The Mansion of Happiness

by Jill Lepore

  Books about sex, usually offering advice about how to do it better, have been around for a long time. The most popular manual, even into the twentieth century, was Aristotle’s Master-piece; Or, The Secrets of Generation, which was first published in English in 1684. It caused a stir in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1744, when Jonathan Edwards discovered that a dozen young men in his congregation had “read Aristotle,” a “nasty book, about womenkind.”8 It went through twenty-six American editions between 1766 and 1831 alone.9 It wasn’t exactly a masterpiece, and it certainly wasn’t written by Aristotle. No one knows who wrote it; it’s a hodgepodge. But it’s got both handy anatomy lessons (“The Clytoris … is the Seat of Venereal Pleasure”) and useful tips: “They that would be commended to their Wedlock actions, and be happy in the fruit of their Labour, must observe to Copulate at distance of time not too often, nor yet too seldom.”10

  Aristotle’s Master-piece, though, wasn’t a kids’ book; it was written and published before kids’ books existed. Books explaining the facts of life to kids have been around only since the beginning of the twentieth century—the so-called golden age of children’s literature—which is also when adolescence as a stage of life was invented. And, curiously, the books and the stage are tangled together, because adolescence, at least when it started, meant the time between when you learn about sex and when you do it.

  Aristotle (the actual Aristotle) wrote about three ages of man: youth, the prime of life, and old age. In the seventeenth century, Boston’s Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet followed medieval writers, by describing four:

  Lo now! four other acts upon the stage,

  Childhood, and Youth, the Manly, and Old-age.11

  In early America, “youth” could mean anyone up to the age of thirty. Jonathan Edwards called the young men in his congregation who were reading Aristotle’s Master-piece “boys”; their average age was twenty-four.12

  The ages of man followed the order of the natural world—the days and the seasons. Morning, noon, night. Spring, summer, fall, winter. “One man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.” (There were seven planets.) Shakespeare’s player goes straight from “the whining school-boy, with his satchel” to “the lover, / Sighing like a furnace.” John Wallis’s New Game of Human Life had seven ages, too. His character is a “boy” until twelve, when he turns into a “youth”; he’s not a “man” until he’s twenty-four.13

  Rousseau talked about l’adolescence in Émile in 1762, which is one route by which the word, and the idea, entered the English vernacular.14 He called adolescence a second birth. “We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life.” The time when a child “leaves childhood behind him,” Rousseau warned, will be a time of peril: “he is a lion in a fever.” If childhood is a paradise, the best plan, Rousseau thought, is to prolong it by staving off the onset of adulthood. This requires keeping the secrets of generation secret.

  The problem is, the little pipsqueaks ask so many questions. “ ‘Where do little children come from?’ This is an embarrassing question,” Rousseau admitted, “which occurs very naturally to children, one which foolishly or wisely answered may decide their health and their morals for life.” He recommended dodging it:

  Should we enlighten children at an early period as to the objects of their curiosity, or is it better to put them off with decent shams? I think we need do neither. In the first place, this curiosity will not arise unless we give it a chance. We must therefore take care not to give it an opportunity. In the next place, questions one is not obliged to answer do not compel us to deceive those who ask them; it is better to bid the child hold his tongue than to tell him a lie. He will not be greatly surprised at this treatment if you have already accustomed him to it in matters of no importance. Lastly, if you decide to answer his questions, let it be with the greatest plainness, without mystery or confusion, without a smile. It is much less dangerous to satisfy a child’s curiosity than to stimulate it.

  That is, if you can’t skirt these questions, better to be honest, early, before your child becomes a lion with a temperature of a hundred and three.15

  The paradise of childhood was a product of the Enlightenment, but the storm of adolescence descended upon the United States with urbanization.16 Children used to be able to see for themselves how animals mate, bear, and nurse their young. But when people left the farm and moved to the city to work in factories, the way Milton Bradley’s father did, kids missed out on the chance to watch animals … sneezing.17 And then, oddly enough, parents began solemnly informing their children that babies, swaddled in blankets, are dropped down the chimney by a tall bird with long legs and a heavy bill.

  Storks, which are common in northern Europe, are known for taking particular care of their young. (Storks haven’t always been associated with fertility; in fact, the reverse has just as often been the case. In eighteenth-century Philadelphia, syringes marketed as abortifacients were “ingenious things said to have been suggested by the stork.” The stork feeds its young by inserting its bill down their throats, and a woman who thrust this syringe up her vagina and through her cervix could induce a miscarriage, or die trying.)18 In the United States, the rise of the myth that babies come from storks dates to the publication in 1838 of “The Storks,” a story by Hans Christian Andersen. In a nest on the roof of a house in a little village, a male stork guards a female and her hatchlings. Down below, a rascally boy sings:

  Stork! stork! long-legged stork!

  Into thy nest I prithee walk;

  There sits thy mate,

  With her four children so great.

  The first we’ll hang like a cat,

  The second we’ll burn,

  The third on a spit we’ll turn,

  The fourth drown dead as a rat!

  The baby storks tell their mother they would like to exact some vengeance on the boys below.

  “Shall not we fly down, and peck out their eyes?” said the young ones.

  “No, leave them alone!” said the mother.

  Instead, she teaches them to fly.

  “Now we will have our revenge!” said they.

  “Very well!” said the mother; “I have been thinking what will be the best. I know where the pool is, in which all the little human children lie until the storks come and take them to their parents: the pretty little things sleep and dream so pleasantly as they will never dream again. All parents like to have a little child, and all children like to have a little brother or sister. We will fly to the pool and fetch one for each of the boys who has not sung that wicked song, nor made a jest of the storks; and the other naughty children shall have none.”

  “But he who first sung those naughty rhymes! that great ugly fellow! what shall we do to him?” cried the young storks.

  “In the pool there lies a little child who has dreamed away his life; we will take it for him, and he will weep because he has only a little dead brother.”19

  And that is just what they do.

  “The Storks” is as cruel as the darkest of the Grimms’ tales, but it also explained, in one fell swoop, both birth and infant death. Andersen’s fables were hugely popular in the United States.20 Soon, the stork myth was everywhere: there were stork books, stork toys, stork baby bottles, and stork postcards. Nineteenth-century Americans, squeamish, but with eggs on their minds, grew all but obsessed with the idea that babies come not from women but from birds.

  To all this, Sylvester Graham objected, strenuously. He was an anti-stork man. Graham was born in West Suffield, Connecticut, in 1794, the youngest of seventeen children. His grandfather, a Scottish emigrant, was a minister. His father, who died when Sylvester was a baby, had been a charismatic preacher during New England’s Great Awakening, in the 1740s, when Jonathan Edwards was preaching—and banning Aristotle’s Master-piece. After the death of her husband, Sylvester Graham’s mother was deemed by the court to be “in a deranged state of mind” and unable to care for her children.21 From the a
ge of three, her youngest son was farmed out to neighbors and relatives; he never had much of a childhood. A wayward and melancholy youth, he once wrote an autobiographical poem about that uncomfortable, feverish age between childhood and manhood:

  In gloom, in sadness, and in tears,

    Through childhood’s period then did’st languish;

  And up through manhood’s early years,

    Thy every pulse was beat in anguish.22

  In 1823, Graham began a course of study at Amherst. Then he had a breakdown. The next year, he married the daughter of a sea captain. And then he was born again. Like many young men of his day, Graham was swept away by what came to be known as the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that aimed at a wholesale reformation in manners. Preachers shunned everything earthy, bawdy, and reckless in favor of everything refined, restrained, pious, and purposeful. In 1776, about one in six Americans belonged to a church; by 1850, that number had risen to one in three. In roughly the same period, the amount of alcohol Americans drank dropped from more than seven gallons per adult per year to less than two. Sobriety, orderliness, and punctuality: these were deemed essential traits for a people leaving farms and working, instead, in factories and in offices, striving to accumulate, achieve, invent, progress, and succeed.23

  Although Graham was licensed to preach in 1826, he never established his own congregation, partly because he was plagued by ill health. He suffered from a series of vague ailments: dyspepsia, sciatica, rheumatism, and neuralgia. For a while, he made a living as a temperance reformer, warning of the dangers of drink. Then he began having visions of a coming apocalypse—an apocalypse of children. “Thousands and thousands of children are springing into existence, and rising up into civil and moral society, and becoming incorporated with the body politic of the nation, without receiving any regular moral culture of the heart,” he preached in Philadelphia in 1829. A half-million children had already reached adulthood without having been given religious instruction, and some two and a half million children were in danger of following them into ruin. This river of children, he said, was more powerful than the Mississippi:

  The millions of children, which are now unseen and unfelt in our Country, with the thousands that are daily gushing into life,—if measures be not taken to qualify and direct their course, will inevitably, from their condition and circumstances, soon unite in one dark and mighty confluence of ignorance and immorality and crime, which will overflow the wholesome restraints of society, and sweep away the barriers of civil law, and sap the foundations of our Republican institutions.24

  The more he considered the coming apocalypse, the more Graham came to believe that this wasn’t so much a religious matter as a medical one. The problem at the heart of the body politic was a problem in the human body itself, and especially in the bodies of young men. They were overflowing; they were spurting: they were ejaculating.25

  Graham didn’t use the word “adolescence.” He talked, instead, about “children” and, more often, about “youth.” Still, the people he was worried about were between ten and twenty-four: growing up, but not yet married. He was more worried about boys than girls. He wasn’t alone. In 1829, the Connecticut minister Joel Hawes remarked, in Lectures to Young Men on the Formation of Character, that on the voyage of life, the waters traveled between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one are the most perilous: “On this sea, my young friends, you are now embarking, with little knowledge of what is before you, and many of you, I fear, without line, or compass, or chart.” Henry Ward Beecher warned, in his own Lectures to Young Men, that “a young man … feels in his bosom the various impulses, wild desires, restless cravings he can hardly tell for what.” He is on a quest, “thirsting for happiness.”26

