The Trouble with Tom

by Paul Collins

  By the time E. B. Foote revised Medical Common Sense in 1870, his book had become a veritable Sears catalogue of the latest radical idealism for the 1870 season: everything from animal rights ('The dawn of the millennium cannot light up human hands and arms red with blood of slaughtered animals . . . The ingenious Yankee will invent a substitute for leather, and we already have enough substitutes for ivory and bone.") to dancing lessons being included in Christian masses. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables, Foote recommends heartily: try shiatsu and botanical remedies! These are now all the stuff of Style section and Mother Jones ads; the only surprise is finding them in Victorian garb. Other predictions by Foote are familiar in a more haunting way, though:

  It is urged by many that capital punishment restrains people from committing crimes for which that penalty is inflicted; but statistics show that more murders are committed in Massachusetts where the death penalty is rigidly administered, than in Wisconsin where it has been for several years abolished. People laboring under violent passion seldom pause to consider consequences . . . Remove this barbaric example from high places and the example will be Christianizing to the whole human family.

  Foote felt confident that people would eventually adopt the rational approach: "The death penalty, happily, is becoming unpopular."

  Well, it has indeed remained deeply unpopular among the many people now slated to receive it. Over a century later, Foote's hopes would still seem to many some distant and even hopeless utopia. Yet he had seen a utopia: he had shaken hands with its inhabitants. Foote had some years earlier paid a visit at one of the branches of the Oneida Community—an extraordinary Christian sect of self-proclaimed "Perfectionists." As laid out in their 1847 pamphlet Biblical Communism, this sect recognized neither private property nor private relations: they were polyamorous communists.

  It's hard to imagine a combination of beliefs more likely to whip up small-town residents into a scandalized froth: Perfectionists were run out of towns and endured decades of pulpit attacks and bigamy prosecutions. They shrugged these off and diligently built up businesses in lumber and blacksmithing; meanwhile, their children were raised by the community, instead of by parents; they had both open marriages and open parenting. These children, visiting doctors marveled, grew up remarkably robust and healthy. The Perfectionists had, in short, created precisely the sort of society that Paine's old friend John 'Walking" Stewart had envisioned decades before. If there was ever a community not for everyone, Oneida was surely it. And yet, Foote mused, those who were there did seem happy. Since he'd first read Common Sense, Foote had come to see the wisdom of the exact inverse of Paine's great proverb: he realized that a long habit of not thinking a thing right gives it a superficial appearance of being wrong. Upon careful thought, he could not find anything actually wrong with Oneida.

  And so Foote came to this startling conclusion: "Freedom of affection, and even sexual promiscuity, do not necessarily degrade or demoralize women or generate diseases." He had seen no degradation at Oneida. No, he decided: it was legal codes and bans on condoms that were the source of that. It was the Anthony Comstocks of the world who were degrading women. If women were granted control of their bodies, Foote announced, there would be no need of Mr. Cornstock and chivalrous efforts on behalf of their honor:

  The conservative man exclaims, 'We worship them as angels" . . . Gallantry is mistaken for justice, and soft soap for equity. Even these exist only on the surface. They compose the cream that rises to the top of polite society, and this is fed only to the handsome, rich, and otherwise fortunate; all below that is skim milk, and this is dealt out sparingly and grudgingly to toiling women, unhappy wives, and to all, indeed, who most need sympathy and help. But let no man who suddenly awakes to this injustice, suppose in his arrogance that he can give woman her rights. The very fact that men talk of allowing women this or that liberty is evidence that authority itself has been usurped. As well might a pickpocket talk of giving a port-monnaie to someone from whom he had clandestinely filched it. I tell you, reader, we men have no rights to give women; she possesses naturally the same rights as we do.

  Fine words. But how exactly might a woman secure these natural rights?

