by Jill Lepore
Graham’s lectures were wildly popular, and no wonder. He was a stagy talker, famous for shouting and sweating himself into a state of froth and fury. Nothing was so violent an overstimulation to the human body, he insisted, as sexual excitement. He compared arousal to a natural disaster: “the body of man has become a living volcano.” During the climax of one of his lectures, when he described orgasm—“the convulsive paroxysms attending venereal indulgence”—he could barely contain himself: “The brain, stomach, heart, lungs, liver, skin, and the other organs, feel it sweeping over them with the tremendous violence of a tornado.” All this, he said with a shudder, is “succeeded by great exhaustion, relaxation, lassitude, and even prostration.”35 And then, he nearly collapsed.
Gesundheit.
Curiously, what Graham described as the consequences of masturbation sound like nothing so much as the ravages of old age: “The sight becomes feeble, obscure, cloudy, confused, and often is entirely lost—and utter blindness fills the rest of life with darkness and unavailing regret.” Masturbators were sure to suffer not only from loss of sight but also from diseases of the heart, lungs, kidneys, and liver, and, in the worst cases, memory loss, brain damage, and death.36 “The skin loses its healthy, clear and fresh appearance, and assumes a sickly, pale, shriveled, turbid and cadaverous aspect;—becoming exceedingly susceptible to the injurious effects of cold, heat, moisture, and other disturbing causes.”37 (Graham also believed masturbation caused insanity. Under the influence of Graham’s ideas, “masturbatory insanity” was a leading cause of admission to the State Lunatic Hospital, in Worcester, Massachusetts, second only to intemperance. And those suffering from masturbatory insanity had, of all inmates, the poorest chance of recovery.)38
What would happen to the United States if young Americans didn’t stop masturbating? They, and the republic, would grow as feeble and decrepit as the Old World. Still, there was hope, boundless hope. If eating the wrong kind of food and having too much sex is what causes disease, then disease can be avoided. And if disease is what causes aging, then aging can be avoided, too. “If mankind always lived precisely as they ought to live,” Graham explained, “they would—as a general rule—most certainly pass through the several stages of life, from infancy to extreme old age, without sickness and distress, enjoying, through their long protracted years, health, and serenity, and peace, and individual and social happiness, and gradually wear out their vital energies, and finally lie down and fall asleep in death, without an agony—without a pain.” Illness and decline were unnatural. “Disease and suffering are, in no degree, the legitimate and necessary results of the operations of our bodily organs,” Graham maintained, “and by no means necessarily incident to human life.”
The science of human life promised to cure all disease and relieve all pain. The rules were simple. For the digestive system, Graham recommended abstinence from meat and processed food and prescribed cold plain foods, whole grains, and the digestive crackers that still bear his name. (John Harvey Kellogg, who read Graham as a boy, later founded the Battle Creek Sanitarium, in Michigan, where he prescribed enemas and cold—and eponymous—breakfast cereal, to stifle desire.)39 For the reproductive system, Graham recommended sexual abstinence, or close to it. And then, decades would pass, but you wouldn’t feel the years. You couldn’t live forever, but you could live for a very long time, disease-free.
