Freud had exposed the split between an individual’s inner psyche and external consciousness at the same time industrialization was separating private from public life by shifting work from inside the home to the factory. Regardless of whether people had read the great Viennese doctor, they had firsthand experience operating in different worlds. There was the self when you were safe at home with family and the self you presented to the harsher world.
Later social scientists like Erving Goffman, David Riesman, and Christopher Lasch expanded on the division between the private and public selves in a modern market system. Goffman talked about the “outer mask” that people offered others to win plaudits. Riesman’s outer-directed personalities, products of an affluent consumer-oriented society, took their cues from friends and the mass media. Success was gauged not by internal standards of conduct or achievement but by how adept one was at passing, at physically adapting and fitting in.
That is why in the early years of the twentieth century, altering features because they were linked with racial and ethnic inferiority—like a Semitic nose, dark skin, or kinky hair—was considered a legitimate reason to apply the crude techniques of plastic surgery and other chemical treatments. Individual transformation was seen to depend less on social or political change than on biology.
The Pursuit of Happiness
The first plastic surgery specifically undertaken to reverse signs of aging was performed by the German physician Eugen Holländer in 1901 at the request of a Polish female aristocrat who desired a rhytidectomy, or “facelift.” In 1906, Charles Conrad Miller developed a procedure to remove baggy eyelids. “Signs of maturity in women must go,” he contended. More innovations followed.
Attempts to treat severely maimed soldiers who returned from the Great War spurred technical developments in plastic surgery and widened interest in the procedures. While reconstructive surgeons initially took pains to distinguish themselves from aesthetic or beauty surgeons, discontent with aspects of one’s appearance soon became an equally acceptable reason for the technique. Twentieth-century medicine adopted a new goal apart from its mission to combat disease: curing unhappiness. Over time, healthy individuals who were dissatisfied with a nose, chin, wrinkles, weight, or breasts could expect to be offered a full menu of treatments, from hormones to surgery, as if they were sick.
This sort of self-improvement was linked to a particular view of humanity that spread throughout the nineteenth century: that individuals had control over their own lives. The sense of being in command was a relatively new experience. In the colonial era, most people adhered to the Calvinist precept that salvation was predetermined. In the divine cosmos, humanity was no better than a wretched worm, wholly dependent on God’s grace. Jonathan Edwards, the New England preacher who became a leader during the First Great Awakening’s religious revival, told his fearful congregation in 1741 that “the God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, . . . and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.” Piety was an individual’s only option. The limits of a person’s spiritual control paralleled the limits of his economic control. A farmer’s son might follow in his father’s footsteps or be apprenticed to a blacksmith or wheelwright. But a clear path leading from high school and college to a rich offering of different careers, lifestyles, and opportunities—in a word, choice—did not exist.
The fall-off in Calvinism in the first decades of the nineteenth century and the rise of evangelical Protestantism, with its emphasis on human effort, gave individuals a greater sense of mastery over their own spiritual fates at the same time political and economic progress was giving them more power over their material lives. The spirit of Protestant evangelism that underlay capitalism’s advance also propelled the development of self-help. What makes aesthetic surgery a “truly modern phenomenon,” Sander Gilman argues, is that it depends on a “cultural presupposition that you have the inalienable right to alter, reshape, control, augment or diminish your body, assuming you turn to surgeons whose expertise you can buy.” And the right to improve your life (by altering your body if that is what you wish) is guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence as part of the inalienable right to pursue happiness.
The pursuit of happiness was also part of Freud’s legacy. He reinforced the link between individuality and self-improvement when he turned the patient’s gaze toward inward exploration. What is psychoanalysis if not a form of self-help, a person’s intense and extended attempt to address his problems and failures through a deep examination of his unique experiences and feelings? The analyst serves as the mostly silent facilitator. Happiness was the goal Christine Frederick cited in her Ladies’ Home Journal columns when she urged women to institute Taylor’s scientific management in the home. And happiness was a reason to undergo plastic surgery. In 1924, the New York Daily Mirror ran a “Homely Girl Contest,” in which the contestant who best explained how ugliness marred her existence would win a surgical makeover. Many surgeons considered the new techniques a form of psychotherapy for women. In 1929, the beauty surgeon Adalbert G. Bettman wrote that aesthetic surgery would improve “patients’ mental well-being,” and foster “their pursuit of happiness.”
There would always be people heralding the virtues of middle age, but the competition between positive and negative views of midlife became increasingly one-sided by the twenties. The emphasis on physiology—in the workplace, the culture, and the research lab—put middle age at a disadvantage compared with youth. Self-improvement through physical alteration promised greater happiness, a process that consumer capitalism adopted as its own. With its ingenious techniques for selling to a mass public, the burgeoning marketplace was able to exploit the fascination with the body. The market was modern, and being modern meant being young. A cult of youth seized the popular imagination after World War I and has kept a grip on it ever since.
