Chapter XVIII: Part 18

More than two-thirds of our national wealth is owned by corporations. They control at some point every process of economic life. Their power is so great that many have wondered whether in time it might not overwhelm popular government. Yet in all this realm of power there is nowhere that sense of personal moral liability which is acknowledged between men and without which civilized human relationships would become utterly impossible. A corporation is like a State in this respect: it cannot, if it would, make moral decisions. The right to do that is not delegated by people to a State nor by stockholders to a corporation. Both therefore are limited to material decisions.

It is probably owing as much to the power-thirsty, law-baiting temperament of the American in business as to the magnitude of the work to be done that the use of the corporation, like the use of labour-saving machinery, has been carried further here than in any other country. Railroads naturally were the first great corporations. The amount of capital required to build a railroad is beyond the resources of any small group of individuals; it must be gathered from a large number, who become shareholders. The original railroads were subsidized by the government with loans of money and enormous grants of land. Industrial and trading corporations came later. For a long time America was to all corporations a Garden of Eden. They were encouraged, not precisely that they were presumed to be innocent but because they were indispensable. Then they ate of the Tree of Political Power and the feud was on. When people began really to fear them their roots were already very deep and touched nearly everything that was solid. The sinister alliance between big business and high finance was accomplished.

One of the absurdities of the case was and is that any State according to its own laws may grant corporation-charters which carry rights of eminent domain in all other states. The Standard Oil Company was once dissolved in Ohio. It took out a new charter in New Jersey, and went on as before, even in Ohio.

Every attempt to reform their oppressive ways by law they have resisted under the constitution as an attack upon the rights of property. And there has always been much confusion as to what the law was. In one case it was construed by the United States Supreme Court to mean that bigness itself, the mere power of evil, was illegal whether it had been exercised or not; in another, that each instance must be treated on its merits by a rule of reason, and, in still another, that the potential power to restrain trade in a monopolistic manner was not in itself illegal provided it had never been used.

Nevertheless the doubt as to which should control the other--the State the corporations or the corporations the State--has been resolved. Gradually the authority of the State has been asserted. The hand of the corporation in national politics is branded. The Federal Government’s control over the rates and practices of the railroads is complete; so likewise is the control of many of the several separate States over the rates and practices of public-utility corporations. Federal authority over the tradeways of the great industrial and trading corporations whose operations are either so large or so essential, to economic life as to become clothed with public interest is far advanced; and supervision of profits is beginning.

Now what manner of profit and loss account may we write with American business?

Given to begin with an environment superb, it has made wealth available to an aggregate extent hitherto unimaginable in the world. But in doing this it has created a conscious, implacable proletariat in revolt against private profit.

In production it has brought about a marvellous economy of human effort. At the same time it has created colossal forms of social waste. It wastes the spirit by depriving the individual of that sense of personal achievement, that feeling of participation in the final result, which is the whole joy of craftsmanship, so that the mind is bored and the heart is seared. It wastes all things prodigally in the effort to create new and extravagant wants, reserving its most dazzling rewards for him that can make two glittering baubles to sell where only one was sold before. It wastes the living machine in recurring periods of frightful and unnecessary idleness.

For the distribution of goods it has perfected a web of exchange, so elaborate that the breaking of one strand is a disaster and yet so trustworthy that we take its conveniences every day for granted and never worry. But the adjustment of supply to demand is so rude and uncontrolled that we suffer periodic economic calamities, extreme trade depression, and social distress, because there has been an over-production of some things at a price-impasse between producer and consumer.

In the field of finance and credit it has evolved a mechanism of the highest dynamic intensity known; yet the speculative abuse of credit is an unmitigated scandal, and nothing whatever has been done to eliminate or diminish those alternations of high and low prices, inflation and deflation, which produce panics and perilous political disorder. On the contrary, business continues fast in the antique superstition that such things happen in obedience to inexorable laws.

