movements, an examination of which

is necessary to complete the picture of the Great Cause: the move-

ment for reform in sexual morals, the manual labor movement,

and physiological reform, or "Grahamism." The last of these was

almost entirely overlooked until the publication of the researches

of Dr. Richard H. Shryock a few years ago.3

Oberlin is particularly significant to the student of romantic

Christian reformism          in the mid-nineteenth century because the

colony  and   college          were   so  completely   dedicated  to  the

Cause and so many of its departments were there represented.

The most long-lived and successful of all of the early experi-

ments in manual labor with study was made at Oberlin; the

Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society was probably the most

influential moral reform society in the country outside New York

City; Elihu Burritt's Christian Citizen called Oberlin the "banner

town" in the peace movement; Oberlin's devotion to temperance

and antislavery were--and are--known to all the world. But for

some years there was perhaps more interest in physiological re-

form than in any of these other causes.

Of course, Sylvester Graham was the leading advocate of

physiological reform, who saw gluttony and all "bad habits"

harmful to the body as sin, and gave to the campaign its neces-

sary moral implications. His ponderous two-volume Lectures on

the Science of Human Life was the Bible of the physiological

 

2 On the most important of these founders aside from Mahan and Finney see

the author's sketch of John Jay Shipherd in the Dictionary of American Biography

(New York, 1928-1937).

3 Public Relations of the Medical Profession in Great Britain and the United

States, 1600-1870," Annals of Medical History (New York), new ser., II (May, 1930),

308-309, and "Sylvester Graham and the Popular Health Movement, 1830-1870," Mis-

sissippi Valley Historical Review (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), XVIII (September, 1931),

172-189.

• 2
 

60      OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

reformers and his public appearance at Boston furnished the im-

mediate occasion for the founding of the American Physiological

Society. Hardly less important, however, were Dr. William A.

Alcott, first president of the society and editor of the Moral Re-

former, a monthly periodical devoted to "Health and Physical

Education" and David Cambell, editor of the Graham Journal of

Health and Longevity and manager with Mrs. Cambell of the

Graham boarding house on Brattle Street in Boston.⁴ Dr. Graham

never came to Oberlin, though he was invited, but he recom-

mended the college to prospective donors as a "most interesting

and promising literary institution . . . closely associated with all the

best interests of Man."⁵ Alcott spent ten days in Oberlin in the

spring of 1840, lecturing on dress, diet and marriage, and seriously

considered removing his residence and his magazine to that prom-

ising      community.6   Cambell discontinued publication  of the

Graham  Journal in 1840 in order to supervise personally the

Graham diet at the Oberlin student commons. Cambell explained

this move by declaring that he looked upon the Oberlin Collegiate

Institute as "a model institution for the approaching 'Millenial

Church'" and felt that "every disciple of Christ who can con-

tribute his mite towards its perfection in any department of labor

should do so."7

From its beginning, long before the coming of Alcott and

Cambell, Oberlin had enthusiastically espoused this reform. The

original settlers had agreed in the colony covenant to eat "only

plain & wholesome food" and renounced "all strong & unneces-

sary drink, even tea & coffee as far as practicable." The women

promised to give up tight lacing.⁸ The original rules of the in-

stitute provided that board furnished to students should be "of

plain & holesome [sic] kind." "Tea & Coffee, highly seasoned

meats, rich pastries & all unholesome & expensive foods" were

4 On Graham and Alcott see the Dictionary of American Biography. There is

mention of Cambell in the article on Graham.

5 MS. minutes of the Trustees of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute, July 6, 1836,

and Graham's letters to Dr. Peter Mark Roget and Dr. William Prout copied in the

manuscript book of credentials of the Oberlin mission to England of 1839-1840.

6 MS. minutes of the Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society, May, 1840, and

Alcott to Gerrit Smith, June 30, 1840, Gerrit Smith MSS., (Syracuse University).

7 Cambell to Levi Burnell, October 1, 1839 (Letter in the office of the Treasurer

of Oberlin College).

8 See the author's "The Government of the Oberlin Colony," Mississippi Valley

Historical Review, XX (September, 1933), 179-190.

