by Jill Lepore
Hall moved to Worcester, to take charge of Clark, early in 1889. He had his work cut out for him, because the university’s patron, Jonas Clark, was demanding, unsteady, and changeable, unsure of whether he wanted to found a college for local boys or a first-rate research university. The editors of the local newspaper, the Worcester Telegram, wanted only the former. Hall wanted only the latter, but he tried to keep that to himself. The Telegram sent a reporter to interview Hall, and described him as looking like “a well-to-do German professor.” His best-honed skill was said to be evasion: “Secretiveness is evidently one of President Hall’s accomplishments.” In March and April 1889, reporters at the Telegram produced one exposé after another about the mad science being conducted at the new university by German-born, or German-trained, or German-looking professors. Hall kept laboratory animals locked in a barn behind his house. The Telegram ran a story with a half column of headlines:
DOGS VIVISECTED
Scientific Torture at Clark University
HELPLESS ANIMALS ARE KILLED BY INCHES
Cruelty That Is Reduced to a Fine Art.
DUMB VICTIMS WRITHE UNDER THE CRUEL KNIFE.
As the story had it, “Dogs, cats, frogs, rats, mice, and occasionally other animals are scientifically cut up alive in order to satisfy the curiosity of the docents in their research.” One of those docents was Franz Boas. “He is a German,” the Telegram reported, “and has evidently studied vivisection with a rapier, or had it practiced upon himself, as numerous scars on his brow show.” Even beloved Worcester family pets were being captured and tortured—sold to Clark, for twenty-five cents each, by boys on the street. The paper also featured the work of the German-trained anatomist Franklin P. Mall. “Dr. Mall was sometime since so very fortunate as to secure a perfect human embryo of about 26 days,” the Telegram reported, following up with an inquiry: “What good can it ever do the human race?”48
Hall fell sick, with diphtheria, and left town; he went to Ashfield to convalesce. The Telegram wondered whether he had been made ill by infected animals, in that barn, and whether the whole city was at risk. On May 10, while Hall was still away, his wife and daughter were snuggling together in bed—the girl had blown soap bubbles on the sheets of her own bed, soaking them, and so climbed in with her mother—when someone turned on the gas heat but failed to light a match. They suffocated. Hall, miles away, heard the news after boarding a stagecoach, when a man on the street shouted to the driver, “Is that man in there named Hall? Tell him his wife and daughter are dead.”49
He sent his nine-year-old son away to boarding school, and barely ever saw him again. And then, suffering “the greatest bereavement of my life—such a one, indeed, as rarely falls to the lot of man,” Hall went to see a medium, who, purporting to be channeling his dead wife, told him “that the suffocation and so-called death was absolutely painless.”50 This proved no comfort, and Hall found James’s oracle pathetic.51 Not only an accomplished liar but also an accomplished magician, Hall had taught himself a passel of conjuror’s tricks and was sure he knew a fraud when he saw one. Nor did he envy the dead who spoke through the likes of Leonora Piper. “I would deliberately prefer annihilation to the kind of idiotic, twaddling life it appears that these inane ghosts of the dark séance live,” he commented. But he did envy James (whose faith in Mrs. Piper he never failed to overstate). “I often wish I could believe in it a little myself,” he confided. And he conceded that James’s will to believe was nothing if not useful: “Very likely he got more out of his faith than I out of my doubt. And so, if pragmatism is true, he was right and I wrong.”52
