Apostles of Abstinence PDF

Apostles of Abstinence: Fasting and Masculinity during the Progressive Era
Author(s): R. Marie Griffith

Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Dec., 2000), pp. 599-638
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30042198
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Apostles of Abstinence:Fasting and
Masculinity duringthe ProgressiveEra
R. MARIEGRIFFITH
PrincetonUniversity
BY THE TIMECHARLESCOURTNEYHASKELLPUBLISHEDHIS AMBITIOUSLY

TITLED
PerfectHealth: How To Get It and How ToKeep It in 1901, Americans
were long acquaintedwith healthreformers.The hygienic regimens of
English physicians George Cheyne (1671-1743) and William Lambe
(1765-1847), not to mention John Wesley's own Primitive Physick
(1747), were widely known well into the nineteenth century. The
various therapysystems of later American reformerssuch as William
Alcott, Sylvester Graham, Russell Trall, Elizabeth Blackwell, John
Harvey Kellogg, Ellen Gould White, and Horace Fletcher were simi-
larly celebrated,attractingfrequentimitatorsand in some cases achiev-
ing considerablepopularity.Vegetarianism,hydropathy,exercise, tem-
perance, and pulverizing masticationhad been so ardentlyadvocated
between the 1830s and the 1890s that desirous (if worn) consumers
must have wonderedwhetherthe farthestreachesof nonpharmaceutical
therapysystems had not been scoured;surelyAmericanshad, by now,
heard it all. But, thanks to a fortuitous encounter with physician
Edward Hooker Dewey, whose own books excoriated the heavy
Americanbreakfastand plied abstinenceas a cure-all remedy,Haskell
managed to seize upon what he would help make into the greatest
fitness craze of the early twentiethcentury,a practicewhose popularity
matched, if not surpassed,all previous health regimens: fasting.
R. Marie Griffith is associate directorof the Center for the Study of Religion and a
lecturer in the departmentof religion at Princeton University. She is the author of
God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission and the forthcom-
ing Body Salvation: AmericanChristianityand Disciplines of the Flesh.
AmericanQuarterly,Vol. 52, No. 4 (December2000) 2000 AmericanStudiesAssociation

599
600 AMERICANQUARTERLY
Fasting'sdestiny as somatictherapycould hardlyhave been foreseen

by Christiansof earliereras, for whom the practiceworkedprimarilyas
a means of spiritualdetoxification. Through the long reaches of the
Christiantradition,the supposed health benefits of fasting-reduction
of fat, rest for the overworked body, even cure of disease-were
secondary,its chief role being to strengthenthe flesh for the pursuitof
sacred ends. Early Christianmonastics fasted to curb sexual desire,
fortify the soul for battle against sin, and sculpt the body into a visible
expression of inwardhumility and devotion to Christ.Medieval saints
fasted, sometimesextravagantly,in orderto manifestpenitentialmourn-
ing and seek mystical communion with God. Protestantreformers,
riveting their attentionon scripture,retainedemphasison fasting while
amending its perceived abuses: MartinLutherrejected the prescribed
fast days instituted by the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the
practice of extreme abstinencethat drove some saints to madness and
death; yet he taught the rightness of "fast[ing] frequently in order to
subdue and control the body." The English Puritans,following John
Calvin, austerely practiced fasting as a biblically mandated act of
sorrow, humiliation, and contrition; while for Reformed Protestants
who emigratedto America,public and privatefast days duringtimes of
war, witchcraft,illness, and othercrises were commonplace.Yet by the
mid-nineteenthcentury,fasting as a means of Christianrepentanceand
humiliation had all but vanished among the majority of American
Protestants,carriedon mostly by upstartslike Mormons and Seventh-
Day Adventists as well as Catholics and other liturgicaltraditionalists
but increasingly rejected by the more "respectable"mainstream.All
that kept fasting from dying out altogether in bourgeois Protestant
culture was its rebirthas an instrumentfor physical rejuvenationand
weight loss, functions with which it has continued to be associated
throughoutthe twentiethcentury.'
Oddly enough, in light of the vast scholarlyattentiondirectedtoward
the body and its disciplines over the past two decades, fasting's
resurgenceat the end of the nineteenthcenturyand its popularityduring
the Progressive Era have received scant notice. More precisely, while
some historians have highlighted fasting in this period, the most
influential accounts have been preoccupiedwith historicizing modern
dietary obsessions that disproportionatelyafflict women and so have
been all too ready to interpretfood refusal as an exclusively female
province. Studies of this kind, notably Joan Jacobs Brumberg's 1988
APOSTLESOF ABSTINENCE 601
Fasting Girls, have focused on a series of notoriouscases of prolonged

abstinence, concentratedamong young women in nineteenth-century
BritainandAmerica, which latermedical historianshave interpretedas
prefiguring contemporaryeating disorders.2The immense volume of
work on the history of Western, and specifically American, dietary
obsessions has all but unanimouslyfollowed this approach,effectively
classifying "fasting"as a female form of pathologicalbehaviorrequir-
ing a socio-psychological explanation.3 The example of the most
renownedhistorianof religiousabstinence,medievalistCarolineWalker
Bynum, has (perhapsunwittingly) helped inspire the gendered narra-
tive now commonly told aboutAmericandietaryobsessions-a narra-
tive thatfocuses on exceptionalfemale cases while ignoringthe heavily
male promotionof extremeabstinenceduringat least one key historical
moment and the linkage between fasting and masculinityat that time.
How fasting was advocated during the Progressive Era by reformist
men as an instrumentfor healing, sloughing off fat for muscle, and
above all shoring up virility among the supposedly sissified business
classes, is a story that remainsto be told.
This essay attemptsto lay some of the groundworkfor telling that
story and, in so doing, for modifying currentinterpretationsof modern
abstinenceas a peculiarlyfemale obsession.4The desire to limit one's
food intake, whetherfor reasons relatedto religion, health, or physical
appearance,was never a purely female impulse, and at the turn of the
centuryit may not have even been primarilyso. Most, indeednearlyall,
advocatesof fasting between 1890 and 1930--Edward HookerDewey,
Charles Haskell, BernarrMacfadden, J. Austin Shaw, Irving James
Eales, Hereward Carrington,Robert Baille Pearson, Edward Earle
Purinton, Upton Sinclair, Wallace D. Wattles, and Frank McCoy, to
name some of the most prominent-were male.5 In one way or another,
virtually all of these figures explicitly connected their own experience
of fasting to virility and defended the practiceas intrepidand heroic-
a clear sign of (or path to) financial and social success and a key to the
regenerationof the Anglo-Americanrace as a whole. Eager to record
their experiences in print,the writings of these vigorous fasters reveal
a near consuming fixation with the body's interior and exterior
functions and, more precisely, with purification, disciplined self-
control,and the pleasurablepain of food refusal.These preoccupations,
incidentally,were alreadyclinically associated with anorexia nervosa,
a condition first identified by British, French, and American doctors
during the 1870s and linked for half a century with that most
thoroughly feminized of illnesses, hysteria.6 Since, however, male
advocatesof the fast generally ate plentifully when not fasting, refused
food only at set intervals and for bounded durations, and carefully
marked their behavior as masculine, they were able to elude
pathologizationas anorexic.
Attention to these texts mandates a reconsiderationof some near
sacred truisms that mark the standardnarrationof food abstinence.
Called into question, for instance, is the entrenchedsupposition that
women's "body work"has ever been far more painstakingthan men's,
that women have worked out deep feelings of grief and rage at the
social order on the material of their bodies while men have paid the
body little mind.7 Exploring the ways in which men have made their
bodies matter should also aid ongoing efforts to upend that stubborn
categoricalequationof female with body and nature,a triadopposed to
the similarly intermeshedabstractionsof male, intellect, and culture.
For althoughthe quest to transformself and world by denying food to
the body was pursuedby both sexes duringthe ProgressiveEra, it was
trumpetedwith especial ardorby men.8 Finally, this account should lay
to rest any characterizationof American diet history as an obvious
secularizationnarrative-a nineteenth-centurymutationfrom religious
fasting to secular dieting, in Brumberg'sformulation-by clarifying
some of the explicitly religious meanings attached to fasting by its
therapeuticadvocates well into the twentiethcentury.9Exploringthese
peculiarly male forms of austeritymay, in short, begin to expand our
historical sense of the multivalentmeanings, gendered and otherwise,
of bodily discipline.0
This story of modern fasting begins as the nineteenthcentury was
giving way to the twentieth, a moment of marked transition for
Americangenderideals and, as numeroushistorianshave convincingly
demonstrated,of profoundambivalenceregardingmasculinity." While
the vegetable and waterdiets advocatedby Lambe,Graham,andAlcott
had long been mocked as enervating and unmanly, the respected
physician (and ex-Civil War field surgeon) Edward Hooker Dewey
(1837-1904) captured public attention in the 1890s with his "no
breakfastplan"and his advocacy of fasting as a cure for virtuallyevery
ill. Fasting was reborn through Dewey's work, filled as it was with
accounts of soldiers and successful businessmen whose lives had been
saved or at least revitalized by food abstinence. Dewey's writings
inspired an array of early twentieth-centuryphysical culturists and

popularhealth writersto embracethe magical powers of fasting, from
Charles Haskell and BernarrMacfaddento a wide spectrumof New
Thought, hygienic, and medical writers who preached abstemious
eating as a universal panacea. Fasting was the long awaited key to
perfect health, vitality, stamina,and longevity for the sick and the well
alike. Increasingly, moreover, it became saturated with hopes for
masculinizationof the weak andreinvigorationof what was supposedly
enfeebled about American democracy and culture.At the same time,
however profanetherapeuticabstinencemight have appearedto skepti-
cal observers, it was suffused with religious imagery, expressed in a
devotional lexicon, and fortified by a quasi-mystical cosmology: an
eschatology of the body that was also a sacralizationof the market
economy. In and through the capacious practice of fasting, religion,
masculinity,and capitalistdreamscoalesced.
The Kingdom of God Within and Without:Gospels of Fasting at the

Turnof the Century
Dewey's 1895 book, The TrueScience of Living, subtitled"TheNew

