The Stammering Century Read online

  Two figures, playing out this role to its furthest extremes, are at the heart of The Stammering Century: Robert Matthias, born Robert Matthews in New York City in 1788, who ruled as God in Manhattan from 1830 to 1835 before disappearing in the early 1840s; and John Humphrey Noyes, born in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1811, who founded the Oneida community in upstate New York in 1848, and died in Canada in 1886. Edwards hovers behind both prophets, but so do Jefferson and Madison. The Declaration of Independence pronounced people free, and as the words “the pursuit of Happiness” germinated in the American mind, they were less a right than a command. There were absolutely no limits as to who could carry its banner or what it could mean. In its less noisy way, the call “to form a more perfect Union” opened the same doors. With those words the Constitution not only legitimated but, to many, with the words floating in the American air, obligated free people to create new communities, new symbolic and completed Americas. Matthias and Noyes—the first a madman, the second, in Seldes’s hands, a kind of saint—were divines; they were also patriots.

  “Matthias, ragged and penniless, stands at the outskirts of a Finney revival,” Seldes writes, the scene so vividly set you instantly see the man, and you want to know what happens next. There is “a suggestion of little cults and backwoods degeneracy” in Matthias’s early life in upstate New York; as an orphan he was blessed by—Seldes could not have made this up, though he might have wished to—a “minister of the Anti-Burgher branch of the Seceders.” As the reincarnation of the biblical Matthias, who replaced Judas among the apostles, he dove into religious insanity and embraced every answer—temperance, vegetarianism, beardedness—as an absolute. He prophesied the destruction of Albany, fled to the hills, traveled as a preacher through the Ozarks, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia: “He returned to New York where he could be seen daily promenading along the Battery, his beard unkempt, his nails filthy, his clothes torn, but walking with a majestic gait, shouting his exhortations to loafers and children.” Soon he would gather a few disciples—two rich white couples and two young black women—and then, with all they had now his, he returned to the Battery gate in a luxurious horse-drawn carriage: “His great height, his long wavy hair, his coarse curly beard and mustaches, and his green coat, figured vest and black pataloons, with a sash of crimson silk around his waist, made him one of the most striking figures in the New York of the early Thirties.”

  In a single house, he built a new Jerusalem. Like Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Jim Jones, David Koresh, and countless more after him, he declared sexual suzerainty over his followers, took a wife from her husband, and married him to one of his own daughters; his rituals, Seldes recounts, included immersing himself in a barrel of water, “thereby sanctifying it, and from it sprinkling the naked women of his sect who stood by.” When his kingdom began to crumble—one of his followers received a message from God not to give Matthias more money—he turned almost certainly to murder, likely poisoning one man to death and trying to poison another, though he was acquitted after a scandalous trial. In the end, there was only one disciple, the young Isabella Van Wagenen, born a slave, to whom Matthias would sometimes preach all day and all night, who never disavowed him. Matthias almost surely did not live to know, and Seldes did not know that, as Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz discovered while researching their 1994 study The Kingdom of Matthias, this was the woman who became Sojourner Truth—thus allowing Matthias to leave a mark on the American story that will never be erased.

  When Seldes wrote in 1928, the shadow of the story he was telling hung over him. It was a time when, as he framed his history, the post—Civil War prohibitionist movements that represented a gruesome perversion and degradation of revivalism and utopianism, and which take up the last, by comparison, dispiriting chapters of The Stammering Century, ruled the land. The sale and consumption of alcohol had been banned since 1919 by the Eighteenth Amendment (in his 1930 The Future of Drinking, Seldes wrote that it “would be nullified in practice, but would never be repealed”); discussing John Humphrey Noyes’s “theory of Male Continence,” Seldes was obliged to note that, “as it describes a means of preventing unwanted children from being born, I am not permitted, under the laws of the United States and under the eye of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, to quote him.” Ads for Oneida silverware, one of the products that made Noyes’s communist utopia a vast financial success, could still be found “on the back cover of the Saturday Evening Post,” as they can be found online today. As Seldes looked back to his own childhood in Alliance, or perhaps remembered a letter he wrote to a cousin in 1910 (“My belief in myself transcends all beliefs in Divinity. I am a Divinity to myself. Were I not, then the world were not”), the tales that were already passing into oblivion were not really so far away—though not as close as they might remain in the spooky aura of Lauren Groff’s Arcadia, a novel about the way the instinct to reenact the stories Seldes told is, precisely, in “the nature, the essential character of America.” Groff’s novel was published in 2012, generations after Seldes published The Stammering Century.

