The Mansion of Happiness (28 page)

Americans appeared to be living longer; perhaps they could live even longer.
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Sylvester Graham had argued that practicing abstemiousness would lengthen life; his followers had founded the
Graham Journal of Health and Longevity.
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“A few slothful men have attained to extreme old age, and so have a few gluttons and drunkards, or at least, hard drinkers,” one observer remarked in 1859, “but for the most part, and in an incomparably
greater proportion, long livers have been distinguished for their sober and industrious habits.”
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When Stanley Hall was growing up, in Young America, there were very many young people but there were also more old people than there used to be, and suddenly they didn’t seem quite so venerable after all. “Years do not make sages,” a New England almanac put it; “they make only old men.”
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The history of aging appears to follow this rule: the fewer old people there are, the more esteemed they will be. Scholars have quibbled with this axiom and its grim inverse, pointing out that, even in
Cotton Mather’s New England, old men, and especially old women, were often ridiculed and held in contempt. Still and all, it holds.
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As
David Hackett Fischer argued, in a landmark study, “The people of early America exalted old age; their descendants have made a cult of youth.” In the first U.S. census, in 1790, 2 percent of the population was over age sixty-five; by 1970, 10 percent. By 2030, it will be 20 percent.
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At the close of the eighteenth century,
John Wallis’s New Game of Human Life ended at eighty-four. Two centuries later, the fastest-growing segment of the population, in the United States, was people over the age of eighty-five. On Wallis’s board, when you get to eighty-five, you’re dead.

G. Stanley Hall was born in a circular world and died in a linear one. As a boy, he drove cows to pasture, work that followed the sun and the seasons. He was supposed to be a preacher, retracing the path tread by his forebears or, failing that, a farmer, like his father. Instead, he started out on another trajectory entirely. He placed his faith in scientific solutions, more learned versions of Graham’s “science of human life.” Caught up in one of the many health crazes of his day (“I eat nothing but brown bread, milk, eggs, and very rare beef”), he wrote home that his father should abandon the farm: “I do hope father will sell the cows and everything and give himself up to the art of prolonging life. Everyone at fifty-five ought to give up everything and call themselves invalids and begin a course of dieting and hygiene.”
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In Germany, Hall ran out of money; he sailed home without a degree.
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He took a job at Antioch College, in Ohio, teaching not philosophy but just about everything else, including French, rhetoric, German, and Anglo-Saxon, a language he did not happen to know. He was also the college librarian. He didn’t have a chair at Antioch, he liked to say; he had
“a whole settee.”
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He fell for Spencer. He fell for Huxley. He fell, hard, for Darwin. In 1876, he left Antioch for Harvard, where he taught English while studying with
William James in the philosophy department. In 1878, he finally earned that PhD—the first awarded by Harvard’s philosophy department and the first in psychology awarded anywhere in the country.
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He was thirty-four; he married the next year. In 1884, he was appointed a full professor at Johns Hopkins, where he held a chair in psychology, the first in the United States. Four years later, he left Hopkins to become the founding president of
Clark University.

Hall had traversed, in a few years’ time, an entire history of ideas: from divinity to philosophy to psychology. He had also come to believe that
genetic psychology explains everything: birth, death, faith, eternity. He once wrote a seven-hundred-page book analyzing Jesus, and every line of the Apostles’ Creed, by way of Freud. “I am still going in the same direction and in the same path in which my infant feet were first taught to walk,” he insisted; he was just going farther.
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Still, he struggled with the animality of man. Darwinism, the philosopher
John Gray has argued, forced Victorians “to ask why their lives should not end like those of other animals, in nothingness. If this was so, how could human existence have meaning? How could human values be maintained if human personality was destroyed at death?”
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When that happened, Gray argues, we forgot how to die, replacing the hope of life after death with “the faith that death can be defeated.”
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This is as depressing as it is true. In 1883, in
The Possibility of Not Dying
,
Hyland Kirk cited Darwin in support of his argument that “the only logical limit to
progress is perfection.” For Kirk, that perfection was not salvation; it was the defeat, by science, of death.
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But maybe there was another way, short of faith in a mansion of happiness, to cheat death. If life isn’t a circle but a line, it ends. Or maybe it doesn’t? Hence: séances, which aimed to prove an
afterlife, of some kind or another. The English Society for
Psychical Research was founded in 1882, and the American counterpart followed three years later. Psychology was new; so was psychical research. In the public mind, the two appeared to be one. This Hall could not abide. One, he said, was science; the other, superstition.
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Nothing’s ever that easy. James thought it went the other way around.

“To take sides as positively as you do now, and on general philosophic grounds,” James wrote Hall, “seems to me a very dangerous and unscientific
attitude.” After all, if anyone was being empirical, James pointed out, it was he who was investigating, not Hall, who was holding firm to an untested belief. “I should express the difference between our two positions in the matter, by calling mine a baldly empirical one, and yours, one due to a general theoretic creed,” James wrote. “I don’t think it exactly fair to make the issue what you make it—one between science and superstition.”
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He was right. It wasn’t fair at all.

William James first visited
Leonora Piper in 1885, just after the death of his infant son and not long after the death of his father, in whose aftermath he had produced a book called
The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James.
In a trance, Mrs. Piper had offered James the very comfort he must have ached for: mention of his son and “a hearty message of thanks” from his father, for publishing his papers.
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In grief, solace; in death, life. “For years she has been the more or less private oracle of one of our leading and very influential psychologists,” Hall wrote of Mrs. Piper’s hold on James. Hall consulted Mrs. Piper himself—he once visited every psychic in New York—probably first sometime in 1890 or 1891, shortly after the deaths of his parents, and just after a family tragedy of his own.
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Hall moved to Worcester, to take charge of Clark, early in 1889. He had his work cut out for him, because the university’s patron,
Jonas Clark, was demanding, unsteady, and changeable, unsure of whether he wanted to found a college for local boys or a first-rate research university. The editors of the local newspaper, the
Worcester Telegram
, wanted only the former. Hall wanted only the latter, but he tried to keep that to himself. The
Telegram
sent a reporter to interview Hall, and described him as looking like “a well-to-do German professor.” His best-honed skill was said to be evasion: “Secretiveness is evidently one of President Hall’s accomplishments.” In March and April 1889, reporters at the
Telegram
produced one exposé after another about the mad science being conducted at the new university by German-born, or German-trained, or German-looking professors. Hall kept laboratory animals locked in a barn behind his house. The
Telegram
ran a story with a half column of headlines:

