During a visit to the Tennessee institution, Dr. Kellog so successfully preached the merits of natural eating, that all the students were induced to give it a trial as a health and economic measure.
The trial was conducted under observation for six months, when an accounting was made. During the six months the drafts on the commissary had been a trifle less than half what they formerly had been, and at the same time the community had been free from the usual "seasonable" and bilious complaints or illnesses. No one had been cured of a craving for alcohol, for the reason that all were teetotalers on principle, but the sheer economy and healthfulness of the results obtained were of prodigious importance to young persons "working their way through college." The amount of the benefit can be imagined when it is considered that they needed to work less on the farm to earn their food because the food-bill was much reduced. The time saved from work was available for study, and the increase of energy and immunity from sickness added enormously to the average student ability.
One day there was brought to the institution on a stretcher a poor chap of the neighbourhood, crazy with delirium tremens. In the infirmary of the college emergency patients were received, as part of the missionary training is medical.
The sorry dipsomaniac was sobered-up in the usual way and instructed in the process of Fletcherizing. He took kindly to it, as all do who have been dietetic sinners, and the result was the same as with the beery and bleery tramp mentioned in the early part of this chapter. He lost his "taste" for "booze" and continued the incident by becoming a worker on the place and a sound temperance example.
Here is a revelation worth while to the missionary workers. Their field of service was the mountain districts of their State and the neighbouring State of North Carolina, which are famous for their moonshine whisky stills. The whisky distilled in the mountains does not pay any Internal Revenue tax if it can be avoided, and hence the stills are hidden in deep forests and operated by the light of the moon. The inhabitants of these lawless regions are the poorest of the poor and call down the contempt of the negroes. They are called "poor white trash," and moonshine whisky that will kill at fifty yards is responsible for much of the poverty and trashiness. They are as good marks for missionary sympathy as any "heathen" the world can produce anywhere. I have been among them all and I assure you, these listless and luckless inebriates of the poor white trash regions are the most pitiable.
FLETCHERISM AS FIRST AID
As soon as the incident of the victim of delirium tremens had been measured at its full significance, it dawned upon the missionaries that Fletcherism was to be their most potent assistant in curing the mountaineers of their vices and preparing them for religious instruction. They were won over to the ideal of Dietetic Corpoculture as "First Aid to the Injured" in establishing Temperance on a sound basis.
Thus it was that the graduated missionaries introduced themselves to their charges by building simple ovens of road-side stones in rail-fence corners, as field surveyors might do, and invited those who came along to feed with them.
There is never any trouble in securing guests at a feed anywhere, and it is extremely easy among the poor to whom free food means less work and more leisure. It is easy, too, to get the ears and attention of guests at meals who would like to be invited again. It is also easy to teach Fletcherizing to youthful dinner-guests, as Madame La Marquise de Chamberay and I found out in connection with our East Side investigation in New York.[O]
The result of this strategy on the part of the Tennessee missionaries was reported to a meeting at the Battle Creek Sanatorium, and the summary of the good attained up to that time was as follows: More than a thousand persons were saving an average of $3.00 a month on the cost of their sustenance, and were temperance converts through the sloughing off of all desire for their moonshine product. Think of a saving from sheer waste of $3,000 a month ($36,000 a year) to a community where $1,000 is considered to be a princely fortune, and a saving of a thousand human units from the scrap-heap of worse than death!