by Jill Lepore
Nixon was re-elected in November 1972. Soon after Roe, Alan Guttmacher showed up at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to give a lecture, only to be confronted by protesters wearing hospitals scrubs spattered with red paint, crying, “Murderer!” Guttmacher wrote in Reader’s Digest that “those who oppose and those who favor legalization of abortion share a common goal—the elimination of all abortion,” through better, safer, cheaper contraception, because, as he saw it, “each abortion bespeaks medical or social failure.” This earned him nothing but hate mail. He died not long afterward.86
Eight days after the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Roe, the newly formed National Right to Life Committee began campaigning for a human life amendment. “This poses real strategy problems,” a former president of Planned Parenthood said in an interview in 1974, “because to the degree that any of us fight to keep that out of the Constitution, it brands Planned Parenthood as pro-abortion.”87
In the late 1970s, GOP strategists Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, both of whom were Catholic, recruited Jerry Falwell into a coalition designed to bring economic and social conservatives together around a “pro-family” agenda, one that targeted gay rights, sexual freedom, women’s liberation, the ERA, child care, and sex education. Weyrich wrote that abortion ought to be the centerpiece of the GOP strategy, “since this was the issue that could divide the Democratic Party.” Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979; Paul Brown, founder of the American Life League, scoffed in 1982, “Falwell couldn’t spell abortion five years ago.”88
Nothing even remotely resembling party discipline on the issue of abortion can be identified on Capitol Hill before 1979. And a partisan divide over this issue only split the country a decade after it showed up in Congress. Meanwhile, opposition to abortion grew violent. In 1985, pro-life protesters picketed at 80 percent of clinics providing abortions.89 As a consequence, fewer and fewer places were willing to provide abortions, which made Planned Parenthood, in many parts of the country, the last abortion provider left standing.
By 1990, the proportion of Americans living in households with children under the age of fifteen had dropped to 35 percent.90 Forty percent of American babies born in 2002 were their mother’s first; that year, the average age of a woman at the birth of her first child reached twenty-five, an all-time high, and the fastest-growing cohort of first-time mothers was women over thirty-five.91
A study conducted by the Guttmacher Institute (formerly the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau) in 2010 found that “virtually all women (more than 99%) aged 15–44 who have ever had sexual intercourse have used at least one contraceptive method” and that one in four of the twenty million American women who used contraception in 2010 received it at a publicly funded clinic.92 Sanger made birth control legal, and Planned Parenthood made it available to poor women. It remained, nevertheless, not only controversial but the defining issue of American domestic politics.
By 2011, Planned Parenthood had eighty affiliates nationwide. Most received about a third of their funding from the government, a third from grants, and a third from private donations. In April of that year, Republicans in Congress threatened to shut down the federal government unless all funding for Planned Parenthood was eliminated. Nearly everyone running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2011 opposed Planned Parenthood. 93 Planned Parenthood reported that abortions constituted less than 3 percent of its services.94 But attacking Planned Parenthood neatly tied together opposition to abortion with opposition to government programs for the poor. A century after Clara Savage began reporting on eugenics for the women’s pages and Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in America, there continued to be, in the United States, one set of ideas about parenthood for the poor and another for the wealthy.
