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On this day in vegan history · May 15, 1850

America's First Vegetarian Society Convenes at Clinton Hall

In a rented hall in lower Manhattan, a physician, a minister, and the man behind the Graham cracker turned a scattered health fad into an organized American movement.

America's First Vegetarian Society Convenes at Clinton Hall
Wikimedia Commons / William Alcott

The facts

Date
May 15, 1850
Location
Clinton Hall, New York City
Founders
William Metcalfe, William Alcott, Sylvester Graham, Russell Trall
First president
William Alcott

On May 15, 1850, delegates gathered at Clinton Hall in New York City to found the American Vegetarian Society, the country's first national vegetarian organization. William Alcott, a physician, was elected president; Bible Christian minister William Metcalfe, who had preached meatless living to his Philadelphia congregation since the 1820s, became corresponding secretary. Sylvester Graham, of Graham cracker fame, and physician Russell Trall were founders alongside them. The society's resolutions pushed past diet-as-health-advice into diet-as-moral-argument, framing the killing of animals for food no one needed as a wrong against the eater's own character.

In their words

The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.

  1. cruelty, in any form, for the mere purpose of procuring unnecesary food, or to gratify depraved appetites, is obnoxious to the pure human soul, and repugnant to the noblest attributes of our being

    resolution adopted at the founding convention of the American Vegetarian Society, May 1850

    Source: Smithsonian Magazine

  2. flesh-eating is the key-stone to a wide-spread arch of superfluous wants, to meet which, life is filled with stern and rugged encounters, while the adoption of a vegetarian diet is calculated to destroy the strife of antagonism, and to sustain life in serenity and strength

    resolution adopted at the founding convention of the American Vegetarian Society, May 1850

    Source: Smithsonian Magazine

Why it still matters

It gave American vegetarianism its first standing organization and its first written case that eating animals was a moral failing, not just a dietary one, a shift that later fed straight into the era's abolition and suffrage movements.

Sources

This history is still being written.

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