  A modern reader of old medical guides and women's magazines might wonder why there are so many ads for syringes . . . but not for needles. Victorian women knew why. Their most popular form of contraception was douching after sex—and though crude and potentially even dangerous, the commonly used weak solutions of vinegar or borax could indeed have prevented pregnancy. You'll gain an appreciation for modern central heating upon learning that spirits were sometimes added so that the solution would not freeze sitting on the nightstand. But even to use that solution, you still needed a way to deliver it.

  Enter, so to speak, the syringe. Medical suppliers came to offer a dizzying array of brass and glass squirters that had no clear purpose other than some vaguely advertised "cleanliness." Moral crusaders like Comstock were quick to catch on, raiding and fining retailers of these syringes, who were thereby driven to some pretty strange subterfuges in their advertising. Turn to the back of Foote's books and you will find ads for an "Impregnating Syringe," a magnificent piece of doublespeak if there ever was one. Not to be outdone, the George C. Goodwin & Company catalogue for 1885 took its Female Syringe, reversed the engraving so that it faced left instead of right, and relabeled it as a House-Plant Syringe. Yes, so now you could water your . . . petunia.

  The ruses didn't always work. After one sexual reformer and publisher, Ezra Heywood, was tossed into jail for advertising syringes, his wife Angela proclaimed in the press: "This womb-syringe question is to the North what the Negro question was to the South." It is a jarring comparison. Slavery: pregnancy. Really?

  No: not really. And yet a curiously large number of sex reformers had indeed cut their teeth in abolitionist movements. That one societal question had led a generation of activists down a tangled path into innumerable others, not the least of which was the plight of women who were dying in childbirth from unwanted pregnancies, or finding themselves locked into loveless marriages and miserable social illegitimacy. It wasn't slavery, but it did share one key element: these were people forbidden from control over their own bodies.

  Race and sex were the two great unspeakables of American society. And to speak of both in the same breath-why, that was just asking for trouble.

  Trouble came—as trouble so often does—with a monkey.

  It is truth universally acknowledged that Everything Is Funnier With Monkeys. I defy you to name a human endeavor that is not enriched by the addition of a screaming, leg-humping, ass-biting primate. Which brings us to what must be the strangest book of the nineteenth century-E. B. Foote's wildly bizarre Sammy Tubbs, the Boy Doctor, and Sponsie, the Trouble some Monkey (1874). It is the five-volume Manhattan saga of the twelve-year-old son of freed slaves. It does indeed also feature a sidekick monkey named Sponsie—and yes, as promised, he is troublesome.

  Sammy is the doorboy for kindly local doctor Samuel Hubbs, who apparently is a splendid fellow in every way. In case you were wondering whether Hubbs might be meant to resemble anyone, I should mention that Hubbs and E. B. Foote share this same 120 Lexington Avenue address. And they have authored books with the same titles.

  Sammy Tubbs becomes the young protege of Foote—sorry, Hubbs—and in a sort of med-school Pygmalion, the older white Hubbs molds the young black Tubbs into a doctor. In each respective volume, amid servant hijinks and literal monkeyshines, Tubbs gets lectured on Muscles, Circulation, Digestion, and the Nervous System. But the fifth and final volume bears a curious inscription on its cover: "A Book for Private Reading." Leaf through it, and you'll see why: it has line drawings of genitals, and of Rand McNally road-map accuracy.

  It's a Victorian sex-ed manual. For children. Starring a monkey.

  The Sammy Tubbs series mixes nearly every progressive and fringe element of nineteenth-century physiology and politics into a sort of patent-medicine speed
ball. There are lectures against tight-fitting clothes, tobacco and alcohol, and for phrenology and animal magnetism; there are thrilling showdowns between bigotry and the rights of women and minorities. And every few pages there is a moralizing medical lecture from good old Dr. Hubbs. In his hands, the human body becomes the embodiment of reform, a vessel of progressivism that is constantly reinventing itself:

  "Particles of matter are all the time dying in your body, and fresh ones are as constantly taking their places, when you are in a condition of health. Some physiologists say that we change our bodies completely as often as once in seven years" . . .