As the story had it, “Dogs, cats, frogs, rats, mice, and occasionally other animals are scientifically cut up alive in order to satisfy the curiosity of the docents in their research.” One of those docents was
Franz Boas. “He is a German,” the
Telegram
reported, “and has evidently studied vivisection with a rapier, or had it practiced upon himself, as numerous scars on his brow show.” Even beloved Worcester family pets were being captured and tortured—sold to Clark, for twenty-five cents each, by boys on the street. The paper also featured the work of the German-trained anatomist Franklin P. Mall. “Dr. Mall was sometime since so very fortunate as to secure a perfect human embryo of about 26 days,” the
Telegram
reported, following up with an inquiry: “What good can it ever do the human race?”
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Hall fell sick, with diphtheria, and left town; he went to Ashfield to convalesce. The
Telegram
wondered whether he had been made ill by infected animals, in that barn, and whether the whole city was at risk. On May 10, while Hall was still away, his wife and daughter were snuggling together in bed—the girl had blown soap bubbles on the sheets of her own bed, soaking them, and so climbed in with her mother—when someone turned on the gas heat but failed to light a match. They suffocated. Hall, miles away, heard the news after boarding a stagecoach, when a man on the street shouted to the driver, “Is that man in there named Hall? Tell him his wife and daughter are dead.”
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He sent his nine-year-old son away to boarding school, and barely ever saw him again. And then, suffering “the greatest bereavement of my life—such a one, indeed, as rarely falls to the lot of man,” Hall went to see a medium, who, purporting to be channeling his dead wife, told him “that the suffocation and so-called death was absolutely painless.”
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This proved no comfort, and Hall found James’s oracle pathetic.
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Not only an accomplished liar but also an accomplished magician, Hall had taught himself a passel of conjuror’s tricks and was sure he knew a fraud when he saw one. Nor did he envy the dead who spoke through the likes of
Leonora Piper. “I would deliberately prefer annihilation to the kind of idiotic, twaddling life it appears that these inane ghosts of the dark séance live,” he commented. But he did envy James (whose faith in Mrs. Piper he never failed to overstate).
“I often wish I could believe in it a little myself,” he confided. And he conceded that James’s will to believe was nothing if not useful: “Very likely he got more out of his faith than I out of my doubt. And so, if pragmatism is true, he was right and I wrong.”
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Hall fell into a state he called “the Great Fatigue.” He found it hard to write; he could scarcely think straight. Clark began to fall apart. Hall, who was infamously stingy, had nevertheless assembled arguably the best professoriate in the country. The first doctorate in anthropology awarded in the United States was at Clark, under Boas. Some of Boas’s most important work began in Worcester. Influenced by Hall’s empirical study of
childhood, Boas measured the physical growth of twelve thousand Worcester schoolchildren. He concluded that environment, not heredity, accounted for different rates of growth (exactly the opposite of what Lewis Terman would conclude from his measurement of the intelligence of Worcester schoolboys). The
Telegram
, in another series of exposés in 1891, reported that Boas was measuring children in the nude, and intimated more. One article described the scarred German professor visiting a school near campus: “When the children saw him, they became very frightened, fearing that he was going to practice on them.” The paper quoted a prominent Worcester native as saying “If I had a sister or children in the school and this Boas came in to measure them, I’d shoot him.”
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As the
Telegram
told it, the city’s children were being exploited and abused and beloved family pets were being captured and tortured, by foreign-born scientists, Germans and Jews. Hall, floundering in depression, proved unable to contend with these problems.
Jonas Clark, alarmed and embarrassed by what was reported in the
Telegram
, withdrew his financial support, whereupon Hall lied to his faculty about what he could afford to pay them. In 1892, 70 percent of the students and two-thirds of the instructors, led in their rebellion by Mall, left.
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Many of the faculty decamped for the new University of Chicago, turning it, overnight, into what Hall had meant Clark to be: the “church of the future.”
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Meanwhile, rumors spread that Hall’s unhappy wife had committed suicide, taking her daughter with her.
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(“Hall was a perfectly ruthless chap you know,” one of his former students later said about Hall as a husband, in an interview the intellectual historian
Dorothy Ross conducted for a remarkably astute biography.)
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Hall aged more than a decade in the space of a few years.
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He felt, in his heart, that he had become an old man. Much
of contemporary developmental psychology, and many popular ideas about childhood and
adolescence, can be traced, in one way or another, to Hall’s attempt to escape depression. He was rescued from his bereavement not by a séance but by a fascination with the relationship between growing up and growing old, which was a way, in psychology, to think about history. Hall’s wife and daughter died—were discovered one morning, dead in that bed—when he was forty-four years old. Old age, he came to believe, begins at forty-five, the age at which we begin to die.
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When Hall realized he was old, he wanted to write about it but wasn’t sure he ought to, because growing old was a subject, in his view, about which “other old men have written fatuously.”
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What he wanted to do was far more grandiose: he wanted to found a “biological philosophy,” with “a view of life far higher, broader and more unified than Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, or even Darwin, Huxley and Spencer ever dreamed of.”
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