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

by Joshua Kendall

  Prologue

  Michael Maccoby, “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons,” Harvard Business Review (January–February 2000), pp. 69–75. Michael Maccoby, Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails (Boston, 2007). Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t (New York, 2001).

  John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America (New York, 2005). Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness (New York, 2011). Though Gartner and Ghaemi both view mental illness from a biological rather than a psychological framework, their work linking madness and greatness actually has much in common with that of the psychoanalytically oriented Maccoby. For another recent take on the advantages of a major mental disorder, see Kevin Dutton, The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success (New York, 2012).

  The late British psychiatrist Anthony Storr provides a concise analysis of the obsessive character in his classic work, The Dynamics of Creation (New York, 1972). While obsessive über-achievers abound, to date, biographers have rarely paid attention to this character type, except for a few literary critics who have analyzed the lives of canonical authors and their fictional characters. See, for example, Andrew Brink, Obsession and Culture: A Study of Sexual Obsession in Modern Fiction (Cranbury, NJ, 1996), which features chapters on five twentieth-century writers, including Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike, and Marina van Zuylen, Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art (Ithaca, NY, 2005), which discusses, among others, the novelists Gustave Flaubert and Thomas Mann.

  Jack Welch and John A. Byrne, Jack: Straight from the Gut (New York, 2001).

  Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York, 2011).

  Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York, 2011).

  Karen Southwick, Everyone Else Must Fail: The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison (New York, 2003).

  Jon E. Grant, Marc E. Mooney, and Matt G. Kushner, “Prevalence, Correlates, and Comorbidity of DSM-IV Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder: Results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions,” Journal of Psychiatry Research (2012), pp. 469–475.

  While research suggests that OCPD is largely environmental in origin, this finding does not rule out the possibility of a biological component to this personality disorder. As a wealth of studies now show, adverse early experiences such as neglect can permanently alter brain chemistry. For a jargon-free overview of the scholarly research linking childhood trauma to impaired brain development, see the pamphlet written by public health researchers Jennifer S. Middlebrooks and Natalie C. Audage, for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, The Effects of Childhood Stress on Health across the Lifespan (Atlanta, 2008).

  For more on the difference between OCPD and OCD, see my article, “Field Guide to the Obsessive-Compulsive,” Psychology Today (March–April 2008), pp. 43–44.

  At the time of writing, the American Psychiatric Association is still debating the final format of the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is due out in May 2013. While OCPD is to remain a personality disorder, the diagnostic criteria are likely to undergo some changes. The criteria that I list come from the edition known as the DSM IV-TR (Washington, DC, 2000).

  Author interviews: Debi Coleman, Dr. John D. Gartner, Dr. Nassir Ghaemi, Nancy Wheeler Jenkins, Dr. Stephen Josephson, Dr. Lorrin Koran, Kate Mitchell, Dr. Michael Maccoby, Dr. John Oldham, Dr. Dan Stein, and Dr. Kerry Sulkowicz.

  1. Politics: Thomas Jefferson

  The weather diary entries for 1776 are reprinted in Thomas Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany (1767–1826) (Princeton, 1997), edited by James A. Bear and Lucia C. Stanton. I also had the privilege of examining Jefferson’s personal copy of the 1776 almanac at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the nation’s largest repository of Jefferson manuscripts. For more on Jefferson and the weather, see Alexander McAdie, “A Colonial Weather Service,” Popular Science (1894), pp. 331–337; and “America’s First Great Global Warming Debate,” my article for Smithsonian.com, the online edition of the Smithsonian magazine (July 15, 2011).

  Princeton University Press will eventually publish all of the nineteen thousand letters that Jefferson wrote and the twenty-five thousand that he received in a projected sixty-volume set, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. The first editor was Princeton history professor Julian P. Boyd, and the first volume appeared in 1950. As of this writing, thirty-six volumes in the main series, covering 1760 to 1801, and seven volumes in the retirement series, covering 1809 to 1814, have appeared.

  The two most comprehensive biographies are the three-volume The Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1858) by Henry S. Randall and the six-volume Jefferson and His Time (Boston, 1981) by Dumas Malone. Of the numerous one-volume biographies, the most authoritative is Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York, 1970) by Merrill Peterson, the scholar who also edited the Library of America’s Jefferson’s Writings (New York, 1984), which features all the major works such as the Autobiography and Notes on the State of Virginia as well as key letters. I also consulted numerous other biographies, including Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York, 1974); Andrew Burstein, The Inner Jefferson (Charlottesville, VA, 1995); Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1996); Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello (New York, 2008); Jon Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women (New York, 2007); and Willard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson: A Life (New York, 1993). Jon Meacham’s biography, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York, 2012), was not available at the time of writing.

  On Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, the recent volume edited by Robert Turner, The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission (Durham, NC, 2011), challenges the position of Annette Gordon-Reed, as articulated in her two books, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville, VA, 1998) and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York, 2008).

  In Burr (New York, 1973), novelist Gore Vidal paints Jefferson as a pedantic obsessive. While this portrait is solidly researched, it seems unduly harsh, as Vidal downplays Jefferson’s considerable brilliance.