  'Then," said Sammy, with a look of surprise, "the body I was born with has been buried, and in smaller pieces and more places than if it had been cut up by the physicians!"

  'We can begin the world anew," Foote's own mentor once wrote of America, and the doctor agreed. The past was quite literally dead and dying. There was no point to conservatism, because there was nothing to conserve.

  Anchoring these extraordinary sentiments are, courtesy of illustrator H. L. Stephens, hundreds of drawings of everything from shrublike capillary diagrams to flying monkeys and animated kitchen appliances. Rather more down-to-earth—if not downright earthy—illustrations include those of genitalia. One set of these occur on pages 1801/2and 1803/4The idea was that mortified parents could razor out the drawings without Junior noticing a break in pagination. But even razored copies still contained a drawing of a vagina with a tiny musical note tooting out of it—a sly touch by Stephens removed from later printings. Hank seems to be a bit of a late-night joker in the print shop: in one edition of Plain Home Talk, the caption "A Delicious Looking Medicine"1eers beneath his illustration of grapes bunched in a dangling manner that will either put you very much off or very much onto your Smuckers for the rest of the week.

  Sammy Tubbs himself is no slouch in such bodily matters. Beginning as a "poor little ignorant colored boy" living in the attic of Hubbs's genteel Manhattan home, he rises to become a self-appointed neighborhood practitioner and health lecturer, addressing halls packed with rapturous black and white women—where his reproduction lecture is introduced by a certain "Miss Goodlove"—and treating not only black patients in his family's neighborhood, but poor whites as well. He gets particularly familiar with white bodies in the form of his girlfriend, Julia Barkenstir. She is—pause for irony—the daughter of a cotton broker.

  Foote advocated interracial relationships on eugenic grounds of avoiding racial inbreeding, resulting in an extraordinary Sammy Tubbs illustration of Sammy and Julia kissing. Bear in mind that this was not only in an era when most states had laws against such relations, but where more than a few enforced them by means of ropes and trees. Yet Sammy is unapologetic about it, yelling over the protests of Julia's father: 'White men are constantly deuying miscegenation, miscegenation!—while they are the only ones that want to miscegenate . . ."

  Indeed. You might even say they invented it.

  The word miscegenation was scarcely a decade old when Foote wrote of Sammy and Julia's kiss: it was a made-up word, a neologism, coined in a mysterious pamphlet. Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and the Negro had appeared on Manhattan newsstands on Christmas Day, 1863. Foote himself might have bought a copy as he strolled up Lexington Avenue. Though published by the local firm of Dexter Hamilton & Co., the seventy-two page pamphlet gave no hint of its authorship. Peruse the chapter titles, and you'll discover why:

  Superiority of Mixed Races

  The Love of the Blond for the Black

  The Miscegenetic Ideal of Beauty in Women

  The Future—No Mite, No Black

  The author helpfully coined a new word for this happy state of affairs, clapping together the Latin miscere (to mix) with genus (race). "White man should marry the black woman," he vowed, "and the white woman the black man."

  Racists went berserk. This was absolutely explosive stuff in 1863, coming on the heels of a not entirely popular Emancipation Proclamation. Democrats tried pinning the whole thing on Lincoln, who was coming up for reelection, and to whom the pamphlet addressed itself directly by heartily recommending that he add a miscegenation plank in the Republican platform. Senators waved Miscegenation around as damning evidence that, thanks to Lincoln, a coming colored tide would swamp white purity.

  And so fancy this: the pamphlet itself was written by a racist.

  Miscegenation was, like Swift's A Modest Proposal, a hoax meant to be so absurd that it would backfire on its erstwhile proponents. When writer David Croly, a journalist at the staunchly Democratic New York World, tried to think of the most appalling, unthinkable outrage imaginable in America, this is what he imagined: a white woman having sex with a black man. To many readers, he was right. And his faux "Republican" pamphlet might have worked, except for one problem: it seems some people rather liked the idea of mixing races. But then, that is the problem with such arguments. When the pastor or politician inveighing against x sneers, 'What next, will they be wanting y?"—it just might be that we realize that, why yes, dear sir, we do want y next. And so what began as a racist smear turned, in the course of a decade, into a liberal doctor's prescription for saving humanity.

