The Mansion of Happiness

by Jill Lepore

  Chapter 8. HAPPY OLD AGE

  1. On the visit, see Saul Rosenzweig, The Historic Expedition to America (1909): Freud, Jung and Hall the King-Maker, rev. ed. (1992; St. Louis: Rana House, 1994); on James’s arrival, see 80–81. Citations come from the 1994 edition. Rosenzweig calls the visit “a watershed for the spread of psychoanalysis in the continents of North America and Europe” (3).

  2. G. Stanley Hall (Hereafter GSH), review of The Principles of Psychology, by William James, American Journal of Psychology 3 (1891): 578–91. On GSH’s review, see also Rosenzweig, Historic Expedition, 95–96, and Dominic W. Massaro, “A Century Later: Reflections on ‘The Principles of Psychology’ by William James and on the Review by G. Stanley Hall,” American Journal of Psychology 103 (1990): 539–45. Many people have commented on what went wrong between James and Hall, who were once close. There was, among other things, a dispute over which man could best claim having established the first psychology laboratory, a dispute that hinged on each man’s definition of the field. Revealing is this recollection, from a contemporary: “I spent some time in 1920 with the eminent lawyer, Emery Buckner of Root’s firm. He had worked his way through Harvard as James’s private secretary and he remarked on the ill-feeling between James and Hall, and implied that Hall had been rather unfair and ungrateful. I knew nothing of the details but was edified by the remark that it was probably due to the fact that James had done so much (too much) to help Hall.” Harry Elmer Barnes to Dorothy Ross, April 3, 1962, Box B1-4-5, “Interviews with Contemporaries of G. Stanley Hall,” GSH Papers, Clark University. Lorine Pruette, who was Hall’s graduate student, has this to offer about Hall’s temperament: “He often said unkind things and could make cutting remarks, but he seemed to reserve his sarcasm and reproof for intellectual slackers. It was the man who did not try or the man who was insincere in his thinking for whom Hall brought out his weapons. For the merely stupid he had a marvelous patience, even gentleness. . . . He made a curious distinction between stupidity and insincerity.” Lorine Pruette, G. Stanley Hall: A Biography of a Mind (New York: D. Appleton, 1926), 45. Finally, this is not related to Hall’s viciousness, but it’s a wonderfully shrewd and well-stated assessment of what really crippled the man: “Hall’s persistent effort to give intellectual form to the full range of his emotional experience was the chief source of both the insight and confusion he would display in his intellectual career.” Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 29.

  3. GSH, introduction to Studies in Spiritism, by Amy E. Tanner (New York: D. Appleton, 1910), xviii, xxxii. GSH, “Spooks and Telepathy,” Appleton’s Magazine 12 (December 1908): 679.

  4. Jung’s recollections: C. G. Jung to Virginia Payne, July 23, 1949, in Letters, selected and edited by Gerhard Adler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 1:530–32.

  5. Harry Elmer Barnes to Dorothy Ross, April 3, 1962, and April 12, 1962, Box B1-4-5, “Interviews with Contemporaries of G. Stanley Hall,” GSH Papers. Ross also cites this as a story Hall commonly told (GSH, 393).

  6. “Hall was justly esteemed as a psychologist and educationalist, and had introduced psychoanalysis into his courses some years before,” Freud wrote. “There was a touch of the ‘king-maker’ about him, a pleasure in setting up authorities and deposing them.” Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study, trans. James Strachey (1925; repr., New York: Norton, 1963), 57. Citations come from the 1963 Norton edition.

  7. Hall regularly gave lectures on the psychology of food (Pruette, GSH, 132). Carl Van Doren once mused that writing about GSH got to the heart of the problem of biography: “We all know well enough that in morals there are few blacks and whites, few angels and devils, few heroes and villains. The great difficulty is to instruct the uninformed without dividing the moral universe in this convenient and dramatic way and yet without troubling them in their search for the rules of worthy conduct. At this point the realistic study of biography comes most valuably to the rescue. . . . Perhaps we Americans, with our republican partiality for simple characters, are specially in need of the study of more complex types, such as President Hall belonged to. As a nation we are very unfamiliar with them; our history lacks them, our literature lacks them, or has lacked them until lately” (Carl Van Doren, introduction to Pruette, GSH, ix–x).

  8. Hall also wrote about what he called “the man-soul.” (He wrote, as well, about “the folk-soul.”) An excerpt: “Man is not a permanent type but an organism in a very active stage of evolution toward a more permanent form. Our consciousness is but a single stage and one type of mind: a late, partial, and perhaps essentially abnormal and remedial outcrop of the great underlying life of man-soul.” GSH, Adolescence (New York: D. Appleton, 1904), 1:vii. For more on the subject, see Adolescence, 2:62–63. Hall’s work and its relation to social Darwinism is discussed in Donald Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 132–38.

  9. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1928; New York: Perennial Classics, 2001); quote from 137. Citation comes from the Perennial edition. See also John Demos, “The Rise and Fall of Adolescence,” in Past, Present and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 92–113.

  10. Writing about conversion, Hall remarked, “It is thus no accidental synchronism of unrelated events that the age of religion and that of sexual maturity coincide, any more than that senescence has its own type of religiosity” (Adolescence, 2:292).

  11. So did the journalist Susan Jacoby, in Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age (New York: Pantheon, 2011). John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Question to Cheat Death (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 207. The best discussion of Hall’s study of old age is Thomas R. Cole, “The Prophecy of Senescence: G. Stanley Hall and the Reconstruction of Old Age in America,” Gerontologist 24 (August 1984): 360–66; see also Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chapter 10.

  12. The recommendation to review your life is from Senescence, but the warning about stodginess is from GSH, “The Dangerous Age,” Pedagogical Seminary 28 (September 1921): 293.

  13. GSH, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (1923; repr., New York: D. Appleton, 1927), 357–58. Citations come from the 1927 edition. Ross, GSH, 3–5. Louis Wilson, G. Stanley Hall: A Sketch (New York: Stechert, 1914), 16–18.

  14. GSH, “Note on Early Memories,” Pedagogical Seminary 6 (December 1899): 507; and see Ross, GSH, 12. Hall later wrote, “It was a resolve, vow, prayer, idealization, life plan, all in a jumble, but it was an experience that has always stood out so prominently in my memory that I found this revisitation solemn and almost sacramental. Something certainly took place in my soul then” (Pruette, GSH, 25).

  15. Ross, GSH, 16–21.

  16. Ibid., 30.

  17. Pruette, GSH, 64, 34.

  18. GSH to Abigail Beals Hall, February 10, 1869, from New York, Box B1-1-2, GSH Papers.

  19. Wilson, GSH, 37.

  20. GSH to Granville Bascom Hall and Abigail Beals Hall, from Bonn, July 9, 1869, Box B1-1-2, GSH Papers. “I am growing deep only if growing at all, but then as applied to men and especially ministers solid is better than surface measure. I am and have been homesick, lonesome, dumpish.”

  21. GSH to Granville Bascom Hall and Abigail Beals Hall, from Berlin, December 16, 1869, Box B1-1-2, GSH Papers. “I will enclose what a fortune teller says is the spirit photograph of my future wife. Have you ever seen her and how will she do and how does she compare with Robert’s?”

  22. Granville Bascom Hall to GSH, January 17, 1870, Box B1-1-2, GSH Papers. Hall’s father adds, “P.S. Are you having any practice in preaching or religions teaching, or any part in public exercises? Are you in any way doing good as well
as getting good? People often inquire for you.”

  23. GSH, Life and Confessions, 578. Pruette writes, “He wanted to ‘get the feel’ of everything the universe afforded. He liked prize fights and religious revivals, visited poor houses and prisons and asylums for the insane, spent two weeks in a home for the insane, explored the dens of iniquity in most of the large cities of the Occidental world, visited morgues, attended meetings of revolutionists, studied the social evil and became a president of the Watch and Ward Society, and declared: ‘I believe that such zests and their indulgence are a necessary part of the preparation of a psychologist or moralist who seeks to understand human nature as it is’ ” (GSH, 63).

  24. For more on GSH’s human-nature tourism, see Pruette, GSH, 63; Ross, GSH, 33; GSH, Life and Confessions, 578–80.

  25. GSH to his sister, from Berlin, January 29, 1870; Abigail Beals Hall to GSH, January 18, 1870, Box B1-1-2, GSH Papers.

  26. Pruette, GSH, 3. For this reason, Pruette dubbed him “the Playboy of Western Scholarship.”

  27. Granville Bascom Hall, quoted in Ross, GSH, 5.

  28. Proverbs 16:31. Cotton Mather, Addresses to Old Men and Young Men and Little Children, in Three Discourses. I. The Old Man’s Honour (Boston: R. Pierce, 1690), dedication. See also Cotton Mather, A Good Old Age (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1726), 1. And Demos, “Old Age in Early New England,” in Past, Present and Personal, 139–85.