  Jonathan R. T. Davidson, Kathryn M. Connor, and Marvin Swartz, “Mental Illness in U.S. Presidents between 1776 and 1974: A Review of Biographical Sources,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (January 2006), pp. 47–51.

  Douglas Wilson has edited Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book (Princeton, 1989). For a lively analysis of this work, see Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1994).

  For more on Jefferson’s two terms in the White House, see the first four volumes of Henry Adams’s nine-volume masterpiece, History of the United States of America 1801–1817 (New York, 1962).

  Robert C. Baron has edited The Garden and Farm Books of Thomas Jefferson (Golden, CO, 1987). For a good secondary source on Jefferson as a builder, see Thomas Jefferson as an Architect and a Designer of Landscapes (Boston, 1913) by William Alexander Lambeth and Warren H. Manning.

  For more on the birth of the University of Virginia, see John S. Patton, Jefferson, Cabell and the University of Virginia (New York, 1906). On Jefferson’s books, the Library of Congress has issued Thomas Jefferson’s Library: A Catalog with the Entries in His Own Order (Washington, DC, 1989), edited by James Gilreath and Douglas Wilson.

  The original manuscript of The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French and English, bound in a red leather book, now resides in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. The Smithsonian has recently published a beautiful facsimile edition (Washington, DC, 2011), which includ
es scholarly essays on both its history and conservation.

  2. Marketing: Henry Heinz

  E. D. McCafferty, Heinz’s private secretary, published the first book about the founder, Henry J. Heinz: A Biography (Pittsburgh, 1923). Businessman and attorney Steve Lentz has republished this privately printed work as It Was Never About the Ketchup! The Life and Leadership Secrets of H. J. Heinz (Garden City, NY, 2007). Another early impressionistic work is Stephen Potter’s The Magic Number 57: The Story of ‘57’ (London, 1959), which, while focusing on the emergence of the H. J. Heinz Company in Britain, contains interesting tidbits about the founder. Likewise, both Eleanor Foa Dienstag’s corporate history In Good Company: 125 Years at the Heinz Table (1869–1994) (New York, 1994) and Nancy Koehn’s chapter on Heinz’s career in Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell (Boston, 2001) also contain valuable biographical information.

  H. J. Heinz has also been the subject of two scholarly biographies. Using previously unexamined diaries and manuscripts supplied by the family, Robert C. Alberts wrote The Good Provider: H. J. Heinz and His 57 Varieties (Boston, 1973). While the originals of these Heinz manuscripts are kept by the Heinz Family Foundation in Pittsburgh and are not available to the public, Alberts deposited copies (and/or transcripts) of some manuscripts in Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center. I examined these materials, as did Quentin R. Skrabec Jr., author of H. J. Heinz: A Biography (Jefferson, NC, 2009). The biography started by John F. Cowan was never completed. However, Cowan did write a manuscript about the family, “Diary of My Life at Greenlawn, Pittsburgh”; though it was never published, a typescript is available at the Heinz History Center.

  Simone Wendel, the director of the forthcoming German documentary Kings of Kallstadt, which traces the roots of the Heinz and Trump families, supplied me with information about the ancestors of both Henry Heinz and Donald Trump.

  Elizabeth Beardsley Butler’s reporting on the Heinz Company is featured in Women and the Trades: Pittsburgh, 1907–1908 (New York, 1909), the first of the six-volume set The Pittsburgh Survey, issued by the Russell Sage Foundation under the editorship of Paul Underwood Kellogg.

  Howard Heinz’s remarks about his father’s legacy are taken from his 1927 address before the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, “Pittsburgh and the Food-Preserving Industry,” published in Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Spirit (Pittsburgh, 1928).

  Ralph Vartabedian’s front-page story in the Los Angeles Times on Heinz’s eccentric heirs, “Family Has Seen Share of Turmoil: Along with Power and Wealth, the Clan Teresa Heinz Kerry First Married into Has Lived through Tragedy and Estrangement,” appeared on October 27, 2004. This item was then considered particularly newsworthy because the presidential election involving Mrs. Heinz Kerry’s husband, Democratic senator John Kerry, was held a week later.

  To write about Heinz, one must also devour the literature on the condiment for which he has become a synonym. The king of ketchupologists is Andrew Smith, author of The Tomato in America (Columbia, SC, 1994) and Pure Ketchup (Columbia, SC, 1996). Malcolm Gladwell’s classic New Yorker article “The Ketchup Conundrum,” has been reprinted in his collection, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures (New York, 2009). For more on the early history of ketchup, see Bee Wilson, Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee (Princeton, NJ, 2008) and Clayton Anderson Coppin and Jack C. High, The Politics of Purity: Harvey Washington Wiley and the Origins of Federal Food Policy (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999).

  For information on Heinz’s activities at various World’s Fairs, I looked at the respective catalogs—e.g., International Exposition, 1876: Official Catalogue (Philadelphia, 1876)—and such secondary works as Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions (Chicago, 1984).

  Author interviews: Clayton Coppin and Jack High.