• 3
 

FLETCHER: BREAD AND DOCTRINE AT OBERLIN         61

prohibited.⁹ Physiology was made a required course. In 1835 the

Female Society of Oberlin for the Promotion of Health was

founded and the co-eds and faculty wives agreed to "abstain from

all modes of dress that are injurious to health, such as exposing

the feet by wearing thin hose and shoes in cold or wet weather,

compressing the chest and preventing the full expansion of the

lungs, especially by lacing and tight dressing." The men of the

colony and college organized the Oberlin Physiological Society,

whose object was declared to be "to acquire and diffuse a knowl-

edge of the laws of life, and the means of promoting health and

longevity." Mahan was president of the society; a student was

recording secretary; Finney was on the executive committee. Two

delegates from the Oberlin society attended the national health

convention held in New York City in June of 1839.10 In the

same year Mahan was able to say of Oberlin in his speech in

Boston: "Tea and coffee are excluded from almost every family

in the place; flesh meat is seldom eaten. . . . All condiments and

seasonings are laid aside. Due regard is paid to dress, exercise,

etc. Sickness is rarely known in the place."

Oberlinites seem to have subscribed to all of the major

tenets of Grahamism. Regular exercise in the open air was en-

couraged by the manual labor system. The taking of medicine

was frowned upon except in case of extreme sickness. Clothing,

it was urged, should be adequate but not too warm or too tight.

All should sleep at least seven hours each night; the college rules

provided that students must keep to their beds from ten to five.

Featherbeds were considered injurious, though some students

seemed to have had them. Regular bathing of the body all over

was recommended even in winter, though the students had to

carry water from the outdoor pump to their stove-heated rooms

for the purpose. Cambell planned to build special "bathing apart-

ments" but this was never done. The use of wine, beer or to-

bacco was prohibited.

It was the dietetic aspects of Grahamism, however, that at-

9 From the manuscript rules of 1834 in Oberlin College archives, never pub-

lished.

10  New York Evangelist, January 16, 1836 and Graham Journal (New York),

III (September 28, 1839), 326.

• 4
 

62     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

tracted most attention at Oberlin as elsewhere. The dining room

in Ladies' Hall, where most of the students of both sexes ate

their meals, offered a tempting opportunity for controlling the

diet of a large group.

Tea and coffee were anathema. In 1837 the colonists agreed

to boycott any merchant who sold them. The secretary of the

institute and his wife admitted, nevertheless, that they occasion-

ally imbibed, but the students at the boarding hall were arbitrarily

limited to crust coffee and rain water! Graham taught that soft

water was, by itself, nutritious. The eating of meat was con-

sidered as dangerous as the drinking of tea and coffee. It was

not only thought to be unhealthy and unnatural but, declared a

writer in the Graham Journal, the eating of animal food tends

"to produce ferocity of disposition."¹¹ Usually students could

secure a meat diet by paying extra for it and sitting at a special

table, but Cambell declared that he had conscientious scruples

against handling meat and so for a while in I840 the meat table

was discontinued.12 "Butter, at best," ran the Graham rules, "is

a questionable article." E. P. Ingersoll, the first Professor of

Sacred Music at Oberlin, wrote to the Graham Journal in 1837

telling how he had conquered his appetite for butter, which he

loved "as the drunkard does his brandy." Having finally won out

against temptation he found that he was entirely cured of cankers

in the mouth. Milk, eggs, and cottage cheese were allowed though

of animal origin.l³

Pastries, candies and all highly flavored foods were to be

eaten, if at all, in very moderate quantities. Cake a la Graham

was suggested as a substitute--"made of coarse wheaten meal,

like gingerbread (without the ginger), wet with milk, without

other shortening."  If pies were eaten the crust, according to

Graham, should be made by "sifting coarse flour, and taking hot,

mealy potatoes, and rubbing them in as you would butter; then

[taking] pearlash, and sour milk or water and wet [ting] it."14

 

11 Graham Journal, III (January 5, 1839), 19-20.

12 MS. minutes of the Prudential Committee of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute,

May 23, 1840.

13 Nature's Own Book (New York, 1825), 16, and the Graham Journal, I (Sep-

tember 26, 1887), 193-194.

14 Nature's Own Book, 45-46.

• 5
 

FLETCHER: BREAD AND DOCTRINE AT OBERLIN             63

 

"You can better imagine than describe my surprise," wrote a co-ed

to her brother in 1837, "when on entering the dining hall one

day, I saw something that looked like pie, in a sheet iron platter

two feet long, and one wide, and three inches deep, these were

in fact, monstrous pies, the upper crust was about an inch thick,

the lower, half an inch, and the rest was filled with apples,-they

were very nice however."¹⁵ Very little sweetening was to be

used in any case. Honey and maple sugar were preferred to

refined cane sugar because in a more natural state. While in

Oberlin, Cambell kept bees to produce honey for the boarding

house. Students were prohibited from using at the table pepper

or other condiments, even when purchased at their own expense.

