The Mansion of Happiness

by Jill Lepore

  76. Hankins told Ross, “His wife was said to be a very beautiful woman when they married, but she got to be a big, fat person. He treated her pretty badly. Hall was a perfectly ruthless chap you know.” When Jung met Hall’s second wife, in 1909, he wrote, “He has a plump, jolly, good-natured, and extremely ugly wife who, however, serves wonderful food.” Hall’s son told Ross that his father’s wife told people that he beat her but that he himself did not believe this. Pruette’s account of Hall’s wife’s madness, which must be considered suspect, given that it was related to her by Hall, whom she adored, reads: “One night she appeared at a seminar meeting wearing her bedroom slippers; another night she arose suddenly, left her guests and went upstairs to take a bath. She began to stop members of the faculty, and even students, to ask for loans, while at the same time she was spending Hall’s money with great extravagance. Here was another occasion for gossip about the University, and the townspeople naturally made the most of it. Florence began to talk more and more wildly, spreading absurd stories about her husband, becoming to him a constant embarrassment and care. A complete separation was finally agreed upon but never entirely maintained, for it seemed as though the poor demented woman could not keep away from Worcester and the University. A paralytic stroke brought her back permanently as a responsibility, and Hall was troubled to the end of his life by unfounded complaints from her regarding her treatment in the sanitarium he had chosen for her. After the separation his friends urged him to put her out of his life, to refuse to look after her personally, since he had already made a generous financial settlement, but this he would not do, and she continued to be a cause of suffering and anxiety to his death” (Pruette, GSH, 102–3).

  77. E.g., two dissertations from 1915, under Hall’s direction: W. T. Sanger, “A Study of Senescence,” and R. S. Ellis, “The Attitude Toward Death and Types of Belief in Immortality.” GSH cites both in his article “Thanatophobia and Immortality,” American Journal of Psychology 26 (October 1915), 551. Amy Tanner, also Hall’s graduate student, was studying psychical research with him during these years. Hall left Tanner a sizable sum in his will.

  78. Fischer, Growing Old, 189. On Nascher, see also Gilles Lambert, Conquest of Age: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Paul Niehans’ Research (London: Souvenir Press, 1960), 12–13.

  79. GSH to his sister, June 1914: “Get Sanford Bennett’s book, Old Age Deferred, and try it on. It is wonderful. My face is getting red and full and my hair is coming back all over my head, my muscular development is something wonderful. He is 72 and says he looks 40 and his photos in the book bear it out. I am too old a bird to be caught much by fads but this interested me and will you.” Family Letters, 1914–1924, Box B1-1-2, GSH Papers.

  80. GSH to the Mary Lawrence East, December 13, 1916, in James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 105.

  81. GSH, “A Reminiscence,” American Journal of Psychology 28 (1917): 297.

  82. [GSH], “Old Age,” Atlantic Monthly 17 (January 1921): 23. The article was published anonymously. Most of it is reproduced in Senescence.

  83. “There is a wonderful liberty in being old and not anxious about a career, and being able to say what you want to in any way and on any topic,” he wrote to his son. December 24, 1923, Letters to Robert G. Hall, 1912–1924, Box B1-1-2, GSH Papers.

  84. Kimball Young, “A Man Out of His Time,” Nation, February 13, 1924.

  85. GSH, Senescence, xv–xxi.

  86. “He wrote his autobiography and made his will, that curious will” (Pruette, GSH, 238). Hall left provision for his wife to be taken care of by her guardian, Dr. E. S. Sanford. His bequests were to his sister, his son, the children of another sister, his cousins, his housekeeper, his best friend, and his graduate student and research assistant, Amy Tanner. The remainder of his estate he left to Clark to fund research in genetic psychology. G. Stanley Hall, Last Will and Testament, June 27, 1922, Worcester Probate Court, Worcester, Massachusetts. (I have deposited a photocopy of the will with Hall’s papers at Clark.) “At the time of his death it was found that he had a great number of savings-bank books, one apparently from every bank in Massachusetts, each representing a savings account filled up to the limit” (Pruette, GSH, 49–50).