In the Great War American business amazed the world, itself included. In 1914 the United States was a debtor nation, owing Europe 3 billions of dollars. By the end of 1920 we were the largest creditor nation on earth, other nations owing us 15 billions. This means simply that in six years this country produced in excess of its own needs and sent abroad commodities amounting to 18 billions of dollars. In 1921, to the naïve astonishment of business, the foreign demand for American goods slumped because foreign countries had not the means to go on buying at any such rate. The result was an acute panic in prices here, trade prostration, unemployment, and sounds of despair. The case was stated by leaders of business and finance in these ominous terms: “America is over-equipped. It has the capacity to produce more of everything than it needs. Therefore unless we continuously sell our surplus abroad, unless the American government will lend foreign countries the credit with which to buy our excess production, prosperity is shattered. Factories will shut up, fields will lie fallow, labour will suffer for want of work. Moreover, we are threatened with a deluge of foreign goods, for presently the countries that owe us 18 billions of dollars will be trying to pay us with commodities. If we open our markets to their goods our own industries will be ruined. So we must have high tariffs to protect American producers from the competition of foreign merchandise.”

Ruined by over-plenty!

We are equipped to produce more of the goods that satisfy human wants than we can use, our command over the labour of foreign countries by reason of the debt they owe us is enormous, and _business desponds_.

Attend. To keep our prosperity we must sell away our surplus, or if necessary give it away to foreign countries on credit, and then protect ourselves against their efforts to repay us! The simple absurdity of this proposition is self-evident. We mention it only for what it signifies. And it signifies that business is a blind, momentous sequence, with extravagant reflex powers of accommodation and extension and almost no faculty of original imagination.

American business despairing at over-production and the American Indian shivering on top of the Pennsylvania coalfields--these are twin ironies.

John Law’s Mississippi Bubble dream three centuries ago was a phantasy of escape from the boredom of toil. The bubble itself has been captured. That is the story of American business. But who has escaped, save always a few at the expense of many? There may be in fact no other way. Still, the phantasy will not lie. And nobody knows for sure what will happen when business is no longer a feudal-minded thing, with rights and institutions apart, seeking its own profit as the consummate end, and perceives itself in the light of a subordinate human function, justified by service.

GARET GARRETT

ENGINEERING

American engineering made its beginning almost immediately after the end of the War for Independence. The pursuits of the colonists under British domination were mainly agricultural. Manufacturing was systematically thwarted in order that the Colonies might become a market for the finished goods of England. Objection to this form of sabotage subsequently developed into one of the main causes of the Revolutionary War. It was but natural, therefore, as soon as the artificial restrictions imposed upon Colonial enterprise were removed, for the new citizens of America to devise machinery, build roads and canals, and plan cities.

The early engineers who carried on this work were seldom formally trained. They were little more than higher types of artisans. It was only after thirty-odd years of discussion and agitation that the first scientific schools were established in this country--two in number. And it was only after the enactment of the Morrill Act by Congress (1862) that formal engineering training as we know it to-day was put on a firm national basis. By 1870, 866 engineers had been graduated from American technical schools and colleges. The real advent of the typical American engineer, however, has only occurred since 1870. At present he is being supplied to the industries of the country at the rate of 5,000 a year.

The coming of the formally trained technologist or scientist of industry lagged somewhat behind the development of the industrial revolution. This was particularly true in America. Originally all attention was centered on the training of so-called civil engineers, i.e., canal, bridge, road, dam and building designers and constructors. The rapid rise of the mechanical arts after the Civil War focused attention on the training of engineers expert in manufacturing. To-day the mechanical and electrical engineers are more numerous than any other group and have far outstripped the civil engineers.

The original function of the engineer, especially in the first days of his systematic training, was to deal scientifically with purely mechanical problems. Thus the oft quoted definition of the British Institution of Civil Engineers that “Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man” reveals quite clearly the legitimate field within which the engineer was supposed to operate. He was to harness the untamed energies of nature. That this conception was then sufficient, and that the careers of most engineers were shaped accordingly, is hardly to be disputed. Nor, judging from the achievement of American engineers in the last fifty years, can it be contended that their function was conceived in too narrow a light. Undoubtedly, the problems of mechanical production, power-creation and transmission, bridge and building construction, and railway and marine transportation, during this period were largely material ones, and the opportunities for their solution were especially good. To these the engineers directed their attention. Thanks to their training, technique, and accumulated experience, they became more and more successful in solving them. At the same time, their relative freedom of thought and action with reference to technological problems brought them into more or less coherent groups which, as time went on, began to conceive a larger function for the engineer--service to society as a whole rather than the solving of mere concrete, specific difficulties.

