America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  While obsessive innovators all have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), they do not necessarily suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). These two psychiatric conditions, while often considered synonymous, are actually cousins. Broadly speaking, obsessions are things that one can’t stop thinking about, and compulsions are things that one can’t stop doing. While the content of these thoughts and actions can be similar in the two disorders, the person’s internal experience is very different. Whereas in OCD, the obsessions—say, fears of dirt—are unwelcome, in OCPD the opposite is true. In psychiatryspeak, this is the distinction between egodystonic and egosyntonic. Compare the elderly Howard Hughes, who would spend all day sitting naked in the middle of hotel rooms—the germ-free zone—with the thirty-something Steve Jobs, who would do his quick dust checks on the factory floor. In contrast to Hughes, who was paralyzed by his OCD, Jobs basked in his OCPD; he was proud of his company’s cleanliness. Likewise, Melvil Dewey celebrated his childhood fixation with the number 10, turning it into his signature achievement, the decimal classification system that bears his name. And in contrast to those with OCD, who often seek psychiatric treatment, those with OCPD rarely acknowledge that anything is wrong. That’s because the personality disorder typically improves rather than impairs normal functioning. “OCPD is a method of avoiding suffering. Those with the disorder come for help only if someone else—say, a spouse—demands it,” explained Lorrin Moran, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford University who ran the Medical Center’s OCD Clinic for many years. But this rarely happens. More often than not, like the inflexible Charles Lindbergh, who insisted that his wife, the writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, keep track of all household expenditures in detailed ledgers, those with OCPD tend to drive other family members into treatment. And Anne Lindbergh had to fight with her husband in order to see a psychotherapist, because he hated everything to do with psychiatry.

  OCPD is also sometimes confused with Asperger’s syndrome. “Aspies” do have some of the same core symptoms, such as rigidity, anger outbursts, and lack of empathy; they, too, can get caught up in repetitive or ritualistic behavior such as collecting bits of information (though they gravitate even more toward the totally useless variety). But the hallmark of this autistic spectrum disorder is the inability to read the social or emotional cues of others—something that doesn’t apply to obsessives. While obsessives can also be cold and distant, they are capable of occasional warmth and charm. For example, Estée Lauder had a remarkable knack for relating to customers, but not necessarily to anyone else; with both employees and family members, she was often demanding and unpredictable. And the characteristically tight-lipped Lindbergh eventually learned a thing or two about how to seduce women—techniques that he would need to feed his sexual addiction. If he had been a true Aspie, he would not have been able to maintain his long-term affairs with his three German mistresses, with whom he fathered a total of seven children. Aspies, who often have trouble connecting with their dates, certainly can’t do that kind of thing (nor, for that matter, can most of us, as it takes an obsessive innovator to build four families).

  While several of these seven super-achievers found a degree of happiness in marriage—including Lindbergh, who developed a deep and meaningful bond with Anne, even though he spent as little as two months a year with her—they all lived as fragmented individuals. Uncomfortable in their own skin, they often fiddled with their identity or created new identities. Estée Lauder (née Josephine Esther Mentzer) hid her Jewish background by inventing not only a new name, but also a bogus aristocratic family, whose origins she kept changing. Much to the amusement of his library colleagues, Melvil (né Melville) Dewey changed his last name to “Dui” after a business failure in his late twenties. On his love trips to Germany, Charles Lindbergh borrowed Superman’s pseudonym, Careu Kent; and the swinging bachelor Ted Williams would sometimes check himself into hotel rooms as G. C. Luther (“How do you doubt,” the perspicacious dissembler explained, “a name like G. C. Luther?”). While Thomas Jefferson didn’t hide his identity, he also had a secret lover—his slave Sally Hemings.