Gospel of Health," was a masterpiece of drama, a sermonic tour de
force that blended the persuasiveintimacy of the revivalist, the zeal of
the social reformer,and the scientific precision of the medical profes-
sional to articulatea dietaryplan for healthandmoraluplift thatDewey
claimed as his own "originaldiscovery."The book had been reprinted
at least four times in the United States and Britain by 1908 and was
followed by an even more successful sequel, The No-BreakfastPlan
and the Fasting Cure (1900), which was translatedinto French and
Germanand enteredits thirdAmericanedition in 1921, seventeenyears
after its author'sdeath. The centraltenet of Dewey's gospel was fairly
simple: abstain completely from breakfast, thereby consuming only
two meals per day, and eat these only when "naturalhunger"calls for
food. Nearly all physiological evils could be attributedto excessive
eating, to gorging oneself on immoderatequantitiesof food out of habit
or "morbid hunger" (as opposed to the "natural,"calmer kind).
Diseases of all sorts took hold in overfed bodies, whose cells fairly
groaned under the weight of this extravaganceand whose exhausted
defenses were laid too low to preventthe entranceof foreign,adversarial
enemies.
Even crime was a product of intemperatehabits that began in the

nursery,a site that Dewey held responsible "for more human misery,
more of lunacy, of homicide, of suicide, of disease, of pestilence, of
prematureending of lives, infinitely more than can be charged to the
saloon, because infinitely more universal."12Christiansespecially had
to accept their accessory role in this grim situation:echoing William
Alcott, Dewey called church suppers"life-depressing. . . sin-enticing
repasts"that should be obliteratedaltogether.13Pastorswere called to
account for "go[ing] into your pulpits with loaded stomachs to teach
the word of life," when insteadthey ought to undergoa solemn Sunday
fast and uphold their duty to "be our highest types of physical as well
as of spiritual life."14Dewey was so certain of the magnitudeof ills
caused by overeatingthathe called for "a new W.C.T.U.association"to
wage a "war on irregular feedings," instructing all citizens about
avoiding excess and fasting when sick or out of sorts.'5 In practically
every imaginable instance, the key to exchanging illness for health,
vice for virtue, and social chaos for orderwas a sincere, thorough,and
extended fast.
Abstinence was, for Dewey, the key to individual and social
regenerationbecause it inculcatedboth virtue and fortitude.Restraint
in eating, like other forms of self-control,was a sacrifice that elevated
practitionersto a higher humanityand an improvedfulfillment of their
social and domestic roles. "If you are Christians,you will become a
greatdeal betterChristians;if husbands,a greatdeal betterhusbands;if
wives, a great deal better wives; if parents, you will be a great deal
more kindly, considerate, reasonable in all your relations to your
children. There will be such moral strength added that in all your
relations to the family, to the church and society you will become
better, stronger men and women."'6 Habits of work would also be
fortified by means of the fast. Dewey approvingly quoted the 1899
account of businessmanMilton Rathbun'stwenty-eight-dayfast.
I had been in the habit of getting to my office about 8; now I get there at 7.
I generallyhad left at 5:30; I now stayed until 6:30. I had been in the habitof
taking an houror an hour and a quarterfor luncheon.The luncheonwas now
cut off, so I stayed in the office and worked. I sat there at my desk and put in
a long, hardday's work, constantlywriting .... My mind was clear, my eye
was sharperthan usually, and all the functions were in excellent working
order. 17
Of anotherfaster under his care, Dewey noted his increased capacity

for work and his "seemingly perfect"physical condition. A modified
abstinence continued after the fast, for "he had found out that for the
best working conditions a nap at noon was better than even a light
luncheon,and thatone meal a day takenafterhis business was over was
the best practice." Extreme food reduction appropriatelysuited the
period's capitalistethic of increased,efficient production.'8
By focusing in this way on heightenedproductivity,Dewey persis-
tently appealedto fasting as a manly practice,one with Franklinesque
overtones of restraintand self-discipline. This view was ever linked
with Dewey's insistence that fasting was a cure for debility-inducing
illnesses, which sappedtheir victims' pep and drainedenergy from the
workplace. In his view, fasting was an antidote not only to common
types of sickness such as catarrhor neurasthenia(the latter which,
thoughafflictingboth sexes, undercutmanlinessin a fundamentalway)
but even extreme instances of mental despair and "the gravest of all
diseases-insanity."'9 Regardingthe latter,he especially lamentedthe
practiceof imposed feeding so common in mentalhospitals,noting that
patients' refusal of food was instinctive and naturally gave rest to
overtaxed brains. Even on a more mundanelevel, the irritabilitythat
came from excessive food intake,besides being a sign of moral failure,
was a type of literal "insanity"that Dewey sorrowfully attributedto
ignorance as much as to greed. Before discovering the gospel of
abstinence, he confessed having caused such a state in his own son,
whose bloated infancy was characterizedby "digestive overtaxing,"
"bowel trouble," and such habitual fussiness that Dewey lost all
affection for the boy and wrote him off as "anafflictive dispensationof
divine Providence."Latermournfulas he realizedhis own contribution
to his son's suffering (he had force-fed the child according to the
nutritionalconventions of the time), Dewey warned readers against
perpetuating such a tragedy in their own families, urging a fresh
undertakingof restraintand periodic fasting as a cure for the tribula-
tions of frailty and dissipationno less than familial strife.20
Dewey was well aware of fasting's devotional meanings, though he
refrainedfrom stressingthem directly;his healthplan was, in any case,
far too dependent on "cheer of mind" to traffic in repentance or
mortification.2'Yet as an active Protestantwriting to a largely Protes-
tant audience,he sought throughoutto affirmthe harmonybetween his
own gospel of healthand the Christiangospel. The introductionto True
Science of Living, written by the famed evangelist George Frederick

Pentecost (1842-1920), gave the entire endeavora distinctly Christian
spin and tracedout key scripturalpassages to buttressthe orthodoxyof
Dewey's plan. To overeat, Pentecost argued,was to "defile the body"
and was thus "an offence against our salvation and the honor of God."
More concretely,"to deliberatelyunderminethe health and strengthof
the body by persistingin an injurious... way of living, is a sin of great
enormity."Like drunkenness,gluttony was an "offence against both
body and soul which no self-respecting person, not to say Christian,
ought for a moment to allow."22Pentecost's languageechoed the older
reformist tradition of Alcott and Graham, not to mention George
Cheyne andJohnWesley,but it was Dewey whom ReverendPentecost,
like so many who came later,esteemed as the originatingsage of such
wisdom. Drawn to Dewey's confidently prophetic voice, his modem
"discovery" and repackaging of an ancient religious practice, or
perhapsmerely his simple promiseto restorehealthto all who followed
him, a vast and motley parade of apostles soon entered the scene,
expanding and popularizingDewey's gospel of fasting to a degree he
could scarcely have imagined.23
One of the most importantof these was Charles Haskell, Dewey's
friend and publisher who grandly titled his own 1901 disquisition
PerfectHealth: How ToGet It and How ToKeepIt, By One WhoHas It.
Like virtuallyall health reformersbefore and since, Haskell laid claim
to a long history of disease and despairpriorto his discovery of fasting
as the path to "perfecthealth."When a physician had suggested to him
that he give up his business and become reconciled to the role of
invalid, Haskell had balked, replying, "thatI would not do that;that a
man might as well be dead as alive, if he could not work, for thereis no
place in this world for a man who does not work."In the midst of one
financial crisis, feeling defeated and decidedly unmanly,an exhausted
Haskell took comfort in modeling himself after a rathermore famous
sufferer:
For a time life and death seemed to balance evenly in the scales. I was in the
distress and darknessof Gethsemaneand before me was the cross. It did not
seem possible thatmy mind could standthe awful strainthat was upon it, but
through "The New Gospel of Health" and two good angels who stood
faithfullyby me, I was enabledto ... come out intopeace, life andsafety, and
to have Perfect Health of body and Perfect Health of mind, which is "The
Kingdom of God within you." 24
Like any good convert, Haskell was motivated to share his "good
news" with others, writing that Dewey's plan "had indeed proved 'A
Gospel'" to him and his wife, and thatthey "desiredabove all things to
give it to other sufferers." Haskell's histrionicwritingwas drenchedin
biblical language and reached out to its audience with an evangelical
urgency that borderedon pathos. He took pride in printing effusive,
weepy testimonies from multiple "disciples" of this gospel so as to
circulate the "glad tidings" that it was destined to bring to all
humankind.Haskell's text was to serve as the authoritativecommen-
tary on Dewey's scriptures,and he gave joyful praise that "Thou has
made known to me the ways of life."25
Haskell himself did not add anything new to Dewey's dietary
regimen; he simply reinforced it with a spiritual foundation deeply
indebtedto the New Thought currentsof his day. Like his mentor,he
was particularlyenamored of the virtue of self-control that fasting
cultivated,noting that this was the Apostle Paul's true meaning in the
scripturalverse, "I keep my body underand bringit into subjection."26
But if Haskell was a latter-dayPaul, polishing anotherman's gospel
while paying full homage to the man himself, reformerswith loftier
ambitionsalso emerged,vying to be crowned a new Messiah. The first
of these was BernarrMacfadden(1868-1955), owner of the Physical
Culture Publishing Company and destined for later notoriety as the
editorof such popularmagazinesas TrueRomancesand TrueDetective
Stories. The pompous Macfadden was a laughingstock to many for
flamboyantlydisplayinghis own developed musculature(and a bane to
Anthony Comstock for featuringscantily clad male and female bodies
in his theatric exhibitions), and he remained a controversial figure
throughouthis adult life. Despite his indecorous behavior (or perhaps
because of it), his magazine Physical Culture, launched in 1899, as
well as his many published books drew a wide audience of readers
concerned to improve their physiques and enrich their lives. Ever
committedto the project of reinvigoratingurbanand suburbanmolly-
coddles, of remasculinizingthe once robust race of white American
men whose muscles had turned to mush and who themselves had
degeneratedinto recreantpantywaists, Macfaddenpublished his first
book on fasting in 1900, claiming his own inspirationand originalityin
discovering this remarkableantidoteto softness.27
If Dewey and Haskell had expected fasting to cultivatemanly virtue,
Macfadden took for granted that the real appeal, the attractionthat
would make men hunger for greater and greaterbouts of abstinence,

was the experience of absolute power evoked by a fast. Through
fasting, Macfadden promised, a person could exercise unqualified
control over virtually all types of disease while revealing a degree of
strength and stamina such as would put others to shame. In short,
fasting was revealedto be a stunningweapon of mastery,an instrument
with which to prove one's superiorityover menacing perils ranging
from microbes to men. Nor did Macfadden hesitate to puff his
program'sredemptive implications;the first chapteropened with the
reverberatingevangelical question, "What shall we do to be saved?"
and implicitly assuredreadersthat salvationwas to be found not along
the sawdust trail but in the regimens propoundedin his book. "Civi-
lized man"needed to throwoff the artificialtastes and cultivatedhabits
accruedover time in favor of the practices observable in animals and
so-called "primitive"people (one of Macfadden's favorite subjects).
This shift would restore the lost strengthand vitality that every man
supposedly coveted, enabling him to conquer all that was debilitating
and feminizing about modem civilization.28
Macfadden's philosophy was basic enough: in all things, trust
Nature, and employ only "natural"remedies to heal disease and
maintainhealth. The body was a "self-regulatingapparatus,"a "house
that cleanses its own chambers"of intrusivesubstanceswhen properly
cared for. What made this system malfunctionwere the "baneful ...
superstitions"that caused people to mistake "poison for food" and to
pour toxic substances into the body until the physical self developed
cravings for excessive aliment (especially meat), drugs, and alcohol
which the unwitting spiritual self would dutifully supply. Eventually
this overabundanceof toxins would so thoroughlydeplete a person's
vigor that constant sickness and prematuredeath would result.29The
cure was not mere avoidanceof overeating(which hardlyproved one's
hardiness) but protracted, cleansing fasts. Fasting during times of
illness was instinctive and hence "natural,"freeing the body's vital
energies that were normallymonopolized by digestion to be utilized in
the war against disease. No virus or microbe stood "a living chance
against that method of expurgation."Whenever the warning signs of
impending illness appear,Macfaddenurged, cease all food intake and
let the body concentrateits energies on riddingthe house of unwanted
intruders,sweeping out germs like so much "rubbish."Example piled
upon example certifiedthat in virtuallyevery case-influenza, asthma,
catarrh,even cancer-this remedy would reap success. Most important

