Battleground of Desire

The Struggle for Self -Control in Modern America

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780814708644
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, Peter N. Stearns has established himself as the foremost historian of American emotional life. In books on anger, jealousy, "coolness," and body image, he has mapped out the basic terrain of the American psyche.

Now Stearns crowns his work of the past decade with this powerful volume, in which he reveals the fundamental dichotomy at the heart of the national character: a self-indulgent hedonism and the famed American informality on the one hand, and a deeply imbedded repressiveness on the other.

Whether hunting and gathering tribe or complex industrial civilization, every social group is governed by explicit and implicit guidelines on how to behave. But these definitions vary widely. The Japanese worry less about public drunkenness than Americans. Northern Europeans adhere to stricter standards than Americans when it comes to littering. Today, we swear more now and spit less, discuss sex more and death less.

With an emphasis on sex, culture, and discipline of the body, Stearns traces how particular anxieties take root, and how they express inherent tension in contemporary standards and a stubborn nostalgia for the previous nineteenth century regime.

Battleground of Desire explodes common wisdom about Americans in the twentieth century as normless and tolerant, emphasizing that most of us follow a litany of rules, governing everything from adultery to bad breath.

PART I
The Issues

ONE
The Heart of the Matter

In the late eighteenth century, those Americans beginning to form a new middle class worried about proper norms of behavior. In 1759 John Adams, the future president, described in his diary his concerns about his physical twitches—too often shrugging his shoulders and moving the muscles of his face—and resolved to acquire a more disciplined grace. From 1775 onward, he and other Americans began consuming a new etiquette literature, spearheaded by the work of British Lord Chesterfield, that spelled out the rules for comporting the body and maintaining other elements of self-restraint. Advice ranged from the broad—“the general rule is to have a real reserve with almost everyone”—to the newly particular: “All men’s breath is nauseous, and some men’s intolerable.” In the same period, again beginning around 1775, writers began to talk of women’s natural virtues, their “superior delicacy,” “modesty,” “natural softness and sensibility of ... dispositions”—“destined by their very constitution, to the exercise of the passive, the quiet, the secret, the gentle and humble virtues.” This was another, gendered, aspect of self-control cherished by many through the nineteenth century and beyond.¹

In the 1920s, a number of opinion leaders—some self-appointed, others genuinely popular—began writing about the need for freedom from repressive nineteenthcentury standards. Ben Lindsey, a widely published Denver judge, argued that a host of ills resulted from outdated attitudes toward heterosexual sex and jealousy. He thus advocated sexual openness and the abolition of Victorian evasions such as red-light districts and double standards. He even praised divorce, at least as a way station until fuller enlightenment prevailed. “It may be that the faster the divorce figures increase from now on till we get rid of the old order, the old maladjustments, the better.” Soon other Victorian staples, including norms of posture and definitions of ethereal love, began to be attacked or jettisoned as well.²

By this time, experts were crafting new rules for personal conduct, in a rebellion against the powerful standards that had been established in the late eighteenth century and lasted for at least a hundred years. Change, however, was complex. It was in the presumably decorous nineteenth century that law courts recognized the validity of unrestrained emotions such as jealousy, by excusing several prominent murderers of adulterous wives and wives’ lovers: “Jealousy, which defies and bears down all restraint... vents itself in one result, which seems to be inevitable and unavoidable,” as one successful defense attorney put it. And it was the courts of the twentieth century that progressively eliminated this line of argument, by invoking restraint: “The idea that a spouse is ever justified in taking the life of another—adulterous spouse or illicit lover—to prevent adultery is uncivilized.” In addition, as the problem of sibling rivalry was introduced and quickly soared to a high place on parental worry lists, nervous parents in the 1920s accepted a new category of children’s behavior that had to be brought under control. More broadly, acts based on a double standard of sexuality or the idea of wives as property became less valid, which was a major stride toward gender equality but a new constraint on male behavior. As part of the twentieth-century pattern of self-restraint, modern Americans began to limit themselves in new ways even as they were told that they were gaining unprecedented freedom of self-expression.³

Charting the relationship between nineteenth- and twentieth-century rules of behavior provides an important vantage point on reactions even today as we continue to refine and amend the contemporary model. Liberals and conservatives alike point to the contrast between Victorian order and more recent freedom (or license), agreeing on the magnitude, though not the quality, of the change. In the process, however, they have oversimplified both past standards—which were not, in fact, uniformly repressive—and the trends of our own age. Precisely because a behavioral history illuminates the codes we live by, it must refute some common stereotypes.

