Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [426]
When grocers, publicans, distillers, and the landlords who rented them space started to fight back, evangelicals assembled at the Masonic Hall in 1829 to organize the New-York City Temperance Society. The society’s first president was banker Samuel Ward (of Prime, Ward, and King); its leadership included Tappan, engine maker J. P. Allaire, Eleazar Lord (president of the Manhattan Insurance Company), and other prominent businessmen and professionals. Over the next several years, the society launched its own newspaper, the Genius of Temperance, and began an aggressive recruitment campaign. By 1835 it had chapters in each ward, forty-five additional subsidiaries attached to individual churches, and societies for sailors, stonecutters, and silversmiths—better than fifty thousand members in all. (A parallel Brooklyn Temperance Society, headed by Adrian van Sinderen, first president of the Brooklyn Savings Bank, made equally rapid headway, as did the black-run Society for Temperance, which recruited through African-American churches.)
Members did more than pledge personal abstinence. They distributed tracts, addressed civic groups, launched boycotts, and pushed for legal restrictions. One measure of their effectiveness was a sharp drop in alcohol consumption (which fell, nationwide, from four gallons per capita in 1830 to less than two gallons a decade later); there was also a modest reduction in the number of liquor licenses, especially in working-class wards. The Brooklyn temperance movement won passage of an ordinance curbing the sale of liquor by the glass, after which the number of taverns fell from 178 to fifty, even as Brooklyn’s population rose from over twelve thousand to nearly thirty thousand.
“THE DESTROYING DEMON OF DEBAUCHERY”
In 1831 and 1832, at the invitation of New York’s temperance leadership, Philadelphia activist Sylvester Graham delivered lectures on the relationship between diet and disease. New Yorkers, Graham argued, had been fatally weakened in their ability to resist epidemics by the improper eating habits spawned by big-city life. Graham opposed the use of stimulants—not only liquor, wine, and cider but tea, coffee, and tobacco too. He advocated vegetarianism. He denounced urban bakers who used “refined” flour—stripped of husks and dark oleaginous germ and whitened with “chemical agents”—because it baked more quickly than traditional bread, even though the result was an almost crustless loaf without granular texture or nutritional value. He railed, too, against marketplace milk, much of which came from cows fed on leftover distillery mash (swill), with the anemic, liquor-inflected product made presentable by the addition of chalk, plaster of Paris, and molasses.
Graham’s proposed antidotes for such urban ills were—like most evangelical suggestions—personal, not social. Rather than calling for regulations on production, he advised New Yorkers to alter their consumption patterns. Ideally they should bake their own bread; he gave them directions for selecting, preserving, and grinding wheat, then fermenting it to produce the old-fashioned, whole-wheat bread that later bore his name. They should also consume more fresh fruits and leafy vegetables—perishables still in short supply in urban markets and considered unhealthy if not cooked.
In 1833 some of his followers opened a Graham Boardinghouse, a kind of temperance hotel where men (no women were allowed) could follow a Grahamite regimen. No alcohol, tea, or coffee was allowed, as the sign in front advised. Bells rang at five o’clock summoning residents to cold baths, followed by a breakfast of fruit, wheat pudding, tepid gruel, and cold water or milk, after which the lodgers—Arthur Tappan, Horace Greeley, and, when he was in town, William Lloyd Garrison were among the noted guests—went off to work in Pearl or Wall Street. They came back for a midday vegetarian meal accompanied by wheat-meal bread and cold filtered rainwater,