The Mansion of Happiness (27 page)

“Favoritism toward things Catholic is good politics,” a Nixon strategist wrote in “Dividing the Democrats,” a memo to
H. R. Haldeman in 1971. “There is a trade-off, but it leaves us with the larger share of the pie.” When Nixon supporters balked, Buchanan held firm. Asked whether Nixon might perhaps go back to his original position, Buchanan said that would be stupid: “He will cost himself Catholic support and gain what,
Betty Friedan?”

Abortion wasn’t a partisan issue until Republicans made it one. In August 1972, a Gallup poll reported that 68 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Democrats agreed that “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.” Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun clipped the
Washington
Post
story reporting this survey and put it in his
Roe
case file.
⁸⁵

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.

O
ne 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 mother, 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