There are, to be sure, some important contrasts between the Victorian approach and the one that began to emerge in the early decades of this century. Moralists’ laments, though not novel, increased in intensity during the 1920s, reflecting a growing relativism in moral standards. College-age youth seemed newly devoted to hedonism. Indeed, such crimes as the child murders by Leopold and Loeb caused even advocates of the new values like Judge Ben Lindsey to comment on the “modern misdirection of youth.” A college newspaper editor noted, again in the 1920s but voicing sentiments that remain current seven decades later: “We have very few convictions about anything,” and a University of Denver student claimed, “There is no absolute right or wrong.” Two psychologists of that decade found that “college students were only half as likely as their parents to judge behavior on the basis of right and wrong.” At the same time, however, arguments based on models of psychotherapy, citing individual powerlessness over various drives, began to modify Victorian moral condemnations of deviations from good character. Likewise, whereas newspaper obituaries in the nineteenth century routinely emphasized character attributes, with men remembered as patriotic, brave, honest, industrious, or devoted to duty and with women described as patient, affectionate, virtuous, and innocent, twentieth-century notices more commonly focused on achievements—education obtained, careers pursued, and wealth amassed (categories that by the 1930s began to be applied even to women). Moral commentary receded. Yet the contrast, despite these relatively clear-cut distinctions, was not absolute, as character attainments still carried some symbolic freight in a society that continued to believe that one’s personal worth, or lack of it, undergirded one’s social and economic place.

The task of comparing two different but related ethics is further complicated by the elusiveness of some twentieth-century norms. There is no question that in the past several decades Americans (with the exception of some important religious minorities and individual critics) have become much warier than their nineteenth-century counterparts about proclaiming rules and castigating deviations. In fact, a significant constraint that many contemporaries have come to accept is the need not to appear judgmental. Even the history of the word judgmental is revealing: until the early twentieth century, judgmental was an adjective referring to rendering judgment, with no pejorative connotations. But in the new regime of the twentieth century, the idea of forming an opinion about other people’s personal beliefs or behaviors began to seem intolerant, an unwarranted interference. And so the term began to imply criticism, most often used as part of an injunction to stop: don’t be so judgmental. By the same token, a judgmental person was thought to be flawed. In essence, Americans, particularly young people, concerned with being up-to-date, passed judgment on judgmentalism. A new norm was introduced, but in a way that made norms harder to identify and articulate. Tracing the history of actual patterns of self-control as Americans moved from the greater clarities of the Victorian world requires grappling with this complexity as well, which makes superficial evaluations impossible. One recent sociological inquiry looked at how Americans combine nonjudgmental tolerance with a subtle commitment to standards in their own lives, a double-think combination that is the very fruit of the historical evolution central to my study.⁴

This book is also about widely accepted regulations of personal behavior in an age that sometimes seems to see itself as lacking norms. Self-restraint and many of our beliefs about the twentieth century do not readily cohabit. Yet most of us follow all sorts of rules, sometimes because we are externally constrained but often because we are governed by self-control. Certain rules are new—like the greater intolerance of jealousy and judgmentalism—but others, despite the rebellion against Victorianism, maintain or even intensify nineteenthcentury standards—like our frantic effort to avoid bad breath. This book focuses on certain areas of impulse control as they have evolved during the century now coming to a close.

Despite its many facets, the basic argument is not complex. Americans in this century have adopted rules for personal behavior that are somewhat different from those that their middle-class counterparts preached in the century before. Although contrasts between Victorian strength of character and its related repressiveness and our contemporary values are often overdrawn, they do reflect some real distinctions in what kinds of restraint were valued and how they were achieved. Explaining why a different regime arose in this century and what the manifestations and consequences have been draws together a number of strands of American behavioral history and helps us better understand ourselves. Contemporary Americans must contend with a mixture of cultural signals, pointing to both individual release and powerful group norms. The novelty of the mixture adds to its inherent tension, which is why anxiety about appropriate standards surfaces so frequently.

