Sylvester Graham - White Bread Makes You Lustful

Today, fad diets are all the rage with people making all sorts of wacky claims in their quest for a magic elixir for better health.  But back in the early nineteenth century people didn't give such things much thought; food was just food, at least until Sylvester hit the scene.

Sylvester was a Presbyterian minister who had taken the cloth because he was basically good at nothing else.  Like all ministers, Sylvester needed some kind of evil to preach against in order to get his congregation all riled up into a holy frenzy.  Unlike other ministers, Sylvester chose white bread as his devil.  At the time, white bread was a fairly new concept having only been recently invented.  Thought of as being better than traditional whole wheat bread, it was rapidly gaining dominance as the bread preferred by the genteel to shove into their mouth holes.  Sylvester wholeheartedly did not agree.  He believed that the good old whole wheat bread was healthier, which is scientifically correct, though not to the point that makes what happened next make any damn sense at all.  You see, claiming that white bread was just somewhat unhealthier than whole wheat bread doesn’t really make for all that exciting of a sermon, so Sylvester decided to spice it up a little.   

According to Sylvester’s rants from the pulpit, not only was white bread unhealthy, it was so unhealthy that it caused people to have excessive sexual desires, which every old timey person knew was definitely not good for you.  Even worse, all that bread inspired lust resulted in masturbation, which was the root cause of blindness, insanity, and early death.  Well, you can bet your ass this got those old timey people's attention, and so the first fad diet was born.  Sylvester, amazed by the power of his own sermon, of course did not take advantage of his new found fame and following.  Just kidding, he kicked the crazy up to 10.

Now if you're a minister who has started the first widely successful fad diet, what would you do?  If you didn't answer turn it into a cult, you just aren't thinking big enough.  Seeing his success with white bread, Sylvester doubled down in every way possible.  Not only was white bread unhealthy, but so was meat, spices of any kind, and alcohol.  These items had to cleared from the diet to avoid the evils of masturbation, which later grew to the evils of sex all together, which then became the evils of any excitement whatsoever.  People ate it up like it was wholesome white bread, and the followers of Sylvester’s diet shifted from annoying jerks to crazed religious zealots who creatively called themselves Grahamites.

Now the average Grahamite was a fairly bland person, what with all the rules limiting excitement of any kind.  The most exciting part of their day was the cult ordered daily brushing of their teeth.  The problem was it was hard to find food that was bland enough to keep them from getting over stimulated.  To help, Sylvester invented the blandest food possible, the Graham cracker.  That's right, this staple of your childhood was invented by a man for his anti-masturbation health cult.  Of course, the whole thing came crashing down when, despite eating healthy and avoiding sex of any kind, Sylvester died at the not quite venerable age of 57.  Just kidding, the cult lasted for another 30 years before finally fading into obscurity.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sylvester_Graham_(1794-1851).jpg

Mary Mallon - The Woman Who Was Never Sick a Day in Her Life

Getting sick sucks, but you know what sucks more?  Having your body be a literal germ factory that infects anyone that comes near you and becoming the quite literal boogeyman of the early 20th century.  That was the sad fate of Typhoid Mary.

TM was born to a poor family in Ireland, and like many young Irish of the time, immigrated to New York City at the tender age of 15 to find better opportunities.  For TM, those opportunities involved cooking for rich people, a job she proved amazingly good at despite thinking hand washing was highfalutin tom foolery.  However, while people found her food very delicious, everyone TM worked for kept coming down with typhoid fever.  Over a seven year period she worked for eight different families, and all but one saw the majority of their households fall ill, which for a number of people also involved dying.  Eventually, this strange set of circumstances led to an investigation by a doctor with a wealth of medical knowledge, but fairly shitty people skills.

It didn't take long for the good doctor, being a man with the basic skill of pattern recognition, to figure out that TM was the common denominator.  The doctor went to TM's place of work and told her she was giving everyone typhoid, a fact she found hard to believe given she was healthy as a horse.  The doctor, lacking tact, then asked if he could have a stool sample.  Not enjoying being harassed by what appeared to her to be a quack with a fecal fetish, TM grabbed a carving knife, started cursing like a drunken sailor, and chased the doctor out the door.  The doctor, a persistent fellow, proceeded to harass TM for several weeks, demanding she hand over her poop.  When this tactic didn't work, he brought in the police, and TM was summarily arrested, after putting up a huge curse laden fight, and placed into quarantine on an isolated island in the East River.

