The Mansion of Happiness (16 page)

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.”
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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 Almanac
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.
)
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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!”

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.)
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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.)
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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:

It was a mansion of happiness, regained.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.