  3. Information Technology: Melvil Dewey

  Wayne Wiegand, an emeritus professor of library and information studies at Florida State University, has published the authoritative biography, Irrepressible Reformer (Chicago, 1996), which includes a frank discussion of Dewey’s racism and sexism. This preeminent Dewey scholar has also written the informative article “The ‘Amherst Method’: The Origins of the Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme,” Libraries and Culture (Spring 1998), pp. 175–194. In contrast to Wiegand, early biographers ignored his dark side. The first life, Melvil Dewey: Seer: Inspirer: Doer 1851–1931 (Lake Placid, NY, 1932), was compiled by Grosvenor Dawe, a former student of Dewey’s at the New York State Library School, under the close supervision of Dewey’s second wife, Emily Dewey. Though an idealized portrait, it is a valuable resource that contains numerous letters and diary entries. It also features a full list of Dewey’s scholarly publications. The short biography Melvil Dewey (Chicago, 1944) written by Fremont Rider, the husband of Dewey’s niece, and a librarian at Wesleyan University, also presented Dewey as a hero.

  Over the course of several chapters on Dewey in her lively book Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876–1920 (New York, 1979), the late historian Dee Garrison was the first to allude to his obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

  To learn more about the birth of the first Columbia Library School under Dewey, see the volume assembled by the School of Library Service (as the second incarnation was called), The School of Library Economy of Columbia College, 1887–1889; Documents for a History (New York, 1937), which includes a copy of the famous application in which he asked for photos so that he could exclude “pumpkins.” Cecil R. Roseberry’s A History of the New York State Library (Albany, NY, 1970) gives a useful overview of Dewey’s tenure as the head of that library.

  As Wiegand notes in his appendix, Dewey manuscripts are now scattered in dozens of libraries across the country. I examined archival material at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library—the largest repository of Deweyiana, it houses his diaries, his memoir, “3/4 of a Century,” as well as hundreds of letters, including that startlingly frank 1927 note to Anne Colony—the New York Public Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, and the Amherst College Library. I also obtained by mail various Dewey manuscripts held at the American Library Association Archives at the University of Illinois in Urbana. At Harvard’s Widener Library, I read the first edition of his classification system, A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library (Amherst, MA, 1876), which was personally signed by Dewey, even though his name does not appear as the author in the book.

  At the Boston Athenaeum, I was delighted to find several books on the Lake Placid Club, including the Handbook (Morningside, NY, 1901), Reginald Townsend’s A University Club in the Wilderness (Essex County, NY, 1923), and T. Morris Longstreth’s Lake Placid and an Experiment in Intelligence (New York, 1923).

  Dewey’s pedantic and unintentionally amusing treatise, “Office Efficiency,” appeared in the three-volume collection The Business of Insurance: A Text Book and Reference Work Covering All Lines of Insurance, Written by Eighty Eminent Experts (New York, 1912), edited by Howard Potter Dunham.

  The volume edited by Sarah Vann, Melvil Dewey: His Enduring Place in Librarianship (Littleton, CO, 1978), features numerous professional and personal writings such as his ten-page eightieth birthday letter.

  Regarding Dewey’s “shady reputation with women colleagues,” see Claire Beck, “A Private Grievance against Dewey,” American Libraries (January 1996), pp. 62–64.

  4. Sexuality: Alfred Kinsey

  To write about Kinsey’s college career and his graduation speech, I drew upon information contained in various issues of his college newspaper, the Bowdoin Orient—the text was printed on June 22, 1916—which I downloaded from the website of the Bowdoin College Library.

  Both Cornelia V. Christenson, author of Kinsey: A Biography (Bloomington, IN, 1971), and Wardell B. Pomeroy, author of Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research (New York, 1972), were former staf
f members of the Kinsey Institute and reveal little about the man. In contrast, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life (New York, 2004) by James H. Jones and Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey (Bloomington, IN, 2000) by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy both address his personal life, including his sex life. T. C. Boyle’s novel The Inner Circle (New York, 2004), which is essentially the fifth Kinsey biography, draws extensively from these two books. Bill Condon, director of the 2004 biopic Kinsey, has published the script to his movie, based on the Gathorne-Hardy biography, in Kinsey: Public and Private (New York, 2004), a volume that also includes a couple of interesting essays on Kinsey’s life by other contributors.

  While Jones and Gathorne-Hardy, authors of the two major biographies, are largely in agreement about the main facts of Kinsey’s life, their interpretations differ. Jones argues that Kinsey was scarred by childhood traumas and that his personality and bizarre sexual behavior “bear the unmistakable stamp of compulsion.” In contrast, Gathorne-Hardy sees in Kinsey a free spirit who simply knew what he wanted sexually and went for it. “By the time he got going,” the British author told the New York Times in 2004, “he was more unrepressed than practically anyone.” The best living authority on Kinsey, Gebhard has praised both books but has called Jones’s massive tome, which took twenty-five years to complete, “definitive.”

  While Werner Muensterberger’s Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives (New York, 1994) relies heavily on Freudian jargon, the basic insights seem well-grounded.

  Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde (trans. Stella Browne), Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique (New York, 1930).