  87. GSH, Senescence, 23.

  88. This argument was most aggressively made by William Osler. See Jacoby, Never Say Die, 43–55. Osler’s brain was dissected and compared with Hall’s. Jacoby mentions Hall’s reaction to Osler’s argument on 54.

  89. Quoted in Cole, Journey of Life, 163–65.

  90. Tamara K. Hareven, “The Last Stage: Historical Adulthood and Old Age,” Daedalus 105, no. 4 (Fall 1976): 20. Achenbaum, Old Age in a New Land, 49. On this subject, see also Carole Haber and Brian Gratton, Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

  91. “I looked over such literature, both poetry and prose, as I found within reach, written by aging people describing their own stage of life.” GSH, Senescence, 149, 100.

  92. Ibid., 322–30.

  93. He had also concluded that old age is divided into senescence, from forty-five to sixty-five, which is the “dangerous age” because “we aim lower,” and senectitude, which is harder. See also GSH, “The Dangerous Age,” 275–94.

  94. GSH, Senescence, 381–82.

  95. Ibid., 247, 410.

  96. GSH, Life and Confessions, 596.

  97. Pruette, GSH, 258–59.

  98. Henry H. Donaldson, “A Study of the Brains of Three Scholars: Granville Stanley Hall, Sir William Osler and Edward Sylvester Morse,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 46 (August 1928): 1–95.

  Chapter 9. THE GATE OF HEAVEN

  1. Details about the Quinlans’ family life I have generally found in Joseph and Julia Quinlan with Phyllis Battelle, Karen Ann: The Quinlans Tell Their Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977). Chapter 15 relates the October trial. Mail addressed “To Karen Quinlan’s Family, U.S.A.” is on 155. For more on the Quinlans’ mail, see Steven Rattner, “Quinlan Family Gets Advice and Sympathy in Mail,” New York Times, October 26, 1975. See also the photograph of the Quinlans sorting through their mail in Julia Duane Quinlan, My Joy, My Sorrow: Karen Ann’s Mother Remembers (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2005), n.p. Mail sent to the judge and the lawyers in the case was turned over to the Morris County sheriff, John Fox. “The people who wrote seemed to take two basic views,” explained Fox. “One was ‘Don’t let Karen die, or we’ll kill you.’ The other was, ‘Let her die, or we’ll kill her.’ ” (Quinlans, Karen Ann, 171–72.) The Quinlans spent a great deal of time at the rectory. See Bruce Chadwick, “For Quinlans, Weather Was Portent of Ruling,” New York Daily News, November 11, 1975.

  2. Two fifteen-minute periods: In the Matter of Karen Quinlan: The Complete Legal Briefs, Court Proceedings and Decision in the Superior Court of New Jersey, 2nd ed. (1975; repr., Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1982), 1:542.

  3. Physical descriptions can be found in “The Law: The Right to Live—or Die,” Time, October 27, 1975; “The Law: A Life in the Balance,” Time, November 3, 1975; and Matt Clark, Susan Agrest, Marianna Gosnell, Dan Shapiro, and Henry McGee, “A Right to Die?,” Newsweek, November 3, 1975. On the spasms, see the testimony of Dr. Sidney Diamond, October 23, 1975 (In the Matter of Karen Quinlan, 1:492–93).

  4. On no hope, see Muir’s opinion (In the Matter of Karen Quinlan, 1:549, but see also 1:560); the testimony of Dr. Julius Korein, October 21, 1975 (In the Matter of Karen Quinlan, especially 1:320, where the court debates what “hope” means); “The Law: Between Life and Death,” Time, September 29, 1975; and “The Law: A Life in the Balance.”