[CHAPTER 8]
Happy Old Age
One Thursday afternoon in 1909, William James took a train from Cambridge to Worcester and caught a ride from the station to the hilltop home of G. Stanley Hall, to which remote destination he had traveled in order to spend the evening with Hall’s houseguests, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, carrying in his breast pocket, at Hall’s request, a report he had written for the American Society of Psychical Research about a medium named Leonora Piper.1 James was sixty-seven; Hall, sixty-five. Their friendship was fraught. Hall, the father of adolescence, had been James’s student at Harvard; he was second only to James as the United States’ most important psychologist. But, as will happen, being second irked him something fierce. Hall had once assessed James’s Principles of Psychology as, mainly, an indulgence: magnificent, impressionistic, and unscientific.2 Then there was the matter of Mrs. Piper. James found her wonderfully compelling. Hall considered her “without question the most eminent American medium,” but this was, in his opinion, so far from a mark of distinction, a badge of infamy, since Hall believed spiritualism the “very sewage,” “the ruck and muck of modern culture.”3
Hall, hosting Freud and Jung in his capacity as president of Clark University, wanted his guests to meet James. He also wanted them to hear all about Mrs. Piper. “I gathered from some remarks of President Hall that William James was not taken quite seriously on account of his interest in Mrs. Piper,” Jung later remembered. Neither Freud nor Jung had ever been to the United States before. They crossed the Atlantic on the same boat. (During the voyage, Jung recalled, “we chiefly analysed our dreams.”)4 Hall was their champion; he imported their work to America, and burnished it. “In Europe I felt as though I were despised,” Freud wrote, but, in the United States, “I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal”—if not, apparently, by James. Hall, who was the sort of man who told fourteen lies before lunchtime, liked to tell the story of how James, on meeting Freud, said he was a “dirty fellow,” which may or may not be true but is a good proxy for the opinion held, at the time, by Freud’s European colleagues.5
Jung, rather misreading his host, found Hall refined; Freud, more cannily, discerned that he was capable of great mischief.6 Hall was intellectually ravenous. (“In the beginning was hunger,” he liked to say when lecturing on the psychology of food.) On a good day, this gave Hall’s work extraordinary vitality; on a bad day, it reduced him to something between a wretch and a fiend.7 He thought of himself as “the Darwin of the mind,” a reference to his commitment to “genetic psychology,” the idea that, over the course of our lives, we—not so much our bodies but our minds and, especially, our souls—recapitulate the evolution of the species.8 He not only invented adolescence but also inspired Franz Boas’s student Margaret Mead to debunk him in her writing about Samoa. (Adolescence in Samoa, Mead observed, is “not necessarily a specially difficult period.”)9 Overlooked because overshadowed by his study of adolesence, though, is Hall’s study of growing old, or what he preferred to call “senescence.”10
Hall founded gerontology, but he came at it by way of thanatology.11 He believed that thinking about aging required thinking about dying. No social science is more extravagantly autobiographical than psychology. Senescence was, for Hall, the flip side of adolescence. You’re either growing up or you’re growing down. For him, there was—there had been—very little in between. Old age takes everyone by surprise, and no one really ever comes to terms with it. Hall thought that this was because old age is the only stage of life we never grow out of, and can never look back on—not on this earth, anyway. He also thought that because one problem with growing old is that you don’t know where you’re going anymore, what you should do, when you feel yourself getting stodgy, is think about where you came from: you should think about your history.12
Granville Stanley Hall, who lied about, among other things, his age, appears to have been born in 1844 in the small town of Ashfield, Massachusetts, that town not very far from Northampton, where Sylvester Graham was living the last years of his life. Hall’s father, a farmer, was descended from Plymouth Colony’s William Brewster, a pilgrim who named one of his sons Wrestling, short for “wrestling with God.” His mo
ther, who also traced her ancestry to the Mayflower, was the granddaughter of an ecstatic preacher. Stanley and his brother and sister, like many New England children—including the March girls, in Little Women—wrote their own family newspaper: the Cottage Weekly News. Everyone expected him to become a minister. His mother read to him from Pilgrim’s Progress.13 He descended the Slough of Despond; he climbed the Hill of Difficulty.
One Sunday when he was fourteen years old, he scrambled up the highest tree he could find and decided he would, one day, leave the farm and “do and be something in the world.”14 Striving to do and be something in this world isn’t very John Bunyan; it’s more Milton Bradley. Hall left home but, as these things go, he never really escaped. He went first to Williams College, where he was elected class poet and wrote a poem called “A Life Without a Soul.”15 He fell for John Stuart Mill. “I do not think I have got the requirements for a pastor,” he wrote home. “What do you think?”16 He graduated in 1867, having avoided fighting in the Civil War because his father bought him a substitute. He went next to New York, where he enrolled in the Union Theological Seminary. He sneaked out to the stage; he trawled the Bowery.17 The city thrilled him. To his parents, he sent blandishments: “New York … wakes me to depravity all over the world.”18
He wanted to see that world. He paid a visit to Henry Ward Beecher, known for giving advice to promising young men. “Tell me frankly, are you not more interested in philosophy than in your theological studies?” Beecher asked. Philosophy, said Hall. Beecher wrote him a letter of recommendation and told him, “You ought to go to Germany.”19 Hall set sail.