TM was held in isolation on that island for three years, during which time she was forced to turn over her poop on a weekly basis.  Finding a large amount of typhoid in her gall bladder, the medical experts suggested removing it.  TM refused and instead started personally sending more poop samples to a private lab for analysis.  When the private lab tests came back negative she sued the government and lost, but was later released due to public outcry over her forced isolation.  However, as part of her release agreement she had to agree to quit her career as a cook.  TM gladly agreed, returned to New York City, changed her name, and went back to cooking delicious meals with her very dirty hands.   

TM thought she was doing nothing wrong, because again, she felt she was healthy as a horse.  Perhaps to prove her point, five years after her release she took a job cooking at a maternity hospital, where she was caught because pretty much everybody got typhoid, which is not a plus in a maternity hospital.  Tiring of TM’s shit, literally, the city medical experts quarantined her back on the isolated island in the East River.  TM there, mostly alone except for a dog and the occasional visitor, for the next 23 years.  During this time, for god only knows what reason, she was allowed to work at the hospital on the island in the laboratory, but only under, what can be assumed, close hand washing supervision. TM died at age 69 in 1938.  Four years later they invented antibiotics, reducing typhoid from a deadly disease to a minor distasteful annoyance.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mary_Mallon_in_hospital_(cropped).jpg

Homer Plessy - Civil Rights Activist and Railroad Stooge

It should come as no surprise that the late nineteenth century was not a very good time to be a black person in the United States, but apparently the state of Louisiana did not feel that things were bad enough.  In 1890 the state legislature passed a new law requiring the railroads to have separate passenger cars for whites and blacks for reasons that can only be described as super racist.  Unsurprisingly, this new law pissed off the civil rights activists of the time.  More surprising was the fact that it also pissed off the various railroad companies that operated in Louisiana.  No, not because the railroad owners loved the idea of justice and equality, but because having to keep everyone separate would require more passenger cars which would cut into their profits.  The two groups got together and what resulted was one of the strangest combinations of greed and social justice in American history.

The activists and the railroads, working together, came up with a convoluted plot to force the challenging of the law in the court system.  The plot involved having a stooge get arrested for sitting in the whites only passenger car.  The stooge they picked was a man by the name of Homer.  Homer was a middle class shoe maker who was a bit of a strange pick given that in his photo he resembles a long lost son of President Garfield's.  However, despite his outward appearance, Homer was 1/8 black, which made him more than enough black for the people of the time to treat like shit.  Being 1/8th black made Homer, in the old timey racist speak of the time, a quadroon, which would have been a great name for a store bought cookie, you know, if it wasn't already a super racist term.

Homer, on a hot summer day purchased a train ticket, climbed aboard the white's only rail car, which nobody batted an eye at because again he looked like James Garfield’s progeny, and then promptly told the conductor that he was 1/8 black.  The conductor, not letting appearances get in the way of his racism, freaked the fuck out and tried to throw Homer out of the car, which resulted in what the newspapers of the time called a severe altercation.  Luckily for all involved, there was a private investigator on board the train, who had also been hired by the railroad, who promptly arrested Homer for breaking the law, because that was something private investigators could do back then.  From there, the plan went along swimmingly.  Homer's case, defended by railroad funded lawyers, worked its way through the legal system until finally reaching the U.S. Supreme Court four years later.

The arguments before the Supreme Court were viewed as rather elementary by both sides.  On Homer's side the argument was that the law was stupid and racist.  On the state of Louisiana’s side, the argument was that god wanted Louisiana to keep whites and blacks from mixing, which was pretty difficult to prove given that god could not be called upon to testify.  Despite this, in the end the Supreme Court, which was entirely made up of old frumpy white men, found in a 7-1 decision that the Louisiana law was about public policy, not racism, and that it was A-Okay as long as the passenger cars for the two groups were relatively the same.  This decision opened the door for 68 years of super racist Jim Crow laws, which made things decidedly worse for blacks in the United States, and less importantly, hurt the railroads’ profit margins.  So yeah, it was all pretty fucked up.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homerplessy02.jpg