Hall fell into a state he called “the Great Fatigue.” He found it hard to write; he could scarcely think straight. Clark began to fall apart. Hall, who was infamously stingy, had nevertheless assembled arguably the best professoriate in the country. The first doctorate in anthropology awarded in the United States was at Clark, under Boas. Some of Boas’s most important work began in Worcester. Influenced by Hall’s empirical study of childhood, Boas measured the physical growth of twelve thousand Worcester schoolchildren. He concluded that environment, not heredity, accounted for different rates of growth (exactly the opposite of what Lewis Terman would conclude from his measurement of the intelligence of Worcester schoolboys). The Telegram, in another series of exposés in 1891, reported that Boas was measuring children in the nude, and intimated more. One article described the scarred German professor visiting a school near campus: “When the children saw him, they became very frightened, fearing that he was going to practice on them.” The paper quoted a prominent Worcester native as saying “If I had a sister or children in the school and this Boas came in to measure them, I’d shoot him.”53
As the Telegram told it, the city’s children were being exploited and abused and beloved family pets were being captured and tortured, by foreign-born scientists, Germans and Jews. Hall, floundering in depression, proved unable to contend with these problems. Jonas Clark, alarmed and embarrassed by what was reported in the Telegram, withdrew his financial support, whereupon Hall lied to his faculty about what he could afford to pay them. In 1892, 70 percent of the students and two-thirds of the instructors, led in their rebellion by Mall, left.54 Many of the faculty decamped for the new University of Chicago, turning it, overnight, into what Hall had meant Clark to be: the “church of the future.”55
Meanwhile, rumors spread that Hall’s unhappy wife had committed suicide, taking her daughter with her.56 (“Hall was a perfectly ruthless chap you know,” one of his former students later said about Hall as a husband, in an interview the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross conducted for a remarkably astute biography.)57 Hall aged more than a decade in the space of a few years.58 He felt, in his heart, that he had become an old man. Much of contemporary developmental psychology, and many popular ideas about childhood and adolescence, can be traced, in one way or another, to Hall’s attempt to escape depression. He was rescued from his bereavement not by a séance but by a fascination with the relationship between growing up and growing old, which was a way, in psychology, to think about history. Hall’s wife and daughter died—were discovered one morning, dead in that bed—when he was forty-four years old. Old age, he came to believe, begins at forty-five, the age at which we begin to die.59
When Hall realized he was old, he wanted to write about it but wasn’t sure he ought to, because growing old was a subject, in his view, about which “other old men have written fatuously.”60 What he wanted to do was far more grandiose: he wanted to found a “biological philosophy,” with “a view of life far higher, broader and more unified than Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, or even Darwin, Huxley and Spencer ever dreamed of.”61
Each of us, he argued, recapitulates, in the course of our lives, the stages of human evolution. Hall’s ideas about recapitulation were racial; primitive people were children. “Most savages in most respects are children, or, because of sexual maturity, more properly, adolescents of adult size.”62 Women, too, were doomed to a more primitive state of development. This, Hall posited, in a revealing aside, accounted for both the higher suicide rate among women and the methods women used to kill themselves: “Women prefer passive methods; to give themselves up to the power of elemental forces, as gravity, when they throw themselves from heights or take poison, in which methods of suicide they surpass man.”63
Adolescence, effervescent and plastic, is when we are most capable of making a leap, and bringing civilization along with us, to the next stage.64 Adolescents were, to Hall, the future of the race, by which he meant the Anglo-Saxon race. “There is color in their souls, brilliant, livid, loud.”65 The storm and stress of adolescence is, at heart, a crisis of faith. (James, an anti-imperialist, once remarked that perhaps the imperialist Theodore Roosevelt was “still mentally in the Sturm und Drang period of early adolescence.”)66 The work of growing up, Hall argued, is the work of finding something to believe in. But as Ross observed, “what he really described was the crisis of belief of the
nineteenth-century intellectual whose religious commitment had been undercut by modern science.”67