  29. Quoted in W. Andrew Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience Since 1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 14, 12.

  30. Louis I. Dublin, Alfred J. Lotka, and Mortimer Spiegelman, Length of Life: A Study of the Life Table, rev. ed. (1936; New York: Ronald Press, 1949); see especially chapters 2 and 3.

  31. Sylvester Graham, Lectures on the Science of Human Life (1839). The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity ran from 1837 to 1839.

  32. Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land, 12–15.

  33. Ibid., 47.

  34. Pat Thane, for example, points out that old age is not lonelier today than it used to be, because it used to be that if you were old, you had outlived your children. Pat Thane, ed., The Long History of Old Age (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 9–10.

  35. David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 3–4. Jacoby, Never Say Die, 28, 4.

  36. GSH to his parents, April 9, 1877, GSH Papers, Box B1-1-2.

  37. Ross argues, “Anxious to remove any sharp divisions in existence, Hall henceforth tried to find Divinity within nature itself. The reconciliation of religious aspiration with the mechanical world-view propounded by science that Tennyson achieved in poetry, Hall hoped to achieve through philosophy” (GSH, 45).

  38. Ross, GSH, 50–51.

  39. Ibid., 61–79. Before leaving Antioch, Hall wrote a short story, which was published: “A Leap Year Romance,” Appletons’ Journal 5 (September 1878): 211–22.

  40. GSH, Jesus the Christ, in the Light of Psychology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1917), 1:xix: “Senescent insights and adolescent sentiments meet and reinforce each other.” And: “As to miracles . . . genetic psychology can have no quarrel with those who cling to them as literally veridical, for this is a necessary stage. They are the baby talk of religious faith, not a disease but an infantile stadium of true belief” (xiii). On the crisis of the Church of Christ and the next necessary step of “re-evolution,” see xvi. He wrote this book for his graduate students—it came out of lectures he had been giving since 1897—and saw it as part of his work on adolescence: “My study of adolescence laid some of the foundations of this work, because Jesus’ spirit was in a sense the consummation of that adolescence” (xviii).

  41. Gray, Immortalization Commission, 19.

  42. Ibid., 192.

  43. Hyland C. Kirk, The Possibility of Not Dying: A Speculation (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 4.

  44. He founded the American Journal of Psychology with money from the American Society for Psychical Research; in its first year, he published an attack on spiritualism and lost his funding. Although he initially served as a vice president of the American society, he resigned soon after, in either 1886 or 1887. Ross, GSH, 164, 170. On the funding of the journal, see also Rosenzweig, Historic Expedition, 92–93.

  45. William James to GSH, November 5, 1887, The Correspondence of William James, edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004), 6:282–84.

  46. William James, “A Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance (1890),” in Essays in Psychical Research (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 79–88. “A hearty message of thanks” appears on 85.

  47. GSH, “Spooks and Telepathy,” 681. GSH, introduction to Studies in Spiritism, by Tanner, xviii.

  48. For the Telegram’s hostility to Clark, even before it opened, see “Our University,” Worcester Sunday Telegram, January 23, 1887. On Hall’s appearance and secretiveness, see “What Is Clark University?,” Worcester Daily Telegram, April 15, 1889. “Dogs Vivisected,” Worcester Sunday Telegram, March 9, 1890. “Clark University Matters,” Worcester Daily Telegram, March 13, 1890. “If He Be a Cur Cut Him Up,” Worcester Sunday Telegram, March 16, 1890. “Docents’ Devilish Devices,” Worcester Sunday Telegram, March 23, 1890. “Snatched from Docents,” Worcester Sunday Telegram, March 23, 1890. “Cat Crucified and Carved,” Worcester Sunday Telegram, April 13, 1890. See also Pruette, GSH, 94–95, and Ross, GSH, 209–10.

  49. Dorothy Ross, interview with Hall’s only surviving child, Robert G. Hall. Notes & Interviews: Robert G. Hall, 1961, Box B1-4-5, GSH Papers. This account is somewhat at variance with a detailed report in the newspaper: “Wife and Child Die Together,” Worcester Daily Telegram, May 16, 1890. In the newspaper account, the girl, Julia, was sleeping with her mother because she had been ill; there was no mention of soap bubbles. Also in this account: the gas was thought to have leaked from a light fixture, a chandelier. A medical examiner ruled the deaths accidental: “The most likely is that Mrs. Hall pulled the chain twice before going to bed, and then left the jet opened.” Doctors summoned to the scene attempted artificial respiration for more than an hour.