For while the material problems of production are undoubtedly as important as ever, the present-day industrial system has begun to reveal new problems which the engineer in America has, to a limited extent, come to realize must be faced. These new problems are not material in the old sense of the word; they concern themselves with the control and administration of the units of our producing system. Their nature is psychological and economic.

Certain groups in the American engineering profession have become quite conscious that these deeper problems are not being solved; at the same time they consider it a necessary duty to help in their solution, inasmuch as the engineer, they feel, is peculiarly fitted to see his way clearly through them. Thus is being split off from the main body of old-line engineers, a new wing not so much concerned with wringing power from nature as with adjusting power to legitimate social needs. As against the old engineer, concerned primarily with design and construction, there is to be recognized the new engineer, concerned mainly with industrial management.

Unfortunately, however, a strict evaluation of the engineer’s status with reference to the influence he may have on the solution of these social and economic problems causes serious doubts to arise regarding his ultimate possibilities in this field. Despite his great value and recognized indispensability as a technologist, expert in problems of materials and processes of manufacture, he can at best but serve in an advisory capacity on questions affecting the division of the national surplus or the control of industry. Nevertheless, it is of fundamental significance that the American engineering profession has of late considerably widened the scope of the British Institution of Civil Engineers’ definition of engineering, namely, to the effect that “Engineering is the science of controlling the forces and utilizing the materials of nature for the benefit of man _and the art of organizing and of directing human activities in connection therewith_.” The implications of this much broader definition, if widely accepted, will bring the American engineers sooner or later squarely before a fundamental issue.

The ideal of service is profoundly inherent in the profession of engineering. But so, also, is the ideal of creative work. The achievements of engineering enterprise are easily visualized and understood, and from them the engineer is wont to derive a great deal of satisfaction. Recently, however, the exactions of the modern complex economic system, in which the engineer finds himself relatively unimportant compared with, say, the financier, have contrived to rob him of this satisfaction. And as his creative instincts have been thwarted, he has turned upon business enterprise itself a sharp and inquiring eye. From isolated criticisms of wastes and inefficiencies in industry, for instance, he has not found it a long or difficult step to the investigation of industry on a national basis for the purpose of exposing technical and managerial shortcomings.

It appears, however, that the majority of American engineers to-day believe that their position as a class is such that they can effectively maintain an impartial position when differences which arise between large economic groups of society such as those of the merchant, the manufacturer, the labourer, the farmer, although these differences frequently lead to economic waste and loss. At all events, it is on this basis that attempts are being made to formulate a general policy for engineers as a class to pursue. It is very doubtful, however, whether a group such as the engineers, constituting the “indispensable general staff of industry,” can long take an impartial attitude towards two such conflicting forces as capital and labour so long as they (the engineers) adhere to the ideal of maximum service and efficiency. The pickets of the fence may eventually prove unduly sharp.

A minority group which believes otherwise has already organized into an international federation of technicians affiliated with the standard organized labour movement of America. This group holds that the engineer is a wage-earner like all other industrial workers, and that his economic welfare in many instances is no better than that of ordinary wage-earners. In addition, this group maintains that in the last analysis it is flatly impossible for engineers to take an impartial attitude in the struggle between capital and labour. Hence they advocate the engineer affiliating with the organized labour movement like other wage earners and, in times of crisis, throwing his influence with the workers of industry.

The organized labour movement of America has indicated in clear terms its estimate of the American engineer’s true value and opportunity. The American Federation of Labour in 1919 issued the following statement:

“To promote further the production of an adequate supply of the
world’s needs for use and higher standards of life, we urge
that there be established co-operation between the scientist of
industry and the representatives of the organized workers.”