  These larger-than-life figures were several fully realized Shakespearean characters all rolled into one. Besides the sybarite and the upstanding family man (or woman), they housed a host of other contradictory selves such as the saint, the sinner, the rule maker, and the rule breaker. Like the young Steve Jobs, who rarely showered, Alfred Kinsey was a cleanliness nut who flirted with filth; the sex doctor enjoyed hanging around public bathrooms in order to count (and to hook up with) gay men searching for anonymous sex partners. Ted Williams helped save the lives of thousands of cancer patients through his tireless advocacy on behalf of the Jimmy Fund, a charity affiliated with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston; however, he also was, as he admitted, “horseshit” with his own three children. The Red Sox star was even two different people on the baseball diamond; the hyperfocused hitter coexisted with the lackadaisical outfielder, who sometimes turned his back to home plate in order to take phantom swings. For Williams, as for the others, the core obsessions and compulsions could rarely be held in check for very long.

  Part One

  Founding Farmers and Factoid Finders

  (Photo source: “A philosopher, a patriote and a friend. Dessiné par son ami Tadée Kociuszko et gravé par Michal Sokolnicki.” Ca. 1800–1816. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-7084].)

  1.

  Politics: Thomas Jefferson

  Omniscient Organizer

  A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe for felicity.

  —Thomas Jefferson, letter to his daughter Martha, May 21, 1787

  On the morning of Monday, July 1, 1776, Thomas Jefferson had, it can safely be said, a lot on his mind.

  On that fateful day, the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia was to consider the resolution, first introduced on June 7 by his fellow Virginian Richard H. Lee, to dissolve “all political connection between [the Colonies] and the state of Great Britain.” And as soon as that resolution passed, as Jefferson expected it would, his draft of the Declaration of Independence, which he had completed the previous Friday, was due to come to the floor for a vote. Hypersensitive to criticism, the assiduous thirty-three-year-old wordsmith dreaded the thought of any tinkering with his text. (In fact, for the rest of his life, Jefferson would be bitter about the “mutilations” that his congressional colleagues were about to make, which reduced its length by about 25 percent.) He was also unnerved because the war effort of the new nation-to-be was not going well; the American troops in Canada, who lacked essential provisions due to a shortage of money, had just been hit by a smallpox epidemic. “Our affairs in Canada,” Jefferson wrote later that day to William Fleming, a delegate to Virginia’s new independent state legislature, “go still retrograde.”

  The six-foot-two-and-a-half-inch delegate with the angular face, sandy complexion, and reddish hair was also dogged by a host of domestic concerns. He was still recovering from the sudden death—her illness lasted less than an hour—of his fifty-six-year-old mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, three months earlier. For most of April and the first part of May, Jefferson was detained by incapacitating migraines at Monticello, his five-thousand-acre estate, then a two-week journey by horseback from Philadelphia. And with his frail wife, Martha, pregnant for the third time in six years, he felt, as he informed Virginia’s de facto governor, Edmund Pendleton, on June 30, that it was “indispensably necessary … [to] solicit the substitution of some other person” to take his seat in the Continental Congress by the end of the year. As it turned out, an anxious Jefferson couldn’t even wait that long; on September 2, he would submit his resignation and return to his “country,” as he still called his native Virginia.

  Amid all the uncertainty and anxiety that he faced early on that sweltering July morning, Jefferson did a surprising thing. He started what turned out to be a massive list. F
or Jefferson, as for other obsessives, list making was a passionate pursuit that could help him get his bearings. Flipping his copy of The Philadelphia Newest Almanack, for the Year of Our Lord 1776 upside down, he wrote on the first interleaved blank page at the back, “Observations on the weather.” Below this heading, he set up three columns, “July, hour, thermom.” At 9 a.m., he recorded 81½. With the debate on Lee’s resolution taking up most of the day, Jefferson did not do another temperature reading until 7 p.m., when he recorded 82. But for the rest of that momentous week and for years on end, he would record the temperature at least three times a day. On the fourth, when the mercury hit 68 at 6 a.m. before reaching a fitting high of 76 at 1 p.m., he even managed to squeeze in a total of four readings. On the day that the Declaration was signed, Jefferson also made the fifteen-minute trek from his room at Seventh and Market to John Sparhawk’s book and gadget store on Second Street, where he shelled out 3 pounds, 15 shillings (the equivalent of several hundred dollars today) for a new thermometer. On Monday the eighth, as he recorded in the account book, which he kept on the interleaved pages in the front half of his almanac, he returned to Sparhawk’s to purchase a barometer for 4 pounds, 10 shillings.