  This is the tale of a 1970s cult that, with a few names changed, is founded on the site of Noyes’s original Oneida colony, in the ruins of the great Oneida community hall. So spookily, as if she has transcended time, an old woman recounts the origin myth:

  They called themselves Divinists, because they believed that people could become perfect, therefore divine. They believed that intercourse was a gift from God and had great quantities of it with everyone in the community. To avoid the consequences, namely babies and love, they had a rotational schedule: every night, a new woman with a new man, and the men had to release themselves into their handkerchiefs . . . But then their leader, John Noland, my great-grandfather, decided it was time to reproduce. He had gone to a Shaker community and saw that they were in danger of dying out, and didn’t wish that upon his people. And so they instituted a program called Egeniculture. The most spiritual men and the most spiritual young women were allowed to mate, after a very thorough matching. Of course because the most spiritual men were old men, and nobody was more spiritual than John Noland, out of forty-eight babies born, twenty-three were his.

  Over many deeply complex, sometimes displacingly thrilling pages on John Humphry Noyes and Oneida, Seldes tells the same story in The Stammering Century, step by step, revelation by revelation: the story of a man who “built a community on the idea that the Second Coming of Christ had already taken place, and that, therefore, man can be perfect in this life,” as “free from law” as one was “from sin”; a man who “on the foundation of his religious and sexual innovations . . . built an industrial organization, abolishing private property and wages. Combining the three, he created the perfect communism which, he asks us to believe, abolishes Death.” In Seldes’s hands it is too complex and subtle, too much a work of art, to catch here; it is the wonder of the book, and thus best left to the reader to discover.

  “The glory breaks upon us in diminished splendor,” Seldes says finally of Noyes’s Perfectionism. “What is hard to understand is not the doctrine itself, but the fact that anyone could believe it.” And yet, as with almost all of the men and women who appear in The Stammering Century, wandering through the years, Seldes tried to believe it. In the supreme act of skeptical empathy that marks his entire book, he tried to enter into the minds and hearts of the men and women who, to him, were the real American pioneers, the untrammeled American idealists, the ones who, more than he, put the American credo into practice, strange practice, blessed practice, cursed practice—those who found themselves in the adventure, and then were mostly lost to history, until a curious critic came along to march them forward.

  —GREIL MARCUS

  Thanks to Robert Christgau and the late Peter C. Marzio.

  THE STAMMERING CENTURY

  To A. H. S.

  Laetificat Dies Meos

  A Note on Method.

  THIS book is not a record of the major events in American history
during the nineteenth century. It is concerned with minor movements, with the cults and manias of that period. Its personages are fanatics, and radicals, and mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements and figures with the primary forces of the century, and to supply a background in American history for the cults and manias of our own time: the Prohibitionists and Pentecostalists; the diet-faddists, and dealers in mail-order Personality; the play-censors, and Fundamentalists, and Point Loma theosophists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and, possibly, the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious excitements, and the relation of each of these to the others and to the orderly progress of America in the past hundred years, are the subject matter. They suggest at once that this is a history of what Mr. Mencken calls the booboisie. It is, however, nothing of the kind. In private conversation—and possibly also in print—Mr. Mencken maintains that no quackery has ever been given up by the American people until they have had a worse quackery to take its place. He holds, explicitly and implicitly, that the difference between intelligent and unintelligent people is the gullibility of the boobs, their irremediable tendency to believe anything sufficiently absurd. The distinction is one of the reasons for Mencken’s distrust of democracy and the history of manias and crazes in America annihilates that distinction entirely.

  The astounding thing about almost all the quackeries, fads, and movements of the past hundred years in America is that they were first accepted by superior people, by men and women of education, intelligence, breeding, wealth, and experience. Only after the upper classes had approved, the masses accepted each new thing. The boob-haters need to correct their theory. They should study the list of endorsers of Perkins Tractors; and note how the faculty of Harvard College felt about phrenology; and read the accounts of Mesmer’s triumphs in Paris; and remember that the two most famous vegetarians in history are Shelley and Bernard Shaw; and consider the experiments of the Fourierite era in relation to almost all the active intelligence of America at that time; and, keeping in mind the fact that the vast majority of Americans were far too preoccupied to care about any of these fanaticisms, they should try to reconcile their easy attack on the stupidity of the mass of mankind with the appalling sentence that Nathaniel Hawthorne passed on his ancestors for their part in the execution of Matthew Maule on the charge of witchcraft:

  “He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen—the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day—stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.”

  The history of fads and fanaticisms in America destroys Mr. Mencken’s concept of a boob-class peculiarly given to gusts of mass-feeling. The religious revivals alone are overrun with stupid people, and even there, at the very head, stands a profound intelligence, that of Jonathan Edwards. In nearly every other case, the more gifted, the more intelligent, the more experienced classes were the first to accept an absurdity and the last to give it up. The preoccupations of the lower orders may have been ignoble and silly; that is beside the point. The fact remains that one cannot distinguish the herd-majority from the civilized minority by ascribing to the former any special tendency to be taken in by charlatans. The minority is as susceptible to mass-suggestion as the majority. It gives fresh names to its idols, Bergson, or Freud, or Internationalism, or Eugenics, but it has no superior power to resist fads or crazes. It goes to Harlem in a taxi while the rustics go to Chinatown in a bus. It spends its days answering crossword puzzles or questionnaires in the waiting rooms of the more popular psychoanalysts.

  There are, of course, superior human beings, marked by independence. These, however, are not a class, but individuals, capable of resisting both the majority and the minority, untouched by suggestion, resisting or following the current as they choose. These are extremely few in number; and the existence of a few human beings who are out of the rut hardly calls for comment. Mr. Mencken is, in fact, not concerned with the few isolated independent individuals. He assumes the existence of an intellectual aristocracy, a class notable for its independence and individuality. If such a class does exist, it is only a smaller herd as much swayed by herd instincts as the majority. It accepts the theories of evolution, or of psychoanalysis, as blindly as the majority rejects them. It accepts anti-Christ as faithfully as the majority accepts Christ. There is no profit in comparing the clarity of vision of two groups which are equally incapable of using, or unwilling to use, their eyes.

  Almost all of the American cult leaders created grandiose illusions for themselves: illusions of purity or perfection, of economic justice, of physical or spiritual happiness. That was their way of seeking salvation. Most of them rejected the common means of salvation, and having by that rejection persuaded themselves of their own superiority, they infected others with their illusions, to fortify their own faith or to multiply their personality. That was their way of seeking power. These illusions and the cults founded upon them were appropriate to their time. The camp-meeting served a useful purpose in the backwoods of Kentucky in 1800 and New Thought was influenced by the capitalism of 1900. This relation of cults to their environment has virtually dictated my attitude toward the material in this book.[1] If one believed that cults and crazes were isolated phenomena of a specially stupid class, one could treat them satirically. If one believed that they were all aberrations, separated from the facts of common life, the method of psychoanalysis might be appropriate. But if one takes these cults and movements as more or less natural phenomena, as abnormalities closely connected with normal life, as part of the continuous existence of the nation, one need only describe them and set them in their true perspective. Thrown against the background of history, they provide their own irony.

  For a special reason, I have avoided explaining the messiahs and mountebanks of this book in the terms of modern psychology. I am not a professional psychoanalyst and I consider that the critic and biographer who is only an amateur analyst and attempts to apply the analytic method, is making a pretty bad job of his criticism. For myself, I have too profound a respect for Freud to take his name in vain. I have no quarrel with his analysis of Leonardo which is altogether proper as an essay in psychoanalysis. The impropriety comes when those without technical training apply the literary skimmings of the psychoanalytical method and, if they discover a suppressed desire or an inferiority complex, fancy they have illuminated the work or character of their subject. The claims which Freud, and Jung, and Adler, make for psychoanalysis are not small; but they have the modesty of science in comparison with the assumptions of the amateur. In the early part of the past century, the work of Spurzheim and Gall created a new science of human nature now discredited. While the serious phrenologists were attempting to give their work a scientific basis, charlatans passed up and down the country and read “bumps,” precisely as the uninstructed and impudent to-day interpret dreams and discover complexes. Where the 1840’s said “amativeness,” the 1920’s say “libido.” The name of the counter is changed, but it is still a counter; it becomes current coin only when it is stamped with authority. It is impossible to read a single page of Freud without observing how scrupulously he employs his weapons and with what solicitude he examines every item that may have bearing on the subject. It is hardly possible to believe that the psychoanalysis which finds its way into common print has employed equal safeguards and merits equal respect. There are significant exceptions but, in most cases, we find that psychoanalytical criticism of artists or men of action is bad psychoanalysis and negligible as criticism.

  I have avoided, as far as possible, the use of the terms of psychoanalysis because I consider that, unless they are used by competent analysts, they give a false appearance of scientifi
c authority to what must after all be lay judgments. Where I have used, but not specifically explained them, it has been in their journalistic sense. These words have passed into the common tongue with a meaning roughly approaching the scientific. But they are short cuts and nothing more.[2]

  Another reason for avoiding the method of psychoanalysis is that I suspect it of being inapplicable. In its present state, psychoanalysis, although part of the general body of scientific knowledge, is preëminently a system of therapeutics. Its intention is to analyze and to cure. Its claim is to reveal the sources of disorder. But merely to discover sources will not carry us very far. With Freud’s instrument in our hand, however awkwardly we use it, we can not discuss the conversion of John Wesley and omit the story of Sophia Hopkey. But Wesley’s love affairs will no more account for all the phenomena of the Methodist revival than the factory system of Great Britain will explain the infidelism, and spiritualism, and millenarianism, which were as important in the founding of New Harmony as Owen’s economic ideas. Even in the field of religious excitement, where the connection with sexual instability is most clearly marked, there is room for a little skepticism. The period of conversion roughly corresponds with the period of adolescence, but there have been conversions at twenty and preoccupation with religion is often liveliest as death approaches. The fact that phenomena occur together is not adequate proof that one causes the other. But even when we are assured of a causal relationship and have given a scientific name to it, we have not entirely explained it or exhausted its points of interest.