The Mansion of Happiness (15 page)

Aristotle (the actual Aristotle) wrote about three
ages of man: youth, the prime of life, and old age. In the seventeenth century, Boston’s Puritan poet
Anne Bradstreet followed medieval writers, by describing four:

In early America, “youth” could mean anyone up to the age of thirty.
Jonathan Edwards called the young men in his congregation who were reading
Aristotle’s Master-piece
“boys”; their average age was twenty-four.
¹²

The ages of man followed the order of the natural world—the days and the seasons. Morning, noon, night. Spring, summer, fall, winter. “One man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.” (There were seven planets.) Shakespeare’s player goes straight from “the whining school-boy, with his satchel” to “the lover, / Sighing like a furnace.”
John Wallis’s New Game of Human Life had seven ages, too. His character is a “boy” until twelve, when he turns into a “youth”; he’s not a “man” until he’s twenty-four.
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Rousseau talked about
l’adolescence
in
Émile
in 1762, which is one route by which the word, and the idea, entered the English vernacular.
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He called adolescence a second birth. “We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life.” The time when a child “leaves childhood behind him,” Rousseau warned, will be a time of peril: “he is a lion in a fever.” If childhood is a paradise, the best plan, Rousseau thought, is to prolong it by staving off the onset of adulthood. This requires keeping the
secrets of generation secret.

The problem is, the little pipsqueaks ask so many questions. “ ‘Where do little children come from?’ This is an embarrassing question,” Rousseau admitted, “which occurs very naturally to children, one which foolishly or wisely answered may decide their health and their morals for life.” He recommended dodging it:

That is, if you can’t skirt these questions, better to be honest, early, before your child becomes a lion with a temperature of a hundred and three.
¹⁵

The paradise of
childhood was a product of the
Enlightenment, but the storm of adolescence descended upon the United States with urbanization.
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Children used to be able to see for themselves how animals mate, bear, and nurse their young. But when people left the farm and moved to the city to work in factories, the way
Milton Bradley’s father did, kids missed out on the chance to watch animals … sneezing.
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And then, oddly enough, parents began solemnly informing their children that babies, swaddled in blankets, are dropped down the chimney by a tall bird with long legs and a heavy bill.

Storks, which are common in northern Europe, are known for taking particular care of their young. (Storks haven’t always been associated with fertility; in fact, the reverse has just as often been the case. In eighteenth-century Philadelphia, syringes marketed as
abortifacients were “ingenious things said to have been suggested by the stork.” The stork feeds its young by inserting its bill down their throats, and a woman who thrust this syringe up her vagina and through her cervix could induce a miscarriage, or die trying.)
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In the United States, the rise of the myth that babies come from storks dates to the publication in 1838 of “The Storks,” a story by
Hans Christian Andersen. In a nest on the roof of a house in a little village, a male stork guards a female and her hatchlings. Down below, a rascally boy sings:

The baby storks tell their mother they would like to exact some vengeance on the boys below.

Instead, she teaches them to fly.

And that is just what they do.

“The Storks” is as cruel as the darkest of the Grimms’ tales, but it also explained, in one fell swoop, both birth and infant death. Andersen’s fables were hugely popular in the United States.
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Soon, the stork myth was everywhere: there were stork books, stork toys, stork baby bottles, and stork postcards. Nineteenth-century Americans, squeamish, but with
eggs on their minds, grew all but obsessed with the idea that babies come not from women but from birds.

To all this,
Sylvester Graham objected, strenuously. He was an anti-stork man. Graham was born in West Suffield, Connecticut, in 1794, the youngest of seventeen children. His grandfather, a Scottish emigrant, was a minister. His father, who died when Sylvester was a baby, had been a charismatic preacher during New England’s
Great Awakening, in the 1740s, when
Jonathan Edwards was preaching—and banning
Aristotle’s Master-piece.
After the death of her husband, Sylvester Graham’s mother was deemed by the court to be “in a deranged state of mind” and unable to care for her children.
²¹
From the age of three, her youngest son was farmed out to neighbors and relatives; he never had much of a
childhood. A wayward and melancholy youth, he once wrote an autobiographical poem about that uncomfortable, feverish age between childhood and manhood:

