Gilbert Seldes (1893–1970)

Told largely in dialogue, or from a character’s narrative POV; almost in code—-the sexual and class relations, the details of telegrams, the petite bleu, sailing lists, powder sachets. It is casually mentioned that someone found it easy to “pass as an octoroon.” Not to mention the details of the negotiations at the very end of WW I—-the victory referred to in the title. I confess I was lost, and yet the book’s energy carried me along even when I had pretty much lost track of who was doing and had done what.… (mehr)

This is a strange book about strange people in a strange time -- and yet, are they that different from us, and is our time so different from theirs? Originally published in 1928 and recently reissued by NYRB, The Stammering Century portrays a series of 19th century revivalists, religion/cult creators, founders of idealistic communities, temperance proponents, spiritualists, medical quacks and more -- mostly in their own words and those of their contemporaries. The title is a quote from Horace Greeley who described, in Seldes's words, the people who "were vehemently stammering out God's curse on material progress, and announcing Christ's Kingdom on earth, or the New Eden in Indiana" -- as opposed to those who were conquering the West, building businesses, and developing engineering advances.

He starts with Jonathan Edwards, an uncompromising, intellectually rigorous 18th century minister, to illustrate what the people in the rest of the book were rejecting, and moves on to the revival meetings at which thousands of people came together and hysterically "jerked" to show that they were saved; religious leaders who rejected sexual relationships because the second coming of Christ had already happened and thus people were sinless and those who advocated sexual freedom for the same reason (strangely, or not so strangely, the religious leaders were always the ones with the most sexual freedom); and what he calls a "messianic murderer." He also portrays "radicals" (although not in the sense we would use the term today) and "reformers," people who tried to found idealistic communities, such as Bronson Alcott and others, often with a "religious" underpinning, sometimes with an associated business (as with the community that for many years manufactured Oneida silverware). He displays how the original temperance movement, which advocated individual rejection of drinking, morphed into the prohibition movement which forced the ban on alcohol on everyone, and illustrates some of its leaders. He covers the beginning of spiritualism (communication with the dead) and shows how it was exposed as fraud, as well as the infinite variety of medical quackery. Finally, as the 19th century draws to a close, he portrays the completely permissive and confused "New Thought," which claimed that if you focused on something good you could make it happen (sound familiar?), and Christian Science, which claimed there was no such thing as illness and death.

Throughout, Seldes lets these "fanatics and radicals," "messiahs and mountebanks" speak for themselves, reveal the looniness and grandiosity of their own thoughts, although he occasionally interjects the perfect understated zinger to deflate them. He notes:

"The underlying motive of the radical cults was salvation -- in modern jargon they were escape mechanisms -- and the underlying motive of nineteenth-century America was the desire for mastery. Through cults, escape was offered: from the terror of sex, by refraining from intercourse or by a special sanctification of intercourse -- the means differ but the motive is the same; from working for a living, by communism or cooperation; from ill health, by Christian Science; from awkwardness, by the cult of Personality; from moral responsibility, by Phrenology; from the drabness of life, by imagining a Utopia; from loneliness, by accepting the friendship of Christ; from fear, by accepting his intercession; from death, by Spiritualism, Christian Science, and Christianity." p. 402

He also makes the point that it was not just the uneducated masses who fell for these cults, as Mencken would have had it but, at least initially, by the educated. "The astounding thing about 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." (Yes, he was writing in the 1920s.) He notes, "I came gradually to want to prove nothing. What I did want was to compose a sort of anatomy of the reforming temperament and to follow it, by winding roads, to the spiritual settlements it made for itself. What the man thinks who sets himself apart from humanity and expects humanity to follow him . . ." Finally, in a summary chapter, he writes:

"A dry world, a world of sanitary tenements, a world of sexless friendliness, a world without bawdy plays, a world in which capital and labor are friends -- all these are the concerns of a single temperament: the idealist. In the service of an Ideal there can be no compromise. As Carry Nation put it, one meddles. The radical-reformer-Prohibitionist is convinced of his God-given authority to interfere with the lives of other men, in order to improve them. Eighty years ago, he withdrew from society, founded his own community, and preached Abstention. Today, he passes laws and cries, I forbid. He believes still in the depravity of man as he is. He still has the ideal of Man before the Fall." pp. 407-408

I should note that there are no footnotes/endnotes in this book, which is filled with quotes. This is intentional, according to Seldes's "Sources" section, in which he quotes a writer who felt it was inappropriate to show the "machinery" of a book is to "stress the toil which has gone into its making, not the pleasure." "It is perfectly obvious that in a book of this kind," he writes, "the principal sources are the works of each of the people studied, and . . . the principal biographical studies." It works, but it seems odd by contemporary standards.… (mehr)

Fascinating though frequently frustrating account of America's history of (Protestant) religious weirdness, written in 1927 and focusing mostly on the 19th century. Traces it all back to the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards in the early days and up to the then-current New Thought movement (and first flowerings in the USA of yoga). While a period piece in some ways, the book shows admirably that nearly 100 years on, America is still very much in the grip of these strains of mystical, spiritual, fundamentalist, evangelical, revivalistic eccentricity, and that somehow we're a country made up of a substantial group of people who can be made, easily, to believe ANY DAMN THING.… (mehr)

The New York Review of Books is about to reissue this one, and I’ve loved a lot of the books they’ve put out, so I couldn’t wait and ordered a used copy of the edition from the 60s. The book took about a month to arrive, by which point I had convinced myself that this was going to be the best thing I had read in my life. It wasn’t. While the content is fascinating, the style in which it’s written is turgid, and the author assumes the reader knows many of the historical characters and movements he refers to, which might have been true in 1928 when the book was written, but certainly not now. I gave up somewhere around the middle.… (mehr)