of all, fasting could restorethat "superbvirility of manhood"so easily
enfeebled by decadence, laziness, sedentarylifestyles, and ill health.30
How long to fast? In general,Macfaddenrecommendeda seven-day
recess from food. Even a fast of two days' duration,however, would do
some good, especially for those inclined towardgluttony.The dilemma,
for Macfadden as for other devotees of abstinence, was how to
persuade a food loving audience of fasting's benefits. Macfadden,
himself an open lover of pleasureand an advocateof frequent,vigorous
sexual intercourse, did not exactly sing the joys of austere living;
instead, he marketedhis plan by arguingthat brief periods of fasting
were pleasurablein and of themselves and, even more, in their results.
Forget humiliation and repentance: "No need of aggravating the
sickness of dyspeptics by mentioning the 'duty of self-denial,' and
evok[ing] visions of spiritualadvisershelping themselves to the assets
of world-renouncingidiots," he wrote acidly. Rather than glamorize
ascetics and mystics, Macfaddendefended fasting "from an epicuric
point of view": food would be relishedmore thoroughly,rest would be
sweeter than before. In short, fasting opened the way to a richer
enjoymentof all life's pleasures.31
Macfaddentook perhapshis own greatestpleasurein exhibiting his
expertly chiseled body, finely carved not simply via exercise but also,
and just as importantly,by means of fasting. His entire oeuvre was
filled with naked photographsof his sinewy frame, as he performed
feats of strengthor simply posed in likeness of classical sculpture.A
number of these images were "before and after" shots of a fast, the
"after"picturesdepictinga leaner,meanerMacfaddenwhose veins and
muscles strainedalmost to burstingout of the tight skin that overlay
them [fig. 1-4]. Throughthese powerful visual representations(which
other fasting masters would also utilize), he presentedhimself as the
perfect model of power, strength,and beauty to which his readers,and
most especially his male readers,could aspire:the exquisitely fit, hale,
and heartybody, as immune to disease as it was scornfulof weakness.
For Macfadden, the body was no mere receptacle of some elusive
higher self but a "machine that thinks," as he often put it, the final
evolution of which was to be the "superman"of physical supremacy.32
Fasting, the body's literal victory over its own craven desires and
dependencies,was a crucialtool in this progression,the key to winning
life's perennialbattle against fragility.
Normal Condition.
Fig. 1. Bernarr MacFadden, "Normal Condition" and "After Seven Day Fast,"
Fasting--Hydropathy-Exercise, 80.
Edward Hooker Dewey and BernarrMacfadden, the field surgeon

who exemplified virtue and the physical culturist who epitomized
brawn, led the way in popularizing a practice that had lately been
chiefly associated with female illnesses like anorexiaand hysteria and
that had also been sullied by charges of fraud. VictorianAmericans
sharedkey assumptionsabout extended abstinencewhich defined it as
peculiar type of behavior: something that women did, whether out of
extreme piety, illness, or a quest for fame and fortune. These were
lessons gleaned from cases dating back into the Middle Ages but
especially from nineteenth-century"fasting girls" such as the English
Ann Moore, the Welsh SarahJacob, and the AmericanMollie Fancher,
all of whom drew as much adorationas sympathy and scorn (while
their caretakersbenefited heartily from the scores of gawking visitors
Fig. 2. Bernarr MacFadden, "Putting up 100-lb. dumb-bell high over head with
one arm after seven-day fast," Fasting-Hydropathy-Exercise, 76.
who came round).33Even seeming exceptions, such as the monitored

forty-two-dayfast of physicianHenryTannerin New York'sClarendon
Hall in 1881 and similarexperimentselsewhere, did not underminethat
image, since such controlled studies were undertakenonly to explore
the physiological effects of fasting on the body. Few if any people prior
to Dewey and Macfadden's popularizationof food avoidance con-
ceived of the fast in termsof ordinarytherapeuticpractice,manly valor,
or masculine vitality, the way so many would think of it a few years
hence. From whence this transition?We may begin to glean some
understandingof fasting's renewed power by exploring the symbolic
repertoire which fasting advocates used in order to convert their
American audiences-a repertoire easily tuned to play on timely
anxieties aboutrace, gender,and nationalidentitywhile promptingand
relentlessly exploiting a severe dreadof personal filth and death.
Fig. 3. Bernarr MacFadden, "Raising 220-lb. Man with strength of arms only,
after seven-day fast," Fasting-Hydropathy-Exercise, 78.
The "Clean, Sweet, Healthy Body": Bodily Enchantmentsand

Repulsions
Macfadden would treat fasting in many other writings during the

next several decades, briefly in SuperbVirilityof Manhood(1904) and
more expansively in Macfadden's Encyclopedia of Physical Culture
(originally published in 1911-1912 and periodically revised into the
early 1940s) and Fastingfor Health (1923, 1934), among others.34In
the meantime a virtual swarm of other fasting advocates rose to
prominence, establishing a corpus of images, ideas, and practical
advice that appeared in fasting manuals over and over again. All
authorswere concernedto demonstratefor theirreadersthe reconcilia-
tion between religious asceticism and dietetic science in the practiceof
fasting, and most prefacedtheirautobiographicalaccountswith grandi-
ose histories of both. Having infused fasting with spiritualand scien-
tific authority,these campaignersproceeded to offer counsel on every
conceivable topic relating to the fast, from the use of tobacco while
fasting to curing hunger-inducedinsomnia to the etiquette of dealing
with exasperated family members. Above all, these expert fasters
shareda keen curiosity about ingestion and expurgation,a fascination
Fig. 4. Bernarr MacFadden, "Normal Condition" and "After Seven Day Fast,"
Fasting-Hydropathy-Exercise, 74.
with all that entered and exited the body's orifices. While this was a
familiar topic of interest and concern, articulatedby both medical
physicians and natural healers concerned about America's dietary
excesses, fasting advocates were especially fervent about somatic
interiorityand consequentlywrote in a differentvein altogether.
Like Dewey and Haskell, many of these authors were Protestants
who had been deeply influenced by New Thought optimism and
preached a cheerful gospel of health and wealth. Haskell himself
published several personal accounts of extended fasts, forty days and
more (Macfadden'sweek-long fasts were milquetoastby comparison).
Laterauthorsinvariablymentionedtheirown indebtednessto Dewey's
influence, many highlightingthe fast as an instrumentof efficiency that
would bestow riches galore. And not only riches: indeed, the faster
harnessed the power to obtain practically any desire. Wallace D.
Wattles (1860-1911), author of Health Through New Thought and

Fasting (1907), cited William James to this effect: "It is notoriousthat
a single successful effort of moralvolition, such as saying 'No' to some
habitualtemptation,or performingsome courageousact, will launch a
man on a higher level of energy for days and weeks, will give him a
new range of power. . . . It is, I believe, admitted that disciples of
asceticism can reach very high levels of freedom and power of will."35
Irving James Eales (fig. 5), an osteopathic doctor and author of a
lengthy fasting treatise entitled Healthology (1907), exulted that even
his "sex powers" were invigorated by the fast.36The celebration of
abundanceevident in these authors'writingwas tempered,however, by
a palpableyearningto escape luxury and to purify the social orderjust
as they purifiedthe self: throughabnegation.
Fasting itself provideda perfect metaphorfor these twin impulses of
excess and renunciation:it did not signify mere dieting, whose health
merits were also receiving accelerated attention in the medical and
popularpress, but the farthestend of all food reduction,the mysterious
outer limits of abstinence,whose attainmentwas vividly fantasized as
a "voluptuousausterity."37The sensuous, even autoeroticdimensions
of fasting were illustratedin the lavish descriptionswritersgave of all
aspects of the process, lovingly memorialized:the carefully selected
last meal eaten before a fast; the roaringpain of hungerduringthe fast's
early days; the cool liquids sipped and savored in place of food; the
bloated stomach and fetid gas expelled from the body; the minutely
measuredsize, substance,and smell of one's excrementduringa fast-
a prize obtainedthroughcompulsively repetitiveenemas;the color and
viscosity of the urine; the foul breath and coated tongue, assurances
that so much poison was being swept from the body; the hot and icy
cold baths;the daily weighing and measuringof one's chest and waist
dimensions;the ritualisticplanningof the foods with which one would
breakthe fast, down to the smallest ounce; the willingness to cook and
serve rich, fragrantmeals to family and friends without touching a
single morsel oneself; the climactic photographsof the fasting body,
defiantly posed to convey strength,beauty, and vitality; the strenuous
daily exercise carried on throughout.Fasters reveled in their bodies
with lush self-absorption,entrancedby the effluvia that passed out of
them as much as by their seeming attainmentof utter emptiness. As
these enthusiastsweighed and documentedevery substance ingested,
each visible and tactile change in the body, and most of all every smell
Fig. 5. Irving James Eales, "25thday. Lifting Mr. Hugo Heinemann, 242 pounds.
Also lifted him with a weight in his hand, making a total of 258 pounds," Eales,
Healthology, facing 160.
and particlethatexited its orifices, materialitywas at one and the same

time wondrouslyrevered and violently extirpated.
Nothing better illustratesthis dynamic of bodily sanctificationand
revilementthan the adamantlonging for odorless excrement.Turn-of-
the-centuryreformerHorace Fletcher,whose teachings on mastication
had so pervasively reached the middle and upper classes, had already
plantedthe notion that healthy intestinesproducedonly infrequentand
perfectly scent-free stools, which he preferred to call "ash." The
offensive smell of most bowel movements, Fletcher instructed, was
simply a sign of poor eating habits and meant that poisons had been
trappedin the body. Odoriferousfeces were, quite literally,toxic waste.
Fasting advocates, similarly committed to ridding the world of this

putrid stuff, effused about the marvelously innocuous excrement that
passed from their bodies towardthe end of a fast, proclamationsoften
preceded by almost unbearablyvivid descriptions of what had come
before. The scatologically obsessed RobertBaille Pearson(b. 1880), a
constructionengineer who daily collected and probedhis own evacua-
tions and who advisedreadersto take enemas of up to 30 quartsper day
during a fast, published this third-personaccount of his own experi-
ence:
During nearly the entire fast, large quantities of catarrhalmucus came out
with the foulest excrement. The mucus looked exactly like small sheets of
transparentskin about an inch square,but had no more cohesiveness when
picked up on a wire, than so much slime. ... This stopped coming out just
before the peristaltic action started up, and the excreta became perfectly
odorless.
Pearson also noted that althoughhe had read Horace Fletcher's book
TheA B-Z of OurNutritionyears earlier,he had "utterlyfailed to attain
odorless excrement"until his technical experimentsin fasting. 38
Like other fasters, Pearson was indignant that the mainstream
medical profession dismissed routine stool-and-odorexaminations as
offensive and of little diagnostic use. He used his own vocational
experience as proof of doctors' idiocy in this area, writing that one in
his trade"would never think of judging the efficiency of a boiler plant
without at least a rough estimate of the unburnedcoal in the ashes and
partly burned gases going up the stack." It seemed patently clear to
Pearson, by contrast, that Fletcher had been right: each individual
should learnto examine and interprethis own excretions,knowing that
healthy human stools were "no more offensive than moist clay [with]
no more odour than a hot biscuit."Even the Bible, long an ambiguous
source on the proprietiesof fasting, acted for Pearsonas a prooftextof
the practice's tremendousbenefits. Quoting-or rather,misquoting-
the Bible as saying, "Fast ye not and ye cannot enter the kingdom of
heaven," he queried, "Could not this mean that eternal life (on this
earth) is obtainable, but only through fasting, and in no other man-
ner?"39Fragrance-freefeces were redolent of paradise.40
This obsession with filth and stench might well be dismissed as little
more than a peculiareffect of the massive urbansewer projectstaking
place at this time. Devastating epidemics of yellow fever, cholera,
typhoid, and other diseases had long spurredefforts toward sanitation

measures, and no undertaking was more important to the reform
movement for public health than the constructionof massive under-
groundpipe systems and wastewatertreatmentfacilities to contain, do
away with, and/orpurify humanwaste. Though Boston's underground
sewer kept the city streetsdry and clean from the early 1700s on, other
urban areas-notably New York-were lined with squalid alleyways
and dotted with overflowing cesspools until well after the Civil War.
The crowded slum areaswere especially reputedto reek of fecal muck.
One nineteenth-centuryinspection officer in New Yorkreportedfami-
lies "living in basementswith privy vaults located at higher levels than
the apartmentsand oozing their contents into them, amidst offensive
odors,"while anothernoted the "insalubrityof privies in which masses
of humanexcrement were found on the seats and floors."41But it was
not only the poor who lived amid such smells: the cities literally stank
throughout,a fact that undoubtedlylent appeal to Pearson'sfantasy of
"ash."42
Yet anxiety over defecatory products and odors cannot merely be
reduced to the desire for more hygienic streets and living quarters,
especially since this uneasiness emerged with greatest intensity well
after sewage systems had made successful inroadsat sanitation.More
pointedly, the trepidation was overlaid with a fanciful vision of
replacing foul bodies with clean, healthy ones, drawing on a lavish
symbolic repertoireof racializedrepresentationsin orderto evoke this
supersession.The vocabularyof bodily contaminationfit contempora-
neous anxieties about "dung"in the public square, played out in the
steady tides of racial enmity, the rising currentsof nativism, and the
zeal for eugenic research(includingforced sterilizationfor the "feeble-
minded")that swept both England and the United States during those
years. Odor, of course, has perennially lent itself to be used as a
conspicuous indicatorof difference, literal catalogs of smells having
been compiled in orderto distinguishthe "stink"of particularraces or
classes of people from the "sweet"smells of one's own kind.43Anglo-
Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
(among other times) displayed intense disgust toward the supposed
fetor of foreign bodies, not to mention that of dark-skinnedbodies in
theirown midst. The purebody would be thoroughlydeodorized,one's
skin emanating only the most pleasing, subtle, and respectable fra-
grance (at least to olfactory organs like one's own). In crusading for
odorless excrement,ProgressiveEra fasting advocates took this obses-

sion to its farthest extreme, but their enthusiastic labors remained
firmly ensconced within the American dialectic of fascination and
repulsiontowardfilth, contagion, and all things alien or inassimilable.
As one longtime fasting advocateput it, "Thereal natureof disease . . .
is the encumbranceof the system with effete, mal-assimilated,foreign
material ... 'the presence of foreign substances in the body.'"44
An oft-used clinical term for this kind of situation was "auto-
intoxication,"a condition of being poisoned by pernicious elements
within one's own flesh that was often signaled by body odor in general
and more specifically that of feces. Auto-intoxicationwas a particular
obsession of Hereward Carrington(1880-1959), author of Vitality,
Fasting, and Nutrition (1908) as well as numerous later books on
medical, psychic, and occult topics. Carringtonwas more thoroughly
disgusted than Pearson with the very idea of waste-perhaps under-
standably so, given his reliance on A.B. Jamison's gloomy book,
IntestinalIlls. Here Carringtonlearnedabout "the putridfecal mass of
solid and liquid contents accumulatedin the artificial reservoirat the
end of the intestinalsewer,"the place where morbidpoisons and gasses
were absorbedand returnedto the blood to be takento all otherpartsof
the body. Thus released, such poisons "clogg[ed] the glands, chok[ed]
up the pores and obstruct[ed]the circulation,thereby causing conges-
tion and inflammation of the various organs." Not only germs but
excrement itself invaded the body's tissues by absorption,so that the
human organism was "constantlysaturatedwith poisonous germs and
filth, re-excreted, re-absorbed and re-secreted-no one knows how
many times-by the various organs of the body."45
Sickened by this ghastly procedure of self-poisoning, Carrington
bemoaned the porousness of human bowels, deploring the fact that
bodies were themselves composed of putrefaction:"That beautiful
form; that God-like intellect; the very soul itself, is on any theory,
dependentupon the materialbody for its manifestation,in this life; and
these materials(and foul air), are the materialsfrom which our bodies
arebuilt!"Ratherthanthe "bloatedfaces, blotchy skins, andfoul breath
... encountered on every hand," Carrington longed for "the clean,
sweet, healthy body that results from perfect nutrition, and a strict
observance of hygienic laws." Fortunately, there was no need to
continue living with the indignityof putridfecal matter:if one ate only
just enough to meet the body's requirements,Carringtonprophesied,
then evacuations themselves could be renderedvirtually unnecessary!

All that would occasionally pass from the rectum would be less
noxious waste productsdeposited by the blood-a hygienist's dream
come true at last.46
In the meantime, however, mundane reality dictated a regular
cleansing of the bowels, and Carringtondutifully devoted an entire
chapterto that ever-populartopic, "The Enema."Nimbly explicating
the calisthenically challenging process whereby to purge impacted
colons both during and after a fast, he urged readers to join him in
keeping this part of the body "clean, healthy, and in such a condition
that we are not ashamed to acknowledge it as a part of ourselves."
Purged, whatever was ordinarily a source of disgrace could be
destigmatizedand fully assimilated.Even more wonderfully,one could
annihilatethose filthy poisons that otherwise putrefiedin the body to
the point of death, creating an enticing alternative to the drone of
mortal fate. Only when the civilized human family began to practice
this and other hygienic laws would one begin to see "the clean,
healthful,pink complexions that should encounterus on every hand."47
To return, then, to the question of the racial dimensions of this
compulsion: that one of the main issues implicitly at stake for
Carringtonand others was the health of "pink" complexions-and
bodies-cannot be underestimated.Indeed, the larger framework of
meaning in which fasting played such a key role was itself deeply
embedded in notions of hierarchy-the strong versus the weak-that
were themselves often racially tinged. BernarrMacfadden's written
corpus was especially suffused with an ideology of racial hierarchy,
which he glossed as the scientific "studyof physical measurementsand
of their relationshipto the prehistoricand modernracial development
of mankind."Black and Asian women and men were contrastedwith
their white counterpartsin orderto illustratethe superiorityof Cauca-
sian facial characteristics and physical prowess. "The broad high
forehead," he wrote in the Encyclopedia of Health and Physical
Culture, "is a sign of intelligence which distinguishes the white man
from the AustralianBushman"-and, as his photographicimages made
clear,from blackAmericansas well. Clearly,"themore advancedraces
have over their eyes more brain capacity than the lower races."48
While such declarationsdid not have to do directly with fasting, his
other writings made clear that the will and strengthneeded to conquer
one's own bodily appetites was in fact only accessible to beings of
advancedmental power, those with the good sense to recognize their

physical dominance over craven appetite. So-called primitives were
useful in Macfadden's evolutionary schema as examples of survival
from imposed starvation-having been compelled by the "rigors of
existence" into "enforcedfasting periods,"these early men developed
the "capacityto sustain life and gain renewed vitality from periods of
temporaryabstinencefrom food" and thus helped propel the progress
of the race49-but none were so advanced as to have given up food
voluntarily, as he called modem civilized (white) men to do. By
focusing so intently on the arduousness of manly self-denial, the
discourse of fasting bolstereda largerthematicagendaof the period of
distinguishinghearty,Anglo-Saxon stock from "degenerate"races of
men and women, those who remained bound to the animalistic
gratificationof eating and were much too weak to fast.50
Fasting and whiteness, then, conveniently mergedinto a largerlogic
of bodily dominationand superiority,if not explicitly for all the fasting
masters of the period then certainly for some. While Macfadden's
language concerning the advancementof the white "superman"was
somewhat more stridentthan that of other fasting writers, the general
fixation with dirt displayed by his counterparts,not to mention the
insistence that starvingthe body was the best way to cure it, resonated
deeply with other anxieties and strategiesregardingso-called polluted
influences in Americansociety. Moreover,the vocabularyof healththat
they employed was used to racializedends by more virulentideologues
of racial hierarchyand eugenic science, such as physician William S.
Sadler (1875-1969). Sadler's Race Decadence (1922) developed an
alarming portrait of the declining health of American citizens and
recommended a "health revival" for the nation's hearty that empha-
sized the rational breeding of children (the "feeble-minded"would
undergoinvoluntarysterilization)no less than the stampingout of that
most awful bane to health, auto-intoxication.Sadler was so concerned
about the latter as the most common cause of high blood pressure,
kidney trouble, and various degenerative diseases that he included a
special appendixentitled "Special Diet List for Auto-Intoxication."A
rationaleating plan was a crucialpartof the overhaulof America'sbest
racial stock, which accordingto Sadler was becoming "moreunstable,
less self-collected and less self-controlled . . . more and more panicky
and hysterical." Though Sadler never went so far as to encourage
periods of complete food abstinence, his menu of dietary regimens
otherwise echoed the prescriptionsof those who did (two daily meals
instead of three, less meat, thorough mastication, raw and natural
foods, etc). Male fasterswere thus invoking a broaderlexicon of health,
purity, and pollution used to shore up the boundariesof the social as
well as the physical body, monitoringthe orifices of the one no less
rigorouslythanthose who policed more expansivebordersof American
democraticsociety.51
Aversions are not univocal, however, and this disgust towardbodily
filth was no exception. NeitherCarringtonnor Pearson,afterall, hoped
actuallyto eradicatehis bowel movements;delving into excrementwas
much too pleasurableto seek its total obliteration.The delight which
these and other fasting writers took in excavating their insides was
predicatedon turningup muck: a perfectly pristinebody would not be
much fun. At the level of actualpractice,likewise, fasting itself was not
so much about transcendingthe body or extinguishingall its functions
as about abandoning all other earthly pursuits for the joy of self-
scrutiny. The body deeply mattered to those who sought health,
happiness, and eternallife throughfasting, and there was no aspect or
particle so minor, so malodorous, so unpleasant that it could not
become a source of both insight and exultation.Its cracksand crevices,
soft tissues and firm sinews, pungent smells and richly textured
surfaces, were thought to be refined and beautified by fasting, not
chastised and certainly not erased. Male impotence was the one
unfortunate,though potentially curable, consequence of fasting that
Pearson delineated (thankfully in less detail than his bowel move-
ments), but others either scornedthis associationor remainedsilent on
the subject. (Macfaddennoted decreased sex drive duringthe fast but
assured his readers that desire would be rejuvenated and, indeed,
amplified, after it was broken.) Like intercourse, fasting bespoke
virility, and while it was in an importantsense a negation of everyday
bodily impulses it also and equally representedthe pinnacle of their
luscious fulfillment.
To clarify the argument further: the compulsion to control the
appetite so thoroughly as to obliterate the smell of one's excrement
resonated with late Victorian constructions of manly self-restraint.
Likewise, the precision that guided these fasters' explorationof their
own feces-the meticulous processes of weighing, measuring,poking,
and purging to which they were so committed-suggests a deep
attractionto a Progressive paradigm of scientific mastery that they
sought to rescue from the possessive clutches and tightly bounded