In 1823, Graham began a course of study at Amherst. Then he had a breakdown. The next year, he married the daughter of a sea captain. And then he was born again. Like many young men of his day, Graham was swept away by what came to be known as the
Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that aimed at a wholesale reformation in manners. Preachers shunned everything earthy, bawdy, and reckless in favor of everything refined, restrained, pious, and purposeful. In 1776, about one in six Americans belonged to a church; by 1850, that number had risen to one in three. In roughly the same period, the amount of alcohol Americans drank dropped from more than seven gallons per adult per year to less than two. Sobriety, orderliness, and punctuality: these were deemed essential traits for a people leaving farms and working, instead, in factories and in offices, striving to accumulate, achieve, invent, progress, and succeed.
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Although Graham was licensed to preach in 1826, he never established his own congregation, partly because he was plagued by ill health. He suffered from a series of vague ailments: dyspepsia, sciatica, rheumatism, and neuralgia. For a while, he made a living as a temperance reformer, warning of the dangers of drink. Then he began having visions of a coming apocalypse—an apocalypse of children. “Thousands and thousands of
children are springing into existence, and rising up into civil and moral society, and becoming incorporated with the
body politic of the nation, without receiving any regular moral culture of the heart,” he preached in Philadelphia in 1829. A half-million children had already reached adulthood without having been given religious instruction, and some two and a half million children were in danger of following them into ruin. This river of children, he said, was more powerful than the Mississippi:

The more he considered the coming apocalypse, the more Graham came to believe that this wasn’t so much a religious matter as a medical one. The problem at the heart of the body politic was a problem in the human body itself, and especially in the bodies of young men. They were overflowing; they were spurting: they were ejaculating.
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Graham didn’t use the word “adolescence.” He talked, instead, about “children” and, more often, about “youth.” Still, the people he was worried about were between ten and twenty-four: growing up, but not yet married. He was more worried about boys than girls. He wasn’t alone. In 1829, the Connecticut minister
Joel Hawes remarked, in
Lectures to Young Men on the Formation of Character
, that on the voyage of life, the waters traveled between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one are the most perilous: “On this sea, my young friends, you are now embarking, with little knowledge of what is before you, and many of you, I fear, without line, or compass, or chart.”
Henry Ward Beecher warned, in his own
Lectures to Young Men
, that “a young man … feels in his bosom the various impulses, wild desires, restless cravings he can hardly tell for what.” He is on a quest, “thirsting for happiness.”
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All this worry about young men was by no means without cause. The period between childhood and adulthood was, at the time, getting longer.
Puberty was beginning earlier (at least as measured by the age of menarche, which was declining), and young people were starting work and marrying later. Girls remained dependent even after getting married, but prolonged dependence was a particular problem for boys, who were trying to grow into men in a nation that had revolted from its parent country and that prized no value more than independence. There were a great many young people around; the average age of the population was seventeen. And many of those young people were living near factories, as
Dorus Clarke, a Springfield, Massachusetts, minister, remarked in his
Lectures to Young People in Manufacturing Villages
in 1836. Clarke preached that the first generation of Americans to come of age during the age of
machines faced dangers unknown to any prior generation: “Never before was the world in such an excitable, impressible state.”
²⁷

Graham started delivering his own
Lecture to Young Men
in the 1830s. He wanted to warn them about excitement by telling them about sex, not storks. In one thing, he sided with Rousseau: “Through a fear of contaminating the minds of youth, it has long been considered the wisest measure to keep them in ignorance.” This would be fine, except that “the natural inquisitiveness of the young mind has been met by misrepresentation and falsehood, on the part of those who would preserve their purity.” This, Graham believed, was a disaster, because young people are as curious as cats—theirs is a “restless and prying curiosity”—and they’ll find out about sex, by hook or by crook, “So that while parents have been resting securely in the idea of the ignorance and purity of their children, these have been clandestinely drinking in the most corrupt and depraving knowledge from mercenary and polluted hands.”
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People often called him “Dr. Graham,” but Sylvester Graham was not a physician. Still, the confusion is a good illustration of the era’s shifting source of authority for how to steer your course through the voyage of life: rules for conduct once laid down by clergymen were, more and more, made by doctors. Graham’s lectures were based in morality—his was a theory, finally, about virtue and vice—but he called it something else. He called it “the science of human life.”

Graham believed that the human body had two functions, nutrition and reproduction, connected by the same bundle of nerves. Stimulation of either system was debilitating. The nineteenth century’s combination of
excitements—the processed food of the factory and the frenzy of city life—was responsible not only for specific diseases, including devastating outbreaks of cholera, but also for a general American malaise, caused by overstimulation. All those hordes of unmarried young people living in cities were eating, instead of fresh farm foods, tinned meat and canned vegetables and bread made with processed flour. Worse, old enough to know
about sex but not old enough to marry, they were masturbating. “Self-pollution,” he said, “is actually a very great and rapidly increasing evil in our country.”
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Young Americans were spilling their precious bodily fluids; the nation was at risk.