The topic is a broad one and, in a literal sense, new, for historians have not probed personal restraint as a twentieth-century subject. Nonetheless, from a host of established findings, I have selected such diverse subjects as child rearing and cleanliness, smoking and smut, along with new research on changing patterns of restraint in such areas as posture and addiction. Established conceptual frameworks also figure in—indeed, we must dip into them at the outset, for according to one common interpretation, we already know what the trends are, and the historian of the subject should, at most, add some discouraging detail. In fact, more nuanced arguments are often more useful than complaints about moral decay, and we introduce several approaches as part of the larger context for the topic itself.

The Downward Spiral

Many commentators would argue that this book’s topic is an oxymoron, or at least that its definition misses the point. Instead, not different rules but, rather, progressively fewer rules should be the target—and although historical analysis might be helpful, the resulting tragedy should really be staged as a morality play.

This approach is understandable, even if the central argument here points in different directions. The Victorian regime of personal regulation was strict, and remnants of it still survive. Although nostalgia for a past order enhances the contrast, enough change has occurred for overlapping generations in the twentieth century to have quarreled about appropriate behavioral standards at several key points. The grandparents of parents aghast at their children’s body piercing in the 1990s had complained about the habits of the 1920s flappers.

Indeed, laments over moral decline and permissiveness have been heard throughout the century. In the 1920s they were against the new public behaviors of women and the changes in how sexuality was discussed and represented. These concerns resurfaced in the 1960s, when child-rearing experts were blamed for undermining proper discipline, which led to the conditions in which youth protest and aberrant lifestyles could flourish. The notion of moral spiral has revived once more in the 1990s: Even a recent editorial links the increases in per capita crimes of violence, illegitimate births, and teenage suicide to the context altered by the outlawing of school prayer in 1962. A New York Times article notes the rampant boastfulness of athletes, politicians, and business leaders, ready to call themselves superstars at the drop of a hat. George Will more broadly condemns the disappearance of civility, symbolized by tattooed, violent athletes like the basketball player Dennis Rodman. The honest frontier coarseness of people struggling with the elements to carve out a new land has given way to “a land where plenitude inflames the sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste.” The United States has become a “slatternly society—boom boxes borne through crowded streets by young men wearing pornographic T-shirts and baseball caps backwards; young women using, in what formerly was called polite society, language that formerly caused stevedores to blush. ‘What next? Whatever.’”⁵

The complaints about the deterioration from the good old days of careful rules and etiquette come most frequently from the conservative side. Robert Bork’s book Slouching toward Gomorrah relates Americans’ waning self-control, including sloppy posture, to a society that has lost its backbone, indulging in welfare frauds and an orgy of illegitimate sex and bastard babies. The conservative tradition has always emphasized human imperfections as part of the argument for order and hierarchy. But in the current climate, liberals often agree with them, complaining about a loss of self-control toward family members, epitomized by the widely assumed increase in the abuse of children. Feminists blast males when they use sexual harassment as a power play. Although some people may assume that men have always behaved like this, others argue that a permissive culture has just made them worse. One’s political orientation does in fact determine what facets of the decline of self-restraint one emphasizes—reactions to the idea of environmental controls are a case in point—but the basic claim nonetheless overrides politics: American morals are loosening.⁶

Not surprisingly, formal scholarly judgments frequently concur, giving editorialists and political commentators more grist. In the 1970s Christopher Lasch’s discussion of the rise of narcissism, including the collapse of parents’ discipline of their children, provided one interpretation of the sea change in American character, which President Jimmy Carter used as a means of explaining the national “malaise.” More recently, historian Richard Bushman traced the decline of manners, which, he argues, young Americans shun as elitist and undemocratic, with the result being an effacement of both beauty and the governance of unruly impulses. He regrets the disappearance of rules for behavior and of service personnel, like theater ushers, responsible for enforcing them. Standards, contends another scholar, James Morris, have gone by the board: “It’s all capitulation. No one wants to make a judgment, to impose a standard, to act from authority and call conduct unacceptable.” “Americans are becoming slaves to the new tyranny of nonchalance.”⁷

