The Editor Who Rarely Ate Meat

Horace Greeley was born February 3, 1811, in Amherst, New Hampshire, and by 1841 he had founded the New-York Tribune, a paper so influential that its editorials could shift public opinion more than a presidential speech. Soon after he arrived in New York City in 1831, he took a room in a boarding house run on Sylvester Graham's meatless regimen, the same house where he met his future wife, Mary Cheney. The rules were strict: no meat, no alcohol, no coffee or tea, no spices, no tobacco. Greeley kept the habit long after he could afford steak dinners, staying mostly meat-free for the rest of his life. It wasn't a fad he outgrew. It became part of how one of the century's loudest editors chose to live, and he used the Tribune to argue for vegetarianism and temperance alongside his politics.