Without in any way impugning the motives of the afflicted, Charles M. Beard recognized that neurasthenia presented a very different order of problem from diseases like diphtheria, which, for the first time, were being traced to an external physical agent—microbes. Neurasthenia, as his term suggests, represented a malfunction of the nerves. To Beard, the ailment seemed to arise from the challenge of the new: some people simply could not cope with America’s fast-growing, increasingly urban, and highly mobile society. Their nerves were overstrained, he believed; they collapsed.
But the invalidism crippling America’s middle class had more to do with the grip of the old religion than the challenge of new circumstances. In some ways, the malady was simply a continuation of the “religious melancholy” Robert Burton had studied in England around the time when the Puritans set off for Plymouth. Many of the sufferers had been raised in the Calvinist tradition and bore its scars all their lives. Mary Baker Eddy’s father, for example, had once been so incensed to find some children playing with a semitame crow on the Sabbath that he killed the bird with a rock on the spot. As a girl, Eddy agonized over the Calvinist doctrine of predestination to the point of illness: “I was unwilling to be saved, if my brothers and sisters were to be numbered among those who were doomed to perpetual banishment from God. So perturbed was I by the thoughts aroused by this erroneous doctrine, that the family doctor was summoned, and pronounced me stricken with fever.” 15
Similarly, Lyman Beecher, the father of Catharine and George, had urged them as young children to “agonize, agonize” over the condition of their souls and “regularly subjected their hearts to . . . scrutiny” for signs of sin or self-indulgence. 16 Charles Beard, a sufferer himself and the son of a strict Calvinist preacher, later condemned religion for teaching children that “to be happy is to be doing wrong.” 17 Even those not raised in the Calvinist religious tradition had usually endured child-raising methods predicated on the notion that children were savages in need of discipline and correction—an approach that was to linger in American middle-class culture until the arrival of Benjamin Spock and “permissive” child-raising in the 1940s.
But there is a more decisive reason to reject the notion that the invalidism of the nineteenth century arose from nervous exhaustion in the face of overly rapid expansion and change. If Beard’s hypothesis were true, you would expect the victims to be drawn primarily from the cutting edge of economic dynamism. Industrialists, bankers, prospectors in the Gold Rush of 1848 should have been swooning and taking to their beds. Instead, it was precisely the groups most excluded from the frenzy of nineteenth-century competitiveness that collapsed into invalidism—clergymen, for example. In this era—before megachurches and television ministries—they tended to lead somewhat cloistered and contemplative lives, often remaining within the same geographical area for a lifetime. And nineteenth-century clergymen were a notoriously sickly lot. Ann Douglas cites an 1826 report that “the health of a large number of clergymen has failed or is failing them”; they suffered from dyspepsia, consumption, and a “gradual wearing out of the constitution.” 18
The largest demographic to suffer from invalidism or neurasthenia was middle-class women. Male prejudice barred them from higher education and most of the professions; industrialization was stripping away the productive tasks that had occupied women in the home, from sewing to soapmaking. For many women, invalidism became a kind of alternative career. Days spent reclining on chaise longues, attended by doctors and family members and devoted to trying new medicines and medical regimens, substituted for “masculine” striving in the world. Invalidism even became fashionable, as one of Mary Baker Eddy’s biographers writes: “Delicate ill-health, a frailty unsuited to labor, was coming to be considered attractive in the young lady of the 1830s and 1840s, and even in rural New Hampshire sharp young women like the Baker girls had enough access to the magazines and novels of their day to know the fashions.” 19
Here, too, under the frills and sickly sentimentality of nineteenth-century feminine culture, we can discern the claw marks of Calvinism. The old religion had offered only one balm for the tormented soul, and that was hard labor in the material world. Take that away and you were left with the morbid introspection that was so conducive to dyspepsia, insomnia, backaches, and all the other symptoms of neurasthenia. Fashionable as it may have been, female invalidism grew out of enforced idleness and a sense of uselessness, and surely involved genuine suffering, mental as well as physical. Alice James rejoiced when, after decades of invalidism, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and told she would be dead in a few months.
