Henry Bailey Stevens

Henry Bailey Stevens (1891-1976) was an American author, playwright and vegetarianism activist. Stevens was born in 1891 in Hooksett, New Hampshire. He graduated from Manchester Central High School and Dartmouth College. From 1912, he worked for the Woman's Journal, a women's rights periodical in Boston. Stevens married Agnes Ryan, the managing editor of the Woman's Journal, in 1915. In 1917 Stevens and Ryan resigned from the Woman's Journal, due in part to their opposition to World War I, a belief not generally shared by the suffrage movement. Stevens and his wife were associated with Emarel Freshel's Millennium Guild, an animal rights organization. Stevens believed that humans were originally pacifists and vegetarians. He authored The Recovery of Culture in 1949. The book argues that early humans made the mistake of changing from vegetarianism to flesh-eating and that soil erosion, starving peoples and war is the result. He recommended for people to return to an agricultural plant based culture. Stevens lived with his wife in an old farmstead at the edge of Durham, New Hampshire. Stevens directed the University of New Hampshire Agricultural Station and Cooperative Extension Service from 1918 until his retirement in 1956. He attended the 1975 World Vegetarian Congress.