When Professor John P. Cowles, an unmarried teacher who took

his meals at the hall, brought a pepper shaker to the table it was

ordered removed by the trustees. His subsequent dismissal, he

believed, was not unrelated to this offense! Such spices were be-

lieved to be irritating to the lining of the stomach and unduly

stimulating to the passions.16

Cereals, fruits and vegetables were the basic elements in the

diet provided.  A student wrote home to his parents in 1836:

"Cold water, milk & wheat will make the sum almost entirely of

our articles of food.  Bread & butter or bread without butter,

bread & milk--& milk toast--compose the variety of our break-

fasts & suppers. We have not had what you could call a meal

of meat since we have been here. Twice we had a few mutton

bones--just enough to set the appetite, once we had a little fish,

& a little dried beef several times. We frequently have what is

called Graham pudding made of wheat just cracked, & boiled a

few minutes in water. Boiled Indian puddings sometimes, &

Johnecakes--this makes the sum total of our living-a splendid

variety--I assure you. . . . If only I could have a little coffee &

a mouthful of meat now & then. . . .17 When the Cambells ar-

rived in Oberlin in the spring of 1840 to take charge of the

 

15 Nancy Prudden (a student) to her father and mother, September 20, 1836

(in private possession, a photostat in the Oberlin College Library).

16 J. P. Cowles to the Trustees, November 23, 1839, published in the Cleveland

Observer, November 27, 1839, and article on "Licentiousness" in the Library of

Health (Boston), V (April, 1841), 131-132.

17 Davis and George Prudden to their father and mother, August 3-5, 1836 (in

private possession, photostats in the Oberlin College Library).

• 6
 

64    OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

boarding house they brought with them a cask of rice, a cask of

tapioca, a box of sago and a copy of a Graham cook book18

containing recipes for Graham bread, pumpkin bread, cracked

wheat porridge, bread coffee, potato coffee and other "plain and

wholesome" dishes, recipes that would have been an inspiration

to the wartime Food Administration.¹⁹

Students were expected to be temperate in the consumption

of all foods--even cracked wheat and rutabagas. One record

survives of a co-ed being granted a special thirty-cent rebate

on her board bill "for abstemiousness".20 For awhile some twenty

students eating at the commons voluntarily cut down their diet to

bread and water. "Probably you think this would be hard living,"

wrote one of them, rather ambiguously, "but I assure you it is

better than you or I think it is."21

Some students seem to have been as zealous in the cause as

Finney or Cambell. A Quaker student, after a year and a half

of "using only two or three articles of food and those of purely

vegetable kind, without any condiments or seasoning whatever,"

was ready to declare that the cause of physiological reform

was "a cause which lays just claim to the aid of every Christian

and philanthropist, and one which must prevail as that day arrives

when 'Lamentation and woe shall no more be heard in our

borders.'" Another student declared that the Graham regimen

had saved him--body, mind and soul. Life had become a com-

plete burden to him; he was constantly attended by "a feeling of

languor and dullness" and "could walk but a short distance with-

out intolerable weariness." His mental alertness and moral judg-

ment also suffered, he said, "for physical, mental, and moral

transgression, all go together." Then he came to Oberlin and

began taking daily baths and eating Graham bread. "My mind,"

he exulted, "immediately burst from its debasement and reassumed

its pristine vigor. . . . Youth has returned again. . . . Cheerfulness

 

18 Nature's Own Book.

19 Sarah Ingersoll (a student) to parents. May 26, 1840 (in private possession).

20 Boarding house account of Mrs. Eliza Stewart, March 4, 1835, MS. (in Oberlin

College archives).

21 James and E. Henry Fairchild to Joseph B. Clark, April 2, 1835 (in private

possession).

