The Metaphor of Dead Young Men

Continuing The Undressing of America with some thoughts on the cultural forces and metaphors driving our evolving ideas about "purity" and "filth."

It is difficult, from our distance, to realize that the perception of indecent literature as a source of social and psychological harm was once a new one.

      There had been attacks on obscenity for centuries, including mass burnings of it and the persecution of people who made it, often led by Calvinists like Comstock. But in the middle 19th Century, Calvinism was fading as a dominant force in American life, eclipsed especially by heterogeneous, secular cultures of New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The mores of New York, in particular, had grown steadily more lax in the decades before the Civil War: risqué entertainment and scandal had become accepted topics of polite discourse, and the prostitute had become a common subject of literature and journalism, a symbol both of what was most tragic and most romantic about modern city life. Religious attacks on immorality generated little interest. But a new conception of forbidden stories and images began coming into focus in mid-century: pornography as a negative social force, a force that a generation needed to be protected against; a force, almost like a disease, worthy of being dealt with through public policy.

       Much of this was simply the worried response of the affluent and established classes to what the common man was seeing. Educated opinion was ambivalent about this still-young medium of mass print: clearly it made the masses more literate and aware, but who knew what sorts of bad ideas or dangerous stimulation it would bring to the uneducated and the impressionable young? When pornography had been consumed only by men of a certain level of wealth and therefore, implicitly, of sophistication, it had been easily dismissed as a matter of personal moral failing. But when one considered the young men who every day arrived in the city fresh from small towns or their parents’ farms, already feeling the heady freedom and countless distractions of the city, one could easily imagine them being aroused and made curious by those magazines and books they could find at any newsstand. And since those same newsstands also sold guides to local brothels and newspapers advertising condoms and questionable medicines for the prevention of social diseases, they might be led to act on that new curiosity; a curiosity that led not only to moral decline but likely to syphilis, that incurable gate to madness, shame, and family devastation.

       Pornography led young men even more certainly often to other deeds, deeds rarely spoken of in public but ever more frequently worried about in private. During those very years a growing mass of medical authorities and educators warned of the physical and psychological danger of masturbation, once a vice that troubled some clergymen but was otherwise of little general interest, now recast as an incipient destroyer of young men’s energies and mental capacities.

       The intensity of concern inspired by pornography, however—intense enough that it apparently came to worry Morris Jesup and other officers of the New York YMCA more than the brothels and diseases themselves—show that we are entering the realm of cultural metaphor, of common patterns of thought and perception shaped by the larger fears, hopes, and daily preoccupations of the time.

       This was a moment of tremendous change. Industrialization was still young in America, its transformation of life, work, physical environment, and common thought still in its fluid days, still bringing soaring dreams, deep terrors, and vast mystery. The cities especially were changing rapidly, and none more quickly or dramatically than New York. The centralization of capital and industry, and the accompanying federalization of power in the wake of the Civil War had raised new questions of national identity and new expectations of government. Ideas of progress and reform, the conviction that change was not only here and inevitable but noble and desirable, dominated nearly every field. Young men made up the new workforce that would drive American industry and commerce during the post-war years, but they became more than that in popular thought: they became symbols of change itself, omens of the future. In the behavior of a generation, older people looked then as they do now for signs of coming prosperity or ruin, indications that the future would be as bright as they hoped or as dark as they feared.

       The Civil War gave new poignancy to that metaphor. The slaughter of so many thousands of young men had made that generation seem not only precious but fragile. The horror of those young bodies scattered over the battlefields, maimed and diseased and blown apart, haunted the national imagination, evoking horror at what we might do to our young, inspiring an overarching protectiveness, a desperation to identify and prevent future harm.

       In the popular imagination grew up a sentimentalization of young men that nearly amounted to a new national myth. Even as Anthony Comstock was beginning his pursuit of indecency in the mass press, another New England Congregationalist, Horatio Alger, was using that same medium to tell stories about plucky, hardworking adolescent boys in New York finding their ways to riches and respectability through courage and moral virtue. Alger himself had a romantic, even erotic, vision of young men, and it struck a loud chord, immediately making him the most popular American writer in the cheap press. Thus mass print became the great promoter of the potential of young men, which tightened the popular association of cheap publications with the moral and intellectual formation of the new generation. If Alger’s stories were to be embraced as good for boys, then Alger’s opposite numbers must be denounced as bad for them.