Among men, neurasthenia sometimes arose in a period of idleness associated with youthful indecision about a career, as happened in the case of Charles Beard. Similarly, William James was uncertain about his early choice of medicine when, at the age of twenty-four, his back went out while he was bent over a cadaver. Already suffering from insomnia, digestive troubles, and eye problems, he fell into a paralyzing depression. The medical profession seemed to him too unscientific and illogical, but he could think of nothing else, writing, “I shall hate myself until I get some special work.” 20 Women had no “special work”; a clergyman’s day-to-day labors were amorphous and overlapped with the kinds of things women normally did, like visiting the sick. Without real work—“special work”—the Calvinist or Calvinist-influenced soul consumed itself with self-loathing.
The mainstream medical profession had no effective help for the invalid, and a great many interventions that were actually harmful. Doctors were still treating a variety of symptoms by bleeding the patient, often with leeches, and one of their favorite remedies was the toxic, mercury-containing calomel, which could cause the jaw to rot away. In Philadelphia, one of America’s most noted physicians treated female invalids with soft, bland foods and weeks of bed rest in darkened rooms—no reading or conversation allowed. The prevailing “scientific” view was that invalidism was natural and perhaps inevitable in women, that the mere fact of being female was a kind of disease, requiring as much medical intervention as the poor invalid’s family could afford. Why men should also sometimes suffer was not clear, but they, too, were treated with bleedings, purges, and long periods of enforced rest.
Mainstream medicine’s failure to relieve the epidemic of invalidism, and the tragic consequences of many of its interventions, left the field open to alternative sorts of healers. Here is where Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, usually considered the founder of the New Thought movement and hence grandfather of today’s positive thinking, comes in. He had no use for the medical profession, considering it a source of more sickness than health. Having dabbled for some time in mesmerism—along with metaphysics and watchmaking—he went into practice as a healer himself in 1859. A fearless thinker, though by no means irreligious, he quickly identified Calvinism as the source of many of his patients’ ills. As he saw it, according to historian Roy M. Anker, “old-style Calvinism depressed people, its morality constricted their lives and bestowed on them large burdens of debilitating, disease-producing, guilt.” 21 Quimby gained a minor reputation with a kind of “talking cure,” through which he endeavored to convince his patients that the universe was fundamentally benevolent, that they were one with the “Mind” out of which it was constituted, and that they could leverage their own powers of mind to cure or “correct” their ills.
In 1863, Mary Baker Eddy, forty-two, made the then-arduous journey to Portland to seek help from Quimby, arriving so weak that she had to be carried up the stairs to his consulting rooms. 22 Eddy had been an invalid since childhood and might have been happy to continue that lifestyle—doing a little reading and writing in her more vigorous moments—if anyone had been willing to finance it. But her first husband had died and the second had absconded, leaving her nearly destitute in middle age, reduced to moving from one boardinghouse to another, sometimes just in time to avoid paying the rent. Perhaps she was a bit smitten with the handsome, genial Quimby, and possibly the feelings we
re returned; Mrs. Quimby certainly distrusted the somewhat pretentious and overly needy new patient. Whatever went on between them, Eddy soon declared herself cured, and when Quimby died three years later, she claimed his teachings as her own—although it should be acknowledged that Eddy’s followers still insist that she was the originator of the New Thought approach. Either way, Quimby proved that New Thought provided a practical therapeutic approach, which the prolific writer and charismatic teacher Mary Baker Eddy went on to promote.