  5. At the time, public sympathy lay with Julia and Joseph Quinlan. In a nationwide poll, two-thirds of Americans said they believed that family members should be allowed to end life support for a person who is terminally ill, in a coma and not conscious, w
ith no cure in sight. Peter G. Filene, In the Arms of Others: A Cultural History of the Right-to-Die in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998), 25, 119–21. The New York Daily News telephoned 532 New Yorkers and asked the rather leading question, “Do you agree with Karen Ann Quinlan’s parents that she be taken off the respirator and allowed to die in dignity?” As reported in “Most Here Back Parents in Their Decision on Karen,” New York Daily News, October 27, 1975, 59 percent said yes; 24 percent, no. That poll’s results were also broken down by the religion of the respondent. If a majority of the American people agreed about anything, though, it was something that the Quinlans and their daughter’s doctors agreed about, too: a judge ought not to be the one to make this kind of decision. See, e.g., “The Law: The Right to Live—or Die,” Time, October 27, 1975: “To allow the court to decide the Quinlan case, says Dr. David Posqanzer, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, ‘is taking the judgment of a doctor and putting it in the hands of those not competent to make a decision—the courts.’ ”

  6. Julia Quinlan quoted in Quinlans, Karen Ann, 173. The reporters had been laying siege to the bungalow for weeks. “They must have a hundred pictures of me walking out to get the morning paper, and another two hundred pictures of me climbing into the car,” Joseph said (Quinlans, Karen Ann, 165).

  7. That she could no longer hear is mentioned in several places, but see B. D. Colen, Karen Ann Quinlan: Dying in the Age of Eternal Life (New York: Nash, 1976), 25. On the singing, see Quinlan, My Joy, My Sorrow, 108.

  8. Quinlans, Karen Ann, 174.

  9. B. D. Colen, “Court Rule Asked on Life, Death,” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 1975. Colen was nominated for a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Quinlan case. A corroborating view: “The outcome of the case of Karen Quinlan will thus be historic. However he decides, Judge Muir will not merely be interpreting the law. He will be making it” (“The Law: A Life in the Balance”).

  10. The proceedings have been compiled in the two-volume In the Matter of Karen Quinlan. For an argument that the abortion issue has contorted American politics, see Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1993); Dworkin notes, “Abortion is tearing America apart. It is also distorting its politics, and confounding its constitutional law” (4). Dworkin’s first chapter insists on the particular intransigence of this issue in the United States, as compared to Europe (see, in particular, 6).

  11. David Rothman has called Karen Quinlan’s the most significant medical case ever, in Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 3 and, especially, 222–28.

  12. “Obama’s Health Care Town Hall in Portsmouth,” New York Times, August 11, 2009. Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, “Statement on the Current Health Care Debate,” Au-gust 7, 2009, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434.

  13. Charlotte Eby, “Grassley: There’s ‘Every Right to Fear’ End-of-Life Counseling Provision,” Globe Gazette, August 13, 2009.

  14. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), 6.

  15. Ibid., 3, 6, 24, 29, 35. The Glenn Beck Program, Premiere Radio Networks, August 6, 2009. Americans weren’t any more paranoid than anyone else, Hofstadter figured; he just thought they were interestingly paranoid and dangerously paranoid; then, too, the United States was his home and his subject. “I choose American history to illustrate the paranoid style only because I happen to be an Americanist,” he explained. “It is for me a choice of convenience.”

  16. Richard Hofstadter Papers, Box 36, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, Butler Library, Columbia University.

  17. Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 5, 24, 29. When revising the essay for publication, he underplayed how far he had jumped around in history. The typescript of Part IV, marked by Hofstadter, begins, “If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary . . .” (Richard Hofstadter Papers, Box 32).

  18. The phrase “pursuit of happiness” is not Jefferson’s; nor is the list. George Mason wrote about “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety” in the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776. See Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), 126–27, 134, 165; Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 216–17; Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), chapter 2, especially pp. 68–70; and David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3, 165–67. Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, October 14, 1774.