  Jefferson had been fascinated by meteorology ever since his undergraduate days at William and Mary. In Williamsburg, he had befriended Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier, a London-born Fellow of the Royal Society, who was well connected in scientific circles. In 1760, Fauquier, who possessed the latest versions of the major scientific inventions of the day— the thermometer, telescope, and microscope—had begun a weather diary (which was limited to just one reading a day). Inspired by this adolescent hero, Jefferson would establish himself as an international authority in the field. In a chapter in his scientific treatise, Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1785, Jefferson summarized some preliminary findings. In the age-old debate about climate change that dated back to the ancients, Jefferson (like another prominent Southern politico who served as vice president exactly two centuries after he did) came down squarely on the side of “global warming.” (But in contrast to Al Gore, who has warned of the dangers associated with greenhouse gases, Jefferson was hypothesizing about how events such as deforestation could be “very fatal to fruits.”)

  “A change in our climate…is taking place very sensibly,” he concluded, based on his assessment of decades of data collected by himself and others. “Both heats and colds are become much more moderate.…Snows are less frequent and less deep.” Jefferson, who bought about twenty thermometers during the course of his life, would continue to gather a wealth of weather data, which he crunched every which way, until 1816. Even during his presidency, he took the temperature at both dawn and 4 p.m. The National Weather Service, established in 1870 as the Weather Bureau, has hailed Jefferson as “the father of weather observers.”

  But a thirst for knowledge wasn’t the only reason why Jefferson began this ambitious new scholarly undertaking at what turned out to be a pivotal moment in world history. Compiling and organizing information, as he well knew, could also help calm him down. “Nature intended me,” he later wrote, “for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them my supreme delight.” Distracting himself from his innermost thoughts was his way of warding off feelings of despair. While Jefferson was a gifted singer, he often used his musical talent, like his ingenuity, to hide from himself. One could “hardly see him anywhar outdoors,” his slave Isaac once noted, “but that he was a-singin’.” He would even sing while reading. His habitual manner of coping with stress was to do not less, but more. In contrast to most people, who become undone when they take on too much, Jefferson became energized. His constant fear was not having enough to occupy his mind. For Jefferson, whose personal credo was a mishmash of Epicureanism and Stoicism, happiness was synonymous with virtuous work. “Nothing can contribute more to it [happiness],” he later mused, “than the contracting a habit of industry and activity.” In contrast, he considered idleness “the most dangerous poison of life.” To be fair, his was not an introspective culture; as one historian has put it, eighteenth-century Virginians had “neither the taste nor the skill for self-examination.” Even so, the vehemence with which Jefferson avoided experiencing internal distress qualifies him as an outlier.

  The pedantic side of this patron saint of polymaths has often been overlooked. Most Americans associate Jefferson only with his staggering intellect. As President John F. Kennedy put it at a White House dinner honoring fifty Nobel laureates a half century ago, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Few are aware that America’s “Apostle of Freedom,” as President Franklin Roosevelt called the most erudite Founding Father, was as consumed by the petty as he was by the lofty. The nonstop doer was not always discriminating in what he did. Jefferson delighted in gathering factoids, regardless of how meaningful they might turn out to be. He was also eager to communicate what he reaped. “[Jefferson] scattered information,” Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania observed in 1790, “wherever he went.” During his presidency, he kept a long list with the equally long-winded title, “A statement of the vegetable market in Washington, during a period of 8 years, wherein the earliest and last appearance of each article is noted.” As this document reveals, while entrusted with running the country, Jefferson felt compelled to keep constant tabs on the availability of twenty-nine vegetables (and seven fruits) in our nation’s capital. The earliest date on which he could enjoy a watermelon at the White House was July 7; the latest was September 4. And when his eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who was about to spend a year studying science in Philadelphia, visited him in Washington in 1807, the president immediately asked the fifteen-year-old to empty out his trunk so that he could personally examine every article. Having completed this inventory, Jefferson took out a pencil and paper in order to make a list of other items that he was convinced the adolescent would need.