Eddy eventually gained considerable wealth by founding her own religion—Christian Science, with its still ubiquitous “reading rooms.” The core of her teaching was that there is no material world, only Thought, Mind, Spirit, Goodness, Love, or, as she often put it in almost economic terms, “Supply.” Hence there could be no such things as illness or want, except as temporary delusions. Today, you can find the same mystical notion in the teachings of “coaches” like Sue Morter: the world is dissolved into Mind, Energy, and Vibrations, all of which are potentially subject to our conscious control. This is the “science” of Christian Science, much as “quantum physics” (or magnetism) is the “scientific” bedrock of positive thinking. But it arose in the nineteenth century as an actual religion, and in opposition to the Calvinist version of Christianity.
In the long run, however, the most influential convert to Quimby’s New Thought approach to healing was not Mary Baker Eddy but William James, the first American psychologist and definitely a man of science. James sought help for his miscellaneous ills from another disciple—and former patient—of Quimby’s, Annetta Dresser. 23 Dresser must have been successful, because in his best-known work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James enthused over the New Thought approach to healing: “The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk. Life-long invalids have had their health restored.” 24 To James, it did not matter that New Thought was a philosophical muddle; it worked. He took it as a tribute to American pragmatism that Americans’ “only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life”—New Thought—had established itself through “concrete therapeutics” rather than, say, philosophical arguments. New Thought had won its great practical victory. It had healed a disease—the disease of Calvinism, or, as James put it, the “morbidness” associated with “the old hell-fire theology.” 25
James understood that New Thought offered much more than a new approach to healing; it was an entirely new way of seeing the world, so pervasive, he wrote, that “one catches [the] spirit at second-hand”:
One hears of the “Gospel of Relaxation,” of the “Don’t Worry Movement,” of people who repeat to themselves “Youth, health, vigor!” when dressing in the morning as their motto for the day. Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households; and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of life. 26
As a scientist, he was repelled by much of the New Thought literature, finding it “so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained mind finds it almost impossible to read at all.” Still, he blessed the new way of thinking as “healthy-mindedness” and quoted another academic to the effect that it was “hardly conceivable” that so many intelligent people would be drawn to Christian Science and other schools of New Thought “if the whole thing were a delusion.” 27
By the early twentieth century, the rise of scientific medicine, powered originally by the successes of the germ theory of disease, began to make New Thought forms of healing seem obsolete. Middle-class homemakers left their sickbeds to take up the challenge of fighting microbes within their homes, informed by Ellen Richards’s “domestic science.” Teddy Roosevelt, assuming the presidency in 1901, exemplified a new doctrine of muscular activism that precluded even the occasional nap. Of the various currents of New Thought, only Christian Science clung to the mind-over-body notion that all disease could be cured by “thought”; the results were often disastrous, as even some late-twentieth-century adherents chose to read and reread Mary Baker Eddy rather than take antibiotics or undergo surgery. More forward-looking advocates of New Thought turned away from health and found a fresh field as promoters of success and wealth. Not until the 1970s would America’s positive thinkers dare to reclaim physical illnesses—breast cancer, for example—as part of their jurisdiction.
However “moonstruck” its central beliefs, positive thinking came out of the nineteenth century with the scientific imprimatur of William James and the approval of “America’s favorite philosopher,” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Norman Vincent Peale, the man who popularized the phrase “positive thinking,” cited them repeatedly, though not as often as he did the Bible. James, in particular, made positive thinking respectable, not because he found it intellectually convincing but because of its undeniable success in “curing” the poor invalid victims of Calvinism. There is a satisfying irony here: in fostering widespread invalidism, Calvinism had crafted the instrument of its own destruction. It had handed New Thought, or what was to be called positive thinking, a dagger to plunge into its own chest.
But wait, there is a final twist to the story. If one of the best things you can say about positive thinking is that it articulated an alternative to Calvinism, one of the worst is that it ended up preserving some of Calvinism’s more toxic features—a harsh judgmentalism, echoing the old religion’s condemnation of sin, and an insistence on the constant interior labor of self-examination. The American alternative to Calvinism was not to be hedonism or even just an emphasis on emotional spontaneity. To the positive thinker, emotions remain suspect and one’s inner life must be subjected to relentless monitoring.