When Hall’s two-volume study of adolescence was published, in 1904, one reviewer complained that it was “chock full of errors, masturbation and Jesus. He is a mad man.”68 But its argument that the ages of man are the stages of evolution was also greeted as good parenting advice. The New York Times observed, “Many a puzzled and despairing parent will be glad to learn from this volume that the reason why ‘that boy is so bad’ is not necessarily because he has started on a downward road to wickedness and sin. Probably it is only because he has reached the age when it is necessary for him to live through the cave-man epoch of the race.”69 Most often, Hall’s study of adolescence was hailed as visionary, and for reasons that prefigure his theory of senescence. What are we to believe in, when men are animals and death is the end? Sex, science, and youth.70
In 1909, Hall brought Freud and Jung to Clark, along with twenty-seven other scholars, to celebrate the university’s twenty-year anniversary. (Jonas Clark, in his will, had forbidden Hall contact with undergraduates, but Hall remained at the university as head of the graduate program.) Only Freud and Jung stayed at his house. Hall had been reading their work for years; at least as early as 1903, as Terman remembered it, Hall had mentioned Freud in his lectures.71 He asked James to come, and to bring his latest paper on Mrs. Piper. When James arrived, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out not an offprint but a wad of dollar bills. Freud and Jung, who had heard about Hall’s reputation for moneygrubbing, found this prank terribly funny—not to mention, given Hall’s having told them that James was not taken seriously as a psychologist (which was simply untrue; the reverse was emphatically more the case), well deserved. “It looked to us a particularly happy rejoinder,” Jung wrote.72 James, feigning an apology, then pulled out from another pocket the actual paper, in which he had discussed the case of Richard Hodgson. A former secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research, Hodgson, before he’d died, in 1905, had said he would try to communicate through Mrs. Piper; to prove that it was really him, he promised, he’d speak in “nigger talk.” Mrs. Piper obliged. But James concluded that the case presented “no knock-down proof”; Mrs. Piper knew Hodgson too well.73
Hall wanted some knockdown proof, too—proof that the whole thing was a sham. He had arranged to host a séance, scheduled for Saturday evening. His plan: to pit psychical research against psychoanalysis. Do the dead speak? Or is it just we, inside our own heads, muttering? This was a dastardly kind of empiricism, closer to vengeance than science. It didn’t work. James was called away, to attend a funeral. And the séance, on Saturday, was a disappointment. The medium, a twenty-year-old girl, failed to impress Freud and Jung, who concluded, after a short interview, that her trancelike state derived from thwarted sexual desire. Hall wrote, “The German savants saw little further to interest them in the case.”74
James died later within the year. Hall began teaching a course called The Psychology of Sex. “After the Freud visit, everything in the university centered around Freudianism,” one of his students recalled. “It got to be the sexiest place you can imagine.”75 Meanwhile, Hall had remarried. His wife, a former kindergarten teacher, grew fat; she also grew eccentric. She claimed that he beat her.76 She fell ill; he committed her to a sanatorium. And then Hall and his graduate students, many of whom were very young women, turned their attention to the study of senescence.77
The transformation of old age from a stage of life into a disease was a long time coming. Sylvester Graham had imagined a world without suffering, a world in which one day we are well, and the next we die, without illness, without pain. But the modern medical treatment of aging as a disease, and death as something to be conquered, began in earnest in the first decades of the twentieth century. The word “geriatrics” was coined, in 1909, by I. N. Nascher, a New York doctor originally from Austria. As the story goes, Nascher was making his rounds one day when the attending physician, discussing an elderly woman who was very ill, diagnosed her as suffering from “old age.”
“What can be done about it?” Nascher asked.
“Nothing.”