• 7
 

FLETCHER: BREAD AND DOCTRINE AT OBERLIN                 65

has taken the place of despondency. Faith takes the place of

darkness, and happiness of gloom and misery."²²

The opposition was equally rabid. Prof. John P. Cowles

insisted that physiological reform at Oberlin went "beyant all the

beyants entirely," and charged that the system had caused the

death of some of the lady students. "But you," he accused the

trustees, "have simplified simplicity, and reformed reformation,

till not only the health and lives of many are in danger; but

some, I fear, have already been physiologically reformed into

eternity."23 At least one student walked the nine miles to the

town of Elyria to get one big meal and break his fast at the local

tavern and then continued on to Hudson where he enrolled in

Western Reserve College, a non-Graham institution.²4 "As for

their water gruel, milk and water porrages, crust coffee, etc."

wrote another student, "they are really too filthy and contemptible

to merit a comment. They are usually known among the students

by their appropriate names, such as Swill . . . slosh, dishwater,

etc., etc." The people of neighboring towns, he said, had become

so well acquainted with the effects of Oberlin diet that they

could identify an Oberlin student by his "leak, lean, lantern-

jawed visage."²⁵ Even the rhymsters joined in the attack:

 

Sirs, Finney and Graham   first--'twere shame to think

That you, starvation's monarchs, can be beaten;

Who've proved that drink was never meant to drink,

Nor food itself intended to be eaten

That Heaven provided for our use, instead,

The sand and saw-dust which compose our bread.

* * * * *

Our table treasures vanish one by one,

Beneath your wand, like Sancho's, they retire;

Now steaks are rare, and mutton chops are done,

Veal's in a stew, the fat is in the fire,

Fish, flesh and fowl are ravished in a trice--

Sirs Finney and Graham! cannot one suffice?

 

22 Pardon Hathaway in the Graham Journal, III (July 20, 1839), 237-239, and

W. B. Orvis, ibid., III (December 14, 1839), 396-397.

23 Cleveland Observer, November 27, 1839.

24 Rev. Horace Dean Walker's reminiscences as quoted in the Reserve Record

(Hudson, Ohio), May 25, 1934.

25 Delazon Smith, A History of Oberlin; or, New Lights of the West (Cleve-

land, 1837).

• 8
 

66     OHIO ARCHEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

Venison is vile, a cup of coffee curst,

And food that's fried, or fricaseed, forgot;

Duck is destruction; wine of woes is worst,

Clams are condemned, and poultry's gone to pot;

Pudding and Pork are under prohibition,

Mustard is murder; pepper is perdition.

 

But dread you not, some famished foe may rise,

With vengeful arm, and beat you to a jelly?

Ye robbers of our vitals' best supplies,

Beware! "There is no joking with the belly."

Nor hope the world will in your footsteps follow,

Your bread and doctrine are too hard to swallow.26

 

Parents protested that their children were being killed by

inches. Wild rumors of mass starvation began to circulate. In

March of 1841 a group of Oberlin townspeople protested that the

diet served in the boarding hall was "inadequate to the demands

of the human system as at present developed."²⁷ In April Cambell

was forced by public opinion and administrative pressure to

resign the stewardship.²⁸

Oberlin abandoned the Graham diet. In 1845 Finney publicly

repented his former "bondage" to strict dietetic reform. Oberlin

students and colonists, lamented one disappointed zealot, "rushed

with precipitous and confused haste back to their flesh pots; and

here under the exhilerating and bewildering influence of fresh

infusions of the Chinese shrub and the Mocha bean, with the

riotous eating of swine's flesh . . . they succeeded in arresting a

necessary renovating work. . . ."29  Elsewhere, too, the cause de-

clined as such; Graham boarding houses went into bankruptcy; the

physiological reform societies adjourned without day. The Amer-

ican sense of humor and of balance, reacting against the fanaticism

of some of the Grahamites, destroyed its future effectiveness as a

moral crusade. Oberlin diverted its millenial zeal to other de-

partments of reform--to the peace movement, the antislavery

 

26 Ibid.

27 MS. notice of meeting in Oberlin College Library.

28 MS. minutes of the Prudential Committee, April 14 and June 15, 1841; MS.

minutes of the Trustees, August 20, 1841.

29 Letter of Finney in Oberlin Evangelist, April 23, 1843; Isaac Jennings, The

Philosophy of Human Life (Cleveland, 1852), 241-242.

• 9
 

FLETCHER: BREAD AND DOCTRINE AT OBERLIN       67

cause and the effort to raise standards of personal morality. But

Physiology continued as a required and popular course. Diet

in the boarding hall continued to be rationally "plain and hole-

some," though not strictly orthodox according to Graham. There

was at Oberlin a continuing, and at that time rather unique, in-

terest in student health.

Shryock has reminded us that it would be ungrateful for a

nation so devoted to outdoor exercise, the bathtub, orange juice

and spinach to forget the early prophets of this cult. Graham,

Alcott and Cambell were the prophets.  But how about the

martyrs--the Oberlin College students?

• 10