6
Middle Age Enters the Modern Age
Bruce Barton, the father of modern advertising
The large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.
—Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1923)
An unexpected champion of middle age appeared in the twenties. G. Stanley Hall, after a career of rhapsodizing about the glories of youth, in retirement became interested in rescuing life after 40 from a growing malaise.
Hall collected his thoughts in Senescence: The Last Half of Life, a book he published in 1922, two years after he stepped down as president of Clark University and two years before his death. He was 78, and maintained his familiar neat long beard, though his sturdy face had thinned and his eyes had sunk a bit into their sockets. He poured his reflections and fears about old age and death into the 522-page text, roaming from discussions of aging’s physiological features to meditations on Western civilization. Old age was the intended subject, but since Hall’s target audience comprised “intelligent people passing or past middle life,” the period gets extended treatment.
Hall scorned the proliferation of fervid efforts to ward off aging. Labeling midlife “the dangerous age”—a term used at the time to describe the madness that supposedly afflicted women going through menopause—he warned that after 40 men exhausted themselves by trying to seem younger, “remain necessary, and circumvent the looming possibilities of displacement.”
Hall acknowledged that these fears were well-grounded. The trends that had worried 40- and 50-something laborers early in the new century etched deep, disfiguring scars into the lives of the working class. By the twenties, machinery was replacing as many as two hundred thousand workers each year, bringing a new term, “technological unemployment,” into circulation. A few years later, Robert and Helen Merrel
l Lynd reported in their classic study Middletown—in reality, the recently industrialized town of Muncie, Indiana—that men of the working class “reach their prime in their twenties, and begin to fail in their late forties.”
In 1923, the Lynds and a corps of younger surveyors settled for eighteen months in this town of about thirty-eight thousand in order to capture what was happening in “average, midsize cities” in the middle of the country. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Lynd and his team noted the anxiety and discouragement among factory employees and their wives over what one plant superintendent called “the age deadline” for men. “I’d say that by 45 they are through.” Middle age meant a dead end. “I think there’s less opportunity for older men in industry now than there used to be,” the head of a leading machine shop said. “The principal change I’ve seen in the plant here has been the speeding up of machines and the eliminating of the human factor by machinery. . . . [In] general we find that when a man reaches 50 he is slipping down in production.”
The personnel manager of another machine shop agreed: “Only about 25 percent of our workers are over 40. Speed and specialization tend to bring us younger men.” For those over 40, sweeping floors was one of the few jobs available. The wife of a patternmaker, the job that Frederick Taylor himself once held, said of her husband, “He is 40 and in about ten years now will be on the shelf. A patternmaker really isn’t much wanted after 45. They always put in the young men.”
More surprising was that anxiety over an age deadline had extended to the white-collar world. In Muncie, such employees made up about a third of the town’s workforce and those on the lower rungs of this class felt the pressure. Retail salespeople and clerical workers were learning that middle age could be viewed as a potential liability. “Even in the professions such as teaching and the ministry, the demand for youth is making itself felt more than a generation ago,” the Lynds noted. For young men in the business class, “they reach their prime in their thirties.”
Periodicals more broadly echoed the plaint. An American magazine article warned that after 50, men “go to pieces.” Another article noted it was common to think “a man has reached the point of greatest efficiency at around 45, is at death’s door at 50 and at 60 has cheated the undertaker.” Advertising, the industry that was helping to set the nation’s tastes and standards, was considered a young’s man game in which those under 35 were most likely to excel. It was widely believed, said Stanley Burnshaw, a copywriter for the Biow Agency in the late 1920s, that a copywriter or layout man lasted no more than ten years before being “thrown on the ashheap.”
Evidence of the waning appeal of middle age in comparison with youth was displayed on Broadway as well as in the Midwest. Elmer Rice’s 1923 play The Adding Machine revolves around the 45-year-old Mr. Zero, who is fired after twenty-five years on the job and, in a rage, murders his boss.
In Senescence, Hall noted that men can be seized by a “meridional mental fever” or “middle age crisis,” but the death they fixated on was their own. “Certain temperaments make a desperate, now-or-never effort to realize their extravagant expectations and are thus led to excesses of many kinds; while others capitulate to fate, lose heart, and perhaps even lose the will to live,” he wrote. This fever, which can strike anytime in the 30s or 40s, is clearly the precursor of what we have come to know as the midlife crisis. Men who were struck often put furious energy into trying to appear young. In Hall’s view, passing as youthful was self-defeating. Such deception wasted vital energy and interfered with the “normal” development of a meaningful old age.