  But I doubt the children were paying any attention.

  "What about the monkey?" Foote sighs. "We want to know how he is, I imagine some of my uninterested young readers are clamorously inquiring." It's true. There are actually two monkeys in these children's books: nobody can much tell them apart. Sponsie 1 and Sponsie 2 are berserk stand-ins for the uncontrollable animality of the human body observed by the coolly rational Sammy, their mishaps provide the forensic grist for Foote's medical theories.

  How? Well, Sponsie 2 gets accidentally sealed alive under some floorboards—his starvation being a handy segue into a lecture on Digestion. He gets his rectum shot off after playing with a gun, all the better to explain incontinence. Ultimately, the unfortunate fellow is accidentally disemboweled by the belt drive of an industrial knife sharpener—"torn all to strings," a witness sadly notes. We are informed that Sponsie I "contracted a taste for malt liquors whiie living in Hoboken"—who wouldn't?—and the instructive result of that is the alcoholic simian tries hanging himself in the attic. M e r being revived, he turns into a pickpocket, a kidnapper, and a Central Park carriage thief; his life of prehensile crime only ends when he gets shot in the head in a duel with the other Sponsie.

  But even death is turned to good purpose: Sammy Tubbs yanks out the dead Sponsie's brain and spine to use as props for a lecture on the nervous system, all the better to prepare him for the full medical school scholarship that he has been awarded at the series' end.

  So all's well that ends well . . . unless, of course, you're the monkey.

  "Banana."

  The waiter sets my dessert down in front of me: Banana Toffee, a caramelized confection with vanilla ice cream. It's very good, a dish fit for a troublesome monkey. Sad to say, there's no record that Foote ever actually kept monkeys in this building, but one can always hope. I pay my bill, and walk back out in the cold afternoon air, down to Twenty-Fourth Street. A clutch of taxis race past: a man and woman walk past me holding hands, black and white. Maybe Foote would be pleased with his old neighborhood.

  I stop: here.

  Nobody had seen "Mr. Peters" leave his room at Putnam House near Twenty-Fourth Street; he certainly was a most mysterious boarder. Evening and then morning passed without a sign of him, and by afternoon it was time for room cleaning. A chambermaid knocked on his door. Nothing. She knocked again, and then tried his door: locked. The key had not been left downstairs, so the gentleman must still be in. Why wasn't he answering?

  The maid grabbed a chair and stood atop it to peek in through a transom. And here is what she saw: probably a little of her own reflection in the glass. Perhaps her breath misting its surface slightly. And then: a painfully thin man, alone, lying very still. He still did not return her greeting. He w
ould not be returning anyone's greetings. His face was bulging and ashen and blue: the kerchief under his jaw was red, the fabric running tautly from around his neck up to a coat rack on the wall, where it was securely tied. It had strangled his breathing hours before.

  In his pockets police found some old receipts, a penknife, and $1.40. There was also a letter marked 'To Be Opened After I Am Dead." In it, August Woehler poured out his life story for one final time to the world. He had, he said, struggled for years with the perilous state of his own body and soul.

  "I wanted to be somebody in the world," the deceased wrote, "so I made up my mind to control my passion and be above low living." As a young man in 1866, he'd moved to California for a while to seek his fortune, to shake his old self away. He found his salvation at this task in the writings of E. B. Foote: "I thought he was the greatest doctor there was." But there were, you see, some things that even Doctor Foote could not cure—some passions that could not be controlled, some diseases that could not be remedied because they were not diseases at all. Three hundred dollars' worth of mail-order treatments later, Woehler was no better than before. Infuriated and depressed, he went back to living miserably with his mother in Hartford.

  His life was ruined: it had been from the start, it seemed, and now its ruination was confirmed: