Alcott was a reformer par excellence, and was constantly in attendance at reform meetings-anti-slavery, vegetarian, and temperance. A few years later, the famous transcendentalist and educational reformer, Amos Bronson Alcott, proposed a cooperative vegetarian colony.

Emerson dubbed him the 'poet of bran bread and pumpkins.' Yet despite all opposition, Graham flour appeared everywhere, and Graham boarding houses and restaurants sprang up. Graham believed that all meats are less wholesome for humans than fruits, grain and vegetables, that all condiments except salt should be avoided, and that tea and coffee, as well as alcohol, deserve to be shunned. He also proposed hard mattresses, open bedroom windows, cold shower baths, vegetables, fresh fruits, rough cereals, pure drinking water, and cheerfulness at meals. Graham advocated the use of bread at least twelve hours old, baked from whole wheat unbolted and coarsely ground. Regimen during a period of lecturing, and in 1830-1831 delivered lectures on these subjects in Philadelphia and New York, and later up and down the Atlantic coast. In 1830 he was named general agent of the Pennsylvania Temperance Society. In the movement for reform of the American diet, opposing its over-emphasis on meat and heavy foods, Sylvester Graham was a. Numerous cooperative communities sprang up, inspired largely by a hatred of industrialism, and a determination to return to more simple modes of life.

Vegetarianism in the United States was one of the many changes proposed in the reform movement of the thirties.

In 1889 the Vegetarian Federal Union was formed, an international federation of vegetarian organizations. Sylvester Graham (1794-1851), Charles Lane and Amos Bronson Alcott (17991888) were leaders of the early movement in the United States. Eduard Baltzer (1818-1887) was an early German pioneer, forming a vegetarian society at Nordhausen in 1868. Newton's Return to Nature, or Defense of Vegetable Regimen, and in 1847 the Vegetarian Society was founded at Manchester. In Great Britain George Cheyne (1671-1743) was one of the earliest pioneers of the movement, publishing his Essay on Regimen in 1740. Vegetarianism dates back as far as the ancient religion of Hindustan, and was advocated by Plato, Plutarch and other writers of classical times. In a period of incubation of varicolored social theories the frontier served both as a safety-valve for the East and as a convenient laboratory to put theory into actual practice, qualities which a more established and crystallized society would have lacked. Cheap land was a great boon to those unemployed or not financially prosperous in the East, while those who were merely discontented could always try a 'new deal' in the West. From the time the 'otherwise-minded' enrolled under the standard of Roger Williams in Rhode Island until the disappearance of the frontier toward the close of the nineteenth century, the vacant lands to the westward gave new hopes to those who wished to found a new society. THE American frontier has always been a fertile field for experiment in social reform. 4), pages 377 to 385Дigitized with permission of the Kansas Historical Society. The Vegetarian and Octagon Settlement Companies

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