  19. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 119–21, 152. David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 104–6.

  20. Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, Series 1, General Correspondence, 1651–1827, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.

  21. Abraham Lincoln, “Speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act at Peoria, Illinois, Octo-ber 16, 1854,” in Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858: Speeches, Letters, and Miscellaneous Writings; the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (New York: Library of America, 1989), 338.

  22. Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

  23. E. N. Elliott, ed., Cotton Is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments (Augusta, GA: Pritchard, Abbott, & Loomis, 1860), iv and especially chapter 2, section 10, 312–19.

  24. In 1859, the governor of Virginia called it an invasion “upon slaveholders and upon their property in Negro slaves.” In a message to the Virginia legislature, Wise proclaimed, “The home to be invaded was the home of domestic slavery; the persons to be seized were the persons of slaveholders; the property to be confiscated was the property in slaves and the other property of slaveholders alone.” State of Virginia, Governor’s Message and Reports of the Public Officers of the State, of the Boards of Directors, and of the Visitors, Superintendents, and Other Agents of Public Institutions or Interests of Virginia (Richmond, VA: William F. Ritchie, Public Printer, 1859), 3.

  25. Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union and the Ordinance of Secession (Charleston, SC: Evans & Cogswell, Printers to the Convention, 1860), 8. See also Rodgers, Contested Truths, 68–70, on the malleability of property for slave owners.

  26. Peter Coutros, “It Is Only a Matter of Life and Death,” New York Daily News, October 21, 1975.

  27. “The Law: A Life in the Balance.”

  28. Peter Kihss, “Case of Karen Quinlan Gives Hospital Maintenance and Security Problems,” New York Times, November 5, 1975.

  29. Quinlans, Karen Ann, 174–75.

  30. For mail sent to the hospital, see Jean Joyce, “Mail: Let Her Live,” New York Daily News, October 23, 1975. One letter writer suggested putting Quinlan in a state of suspended animation until scientists in the future could repair her damaged brain.

  31. In his excellent history of the right-to-die movement, Peter Filene points out that four photographs of Quinlan were available to the press but this one was used nine times out of ten. Filene, In the Arms of Others, 79–81. See also M. L. Tina Stevens, Bioethics in America: Origins and Cultural Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 110. For a very different photograph of Quinlan, see “Judge: Keep Karen Alive,” New York Daily News, November 11, 1975. The offer for $100,000: Quinlan, My Joy, My Sorrow, 90–91; and for more on the family’s position about the photographs, see 46.

  32. Armstrong to his colleague as quoted in Stevens, Bioethics in America, 125.

  33. The best account of this shift is Rothman, Strangers at the Bedside.

  34.
Filene, In the Arms of Others, 53, 55.

  35. Selig Greenberg, “The Right to Die,” Progressive 30 (June 1966), 37.

  36. Filene, In the Arms of Others, 10, 49–50.

  37. Pope Pius XII, “The Prolongation of Life,” November 24, 1957, The Pope Speaks 4 (Spring 1958): 393–98.

  38. Joseph Quinlan quoted in Georgie Anne Geyer, “A Question of Life or Death,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1975.

  39. And, on Coburn’s own investigation, including borrowing a manuscript from Norman Cantor, see In the Matter of Karen Quinlan, 1:22–23.

  40. The press flocked to New Jersey, Filene has argued, because the story of Karen Ann Quinlan served as an irresistible counterpoint to that of Patty Hearst, who had just been arrested for robbing a bank two years after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army; Hearst was “brainwashed” (In the Arms of Others, 76–79).

  41. “The Law: Between Life and Death,” Time, September 29, 1975.

  42. On the 1968 ad hoc committee, see Stevens, Bioethics in America, especially 81. Armstrong quoted in “The Law: The Right to Live—or Die,” Time, October 27, 1975.