“Nobody, with few exceptions, goes to church on Sunday,” he wrote home from Bonn, wide-eyed.20 He went to Berlin; he fell for Hegel. He went to see a fortune-teller, who predicted, he said, that “I have some sharp disappointments to bear, but all will end well.”21 His parents were not amused. “Just what are you doing?” his father wanted to know.22 He learned to dance; he conducted dissections; he went to the circus; he moved to a tiny village; he swore off speaking English. (All his life he had this immersive, touristic habit. He tramped to prizefights and cockfights, brothels and crematoriums, prisons and poorhouses. He had, he said, “a love for glimpsing at first hand the raw side of human life.”23 He attended meetings of radicals and revolutionaries; he never missed a revival meeting.)24 He soaked up everything and everyone. “If I was a Dickens I should have seen characters enough for a dozen novels,” he wrote to his sister. He informed his parents that he was thinking about getting a PhD in philosophy. “Now Stanley wherein is the great benefit of being a Ph.D.?” his mother demanded. “I think a preacher should be a D.D. Just what is a Doctor of Philosophy?”25
Hall, boy and man, was subject to enthusiasms. “I sometimes think my life has been a series of fads or crazes,” he once wrote.26 This zest for novelty set him against authority, no more so than when he was young. “Never allow yourself to lean to your own understanding when it conflicts with the experience of your elders,” his father warned.27 The general thinking had been for a long time that old people were wiser than young people. To be ancient, as Cotton Mather put it, was to be honorable. Mather dedicated The Old Man’s Honour to a friend: “Were there nothing else to commend my Regards for you, besides the Old Age, which your out-living of Three-score Winters has brought you to the Border of, That were enough to give you a room in my Esteem, and Reverence, and Veneration.”28 Benjamin Rush thought “none but men of very active minds attain to a high degree of longevity.” The French émigré J. P. Brissot, touring the United States, argued that longevity was a measure of the strength of a nation: “Tables of longevity may be everywhere considered the touchstones of government, the scale on which may be measured their excellencies and their defects, the perfection or degradation of the human species.”29
Americans appeared to be living longer; perhaps they could live even longer.30 Sylvester Graham had argued that practicing abstemiousness would lengthen life; his followers had founded the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity.31 “A few slothful men have attained to extreme old age, and so have a few gluttons and drunkards, or at least, hard drinkers,” one observer remarked in 1859, “but for the most part, and in an incomparably greater proportion, long livers have been distinguished for their sober and industrious habits.”32 When Stanley Hall was growing up, in Young America, there were very many young people but there were also more old people than there used to be, and suddenly they didn’t seem quite so venerable after all. “Years do not make sages,” a New England almanac put it; “they make only old men.”33
The history of aging appears to follow this rule: the fewer old people there are, the more esteemed they will be. Scholars have quibbled with this axiom and its grim inverse, pointing out that, even in Cotton Mather’s New England, old men, and especially old women, were often ridiculed and held in contempt. Still and all, it holds.34 As David Hackett Fischer argued, in a landmark study, “The people of early America exalted old age; their descendants have made a cult of youth.” In the first U.S. census, in 1790, 2 percent of the population was over age sixty-five; by 1970, 10 percent. By 2030, it will be 20 percent.35 At the close of the eighteenth century, John Wallis’s New Game of Human Life ended at eighty-four. Two centuries later, the fastest-growing segment of the population, in the United States, was people over the age of eighty-five. On Wallis’s board, when you get to eighty-five, you’re dead.