This conviction has also been expressed in the following terms:

“The trades-union movement of America understands fully the
necessity for adequate production of the necessities of life.
American labour understands, perhaps more fully than do
American statesmen, the needs of the world in this hour, and it
is exerting every effort to see that those needs are met with
intelligence and with promptness. The question of increased
productivity is not a question of putting upon the toilers
a more severe strain; it is a question of vast fundamental
changes in the management of industry; a question of the
elimination of outworn policies; a question of the introduction
of the very best in machinery and methods of management.”

The fundamental significance of these attitudes of the engineers and the organized workers of the country will perhaps be better understood when it is realized how indispensable the engineers have become in the conduct of industrial affairs to-day. While virtually the product of the last fifty years, they have already fallen heir to one of the most strategic positions in society. To them are entrusted the real “trade secrets” of industry. Only they understand how far the intricate material processes of manufacture are interdependent, and how they can be kept in harmony. The engineers have the skill and the understanding which is absolutely necessary for industrial management. Without their guidance the present highly complicated system of production would quickly tumble into chaos.

The ownership of industry has frequently been suggested as the key to the true emancipation of the great mass of workers of a nation. Leastwise many theoretical arguments on the process of workers’ liberation have been premised on the necessity of eventually liquidating the institution of private property. How futile such a programme is without recognizing the indispensable part which technical and managerial skill plays in any system of production has been emphasized again and again by individuals, notably in Russia and Italy, where the experiment of securing production without the assistance of adequate technical control has been tried. In fact, the whole question of property control is secondary when once the true value of engineering management is understood. In so far as the American workers see this, and make it possible for American engineers to co-operate with them in their struggle for liberation, will they make the task of the worker more easy and avoid the frequent recurrence of wasteful and often tragic conflict. The burden, however, is equally upon the shoulders of the engineer to meet labour half way in this enterprise.

It is very much to be doubted if most American engineers really have a clear understanding of the position in which they find themselves, beyond a general conception of their apparent impartiality. The progressive economic concepts and activities which have been outlined, while advanced by representatives of national associations of engineers, are not necessarily the reflection of the great mass of American engineers to-day, over 200,000 strong. Nevertheless, it is fortunate that an otherwise conservative and socially timid body of individuals, such as the engineers frequently have been in the past, should now find itself represented by a few spokesmen at least who are able to promulgate clear statements on fundamental issues. The rank and file of engineers have a long road to travel before they will be in a position to command adequate consideration for their basic ideals and purposes as expressed in their new definition of engineering, and as proposed by some of their leaders.

It is, indeed, seriously to be doubted if many engineers of America have really had the training to grasp the relation of their position to the economic developments of to-day. Conventional engineering education has been entirely too narrow in its purpose. It has succeeded in turning out good technical practitioners, not far-seeing economic statesmen. In recent years many engineering schools have placed emphasis on what has aptly been termed “The business features of engineering practice.” This, while conceivably a good thing from the standpoint of the limits within which engineering enterprise must ordinarily function to-day, is bound to over-emphasize the _status quo_, and so confine the vision of the engineer.

Engineers in this country have frequently taken a sort of pharisaic attitude on the desirability--offhand--of delegating the entire running of things human to technical experts. While such experts may usually have been quite successful in operating engineering enterprises, it hardly follows that this necessarily qualifies them for the wholesale conduct of the affairs of society.

Yet the demand on the part of certain engineers for a more fundamental participation in the conduct of the larger economic and political affairs of society should be construed as a healthy sign. It is an outgrowth of an intellectual unrest among the profession, precipitated by the thwarting of a genuine desire to build and serve. This unrest, in the absence of a constructive outlet combined with the past failure of engineering education to provide a real intellectual background, has resulted from time to time in some amusing phenomena. Thus not a few engineers have developed a sort of symbolism or mysticism, expressed in the terminology of their profession, with a view to building a new heaven and a new earth whose directing head they propose to be. From this they derive a peculiar satisfaction and perhaps temporary inspiration, and incidentally they often seem to confound laymen who do not understand the meaning of their terms. Instead of deriving comfort from symbolic speculations and futurist engineering diagrams, one would rather expect engineers to be realists, especially in the larger affairs of their profession. The seriousness with which the speculations concerning “space-binding” and “time-binding” have been taken is an example of how engineers with their present one-sided intellectual development may seize upon metaphysical cobwebs for spiritual solace in their predicament.