Grahamism marked a turning point between a religious conception of the good life and a medical one. With Graham, the wages of sin became the stages of life. “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Graham believed in Christ, death, and eternal life; he just didn’t believe in sex, sickness, or aging. They weren’t necessary. No, he said: “God made you to be happy.”40
This led Graham to a rather uncomfortable position: to be saved, children had to be taught the facts of life. But to advocate this position was to court more controversy than he could bear.41 “When I commenced my public career, as a Lecturer on the Science of Human Life, it did not, in any degree, enter into my plan, to treat on this delicate subject,” he insisted. (He had also been attacked by mobs: once by a posse of commercial bakers, once by angry butchers, and once for delivering an arousing lecture about chastity to young women.)42 But, at least as he told it, he had been persuaded of its necessity because so many very young men had approached him, complaining of all manner of illness and having not the least notion that their suffering was the consequence of masturbation. Something had to be done.43
Crowds thronged by the thousands to see him speak, thrillingly, about volcanoes and tornadoes. And they scooped up copies of his book, too. A Lecture to Young Men, on Chastity, Intended Also for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians went through ten editions in fifteen years. He always insisted that it wasn’t really appropriate for children: “It may, perhaps, be said, that this work is better calculated for adults than for young boys. This is true.”44
He never discounted the idea of writing a book about the science of human life for young men and women, rather than for their parents. One day, he thought, it may “be found expedient and desirable that a work should be produced on the subject, more peculiarly adapted to young minds.”45 He never wrote it. Despite a strict adherence to his regimen, his health declined. He abandoned lecturing. He abandoned writing. He got sick, and then he got sicker. As he languished, at the end of his life, at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, he tried eating meat, and even drinking alcohol.46 Nothing helped. He died in 1851, at the age of fifty-seven. A postmortem was conducted, but no one was quite sure what had killed him. He seemed, simply, to have wasted away.47 Before his final illness, he had been at work on a new book. It was to be called The Philosophy of History.48
“Perchance the mantle of Graham may fall upon the shoulders of someone who, availing himself of all that Graham learned, and rejecting all his errors, shall carry on the work,” observed one obituary writer.49 The year Graham died, Granville Stanley Hall was seven years old and living on a farm in western Massachusetts, about twenty miles from Graham’s house. Hall’s father, a farmer, was also a temperance lecturer. He must have known Graham; he certainly knew of him. Young Stanley was said to have been “unusually inquisitive about the origin of babies.” He asked a lot of questions, including whether God had ever been a baby. He read everything he could get his hands on. Very likely, he read Graham’s Lecture to Young Men. Told that masturbation causes leprosy, he tied himself up at night, with bandages.50
When Hall grew up, he went to study in Germany, where he learned all about kindergartens; he helped bring them to the United States. In the 1890s, he founded the child-study movement, which is what led to children’s rooms at public libraries. He earned the first PhD in psychology awarded at an American university. Psychology was Hall’s science of human life. He founded the American Journal of Psychology, and he founded and served as first president of the American Psychological Association. But what G. Stanley Hall is best remembered for is what Anne Carroll Moore captured when she called him “the great explorer of adolescence.”51
In Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, an exhaustive, rambling, and at times downright bizarre two-volume study published in 1904 (and that sold more than twenty-five thousand copies), Hall finished what Graham had begun, stirring in much of Darwin and a great deal of Freud, insisting that the time between childhood and adulthood is a stage of life all its own.52 It happens, he explained, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. It is marked by Sturm und Drang, storm and stress. On the voyage of life, adolescence is when you have to steer your ship through a hurricane.
This stage of life was, to Hall, living in an age of psychological explanations, mostly in your head. “The dawn of adolescence is marked by a special consciousness of sex,” he wrote. Its dusk is the act itself. Hall condemned masturbation, but, unlike Graham, he didn’t
condemn intercourse. Instead, in language no less fevered and millennialist than Graham’s, he celebrated sex as the birth of the adult. The crisis of adolescence, Hall argued, is solved by the integration of religious fervor and sexual passion. That integration is accomplished by the realization—earned by experience—that sex is sacred. Here is Hall on intercourse:
In the most unitary of all acts, which is the epitome and pleroma of life, we have the most intense of all affirmations of the will to live and realize that the only true God is love, and the center of life is worship. Every part of the mind and body participates in a true pangenesis. This sacrament is the annunciation hour, with hosannas which the whole world reflects. Communion is fusion and beatitude. It is the supreme hedonic narcosis, a holy intoxication, the chief ecstasy, because the most intense of experiences; it is the very heart of psychology, and because it is the supreme pleasure of life it is the eternal basis and guarantee of optimism. It is this experience more than any other that opens to man the ideal world. Now the race is incarnated in the individual and remembers its lost paradise.
It was a mansion of happiness, regained.53
Books like Where Did I Come From? came from G. Stanley Hall. It was Hall’s work on adolescence that led, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to facts-of-life books for “teenagers” (the word, an Americanism, was coined not long after Adolescence was published).54 Adolescent boys, Hall reported, spend nine-tenths of their time thinking about sex, and they don’t know what to think.55 He therefore argued for sex education; adolescents could enter that mansion of happiness only if they were taught about sex. They needed help: they needed something to read.56
Under Hall’s influence, books explaining sex to kids, directly, and not through their parents, began to proliferate during Anne Carroll Moore’s golden age of children’s literature, which also happened to be a time when there was a lot of talk about sex. “Sex O’clock in America” is what one pundit called it, in 1913.57 At the same time, venereal disease had come to be seen as the cause of all manner of social problems, including a perceived crisis in the American family, marked by a falling marriage rate, a rising divorce rate, and a declining fertility rate, at least within the middle class. Teaching “sexual hygiene,” celebrating chastity and marriage, was to be the solution.
Early-twentieth-century Progressives, who could make a science of licking envelopes if they set their minds to it—which is why so many ideas about life and death hinge on this period—made a science of adolescence. Sex education in the public schools began in the 1910s; by 1922, the subject was taught in nearly half of all public schools in the United States.58 The first sex books for kids were schoolbooks. About matters anatomical, they were candid. About the dangers of venereal disease, they were concerned. But as for that question Rousseau mentioned—“Where do little children come from?”—they were, as yet, coy.
“All live things start from eggs,” wrote Winfield Scott Hall in 1912 in Life’s Beginnings: For Boys of Ten to Fourteen Years. Hall, a professor of physiology at Northwestern University, and no relation to G. Stanley Hall, was, at the time, America’s foremost sexologist.59 The author of such classics as From Youth into Manhood, he wrote with a winning frankness (“Turning our attention now to the testicles …”) and had been particularly commended for his forgiving attitude toward the nocturnal emission (“It is a perfectly natural experience that results in no loss of vitality, only a slight depletion of material”).60 His books about what he called “the great truths of life” included a twenty-five-cent pamphlet titled Instead of “Wild Oats” and a collaboration with his wife, Jeannette Winter Hall, Girlhood and Its Problems: The Sex Life of Woman, although he was perhaps best known for a 320-page manual, Sexual Knowledge: In Plain and Simple Language, published by the International Bible House in 1913 and available, for two dollars, bound in morocco.61
In Life’s Beginnings, a twenty-five-cent primer published by the YMCA, Winfield Scott Hall aimed to explain the birds and the bees by way of the barnyard, as if every boy were William Harvey: “All boys are interested in live things, therefore all boys are interested in eggs. The best place to see all kinds of eggs is out on a farm.”62 Let’s go out to the country, he told his readers, city boys all. In the henhouse, a “motherly old biddy” sits on a nest of eggs. Where do those eggs come from? Let’s follow the farmer’s wife into the kitchen, where she’s butchering chickens for Sunday dinner. “When the farmer’s wife opens the bodies of these hens to remove their internal organs, she finds in each an ovary or egg-sack, with many eggs in different stages of development,” Hall explains. “If the egg is to develop into a chicken it must be fertilized. Every day the rooster deposits the fertilizing fluid in the pouch or cloaca of the hen.”63 Next he takes his readers down to the pond, to watch the frogs spawn. By chapter 3, he’s moved on to kittens and puppies, colts and calves. Do these animals come from eggs, too? “Yes, all these animals begin as tiny little eggs. But they are so delicate that, if they were deposited in any nest outside of the body, they would surely be destroyed, so nature has provided that in all these animals the delicate eggs should be held within a sort of nest in the mother’s body. This nest is called the womb.” And then, somewhat abruptly, our tour comes to a close:
You return to the city after three months on the farm, to be introduced to a baby sister, who came into your home two weeks ago. When you come into the house and see your little sister you find that she is in the act of taking her dinner from her mother’s breast, and after the first rush of joy at the sight of them both—joy and surprise nearly smothering you—it all comes over you that little baby sister has come in the same way the little baby colts and calves and kittens and lambs came. “Mother,” you ask, “was my sister formed from an egg and did she grow within your body?” Your mother will of course answer “Yes,” and you will go away and think it over.64
That, it hardly needs to be said, leaves rather a lot to the imagination.
E. B. White was thirteen years old when Winfield Scott Hall published Life’s Beginnings: For Boys of Ten to Fourteen Years. In 1929, the year he married Katharine Angell, White, with his officemate, James Thurber, published his first book, Is Sex Necessary? (Their answer: not strictly, no, but it beats raising begonias.) Is Sex Necessary? is a lampoon of the sex books that White had grown up with. It features fake Freudian sexologists (viz., the undersized Dr. Samuel D. Schmalhausen) and a chapter, written by White, addressing the child’s perennial question: “What shall I tell my parents about sex?” The answer: “Tell them the truth. If the subject is approached in a tactful way, it should be no more embarrassing to teach a parent about sex than to teach him about personal pronouns. And it should be less discouraging.”65
White’s first children’s book, Stuart Little, could easily have been titled Is Childbirth Necessary? (Not strictly, no, but it beats banning books.) Plenty of grown-ups got the joke about how the tale of the mouse was, among other things, a sly commentary on Progressive-era sex education. The Washington Post even ran a review that took the form of a loving imitation of Is Sex Necessary? right down to the idiotic Freudian sexologists, in this case, Dr. Hans Von Hornswoggle, who asserts that Stuart Little must be a hoax: “ ‘Lacks verisimilitude from the very first line,’ said Herr Von Hornswoggle. ‘Man or mouse, homo sapiens or Mus musculus—no little rodent can sail a ship in Central Park lagoon while still teething. Much, much too Jung.’ ”66 Kids, though, were too young to get that one.
“Have you ever thought about an egg, perhaps the one you know best, the chicken egg?” Books like Window into an Egg: Seeing Life Begin, which explained the story of life through pictures of a chicken egg with a piece of the shell missing, were still being published in 1969.67 But that same year also saw the publication of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), which rather dramatically raised the stakes (and inspired a Woody Allen film). Sex left the farm.
The possibility that books explaining sex to kids could become fa
r more explicit came into play after 1957, when, in Roth v. United States, the Supreme Court drew a distinction between sexual explicitness and obscenity, which meant that, if being explicit had a redeeming social value, you could be explicit.68 By the 1960s, sex education had become a partisan battleground, especially after the founding of both the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States and a flock of local organizations, like the New York League for Sexual Freedom. Their reforms of the sex education curriculum in public schools—which consisted not only of greater explicitness but also of a rejection of the Progressives’ chastity-and-marriage curriculum, the promotion of contraception, and the discussion of homosexuality—led to campaigns to regulate it by organizations including the John Birch Society, whose founder called sex education a “filthy communist plot.”
Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? was the title of a pamphlet published by the Christian Crusade in 1968.69 In the 1970s, the battle over sex education got nastier, especially in the wake of Roe v. Wade.70 Kids trying to figure out sex were caught in the middle. Then came AIDS. During all this time, a great deal remained as unspeakable as it had been in the days of Sylvester Graham’s brimstone. In 1994, U.S. surgeon general Joycelyn Elders was asked, at an AIDS forum, whether it might not be a good idea to discuss masturbation with children. “I think that it is something that’s part of human sexuality and it’s part of something that perhaps should be taught,” Elders said. “But we’ve not even taught our children the very basics. And I feel that we have tried ignorance for a very long time and it’s time we try education.” Within hours, Elders was asked to resign.71
Teaching sex became a political minefield. And facts-of-life books changed. They no longer involved going to a farm or studying other animals; this is not zoology class. We are not dissecting frogs; we are thinking about ourselves. Late twentieth-century books were full of anatomical drawings of the insides of kids’ bodies, with cross sections of gonads on every page. That’s partly because, outside a laboratory or a surgery, some of those things had only recently been photographed, Lennart Nilsson–style. But it’s also because of the culture’s inward looking. Eggs and sperm aren’t to be found out there in the barnyard or on some farmer’s wife’s kitchen table: they are inside of you.