In many important ways, Christian Science itself never fully broke with Calvinism at all. Its twentieth-century adherents were overwhelmingly white, middle-class people of outstandingly temperate, even self-denying habits. The British writer V. S. Pritchett, whose father was a “Scientist,” wrote that they “gave up drink, tobacco, tea, coffee—dangerous drugs—they gave up sex, and wrecked their marriages on this account. . . . It was notoriously a menopause religion.” 28 In her later years, Mary Baker Eddy even brought back a version of the devil to explain why, in this perfect universe, things did not always go her way. Bad weather, lost objects, imperfect printings of her books—all these were attributed to “Malicious Animal Magnetism” emanating from her imagined enemies.
In my own family, the great-grandmother who raised my mother had switched from Presbyterianism to Christian Science at some point in her life, and the transition was apparently seamless enough for my grandmother to later eulogize her in a letter simply as “a good Christian woman.” My own mother had no more interest in Christian Science than she did in Presbyterianism, but she hewed to one of its harsher doctrines—that, if illness was not entirely imaginary, it was something that happened to people weaker and more suggestible than ourselves. Menstrual cramps and indigestion were the fantasies of idle women; only a fever or vomiting merited a day off from school. In other words, illness was a personal failure, even a kind of sin. I remember the great trepidation with which I confessed to my mother that I was having trouble seeing the blackboard in school; we were not the sort of people who needed glasses.
But the most striking continuity between the old religion and the new positive thinking lies in their common insistence on work—the constant internal work of self-monitoring. The Calvinist monitored his or her thoughts and feelings for signs of laxness, sin, and self-indulgence, while the positive thinker is ever on the lookout for “negative thoughts” charged with anxiety or doubt. As sociologist Micki McGee writes of the positive-thinking self-help literature, using language that harks back to its religious antecedents, “continuous and never-ending work on the self is offered not only as a road to success but also to a kind of secular salvation.” 29 The self becomes an antagonist with which one wrestles endlessly, the Calvinist a
ttacking it for sinful inclinations, the positive thinker for “negativity.” This antagonism is made clear in the common advice that you can overcome negative thoughts by putting a rubberband on your wrist: “Every time you have a negative thought stretch it out and let it snap. Pow. That hurts. It may even leave a welt if your rubber band is too thick. Take it easy, you aren’t trying to maim yourself, but you are trying to create a little bit of a pain avoidance reflex with the negative thoughts.” 30
A curious self-alienation is required for this kind of effort: there is the self that must be worked on, and another self that does the work. Hence the ubiquitous “rules,” work sheets, self-evaluation forms, and exercises offered in the positive-thinking literature. These are the practical instructions for the work of conditioning or reprogramming that the self must accomplish on itself. In the twentieth century, when positive thinkers had largely abandoned health issues to the medical profession, the aim of all this work became wealth and success. The great positive-thinking text of the 1930s, Think and Grow Rich! by Napoleon Hill, set out the familiar New Thought metaphysics. “Thoughts are things”—in fact, they are things that attract their own realization. “ALL IMPULSES OF THOUGHT HAVE A TENDENCY TO CLOTHE THEMSELVES IN THEIR PHYSICAL EQUIVALENT.” Hill reassured his readers that the steps required to achieve this transformation of thoughts into reality would not amount to “hard labor,” but if any step was omitted, “you will fail!” Briefly put, the seeker of wealth had to draw up a statement including the exact sum of money he or she intended to gain and the date by which it should come, which statement was to be read “aloud, twice daily, once just before retiring at night and once after arising in the morning.” By strict adherence to this regimen, one could manipulate the “subconscious mind,” as Hill called the part of the self that required work, into a “white heat of DESIRE for money.” To further harness the subconscious mind to conscious greed, he advises at one point that one “READ THIS ENTIRE CHAPTER ALOUD ONCE EVERY NIGHT.” 31
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