Allen, James Madison (1836-1909)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Reverend James Madison Allen was associated with the Bible Christian Church and also the Spiritualist movement. Born on 15 May 1836 in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. A portrait of Allen (Food, Home and Garden  Vol. II no 16 (April 1898): 51-52) traces Allen's influence on US veg*n thought from journal publications of the 1860s. His education included an interest in phrenology, which led to the study of food and the human constitution, and thence to the refusal of animal flesh, eggs, and dairy products. Allen is quoted as saying, "I believe that if every person accustomed to use flesh and its products should hereafter be obliged to do the killing also, our tables would in a majority of cases be speedily cleared of every last vestige of murder and made attractively innocent, sweet and beautiful: adorned with charming flowers and luscious fruits, and surrounded and overshadowed with a pure, innocent and peaceful mental atmosphere, wherein the very angels from the Peace-heavens may commingle their loving thoughts with ours, and lift us to loftier planes than those to which we can ever hope to attain so long as we remain in mental rapport with the sub-human, infernal sphere of the slaughterhouse!" (52). In the late 1870s, for a period of six years, he led a veg*n community in Ancora, New Jersey that was dedicated to "Purity, Peace, and Progress" and the "humane diet"; in 1895 he participated in the utopian veg*n project at Washington County, Arkansas. James Madison Allen died in Springfield, Missouri, in 1909.

IMAGE: Food, Home and Garden Vol. II no. 15 (March 1898): 50.

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