world of gentlemen physicians, those who operatedin the mainstream
of American medicine. Yet the exemplary self to which the fasters
aspired was equally overlaid with cherished ideals of masculine
potency and physical conquest, ideals that in the past had conflicted
with Victorian manliness more than harmonizing with that model.52
Part of fasting's allure, then, was surely its expansive capacity to
combine more traditional,refined sorts of manly "will-training"with
the newer masculine concern arising in the period with raw strength
and power-the businessman and the bodybuilder fused into one
omnipotent,invincible body. The habitsthat surroundedthe practiceof
fasting celebratedsensualityas much as self-denial, paving the way for
a model of virility in which even the most extremeforms of narcissism
could be revampedas self-sacrifice.
In reconciling the contradictionsbetween "manliness"and "mascu-
linity,"therapeuticfastersof the era also sought to harmonizetranscen-
dence and materiality,cresting the heights of spiritualenlightenment
while basking in earthly and bodily gratification.The pragmaticlink
between these seemingly disparateexperiences was an ethic of sparse-
ness, a purificationfrom all superfluitiesso that one could enjoy what
was truly rapturous,in both the tangible and intangibleworld. Fasting,
however literal, was also a metaphorfor the pleasurable,life-giving
restraint that led to success in industry, only its disciplines were
deliciously erotic and its outcome the perception of ultimate power.
The capacity to fast successfully, to purify and deodorize the body in
preparationfor a lengthy and robust life, distinguished not only the
clean from the dirty or the refined gentlemanfrom the instinct-driven
primitive but the virile from the effeminate, the fearless from the
fragile, the stalwartfrom the weaklings on all sides.
Living on Air: Religion and the "ConquestFast"
Though the impulses of bodily celebrationand erasure,enchantment

and repulsion,were intertwinedin all of the fasting texts exploredhere,
some fasters, especially the more fervent mind-cure adherents, did
expound a more dualistic, anti-materialistphilosophy than Macfadden
or Pearson. Fasting healed, accordingto this view, because it enabled
the spiritto soar above and beyond the body, free from the animalistic,
even grotesque indignity of eating. Edward Earle Purinton (1878-
1945), the widely read authorof such success manualsas The Triumph
of the Man Who Acts, Efficient Living, and Personal Efficiency in
Business, voiced this dualism in his Philosophy of Fasting (1906):
There is no enduring power save transcendenceof soul. Money tarnishes,

fame withers,friendshipwanes, beautyfades, success palls and worlds end in
dust. But to the soul that can leave the mortal when it chooses, sustaining
itself on air, water, light, faith and love-there are no limitations, no
disappointments,no doubts, no fears, no disabilities, no misunderstandings,
no tremorswhatsoever.53
For the soul to endureon etherealthings, the body would have to do the
same, and writers like Purintonurged fasting not predominantlyfor
physical health or beauty (at least not as means in themselves) but for
spiritual well-being, empowerment, and virtue, among other things.
This insistence on abstinence as the key to attainingall one's desires
signaled a powerful aversion, not so much to the body qua material
substance as to the vulgar limitations of corporeality, its pathetic
vulnerabilityand untrustworthiness,its conflated needs and desires. In
that sense, the visionary dream of these fasters was to discover the
means by which they could go withouteating altogether,living only, as
Purintonhad it, on "air,water,light, faith and love."
Charles Haskell himself manifested that hope when, in one of his
published letters to J. Austin Shaw during the latter's forty-five-day
fast, he expressed his intention to visit Mollie Fancher, the young
Brooklyn woman whose extended fasting (which turned out to be
fraudulent)was widely renowned."She is certainlya very remarkable
person, and she shows how little food one can subsist upon," wrote
Haskell wistfully. "If she could be in the open air where she could
breathein more of the tonic of life from the atmosphere,I think she
would live all right without even the fruit-juice."54 After Shaw (fig. 6)
had finally brokenhis fast, Haskellurgedhim to remainvigilant against
falling again into excess. "See how little you need to eat in order to
keep yourself in equilibriumand at your normalweight. If it is but one
ounce a day, then let it be that, and if it takes two ounces or more, let it
be whateveryou need. Every ounce of earthmatterthatyou accumulate
in your body detracts from your strength."55Fasting was indeed a
sacredactivity,because it purifiedthe "DivineTemple"and established
the spirit's ascendancyover the insubordinatebody.56
New Thought advocates, patently disenchanted with what they
perceivedto be an overly routinized,this-worldlyProtestantism,craved
Fig. 6. J. Austin Shaw, "Photograph taken on the 40thday of his 45-day fast, May
19th,1905," Shaw, The Best Thing in the World, facing 52.
the magic and mysticism of an older faith. Obsessed with transcending

the drearinessof the body, they longed to live on air. The publisher's
introduction to Wattles' Health ThroughNew Thought and Fasting
invoked as a model for readersthe heroic figure of Atlas, "standingon
air,living on air and lifting the earth."The writerlooked forwardto the
day when the body would store enough materialnot only for a forty,
fifty, or sixty-day fast but for "eternal famine," a blessed state of
perennial abstinence.57Wattleshimself argued that human powers of
strengthwere not drawnfrom food at all; instead,"food is to the human
body what the soil is to a plant-merely raw material;tissue elements,
to be built into the organism,but not in any sense a sourceof life." Vital
power, the life force that sustaineda person'senergy,was received into
the body during sleep via the brain;it had literally nothing to do with
what one ate. The belief that life had any materialbasis was a well-
worn fallacy, sighed Wattles.
We are spiritualbeings; we get our life in the GreatSilence, out of which we

came. We shall live after we cease to eat, for we do not live by eating now;
our physical bodies are kept up by a mysteriouspower[,] which comes to us
while we are unconscious. God is Spirit;and He giveth life to all.
Best of all, since vital power did not come from food, fasting-and
living daily on as little nutrimentas possible-could open the door to
the possibility not only of spiritualimmortalitybut as well of eternal
physical immortality,the theme of Wattles'spenultimatechapter.58
This de-corporealizedphilosophy of fasting seems a pointed repu-
diation of the versions espoused by other fasting masters,whose goals
for abstinencewere franklycarnal-muscular strengthfor the likes of
Macfadden and voluptuous experience for such as Pearson and
Carrington.Indeed, this conflict over "spirit"or mind versus "matter"
or body was one in which Americans more generally were deeply
embroiled around the turn of the century, a debate in which clear
definitions of manliness and womanliness were supremelyat stake.As
Beryl Satter has persuasively argued, this broad cultural debate,
engaged by New Thought authorsno less than social theorists, femi-
nists, reformers,and physicians, centeredon the contested meaning of
desire. The question at hand was whether "desire"itself-for wealth,
pleasure, materiality,power, or simply individual autonomy-was to
be denied, as befitted the austerenorms of late Victorianpropriety,or
celebrated, suiting the dynamic ideal appropriatefor a progressive,
consumer-orientedcivilization.59For New Thoughtwriterslike Haskell
and Wattleswho wrestled with this dilemma, fasting could be utilized
as a check against excess, a hopeful summons to the realizationthat
matter was utterly insignificant and desire, therefore,patently sense-
less. The path to heaven was paved not with corruptdesire but with
virtuousrenunciation.
At the same time, however,the discourseof fasting was lithe enough
to be enlisted for antithetical ends, even by New Thought authors
themselves. Julia Seton, one of the occasional female fasting writers,
procuredfasting once again as a tool for obtainingone's desires, going
so far as to posit a literal distinctionbetween the "food body" and the
"life body" while noting that abstinencefrom food opened the way for
a person to "breakup all his old flesh tractsand lay the foundationfor
a new body."To one dismayed by the burdenof his or her own flesh,
Seton's vision was appealingindeed. In The Short Cut-Regeneration
ThroughFasting (1929), Seton wrote:
All old age is in the food body. The life body is young, fresh, unwrinkled,not
fat or flabby nor skinny, but just whole. When one gets his misfit food body
out of the way by fasting, breathingand exercise, he gives the life cells a
chance to make him a new flesh suit, and this flesh suit can be of any type
that he himself decides.
In other words, "If he does not like his face he can change it; if he does
not like his form he can give himself a new one just as easily as he can
order a new suit of clothes."60
Extended abstinence, according to Seton, erased the tell-tale signs
thatmental and physical stress had imprintedupon the body's features.
It also proved that the body's willful, petulant greed for food, mani-
fested as much in double chins and wrinkles as in hunger pangs and
stomach growls, could be disciplined and the spirit freed for higher
work. Desire, then, was ambivalent:to want food was, for Seton as for
earlierNew Thoughtwriters,a source of shame;while to want a whole
new body was perfectly appropriateand deserving of fulfillment.Even
more, the fat-free, flab-free "whole" body was the body truly fit for
spiritualends-"misfit" bodies merely languished on the sidelines. In
Seton's view, as in those of Macfaddenand Carringtonin distinctways,
the flesh should be an index of what lived beneathit, the authenticself
within (fig. 7).
For those occupying more obstreperousbodies, whose beast-like
voracity seemed to know no bounds, authorsoffered anotherkind of
comfort. The more rebellious the carnal substance, after all, the more
the spiritualself could revel in his or her mastery over this chastened
savage, a mastery that extended far beyond the disciplined self. More
importantly,this phraseologyof forcefuldominanceseized desirelessness
from late Victorianfemininity,realigningit with the cause of sovereign,
masculine power. Purinton,for instance, labeled his special mode of
fasting the "ConquestFast,"describingit as "a combinationof the early
ChurchFast with the modem TherapeuticFast." The benefits of this
Conquest Fast were multiple: it would sever one's "thralldom"to
useless things and people, reveal the "insignificance of the brain,"
refine one's faculties of reason, and "perpetuatethe joy of living."
Above all, however,Purintonnoted thatthe ConquestFast had revealed
to him his "oneness with Omnipotence."
fMter
S<venwdasFast.
Fig. 7. Bernarr MacFadden, "Showing how the face wastes during a fast,"
Fasting-Hydropathy-Exercise, 72.
The power releasedto Purinton,and availableto those who followed

his method, was extraordinary:
Ever since the Fast, the goal has grown clearer,and the avenues to it broader.
At no single time have therebeen less than six possibilities awaitingme; any
one of which would have led ultimatelyto the object of desire. Comparethis
with the average man's anxiety in "getting a job," his trepidationin holding
it, his despairat losing it. I own any "job"I want anywhere.But I don't want
it-unless throughit I may serve the ends of Truth.Then it comes to me-I
need never beg for it. . . . Any soul thus inspired commands whatever
situationit chooses.61
Even as he concluded this chapter, Purinton wrote that he was

beginning anotherFast (always capitalized),and though his brain was
clouded and his body irritated,befitting the early days of any Fast, his
heartwas light and his soul "radiantlyhappy.""Alreadyangels' voices
woo me from a distance. Symphoniesno ear can sense, visions no eye
can bear, eternitiesof glory no mortalcan attain;a rapturousblending
with the Spirit Source of worlds and starsand solar systems; is not this
worth more than a morsel of food on the tip of the tongue?"62
As some of these ecstatic musings have alreadysuggested, Purinton
was not so wooed by angels' voices as to shunmore terrestrialpursuits.
Indeed, even as he continuedto rhapsodizeabout both regularfasting
and spiritualpursuits in later published writings, Purinton'spractical