  All this worry about young men was by no means without cause. The period between childhood and adulthood was, at the time, getting longer. Puberty was beginning earlier (at least as measured by the age of menarche, which was declining), and young people were starting work and marrying later. Girls remained dependent even after getting married, but prolonged dependence was a particular problem for boys, who were trying to grow into men in a nation that had revolted from its parent country and that prized no value more than independence. There were a great many young people around; the average age of the population was seventeen. And many of those young people were living near factories, as Dorus Clarke, a Springfield, Massachusetts, minister, remarked in his Lectures to Young People in Manufacturing Villages in 1836. Clarke preached that the first generation of Americans to come of age during the age of machines faced dangers unknown to any prior generation: “Never before was the world in such an excitable, impressible state.”27

  Graham started delivering his own Lecture to Young Men in the 1830s. He wanted to warn them about excitement by telling them about sex, not storks. In one thing, he sided with Rousseau: “Through a fear of contaminating the minds of youth, it has long been considered the wisest measure to keep them in ignorance.” This would be fine, except that “the natural inquisitiveness of the young mind has been met by misrepresentation and falsehood, on the part of those who would preserve their purity.” This, Graham believed, was a disaster, because young people are as curious as cats—theirs is a “restless and prying curiosity”—and they’ll find out about sex, by hook or by crook, “So that while parents have been resting securely in the idea of the ignorance and purity of their children, these have been clandestinely drinking in the most corrupt and depraving knowledge from mercenary and polluted hands.”28

  People often called him “Dr. Graham,” but Sylvester Graham was not a physician. Still, the confusion is a good illustration of the era’s shifting source of authority for how to steer your course through the voyage of life: rules for conduct once laid down by clergymen were, more and more, made by doctors. Graham’s lectures were based in morality—his was a theory, finally, about virtue and vice—but he called it something else. He called it “the science of human life.”

  Graham believed that the human body had two functions, nutrition and reproduction, connected by the same bundle of nerves. Stimulation of either system was debilitating. The nineteenth century’s combination of excitements—the processed food of the factory and the frenzy of city life—was responsible not only for specific diseases, including devastating outbreaks of cholera, but also for a general American malaise, caused by overstimulation. All those hordes of unmarried young people living in cities were eating, instead of fresh farm foods, tinned meat and canned vegetables and bread made with processed flour. Worse, old enough to know about sex but not old enough to marry, they were masturbating. “Self-pollution,” he said, “is actually a very great and rapidly increasing evil in our country.”29 Young Americans were spilling their precious bodily fluids; the nation was at risk.

  This was, for Graham, a matter of national political urgency. The new republic—Young America it was called—was not only full of young people, it was a young country, and it was also the world’s first modern democracy. It was precarious, an excitable experiment. Graham put it this way: “Whether a national Government can permanently and beneficially exist, whose ultimate power is in the hands of the people, and whose form of existence and mode of operation depend on the popular will, is yet a matter of experiment, with us; not only for ourselves, but for the whole human family; and it may be, for ages or forever!” No government in the history of the world, he argued, had so entirely depended on the virtue of its people. The United States was “the political POLE-STAR of the world; by which the political philanthropists of every nation, are endeavoring to govern their course.”30 The health of the nation’s youth would determine the future of the republic. If the American body politic spent its time masturbating, what then?

  Haranguers, of course, had damned masturbation before. In the 1790s, before Parson Weems wrote his Life of Washington, he sold Onania, a treatise against masturbation. (Weems, an itinerant bookseller, also pocketed tidy sums peddling The Lover’s Alm
anac and, in 1799, a book dedicated to George Washington called The Philanthropist; Or, A Good Twelve Cents Worth of Political Love Powder, for the Fair Daughters and Patriotic Sons of Virginia.)31 But Graham went much further than moralists who damned only masturbation—he also damned intercourse. For Graham, it wasn’t solitude that was the problem; it was ejaculation. Before Graham, sex within marriage, at least, hadn’t been bad; usually, it was considered good for you. Aristotle’s Master-piece described intercourse as a release: “It eases and lightens the body, clears the mind, comforts the head and senses, and expels melancholy.” The best sex was “furious”: “The act of coition should be performed with the greatest ardor and intenseness of desire imaginable, or else they may as well let it alone.”32 The Garden of Eden, after all, was a “Place of Pleasure”; Adam and Eve were together, “compleating their mutual Happiness” in “the Paradise of Paradise itself.”33

  With all this, Graham could hardly have disagreed more strenuously. “Sexual excess within the pale of wedlock” was, he argued, a national crisis. If a man was exceptionally robust, and terribly lucky, he might indulge in it once a month without too much ill effect. Much more, and he would grow old before his time, and die an early and miserable death.34 Graham did not consider marital sex a mansion of happiness. Ejaculation was an injury; even the most innocent sexual release was debilitating. “There is a common error of opinion among young men, which is, perhaps, not wholly confined to the young,—that health requires an emission of semen at stated periods, and that frequent nocturnal emissions in sleep are not incompatible with health.… All this is wrong,—entirely, dangerously wrong!”