       There was, however, a bigger metaphor than this at work. The industrial revolution was changing the social and political worlds, creating new models of business and new ways of working, forming a new kind of city, and requiring new forms of regulation and coordination. It was also bringing a profound change to common views of the world. People were seeing that vast changes could be wrought by human design and effort that no one had ever imagined could be made before. Industry, driven by science, was transforming the physical world and taking control of powers that had been assumed to lay beyond human mastery. The ages-long acceptance of the great forces and inevitabilities of life was, in the span of just a few generations, giving way to dreams of a world in which anything might be changed, of existence shaped not by what God had made but by what men wanted it to be.

      And so came the idea that mankind itself might be reshaped by design and will. The “social sciences” came to prominence, promising to bring a rational mastery of human society equivalent to what chemistry and physics brought to the material world. Against the pessimism about man’s fallen nature that informed Christianity, especially Calvinism, there arose the idea that human behavior and human society might be, if not perfected, then at least reformed beyond what anyone had dreamed possible. Through superior knowledge, rigorous design, and coordinated effort, a new human reality might be made in the same way that new transportation, materials, and energy sources were made.

      The driving metaphor, then, was of the rational mind subduing and marshaling the organic. This was not, though, a monastic punishing of the organic or a gnostic attempt to leave it behind. Following the industrial metaphor, in which science and design are the controlling elements but sheer physical might is the maker of change and the force on which everything depends, the body and its energy were seen as essential to the perfect whole. The body in this new model of human perfection would be healthy, strong, and well-trained, but entirely subject to the requirements of the mind; and not only the individual mind, but the plan set by the leaders of society.

      This was such a powerful idea, and so well fueled by the technological and economic currents of the day, that devout Christians began to form their world views around it. A self-described “Purity Movement” began in England in mid-century and spread to America. It was a Protestant Evangelical movement, stressing purity of soul foremost, preaching against alcohol and sexual stimulation; but it also advocated elements of diet, physical fitness, and purity from chemical contaminants, drawing many of its ideas from medical sources. The founders of the YMCA drew heavily on the Purity Movement in their emphasis on physical fitness; and although that emphasis was mainly on fitness through diet, sobriety, and adequate sleep during the Association’s first years in England, as soon as the New York branch opened it began to emphasize exercises and physical games. The body was to be made fit, its energies were to be first stirred and then marshaled. In some ways this Christian focus on health was an answer to threats raised by industrialism and urbanization, but in other ways it grew straight from the underlying suppositions and dominant metaphors of the new world of industry and science. So we are always shaped by our opposites.

      The energy that most needed to be marshaled, from both the Protestant and industrial viewpoints, was sexuality. Industrial logic demanded that resources not be expended on the unproductive, and that no one’s energies should turn inward. Where children would be produced, sexuality was encouraged. Where they would not be, it would be discouraged in a way it had not been before: because the issue at hand was not simply unwanted pregnancy, the threat of disease, or the saving of the soul, but a use of precious resources. Metaphors of waste and depletion, as well as of energy and production, run through 19th Century discussions of sex. In that regard, the anxiety over masturbation was a fundamental one. If the marshaling of sexual energy to the growing vigor of the young man was essential not only to his health but to his value to the world, then the squandering of that energy was a cost the world could not approve.

       The concept of purity drew Christian and scientific beliefs together into a new metaphor: impurity as disease. People’s relationships with illness then was very much marked by that same combination of hope and fear that filled their visions of the future and the young generation. Science made rapid advances in understanding and fighting disease, raising hopes that illnesses could be conquered that mankind had always accepted with tragic resignation. As the roles that sewers and stagnant water played in cultivating cholera, malaria, and other diseases became clearer, vast public works, driven both by the new technology and the new systems of organizing labor, made the cities cleaner and safer. But at the same time, industry introduced new contaminants into the atmosphere, causing physical problems that mankind had never to contend with before, providing no relief from fears of deadly impurity.

      The more bodily health became linked to mental, spiritual, and social health, the more mental and spiritual influences were viewed as bearers of disease. The young mind was perceived as pure in the way the body free of disease and contamination was pure, and the elements that might corrupt it were seen not as ideas but as poisons and disease agents. Comstock’s association of pornographers with mad dogs, simple and reflexive as it was, contained in it some of the most potent metaphors and assumptions of his moment.

      Calvinists like Comstock and Jesup, in fact, found themselves strangely relevant to the larger concerns of society in the years after the Civil War. No one was better suited to funnel the anxieties of the time into a course of action, a mission of public cultural reform; and no one had a comparable zeal to fight the battles that such a mission required. They shared the industrialists’ belief in group control of the individual and the authority of expertise, but their area of expertise was morality, and the source of it they believed to be the word of God. Further, as Comstock quickly demonstrated, cultural reform might require far more than battles against the publishers of naughty stories and dirty pictures. For there were voices out there calling for a different sort of cultural reform, envisioning a different America to come.

To be continued...