Historian John Burnham attempted to put this general notion on solid historical ground. In a book entitled simply Bad Habits, Burnham traces the decline of Victorian controls and the rise of new latitudes for drinking, smoking, drug taking, sexual promiscuity, swearing, and gambling. He sees the righteous Victorian middle class as having been undermined during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a combination of temptations emanating from the lower classes plus commercial exploiters like the liquor companies who helped destroy Prohibition. Although Burnham’s causation may be open to question—he never quite explains the internal motivations of the Victorians who yielded to these wiles—many observers would accept his basic findings. America has now succumbed to indulgences that were held at bay a century or more ago. In a study of patterns of family abuse, another historian declared:

Exercising self-restraint has become countercultural. External controls imposed by police and the courts can of course help to reduce husbands’ violence, just as less formal community oversight sometimes restrained violent husbands in the past. But creating within men the ability to exercise self-control will require a reorientation of modern culture.

Like other culture critics such as Lasch, this author really does not know how to escape from the prison of modern impulsiveness, for Americans have become too far removed from their earlier values and rules to recover on their own.⁸

The problem with these models of steadily advancing anarchy is, quite simply, that in some respects they are wrong. Some behaviors have clearly loosened—swearing is a case in point, though George Will overstated the case. The use of profanity to boost book and movie sales and then, gradually, television, aided by legal rulings that altered censorship in the 1950s, helped create a climate in which men began to swear somewhat more freely, and since the 1960s, middleclass women have joined in as a badge of liberation. Even here, though, some rules remain. Almost all middleclass adults (aside from the minority who do not normally swear at all) are able to adjust their language habits to the setting in which they find themselves. Speeches before unfamiliar audiences, interviews, and initial dealings with strangers thus require a restraint that is readily acknowledged. But there has been a noticeable change, and the growing coarseness is an accurate, if editorially freighted, historical model for the twentieth century.⁹

Some equally clear models work in the opposite direction. We no longer need to be reminded by prominently placed signs not to spit. But in the nineteenth century, such warnings were commonplace (and frequently ineffective) in stagecoach stations, trains, and public squares. (This norm developed gradually. The Omaha Herald published tips for stagecoach travelers in 1877, including suggestions like “don’t swear,” “never attempt to fire a gun or pistol while on the road,” and “spit on the leeward side of the coach.”) One major American sport, baseball, grew up in an age when spitting seemed to a required ritual. The (charmingly?) nostalgic spitting habits of contemporary baseball players should remind us by contrast how much a common impulse has been restrained in most public and private settings. Similarly, chewing tobacco and the public spittoons that accompanied it—staples of nineteenthcentury life, though shunned by the “best” elements—have virtually disappeared.¹⁰

So we swear more and spit less. Although we could argue that we should work on swearing, the model of steadily expanding license does not work here. My guess is that most current culture critics, sincerely offended by swearing, would nevertheless not opt for an exchange with bygone saliva habits.

Even the common assumption that our century has been characterized by increasing frankness, in contrast to the repressions of the past, is somewhat doubtful. Matters concerning sexuality are unquestionably more open, which will be a major topic in our later exploration of redefined restraint. To be sure, few of us discuss bestiality (despite evidence from the Kinsey report that it was not uncommon in the 1940s). But if many sexual taboos have eased in mainstream middleclass conversation, many observers would contend that limitations on the discussion of death have increased. In the twentieth century, death was moved from the home to the hospital, where its primary caretakers were doctors who vowed to fight it, rather than the pastors and family who in the nineteenth century confronted it directly. A host of euphemisms developed to avoid having to refer to death directly; thus child-rearing experts in the 1920s, concerned about shielding children from direct knowledge of such an unsettling human experience, urged evasions such as “grandma’s gone.”¹¹

So we discuss sex more (though not as thoroughly as we might imagine), and death less—a real change, but hardly one that marks the twentieth century as an age of feckless candor. We need a different model to understand what constraints remain, which have really vanished, and what processes of replacement have occurred.

Broader factors must be considered as well. Despite the recent flurry of comments about deteriorating self-contr...