  Keeping track of minutiae was a lifelong preoccupation. Jefferson kept in his pocket an ivory notebook—a kind of proto-iPad on which he could write in pencil; and when he returned to his study, he would then transfer his data to one of his seven permanent ledger books. In his Garden and Farm books, which he kept for more than fifty years, he recorded all the goings-on at Monticello. “[H]ad the last dish of our spring peas,” he wrote on July 22, 1772, in a typical entry in the Garden Book. And in his account books, which he maintained for nearly sixty years, he kept track of every cent he ever spent. “Mr. Jefferson,” the overseer at Monticello once observed, “was very particular in the transaction of all his business. He kept an account of everything. Nothing was too small for him to keep an account of it.”

  All this financial calculating did not do much for Jefferson himself. One reason why obsessives love control—or, to be accurate, the illusion of having everything under control—is that they can easily be overwhelmed by their own impulses. A man with sumptuous tastes, Jefferson never could get a handle on his own penchant for runaway spending; during his eight years in the White House, he would shell out $10,000 ($200,000 today) on fine wines. But while he would always be in debt and would saddle Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the executor of his estate, with a $100,000 ($2 million) tab, time and time again, America benefited from his interest in systematically tracking the smallest of expenditures. After all, Jefferson created the penny as we know it—an innovation that would help put the whole country’s finances in order. On account of this little-known legacy, to this day, Americans have Jefferson to thank every time they open their wallet or balance their checking account.

  Jefferson loved all things decimal (as did fellow obsessive the librarian Melvil Dewey, discussed in chapter 3), and as a congressman at the end of the Revolution, he convinced Robert Morris, then the superintendent of finance, to scrap his confusing plan for establishing a uniform currency. To repl
ace the various state currencies, which featured both pounds and dollars, Morris had proposed issuing a new federal dollar divided into 1,440 units (a measure that would have incorporated the pennies of each state without leaving any fractions). As Jefferson cogently argued in his 1784 paper, “Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, and of a Coinage for the United States” (of which he was so proud that he appended it to his autobiography, written in 1821), “the inconveniences of this Unit” meant that an eighty-dollar horse would “require a notation of six figures, to wit, 115,200 units.” Jefferson’s recommendation to divide the dollar instead into ten dimes and one hundred pennies was readily accepted. Jefferson also sought (as would Dewey a century later) to extend the decimal system to weights and measures, but his extensive report on the subject, submitted to the House of Representatives when he was secretary of state, went nowhere. However, his countrymen may well have been better off had Congress heeded his sage advice to divide the foot into ten inches and the inch into ten lines.

  Jefferson was the Founding Father who could not stop organizing the fledgling nation. When the bored vice president and president of the Senate became frustrated by the chaotic ways of Congress, he did not hesitate to take on the monumental task of setting it aright. As a law student in the 1760s, he had done a systematic study of deliberative bodies through the ages, gathering quotations—a practice that he called “commonplacing”—from various British treatises. After returning to Philadelphia in 1797 to assume his position as the number two in the administration of President John Adams, Jefferson frequently relied on these old notes contained in his “Parliamentary Pocket-Book,” a 105-page leather-bound duodecimo (a small volume whose pages are just 5 by 7¾ inches). In early 1800, he began to think about publishing a trimmed-down version of this guide, which he called A Manual of Parliamentary Practice. To put the finishing touches on his neatly written manuscript required clarifying “small matters of daily practice,” as he wrote that February to George Wythe, his legal mentor from his Williamsburg days; for Jefferson, this need to go into procedural minutiae made the endeavor all that much more enjoyable.