side soon emergedforcefully into view. It was apparentlynot long after
first publishingPhilosophy of Fasting in 1906 that he enteredbusiness
and redirectedhis time to the furtheranceof "efficiency,"that dogma
that so captivatedAmerican engineers, businessmen, workers, scien-
tists, and housewives during the 1910s. Following the industrial
managementprogramdevised by FrederickWinslow Taylor,efficiency
societies sprang up in places like New York, promoting not only
increased labor productivity and business profits but also personal
efficiency amongindividualsseeking success andhappiness.63Purinton
himself was actively involved in proclaimingwhat Samuel Hays would
later call the "gospel of efficiency,"becoming directorof the Indepen-
dent Efficiency Service, dean of the American Efficiency Foundation,
and a member of the governing board of the National Efficiency
Society even as he penned numerous manuals for the aspiring white
collar workers of the middle class. His Philosophy of Fasting was
reprintedin 1915, while one of his later publications,the seven-lesson
Purinton Foundation Course in Personal Efficiency (1918), invoked
similar themes as it implored readersto follow their naturalinstincts
and eat only according to "true hunger," skipping meals whenever
possible.64
Wattles followed an analogous career path, writing a variety of
success manualswith titles like The Science of GettingRich (1910) and
The Science of Being Great (1911), editions of which have been
translatedinto French and Spanish and reissued into the 1990s. Both
Purintonand Wattlesblended themes of sacrificial austerity,business
efficiency, and the pleasures of consumer-orientedsuccess, whose
rapprochementwas effected not simply via bodily metaphorsbut, more
importantly,by means of bodily practices that promised omnipotent
control over need as well as desire. However much desire may have
been celebratedduring this period, particularlyby those who viewed
desire in male terms as the fuel for competition and economic
prosperity, its disciples knew all too well its sinister potential if
releasedunchecked.Restraintneeded to be made appealing,something
that was not simply a means to an end (prosperity)but as exquisitely
interchangeablewith that end itself. The careers of Purinton and
Wattles,among otherfasterswritingin the same vein, well display how
the practice of fasting resonatedwith the self-help literaturethat was
supportedby and, in turn, fortified market capitalism, even among
those not likely to reapits grandestfruits.Indeed,because fasting could

incorporatethe themes of excess and renunciationso exhaustively,the
contradictionssubsumedby advocates into a kind of glorified synthe-
sis, the ideology of fasting could performcrucially importantwork in
service to that marketsystem.
Not all were so comfortablewith this easy mix of soul soaring and
commerce, however, ratherconnecting abstinenceto a grandersocial
vision. Upton Sinclair(1878-1968), the socialist writerwho became an
ardentfaster underthe care of Macfadden,wrote a promotionalarticle
for Cosmopolitan in 1910 and expanded it into a book, The Fasting
Cure, the following year. Sinclair had already displayed a more than
ordinaryinterestin Americaneating practicesin The Jungle (1906), an
expose of the meat packingindustryand the wage slavery system under
which laborers were forced to live. Convinced that there was an
importantconnection between what people ate and how liberatedthey
were, Sinclair saw fasting as radically progressive, a practice that
would bring about a "new state of being, a new potentialityof life; a
sense of lightness and cleanness and joyfulness" for all citizens and
thereby transform American society as a whole. As literary critic
William Bloodworthhas noted, Sinclairviewed dietaryexcess in much
the same way that he interpreted the current labor system, both
exhibiting a fundamentaldenial of social parity and equality that only
fasting and socialism could rectify. Yet Sinclair's dedication to this
profoundlynarcissistictechnique--displayed in wearisomeaccountsof
his own enema-filled fasts-more properly illustrates a radically
collectivist impulse turninginwardand collapsing on itself, ultimately
buttressingratherthan opposing emergenttherapiesof the self.65
The gospel of fasting was a religion of masculine omnipotence,one
in which women could (and did) participatebut which was promoted
and marketedmost assiduouslyby men. The New Thoughtcurrentsof
the day cloaked it in the sacredgarbof mystical transcendencewithout
undermining its profoundly materialist ends. Like its cousin, the
doctrine of scientifically managed efficiency, the practice of fasting
aimed at achieving peak performance while expending as few re-
sources as possible-hoping all along thatone could eventuallylearnto
live on air and thus stave off waste (and death) forever. Revealingly,
more than a few fasting advocates actually died afterembarkingon an
extended fast to cure an illness, including that most masculine of all
advocates, Macfadden.Fasting's ultimateenticement,eternallife, may
have remainedunrealized,but its intermediatepleasures, from weight

loss and purificationto the felt experiences of strength,control, and
transcendence,live on for many hopeful seekers of regeneration,men
and women alike.
However radical these early twentieth-centuryfasting reformers

believed themselves to be-however passionately they sought to cut
throughthe drearymiasma of ill healththat surroundedthem and forge
a new.path toward healing and rebirth attainableby all-they were
ultimately and decisively defeated by their own medium. Anxieties
over invasive poisons-the constant fear of disease and autointoxica-
tion-turned the body into a literal fortress against all impuritiesthat
might penetrate its borders, compelling the faster to obsessively
regulatethe gaseous and materialsubstancespassing in or out of every
orifice, to discipline the body at the expense of all other pursuits.
Fasting was solitary and self-absorbing, not communal. Yet those
fasting openly longed for a communionof the likeminded,convertsand
spectatorswho would dignify theirabstinenceinto a religious calling or
a work of art;hence we find the extensively publishedcorrespondence,
the habitualphotographsof fasting bodies, the dramaticautobiographi-
cal accounts, the widespread and generally favorable newspaper re-
ports. Like Kafka's hunger artist,defeated by viewers' indifferenceto
his sacrifice, the eventual absence of sympathetic onlookers would
reduce fasting once again to pathology-and a feminized one at that-
as anorexia nervosa moved ever more insistently into the public
spotlight, erasing public memory of the bygone apostles of absti-
nence.66But for a few brief years, the virile masters of fasting, along
with their followers, could abstainfrom food in the solemn belief that
they did so as a sacrifice for humankind'ssalvation.
By the early decades of the twentiethcentury,Anglo-Americandiet
reformershad achieved favorable success in their quest to demonize
flab andpreachbrawnas necessaryto economic and spiritualsalvation.
It was a crusade,moreover,in which food refusalplayed a key role, not
simply among troubled (or fame-seeking) women but among highly
enterprisingmiddle-class men. Their writings signaled that the older
devotional context for abstemiouseating, in which fasting was under-
taken as a godly discipline of repentance,had metamorphosedinto a
shrillergospel of masculine self-masteryand force. Perfection,purifi-

cation, and power had always been part of fasting's promise to
believers, but they were retailored by the fasting masters of the
Progressive Era. These men culled fresh meaning out of texts ranging
from scriptureto hygienic literature,inspired to do so by their own
disgust and dismay at the degradationsof modernurbanlife thatturned
men into milksops and healthybodies into mere repositoriesof disease
and sludge. Fasting advocates not only believed in the attainmentof
robust, immaculate fitness but saw it as their mission to help others
achieve it; deeply preoccupiedwith the body's waste productsand with
invasion from without, they judged abstinencethe plain solution. The
emptied stomach, chaste in its barrenness,was the receptacle from
which the heart's desires could be satisfied-the key to fulfillment
within. Laterfasters, from Jack LaLanneto Allan Cott to Jay Kordich
("the Juiceman" of infomercial fame) would imagine no less and
perhaps fantasize even more. Hopeful dreams of virility, potency,
longevity, success, control, and triumph forcefully converged in the
masculinized practice of food refusal. Purged, regulated, and self-
contained, he who fasted would reap extraordinary fortune.
NOTES
The authorwould like to thankGail Bederman,Tom Bremer,CynthiaEller, David D.

Hall, Melani McAlister,RobertNye, PatrickRael, Beryl Satter,Leigh Schmidt,the two
anonymousreviewers for American Quarterly,participantsin the MaterialHistory of
AmericanReligion Project,and the membersof the Religion and Cultureworkshopat
PrincetonUniversity for insightful feedback on earlier versions of this article.
1. Classic historical treatmentsof Christianfasting include Rudolph Arsbesmann,

"Fastingand Prophecyin Pagan and ChristianAntiquity,"Traditio7 (1949-1951): 1-
71; A. J. Maclean, "Fasting (Christian),"Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed.
JamesHastings,et al., 13 vols. (Edinburgh:T. & T. Clark, 1908-1926), vol. 5: 765-71;
and William DeLoss Love, The Fast and ThanksgivingDays of New England (Boston
and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1895). More recent studies that have
influenced this synopsis are Teresa M. Shaw, The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and
Sexuality in Early Christianity(Minneapolis, Minn.: FortressPress, 1998); Caroline
Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to
Medieval Women(Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of CaliforniaPress, 1987); and Charles E.
Hambrick-Stowe,The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seven-
teenth-CenturyNew England (ChapelHill, N.C.: Univ. of NorthCarolinaPress, 1982).
See also Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985);
VeronikaGrimm,From Feasting to Fasting, the Evolution of a Sin: Attitudesto Food