Not long after, Nascher wrote an article called “Why Old Age Ends in Death.” He thought it might not have to.78
Hall followed this research.79 He had, by now, given up on writing about sex. In 1916, when asked to join the Massachusetts Birth Control League, he declined: “I regret to say that I cannot give the use of my name in connection with your work. If you want to know why, I will tell you frankly that I have borne my share of odium sexicum for almost a generation of men. Some fifteen years ago I wrote a book on adolescence advocating what I believed was true and right, and for that have been pilloried severely and ostracized by some of my friends. The same was true because I went into the sex instruction movement.…I have done my bit in this movement and am now retiring and am going to have a rest from this trouble for the remainder of my life.”80
He began his study of old age by making a study of himself, reporting, in 1917, “that early senescence is not so bad as it is painted, but that its study is likely to prove even more interesting than that of adolescence ever was.”81 He didn’t publish much on the subject until 1921, when he wrote an essay for the Atlantic Monthly called “Old Age.” He had just retired; he was seventy-seven. “Now I am divorced from my world,” he wrote, “and there is nothing more to be said of me, save the exact date of my death.”82 This was balderdash. Hall dedicated his retirement—to which he objected—to writing an autobiography and to pulling together everything he had been able to discover about life after forty-five. Senescence: The Last Half of Life was published in 1922; it was followed, the next year, by The Life and Confessions of a Psychologist.83 The autobiography was very shrewdly reviewed in the Nation: “The reading of this book leaves one a trifle depressed. It is a pathetic life-epic in a minor key. It might even be called an apology for failure. Hall, essentially a poet-dreamer, decidedly subjective in temperament, is touched by hard, materialistic science and everywhere its dehumanized hand has either made his work abortive or else left him with a feeling of incompleteness. To overcome this insufficiency he resorted to a new form of religious tenancy.”84
Hall began Senescence by explaining his object. “The one thing I have always planned for this stage of life,” he wrote, was to “know more about what it really is, find out its status, estimate its powers, its limitations, its physical and mental regimen; and especially, if I can, look death, which certainly cannot be very far off, calmly in the face.” He took stock of his eyesight, his limbs, his acuity. He chronicled every debility of old age, along with its treatment. He visited doctors, only to conclude, “I must henceforth, for the most part, be my own doctor.” He read all his old papers, as well as his parents’. James had published his father’s “literary remains”; Hall threw his mother’s diaries into his fireplace. He noted, “as I watched them burn in the grate one solitary spring at evening twilight, I felt that I had completed a filial function.”85 He wrote his will. It would be discovered after his death that he had hidden away a miser’s fortune, in accounts he had taken out in every savings bank in Massachusetts.86
Having taken stock of himself, Hall took a look at the lives of other old men. “Napoleon lost Waterloo at 45, Dickens had written all his best at 40, and Pepys finished his diary at 37,” he wrote (giving extraordinarily short shrift to Great Expectations).87 Studies, something like actuarial tables, correlating age with productivity were commonplace in those years; it was those studies that led to the invention of retirement.88 As early as the 1870s, a New York physician had conducted a study of “nearly all the greatest names in history” and examined the course of their lives: “seventy percent of the work of the world is done before forty-five,” he’d concluded, “and eighty percent before fifty.”89 From 1874 to 1900, only four American companies had retirement policies; between 1911 and 1915 alone, ninety-nine companies established such policies.
In the Taylorized age of efficiency, stopping work at sixty-five became routine and, soon, mandatory.90
Hall was dubious. He looked to art, and took heart from Longfellow: “Ah, nothing is too late / Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate /…Chaucer at Wadstock, with the nightingales, / At sixty wrote The Canterbury Tales.”91 Then he sent questionnaires to all the “mostly eminent and some very distinguished old people” he could think of. He asked good questions:
When did you realize you were getting old?
To what do you ascribe your long life?
How do you keep well?
Are you troubled by regrets?
What temptations do you feel?
What duties do you feel?92
From all of this, Hall concluded that humanity itself was senescing.93 “The human stock is not maturing as it should,” he wrote, because people were living longer, but they weren’t living better.94 “At no stage of life do we want more to be of service than when we are deprived of our most wonted opportunities to be so,” he said. The time had come “to add a new story to the life of man, for as yet we do not know what full maturity really is and the last culminating chapter of humanity’s history is yet to be written.” A lot of this is Hall’s patented mumbo jumbo. But much of it is a howl of pain. “We do not take,” he remarked, “with entire kindness to being set off as a class apart.”95
To the very end, the Darwin of the mind thought he was wiser than everyone, wiser than his parents, wiser than William James. “I am far older than my years,” he wrote, on the final page of his autobiography, “for I have laid aside more of the illusions and transcended more of the limitations with which I started than most.”96 As he was dying, he asked to be carried into his study. He had the idea that looking at his books would save his life. Aquinas, Hegel, Freud. A student of his described what happened next: “They brought a wheel chair and bore the indomitable old man into the shabby room which held so many memories of the best part of his life. Here he had thought some of his best thoughts.” Hall stared at his desk, the shelves of books. Divinity, philosophy, psychology. Nothing. He collapsed in his chair. “He had placed such hopes upon the study, and the study had failed him.”97 Doctors dissected his brain. It wasn’t as distinctive as they had hoped.98