Henry Bailey Stevens

Stevens was born in 1891 in Hooksett, New Hampshire.^[1] 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.^[1] Stevens married Agnes Ryan, the managing editor of the Woman's Journal, in 1915.^[1] 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.^[1]

Stevens lived with his wife in an old farmstead at the edge of Durham, New Hampshire.^[2] Stevens directed the University of New Hampshire Agricultural Station and Cooperative Extension Service from 1918 until his retirement in 1956.^[3]

Stevens and his wife were associated with the Millennium Guild, an animal rights organization.^[4] In 1949, Curtis Freshel awarded $1,000 to Stevens for the best humanitarian work of the year.^[5]

Stevens believed that humans were originally pacifists and vegetarians.^[6] 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.^[7] He recommended for people to return to an agricultural plant based culture.

Stevens was a vice-president of the International Vegetarian Union.^[8] He attended the 1975 World Vegetarian Congress.^[9]

Stevens died from natural causes on 16 March 1976 at the age of 85.^[10]

• A Cry Out of the Dark (1919)^[11]
• All Alone in the Country (1921)
• Tolstoy: A Play in Seven Scenes (1928)
• The Recovery of Culture (1949, with a foreword by Gerald Heard)
• Para-Desa (1975, with a foreword by Richard Eberhart)