in Late Antiquity(London:Routledge, 1996); and Walter Vandereyckenand Ron van
Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation(New
York: New York Univ. Press, 1994 [published in Germany as Hungerkiinstler,
Fastenwunder,Magersucht:eine Kulturgeschichteder Ess-stiirungen,1990]). Luther
cited in WhatLutherSays: An Anthology, 3 vols., comp. Ewald M. Plass (St. Louis,
Mo.: Concordia, 1959), vol. 1: 506.
2. Joan Jacobs Brumberg,Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia as a Modern
Disease (Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1988); these cases are also given
extensive attentionin Vandereyckenand van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic
Girls.
3. See n. 1 and below n. 4. Appropriationsof this historical narrative(often in
exaggerated form) are rife in the clinical literatureon this subject; see for instance,
Jules R. Bemporad,"Self-StarvationThroughthe Ages: Reflections on the Pre-History
of AnorexiaNervosa,"InternationalJournal of Eating Disorders 19 (Apr. 1996); 217-
37. A differentgenre of scholarship,classically representedin William DeLoss Love's
Fast and ThanksgivingDays of New England and taken up in several recent doctoral
dissertations,does not focus on actual fasting practicesper se so much as the public
appointmentof fast days by ecclesiastical and civil authorities.See Love, Fast and
ThanksgivingDays; RichardJoseph Janet,"The Decline of GeneralFasts in Victorian
England, 1832-1857," (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Notre Dame, 1984); James Eric Hazell,
"Triumphof Humility: The Puritan Fast Day, 1570-1740," (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of
Maryland,1997). Hazell's is the most useful for exploring actual practicesof fasting.
4. Vandereyckenand van Deth, From Fasting Saints to AnorexicGirls. See also, for
instance, RobertaPollack Seid, Never Too Thin: Why WomenAre At War With Their
Bodies (New York:PrenticeHall, 1989); and Becky W. Thompson,A Hunger So Wide
and So Deep: AmericanWomenSpeak Out on Eating Problems (Minneapolis,Minn.:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994). Susan Bordo, though more attentive to men's
experience, has also tended to divide bodily preoccupationsalong genderedlines, with
women more likely (at least until recently) to be obsessed with diet; see especially
UnbearableWeight:Feminism,WesternCulture,and the Body (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ.
of CaliforniaPress, 1993). (Bordo's most recent work on "the male body" does not
satisfactorilychallenge thatdivision; see Susan Bordo, TheMale Body: A New Look at
Men in Public and in Private [New York: Farrar,Strausand Giroux, 1999].) Peter N.
Steams claims to avoid an overdeterminedinterpretationof abstinence as female
pathology, yet he argues that the decline of religious fasting in the nineteenthcentury
was especially significant for women, noting: "New reportsof anorexia nervosa may
indeed have reflected the decline of this more traditionaloutlet for certainpersonality
types." Steams also unilaterallyasserts that the concern for men "centeredon muscle
developmentratherthanappetitecontrol,"when, in fact, the reversewas often the case.
In many other instances, like Macfadden's programfor masculinity, muscle develop-
ment and appetite control went hand in hand. See Steams, Fat History: Bodies and
Beauty in the Modern West (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997), 8, 17. Hillel
Schwartz'sgrandretelling of Americanpreoccupationswith slimness and food refusal
since the nineteenth century does make the point that men who have dieted have
presented it as a "muscular,willful act." Schwartz argues that, for men, dieting has
been "a romance,an unburdening,a freeing up, a moral athleticism,"but he does not
analyze the link between fasting and masculinity or pay much attentionto the male
fasting adeptsof the early twentiethcentury.See Schwartz,Never Satisfied:A Cultural
History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 17.
5. Only two women wrote similar treatises on fasting: Linda Burfield Hazzard, a
physician, and Julia Seton, an authorof many New Thoughtand occultist books. See
Hazzard, Fasting For the Cure of Disease (Seattle, Wash.: Harrison Publishing
Company, 1908); and Seton, TheShortCut--RegenerationThroughFasting (Chicago:
Occult Publishing Company, 1928). (New Thought writer and publisher Elizabeth
Towne also advocatedfasting in some of her writings, such as Practical Methodsfor
Self-Development:Spiritual-Mental-Physical [Holyoke,Mass.:ElizabethTowne, 1904];
but she did not focus on the on the practice as intently as Hazzardand Seton.) While
Hazzard's book was often cited as authoritativeby her male counterparts,especially
Macfadden,her careerwas blottedby the 1912 death of a fasting patientat her Seattle
sanitoriumand Hazzard'ssubsequenttwo-yearprison sentence.This series of events is
describedin William R. Hunt,Body Love: TheAmazingCareer of BernarrMacfadden
(Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State Univ. PopularPress, 1989), 61-63.
6. Brumbergtraces out this history;see her Fasting Girls, 101-25. She notes thatup
through the 1930s, American doctors used the terms "hysterical anorexia" and
"anorexianervosa"almost interchangeably(110).
7. The only serious challenge to this view has come from treatments of male
bodybuildingand other sportsin which the primarygoal is to attainbodily strengthand
muscularity.See, for instance, Harvey Green, Fit for America:Health, Fitness, Sport,
and American Society (New York: Pantheon, 1986); Elliot J. Gorn, The Manly Art:
Bare-KnucklePrize Fighting in America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986);
Donald J. Mrozek,Sportand AmericanMentality,1880-1910 (Knoxville, Tenn.:Univ.
of Tennessee Press, 1983); ElizabethH. Pleck andJosephH. Pleck, eds., TheAmerican
Man (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,1980), 24-25; and E. Anthony Rotundo,
American Manhood: Transformationsin Masculinity from the Revolution to the
ModernEra (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 222-46. These studies are valuable for
conveying middle-class men's bodily preoccupations,yet by examining only external
practices while neglecting ingestive and digestive ones their interpretiveframework
remains incomplete.
8. The sex ratio of this literature'sreadership,and that of ordinarypractitioners,is
much less clear. CharlesHaskellprintedover a hundredpages of lettersandtestimonies
thathe had allegedly received from convertsto fasting. If his numbersare proportional,
many more men thanwomen were drawnto the gospel of fasting-though therewas no
shortageof women in his pages either (CharlesHaskell, Perfect Health: How to Get It
and How to Keep It, By One WhoHas It [Norwich, Conn.: CharlesC. Haskell, 1901],
106-209). The reception of these texts-and of the practice of fasting more gener-
ally-is difficult to grasp, and this essay concerns itself more with purveyors than
consumersof the message.
9. Brumberg,Fasting Girls. Schwartz has argued, to the contrary, that modern
dieting is itself a central ritual in what has become the predominantreligion of late
twentieth-centuryAmerica: the worship of the body beautiful, lean, and physically
"fit." See Schwartz, Never Satisfied. For a feminist theological alternative to the
secularizationnarrativeof Americandiet history, see Michelle MaryLelwica, Starving
for Salvation: The SpiritualDimensions of Eating ProblemsAmongAmericanWomen
and Girls (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).
10. This episode of male-dominatedfasting can serve to furtherdevelop the narrative
of American health reform, whose best historians, notably James C. Whorton and
Stephen Nissenbaum, end their accounts in the nineteenth century and neglect to
account for the hygienists' vital and complex role in the ongoing construction of
gender. See Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health
Reformers(Princeton,N.J.: PrincetonUniv. Press, 1982); Nissenbaum,Sex, Diet, and
Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport,