G. Stanley Hall was born in a circular world and died in a linear one. As a boy, he drove cows to pasture, work that followed the sun and the seasons. He was supposed to be a preacher, retracing the path tread by his forebears or, failing that, a farmer, like his father. Instead, he started out on another trajectory entirely. He placed his faith in scientific solutions, more learned versions of Graham’s “science of human life.” Caught up in one of the many health crazes of his day (“I eat nothing but brown bread, milk, eggs, and very rare beef”), he wrote home that his father should abandon the farm: “I do hope father will sell the cows and everything and give himself up to the art of prolonging life. Everyone at fifty-five ought to give up everything and call themselves invalids and begin a course of dieting and hygiene.”36
In Germany, Hall ran out of money; he sailed home without a degree.37 He took a job at Antioch College, in Ohio, teaching not philosophy but just about everything else, including French, rhetoric, German, and Anglo-Saxon, a language he did not happen to know. He was also the college librarian. He didn’t have a chair at Antioch, he liked to say; he had “a whole settee.”38 He fell for Spencer. He fell for Huxley. He fell, hard, for Darwin. In 1876, he left Antioch for Harvard, where he taught English while studying with William James in the philosophy department. In 1878, he finally earned that PhD—the first awarded by Harvard’s philosophy department and the first in psychology awarded anywhere in the country.39 He was thirty-four; he married the next year. In 1884, he was appointed a full professor at Johns Hopkins, where he held a chair in psychology, the first in the United States. Four years later, he left Hopkins to become the founding president of Clark University.
Hall had traversed, in a few years’ time, an entire history of ideas: from divinity to philosophy to psychology. He had also come to believe that genetic psychology explains everything: birth, death, faith, eternity. He once wrote a seven-hundred-page book analyzing Jesus, and every line of the Apostles’ Creed, by way of Freud. “I am still going in the same direction and in the same path in which my infant feet were first taught to walk,” he insisted; he was just going farther.40 Still, he struggled with the animality of man. Darwinism, the philosopher John Gray has argued, forced Victorians “to ask why their lives should not end like those of other animals, in nothingness. If this was so, how could human existence have meaning? How could human values be maintained if human personality was destroyed at death?”41 When that happened, Gray argues, we forgot how to die, replacing the hope of life after death with “the faith that death can be defeated.”42 This is as
depressing as it is true. In 1883, in The Possibility of Not Dying, Hyland Kirk cited Darwin in support of his argument that “the only logical limit to progress is perfection.” For Kirk, that perfection was not salvation; it was the defeat, by science, of death.43
But maybe there was another way, short of faith in a mansion of happiness, to cheat death. If life isn’t a circle but a line, it ends. Or maybe it doesn’t? Hence: séances, which aimed to prove an afterlife, of some kind or another. The English Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882, and the American counterpart followed three years later. Psychology was new; so was psychical research. In the public mind, the two appeared to be one. This Hall could not abide. One, he said, was science; the other, superstition.44 Nothing’s ever that easy. James thought it went the other way around.
“To take sides as positively as you do now, and on general philosophic grounds,” James wrote Hall, “seems to me a very dangerous and unscientific attitude.” After all, if anyone was being empirical, James pointed out, it was he who was investigating, not Hall, who was holding firm to an untested belief. “I should express the difference between our two positions in the matter, by calling mine a baldly empirical one, and yours, one due to a general theoretic creed,” James wrote. “I don’t think it exactly fair to make the issue what you make it—one between science and superstition.”45 He was right. It wasn’t fair at all.
William James first visited Leonora Piper in 1885, just after the death of his infant son and not long after the death of his father, in whose aftermath he had produced a book called The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James. In a trance, Mrs. Piper had offered James the very comfort he must have ached for: mention of his son and “a hearty message of thanks” from his father, for publishing his papers.46 In grief, solace; in death, life. “For years she has been the more or less private oracle of one of our leading and very influential psychologists,” Hall wrote of Mrs. Piper’s hold on James. Hall consulted Mrs. Piper himself—he once visited every psychic in New York—probably first sometime in 1890 or 1891, shortly after the deaths of his parents, and just after a family tragedy of his own.47