  50. GSH, “Spooks and Telepathy,” 681–82, and Pruette, GSH, 97–98.

  51. GSH, introduction to Studies in Spiritism, by Tanner, xviii.

  52. GSH, “Spooks and Telepathy,” 678.

  53. “What Franz Boas Must Do,” Worcester Sunday Telegram, March 8, 1891. “Condemned by Physicians,” Worcester Daily Telegram, March 9, 1891. “Strip for Measurement!” Worcester Daily Telegram, March 10, 1891. Marshall Hyatt, Franz Boas, Social Activist: The Dynamics of Ethnicity (New York: Greenwood, 1990), 26–27; see also Ross, GSH, 210. On the rise of the modern research university, see Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

  54. See Florence Rena Sabin, Franklin Paine Mall: The Story of a Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934), 100–104. See also Hyatt, Franz Boas, 28–30.

  55. GSH, Life and Confessions, 340.

  56. On the rumors, see Pruette, GSH, 95–96.

  57. Dorothy Ross, interview with Frank Hankins, March 8, 1961, Box B1-4-5, GSH Papers.

  58. Ross, GSH, 252.

  59. GSH, Senescence, vii.

  60. Ibid., xxi.

  61. GSH, from 1896, quoted in Ross, GSH, 264.

  62. GSH, Adolescence, 2:649.

  63. Ibid., 2:194. Stephen Jay Gould, discussing this passage, writes, “In what must be the most absurd statement in the annals of biological determinism, G. Stanley Hall—again, I remind you, not a crackpot, but America’s premier psychologist—invoked the higher suicide rates of women as a sign of their primitive evolutionary status” (The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. [1981; repr., New York: Norton, 1996], 147; citation comes from the 1996 edition). For more on Hall and social Darwinism, see
Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 29–30.

  64. GSH, Adolescence, 2:71. But see the entirety of chapter 10.

  65. Ibid., 2:60.

  66. James quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944; Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 195. Citation comes from the Beacon edition.

  67. Ross, GSH, 334. On this transition among scholars at American universities, see also Reuben, Making of the Modern University. Reuben argues that “the separation of knowledge and morality was an unintended result of the university reforms of the late nineteenth century” (4).

  68. Quoted in Ross, GSH, 385.

  69. “Stanley Hall on Youth’s Problems: President of Clark University Discusses Adolescence—the ‘Cave-Man’ Period of Life,” New York Times, September 28, 1907.

  70. There is a real headiness to this, for Hall. Of genetic psychology: “It appeals to the really young, and would appreciate and meet adolescent needs rather than deal in sad insights which belong only to senescence, whether normal or precocious. It believes youth the golden age of life, the child the consummate flower of creation, and most of all things worthy of love, reverence, and study. . . . It realizes that even pure science, including those departments that deal with mind, is not for its own sake, but that it becomes pure precisely as it becomes useful in bringing a race to ever more complete maturity” (Adolescence, 2:55–56).

  71. Ross, GSH, 382.

  72. Jung to Payne, July 23, 1949, Letters, 531.

  73. William James, “Report on Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson-Control,” Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 3 (1909): 470–500; quote from 498.

  74. Rosenzweig, Historic Expedition, 104.

  75. Dorothy Ross, interview with Frank Hankins, March 8, 1961, B1-4-5, GSH Papers. A significant number of Hall’s graduate students were women, partly because Harvard would not admit them (and James sent them to Hall). One of his graduate students from this period, Lorine Pruette, went on to write his biography, which is passionately affectionate. One wonders about the nature of their relationship: “For two years I visited Hall repeatedly, sat in his shabby old study or in the library that never was comfortably warm through the whole New England winter, and talked with him about a multitude of things. For one year I was his student, attending all his lectures and sitting in the famous Monday-night seminars, while for four years he read and criticized practically everything I wrote. Thus the record of his personality may be at all points somewhat warped by my enthusiasm for him, by my remembrance of the stimulation and joy he brought into my life. When I first met ‘G. Stanley’ he was in his middle seventies while I was twenty-two; I was old with the excessive luxurious age of youth and he was young as he had always been, the perennial adolescent” (Pruette, GSH, 6–7).