Conn.:GreenwoodPress, 1980); see also JaymeA. Sokolow, Eros and Modernization:
Sylvester Graham,Health Reform,and the Origins of VictorianSexuality in America
(Rutherford,N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1983); and Jane B. Donegan,
"HydropathicHighway to Health": Womenand Water-Curein AntebellumAmerican
(New York:GreenwoodPress, 1986). In fact, Whorton'sfinal chapteris on twentieth-
century health reform, but it is a sketchy and not very illuminatingdiscussion. Most
otherbooks on twentieth-centuryhealth reformersare polemical in nature.While such
sources offer useful informationand analysis, they are not comprehensive,nor do they
attempta cogent historicalargument.
Meanwhile, histories of American diet literaturethat survey the twentieth-century
landscapehave all but erased some of the most colorful and influentialfigures of the
time, like Charles Haskell, Edward Earle Purinton,and HerewardCarrington;these
reformersturn up mostly as caricaturesin polemics against health fads and quackery,
where their roles in American history have been distorted and diminished; see, for
instance, ArthurJ. Cramp,Nostrums and Quackeryand Pseudo-Medicine (Chicago:
American Medical Association, 1912-1936); Morris Fishbein, The Medical Follies
(New York:Boni & Liveright, 1925); MartinGardner,Fads and Fallacies in the Name
of Science (New York: Dover Publications, 1957); Ronald M. Deutsch, The Nuts
Among the Berries (1961; New York: Ballantine, 1967); James Harvey Young, The
Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackeryin Twentieth-Century America
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967); Gerald Carson, Cornflake Crusade
(New York: Arno Press, 1976); and Jack Raso, Mystical Diets: Paranormal,Spiritual,
and Occult Nutrition Practices (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993). Bernarr
Macfaddenhas received some serious attentionfrom historians;see Hunt,Body Love;
RobertErnst, Weaknessis a Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden(Syracuse, N.Y.:
SyracuseUniv. Press, 1991);and,most recently,Lisa Grunberger,"BernarrMacfadden's
Physical Culture: Muscles, Morals and the Millennium," (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of
Chicago, 1997).
11. The literatureon ideals of manliness and masculinityduringthe Gilded Age and
Progressive Era is quite extensive and of variable quality. Some of the best recent
treatmentsof this topic are Gail Bederman,Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural
History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1993); Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, ed., Meanings For
Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1990); and Judy Hilkey, Character is Capital: Success Manuals and
Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North CarolinaPress,
1997). See also the authors'introduction,"Historiansand the Politics of Masculinity,"
in Michael Roperand JohnTosh, ed. ManfulAssertions:Masculinitiesin Britain Since
1800 (London:Routledge, 1991), 1-24. Beryl Satterhas recently arguedthat anxieties
over masculinity in this era need to be contextualized within the period's pervasive
culturaldebates about American progress, debates that pitted (Anglo-Saxon) "male"
desire against "female"virtue as the key. The contest between conspicuous consump-
tion on the one hand and austererestrainton the other was thus deeply gendered and
carriedvast implicationsfor changingnotions of masculinityas well as femininity. See
Satter,Each Minda Kingdom:AmericanWomen,Sexual Purity, and the New Thought
Movement,1875-1920 (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of CaliforniaPress, 1999), esp. 10-13
and 21-56.
12. Dewey, The TrueScience of Living: TheNew Gospel of Health (1895; Norwich,
Conn.: CharlesHaskell and Son, 1899), 242.
13. Dewey, True Science of Living, 244. Alcott had similarly noted that Sunday
dinners were "immoral, unchristian, and-to coin a term-unrepublican" (Alcott,
"SundayDinners," The Moral Reformerand Teacher on the Human Constitution1 [
Jan. 1835], 23; cited in RobertH. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling:AmericanReform and
the Religious Imagination [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994], 171).
14. Dewey, True Science of Living, 306, 309.
15. Ibid., 241, 243.
16. Ibid., 213. (Italics in original.)
17. Dewey, The No-BreakfastPlan and The Fasting Cure (Meadville, Pa.: pub. by
the author,1900), 122-23. Dewey took this accountfrom the New YorkPress of 6 June
1899.
18. Ibid., 120.
19. Ibid., 157.
20. Dewey, True Science of Living, 215, 214,
21. Ibid., 47, 52, e.g.
22. Pentecost, "Introduction,"True Science of Living, 4.
23. Dewey's text was by no means the first popular medical text to advocate
abstemious eating, of course; George Cheyne had done so over a century and a half
before, and he had been followed by physicians and health reformerssuch as William
Lambe,Sylvester Graham,William Alcott, and Dio Lewis. Lewis, a physician inspired
by Cheyne, presentedmany of the teachingsthat Dewey would make so popular,such
as the idea of two meals per day (Lewis, however, believed that one should abolish
supperratherthan breakfast).He lamentedthe great deeds and triumphsthat had been
foreverlost to indigestion,dyspepsia,lethargy,anddiseasebroughton by gourmandizing,
and he argued that the entire future of Christianitydepended on the abolition of
gluttony. "Christianitycan make but little progress under the present system of
cookery,"he sighed. "Dyspepsiais a cloud so dense that it shuts out the very light of
heaven" (Lewis, Our Digestion, or, My Jolly Friend's Secret [Philadelphia, Pa.:
George Maclean & Co., 1874], 191, 360-61).
24. Haskell, Perfect Health, 12, 79.
25. Ibid., 32, 33, 34, 40.
26. Ibid., 100 (italics in original). The biblical quote is from 1 Corinthians9:27.
27. Macfaddenand Felix Oswald, Fasting-Hydropathy--Exercise: Nature's Won-
derfulRemediesfor the Cure of all Chronic and Acute Diseases (New York: Physical
CulturePublishing Co., 1900). Like other of Macfadden's books in the years of his
early productivity,he justified his theories by sharingauthorshipwith a physician, in
this case Oswald. The writing and narrativevoice, here and elsewhere, however, were
solely Macfadden's.
28. Macfadden and Oswald, Fasting-Hydropathy-Exercise, 11. The struggle
between natureand civilization was of enormous interest to Macfadden.His fascina-
tion with photographic images of "primitives" such as Africans and Asians is
especially evident in latereditions of the Encyclopediaof Health and Physical Culture,
8 vols. (New York: Macfadden Book Company, 1940), esp. vol. 5: "Health and
Personality,"1926-32. This volume was originallypublishedas Macfadden'sEncyclo-
pedia of Physical Culture:A WorkOf Reference,Providing CompleteInstructionsFor
The Cure Of All Diseases Through Physcultopathy, With General Information On
Natural Methods Of Health-BuildingAnd A Description Of the AnatomyAnd Physiol-
ogy Of The Human Body (New York: Physical CulturePublishing Company, 1912),
with numerousrevised editions.
29. Macfaddenand Oswald, Fasting--Hydropathy-Exercise, 11, 12.
30. Ibid., 53. Superb Virility of Manhood was the title of Macfadden's later work
(1904), but the concern for masculinity was everywhere apparentin his writing.
31. Macfaddenand Oswald, Fasting-Hydrotherapy-Exercise, 62, 64.
32. Macfadden,ed., Encyclopediaof Health and Physical Culture,vol. 1: "Physiol-
ogy and Hygiene," 146.
33. Stories of "fasting girls" have been recountedin numeroussources. Brumberg
relates them in Fasting Girls, 41-100; see also Schwartz,Never Satisfied, 115-19 and
passim. Jane Shaw has recently explicated the story of MarthaTaylor in terms of
Enlightenmentdebatesover religious experience;see Shaw, "ReligiousExperienceand
the Formationof the Early EnlightenmentSelf," in Roy Porter,ed., Rewritingthe Self:
Histories From the Renaissance to the Present (London:Routledge, 1997), 61-71.
34. Macfadden,Superb Virilityof Manhood: Giving the Causes and Simple Home
Methods of Curing the Weaknessesof Men (New York: Physical CulturePublishing
Co., 1904), Macfadden's Encyclopedia of Physical Culture (New York: Physical
CulturePublishingCo., 1911-1912), Fasting For Health: A CompleteGuide On How,
WhenAnd Whyto Use The Fasting Culture (New York: MacfaddenBook Company,
1923).
35. Wattles, Health ThroughNew Thoughtand Fasting (Holyoke, Mass.: Elizabeth
Towne, 1907), 56. Wattles was quoting James's 1907 essay, "The Energies of Man,"
originally the PresidentialAddress delivered to the American Philosophical Associa-
tion and reprintedin the Philosophical Review 16 (Jan. 1907), and underthe title "The
Powers of Men,"AmericanMagazine 64 (Oct. 1907). In this essay James enthusiasti-
cally described the experience of a friend with "Hatha Yoga," in which, through
fasting, breathing exercises, and "posture-gymnastics,"the man seemed to have
"succeeded in waking up deeper and deeper levels of will and moral and intellectual
power in himself, and to have escaped from a decidedly menacing brain-conditionof
the 'circular' type, from which he had suffered for years." James even mentioned
EdwardHookerDewey's no-breakfastplan and the fasting disciples using this "ascetic
idea" who achieved success. The American Magazine version of James's essay is
reprintedin JohnJ. McDermott,ed., The Writingsof WilliamJames: A Comprehensive
Edition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), 671-83, quotes 679 and 680.
James's essay was also frequentlyused-and misused-by enthusiastsof scientific
managementduringthe ProgressiveEra as a clear statementof the populardoctrineof
"efficiency"; see Samuel Haber,Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Managementin the
Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964), 57-58.
36. Eales, Healthology (London:L.N. Fowler & Co., 1907), 200.
37. The term is from Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and
Imprisonment(Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1993), 14.
38. Pearson,Fasting and Man's Correct Diet (Chicago: pub. by the author, 1921),
16, 18.
39. Pearson, Fasting, 44, 45, 47. In the second quote, Pearson directly quotes
Fletcher, The A.B.Z. of Our Own Nutrition(New York: Stokes, 1903), 11.
40. The modernhistory of excrementalobsessions is recountedquite thoroughlyin
James C. Wharton,Inner Hygiene: Constipationand the Pursuit of Health in Modern
Society (New York:OxfordUniv. Press, 2000). Wharton'swonderfullydroll book was
published after the completion of this article.
41. Quoted in "Sewers and WastewaterTreatment,"ch. 12 of History of Public
Works in the United States, 1776-1976, ed. Ellis L. Armstrong(Chicago: American
Public Works Association, 1976), 401.
42. Other useful sources on the American history of urban sanitation and sewage
disposal include Suellen M. Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The AmericanPursuit of Cleanliness
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), esp. 62-72; James H. Cassedy, "The
FlamboyantColonel Waring:An AnticontagionistHolds the American Stage in the
Age of Pasteurand Koch,"in Sicknessand Health in America:Readings in the History
of Medicine and Public Health, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers
(Madison, Wisc.: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 305-12; Sewering the Cities (New
York: Amo Press, repr. 1977); Henry I. Bowditch, Public Hygiene in America (1877;
New York: Arno Press, repr., 1972); Lawrence Wright, Clean and Decent: The
Fascinating History of the Bathroomand the WaterCloset (New York: Viking Press,
1960); and Rudolph Hering, "Sewage and Solid Refuse Removal," in Mazyck P.
Ravenel, ed., A Half Centuryof Public Health (New York: American Public Health
Association, 1921), 181-96. For the broaderhistory of public health,there is no better
startingpoint than George Rosen's classic History of Public Health (1958; Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), repr. with an up-to-dateand marvelously compre-
hensive historiographicalessay by ElizabethFee.
43. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social
Imagination,trans.MiriamL. Kochan(Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1986);
Peter Stallybrassand Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression(Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), esp. 139-40. See also Mary Douglas, Purity and
Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1966). T.J. JacksonLearshas noted the early twentieth-centuryobsession
with odor, attributingit (somewhatvaguely) to "thecoming of an urbansociety and the
increase in person-to-personcontact"; see Lears, Fables of Abundance:A Cultural
History of Advertisingin America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 171, et seq.
44. HerewardCarrington,Vitality,Fasting, and Nutrition(New York: RebmanCo.,
1908), 60. A mesmerizing, if cheeky, treatment of these entwined impulses of
fascinationand repulsion towardhumanwaste is Dan Sabbathand Mandel Hall, End
Product: The First Taboo (New York: Urizen Books, 1977).
45. Jamison, Intestinal Ills, 25-26; qtd. in Carrington, Vitality, Fasting, and
Nutrition,406.
46. Carrington,Vitality,407.
47. Carrington,Vitality,419, 63.
48. Macfadden,Encyclopedia of Health and Physical Culture,vol. 5: 1925, 1929-
30.
49. Macfadden,Encyclopedia of Health and Physical Culture,vol. 1: 401.
50. A most useful analysis of the various discourses of race and eugenic theory
popularduringthis period is MatthewFrye Jacobson, Whitenessof a Different Color:
European Immigrantsand the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniv.
Press, 1998), esp.75-90.
51. Sadler,Race Decadence: An Examinationof the Causes of Racial Degeneracy in
the United States (Chicago: A.C. McClurg& Co., 1922), 404-8, 205; Sadler's dietary
plan is summarizedon 186-88.
52. See Bederman,Manliness and Civilization,esp. 16-20.
53. Purinton,ThePhilosophy of Fasting: A Messagefor Sufferersand Sinners (New
York: Benedict Lust, 1906), 40.
54. Haskell, letterof 15 May 1905; repr.in Shaw, TheBest Thingin the World,Good
Health: How To Keep It For a HundredYears(Norwich, Conn.:CharlesC. Haskell &
Co., 1906), 94. The story of Mollie Fancher,the "BrooklynEnigma,"is recountedin
Brumberg,Fasting Girls, 77-91.
55. Haskell, letter of 25 May 1905; repr. in Shaw, Best Thing in the World, 103.
56. Haskell, letter of 27 May 1905; repr. in Ibid., 105.
57. Wattles,Health ThroughNew Thoughtand Fasting, 7, 8. As noted above (n. 5),
ElizabethTowne (Wattles's publisher)was one of the very few women who contrib-
uted to this genre of therapeuticfasting, however briefly. Notably, her own commen-
taryfocused on the male example of Gilman Low, a muscularshowmancelebratedfor
lifting one thousandpoundsone thousandtimes in a half-hourwhile living on less than
one full meal per day for eight weeks beforehand.
58. Wattles, Health, 15-16, 55. The penultimatechapteris entitled "New Light on
Immortality"(82-87).
59. Satter,Each Minda Kingdom,13-18 andpassim. Gail Bedermananticipatedthis
argumentin her discussion of the contest between the ideals of "manliness"and those
of "masculinity"in the 1890s; see Bederman,Manliness and Civilization,esp. 18-20.
60. Seton, The Short Cut, 14.
61. Purinton,Philosophy of Fasting, 69, 75-77, 84. Comparethis last passage with
Julia Seton on fasting: "Ourflesh is renewed through the renewing of our mind; we
find that the things we sought are seeking us and that, throughfasting, we have made
ourself [sic] a higher magnet to attractto us from out the universal the things we so
desired. We have 'tuned up the fine, strong instrumentsof our being to chord with our
dear hope' and suddenly, without strain or effort, we are face to face with our own"
(Short Cut, 33).
62. Purinton,Philosophy of Fasting, 85.
63. See Haber,Efficiencyand Uplift;Samuel P. Hays, Conservationand the Gospel
of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge,
Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1959); Daniel T. Rodgers, The WorkEthic in Industrial
America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), 50-57; Wayne A.
Wiegand, IrrepressibleReformer:A Biography of Melvil Dewey (Chicago: American
LibraryAssociation, 1996), 325-27; and, for the broadestcontext, Robert H. Wiebe,
The Search For Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
64. EdwardEarlePurinton,The PurintonFoundationCourse in Personal Efficiency
(New York: IndependentCorporation,1918), lesson seven, part II, 13-28.
65. Sinclair,TheFasting Cure (London:WilliamHeinemann,1911), 18; Bloodworth,
"FromTheJungle to The Fasting Cure:Upton Sinclairon AmericanFood,"Journal of
American Culture 2 (fall 1979): 444-53. The collapse of Sinclair's socialism into
narcissismevokes the wider breakdownof ProgressiveEraantimodernisminto modem
therapeuticculture;see T.J. JacksonLears,No Place of Grace: Antimodernismand the
Transformationof AmericanCulture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981).
66. For an interestingtreatmentof Franz Kafka's story "A Hunger Artist"(1922),
see Ellmann,Hunger Artists, esp. 65-67.

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Apostles of Abstinence: Fasting and Masculinity during the Progressive Era

Author(s): R. Marie Griffith

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BY THE TIMECHARLESCOURTNEYHASKELLPUBLISHEDHIS AMBITIOUSLY

AmericanQuarterly,Vol. 52, No. 4 (December2000) 2000 AmericanStudiesAssociation

Fasting'sdestiny as somatictherapycould hardlyhave been foreseen

Fasting Girls, have focused on a series of notoriouscases of prolonged

inspired an array of early twentieth-centuryphysical culturists and

The Kingdom of God Within and Without:Gospels of Fasting at the

Dewey's 1895 book, The TrueScience of Living, subtitled"TheNew

Even crime was a product of intemperatehabits that began in the

Of anotherfaster under his care, Dewey noted his increased capacity

Science of Living, written by the famed evangelist George Frederick

would make men hunger for greater and greaterbouts of abstinence,

catarrh,even cancer-this remedy would reap success. Most important

Edward Hooker Dewey and BernarrMacfadden, the field surgeon

who came round).33Even seeming exceptions, such as the monitored

The "Clean, Sweet, Healthy Body": Bodily Enchantmentsand

Macfadden would treat fasting in many other writings during the

Wattles (1860-1911), author of Health Through New Thought and

and particlethatexited its orifices, materialitywas at one and the same

Fasting advocates, similarly committed to ridding the world of this

typhoid, and other diseases had long spurredefforts toward sanitation

odorless excrement,ProgressiveEra fasting advocates took this obses-

then evacuations themselves could be renderedvirtually unnecessary!

advancedmental power, those with the good sense to recognize their

sought to rescue from the possessive clutches and tightly bounded

Living on Air: Religion and the "ConquestFast"

Though the impulses of bodily celebrationand erasure,enchantment

There is no enduring power save transcendenceof soul. Money tarnishes,

the magic and mysticism of an older faith. Obsessed with transcending

We are spiritualbeings; we get our life in the GreatSilence, out of which we

The power releasedto Purinton,and availableto those who followed

Even as he concluded this chapter, Purinton wrote that he was

and spiritualpursuits in later published writings, Purinton'spractical

those not likely to reapits grandestfruits.Indeed,because fasting could

have remainedunrealized,but its intermediatepleasures, from weight

However radical these early twentieth-centuryfasting reformers

shrillergospel of masculine self-masteryand force. Perfection,purifi-

The authorwould like to thankGail Bederman,Tom Bremer,CynthiaEller, David D.

1. Classic historical treatmentsof Christianfasting include Rudolph Arsbesmann,

VeronikaGrimm,From Feasting to Fasting, the Evolution of a Sin: Attitudesto Food

Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport,

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