The venerable psychologist turned the telescope around and defined middle age from the perspective of old age: “At forty old age is in its infancy; the fifties are its boyhood, the sixties its youth, and at seventy it attains its majority.” Women embark on the same journey earlier, he said, but end it later. In his tract, Hall divided a human life into five fifteen-year segments. He labeled the middle segment, which spans 30 through 45, as midlife. But what we consider middle age today is the onset of what Hall called “senescence.” He staked out his opposition to the neurologist George Miller Beard, who believed man’s most productive years were fixed between 30 and 45. In contrast, Hall wrote, “Modern man was not meant to do his best work before 40.” The intricate problems of the modern world required maturity, wisdom, and experience. Those could be provided only by a “superman,” said Hall, referencing the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In Nietzsche’s cosmology, Christianity had saddled humankind with a spurious set of precepts that hamstrung its potential. What was needed was a new savior, a “superman” to serve as a flesh-and-blood replacement for God, establish a new set of values appropriate to contemporary life, and lead humanity to greatness. Hall predicted: “The coming superman will begin, not end, his real activity with the advent of the fourth decade.”
Hall argued that the human race “within the past few years had passed its prime,” and “those higher powers of man that culminate late” are civilization’s best hope for salvation. By the time Senescence was published, though, public attitudes toward the virtues of life’s latter half had hardened. Four gangrenous years spent fighting the Great War tore down confidence in mature judgment. Writing from the front, the 22-year-old John Dos Passos (who later wrote a touching eulogy for his friend Randolph Bourne after his 1918 death from influenza) insisted that joy, desire, and hope rested with youth and not with “the swaggering old fogies in frock-coats.” Young men like Dos Passos, who were sent into battle, were profoundly disenchanted with the middle-aged civilian and military leaders who had entangled them in the bloody enterprise. By the 1920s, youth had been all but sanctified as the savior of a corrupt and moribund European civilization that an older generation had dragged into years of ruinous war.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fantastically popular debut novel This Side of Paradise, published in 1920, captured the sentiments of the young postwar generation. Taking its title from a poem by Rupert Brooke, the British golden boy whose death came to symbolize the war’s grotesque bloodiness and waste, This Side of Paradise depicted the disillusionment of the younger generation in the person of Amory Blaine, a wealthy Princeton undergraduate. “Young students try to believe in older authors,” Amory says, “constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can’t.”
In 1924, the critic Edmund Wilson poked fun at his friend Fitzgerald and the heady pronouncements of youthful superiority in an imagined interview in which Fitzgerald proudly claims to be the man “who has made America Younger-generation conscious.”
Fitzgerald was one of the scores of artists, writers, architects, and filmmakers who fit under the multicolored coat of modernism, the far-flung cultural movement that hit its stride in the early twentieth century. Modernism reversed the baleful eighteenth-century connotation of words like “modern,” “novelty,” and “innovation.” “Make It New!” Ezra Pound instructed his fellow artists. The historian Peter Gay explains: “The one thing that all modernists had indisputably in common was the conviction that the untried is markedly superior to the familiar, the rare to the ordinary, the experimental to the routine.” And by extension, the new over the old and youth over experience.
Novelists of all stripes gave textured life to the idea of middle-age decline. Even though conditions for most Americans in the twenties were improving in substantial ways, writers, including Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, and T. S. Eliot, created a narrative arc of middle age failure and disappointment that helped establish a set of expectations about how people responded to their middle decades.
Jesus Would Have Been an Adman
No group was more adept at extolling the virtues of youth and progress than advertisers. They “proudly proclaimed themselves missionaries of modernity,” the historian Roland Marchand writes in his classic study Advertising and the American Dream. “Constantly and unabashedly, they championed . . . the modern against the old-fashioned.”
Bruce Barton was the most famous adman of his era. Born in 1886, he grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, the Chicago suburb where Ernest Hemingway was born twelve years later. The Barton family’s trajectory reflects that of America itself. Barton’s great-great-grandfather came over as a soldier in the British army during the Revolutionary War and, whether through principle or prescience, switched sides and settled in New Jersey after Britain’s defeat. By the time Bruce was born, the Bartons had moved farther west. His father, William, a traveling preacher based in Robbins, Tennessee, rode a white horse to visit the mountain churches in his circuit. He had larger ambitions, though, and eventually became the minister of a prominent Congregational church in Oak Park.
In Bruce’s childhood, retailers and their customers lived in the same locale. There were no chains or franchises, no easy method of informing consumers at the other end of the country about a product, and no cheap, efficient way to transport goods to distant customers. By the time Barton co-founded an advertising agency in 1919, assembly lines were churning out shiploads of different products, railroad tracks crisscrossed the nation, a new highway system etched lines in the country’s plains, and publications reached from one coast to the other. Mass consumer capitalism took off with the force of a steam engine. Whether you brushed your teeth in Philadelphia or scrubbed a sink in San Francisco, the same brands of toothpaste and cleansers were in reach. And the same movie magazines and weekly journals that showed off the latest hat styles or warned of a common fashion faux pas decorated newsstands in Baltimore and Chicago. Sinclair Lewis captures just how quickly Taylorized mass production standardized materials, tastes, and expectations in his portrait of Floral Heights, George Babbitt’s hometown:
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