Another aspect of the intellectual limitations of many American engineers is revealed by some of the controversies which engage the technical societies and the technical periodicals. A notable and recurring instance is the debate concerning the relative merits of steam and electrical operation of railways. The real question which underlies replacing a going system with one which is better but more costly in capital outlay is primarily economic in nature. Consequently such a change is contingent upon a revised distribution of the national surplus rather than on the comparative merits of detail parts. This fact seldom seems to get home to the engineers. They have been arguing for the last fifteen years the relative advantages of this or that detail, failing all the while to understand that the best, in the large, from an engineering standpoint, can be secured only when unrestricted, free enterprise has given way to some form of enterprise regulated principally in the interest of public service.

The profession of engineering, especially in America, is still young enough not to have become ridden with tradition and convention. It has developed rapidly along essentially pragmatic though perhaps narrow lines. Certainly it is not bound and circumscribed by precedent and convention like the legal profession, or even the medical profession. Above all, it derives its inspiration from powerful physical realities, and this constitutes its bulwark.

What the profession really lacks are two fundamentals, absolutely necessary for any group strategically located and desirous of leadership in society. These are: (1) an intellectual background based squarely upon a comprehensive study of the economic and political institutions of society, their history, growth, and function, together with a study of the larger aspects of human behaviour and rights; and, (2) the development of a facility for intelligent criticism, especially of engineering and economic enterprises. A wholesome intellectual background is necessary to interpret the new position and its prerogatives which the application of science has created for the engineer. A development of the critical faculty is desirable in order to enable him to detect the blandishments of cult, the temptations of formulas and systems expressed in indefinable abstractions, and the pitfalls of the _status quo_.

The responsibility for the American engineer’s function in society rests largely upon the schools which train him. Engineering education in America has done its task relatively well considered from the simple technical point of view. Of late, progressive engineering educators have stressed the necessity for paying more attention to the humanistic studies in the engineering curriculum. The beginning made in this respect is, however, entirely too meagre to warrant much hope that younger American engineers will soon acquire either that intellectual background or genuine critical faculty which will entitle them to a larger share of responsibility for the affairs of men.

The most hopeful sign in this direction is rather the fusion of the engineers into a large federation of societies, with service to the community, State, and Nation as their motto; a growing tendency, collectively, at least, to investigate the conduct of national industrial enterprises; and, finally, an attempt at a rapprochement, in the interest of society, between labour and the engineers. Ere long these developments will reflect themselves in the schools of engineering, and then, it is reasonable to expect, will the process of developing a truly worthy class of industrial leaders in this country really make its beginning. In America to-day no such leadership exists.

O. S. BEYER, JR.

NERVES

Young as America is, she is nevertheless old enough to have known the time when there were no such things as nerves. Our earliest settlers and colonists, our proverbially hardy pioneers apparently managed to get along with a very modest repertory of diseases. They died, if not from malnutrition or exposure or from Indians, then from some old-fashioned, heaven-sent seizure or sudden pain, not to mention from “old age,” long a favourite diagnosis of a pious and not too inquisitive school of medicine even where the patient’s age had to be entered by the coroner as of forty or thereabouts. As for the various forms of nervousness which belong to our age of indulgence and luxury, they were unknown to those sturdier times, and would undoubtedly have put their unhappy victims under the quick suspicion of having had forbidden converse with the Devil.

If, nevertheless, we feel justified in assuming that this golden age of health and disease probably hid beneath its tinsel a good many of the nervous afflictions which had already made the Middle Ages so interesting, we must bear in mind that the pioneer neurotic of those days had at his command a number of disguises and evasions to which his fellow-sufferer of to-day can no longer have recourse. One of his favourite expedients for concealing his neurotic maladjustment was to take refuge in some form of religion or rather in some new variation of religious belief or practice, for it is, of course, not claimed here that religion itself can be exhaustively explained as a manifestation of nervous maladjustment. But the colonial period was an era when it was still good form, so to speak, for a neurosis to express itself in some religious peculiarity, and as this was a country without monasteries (which had proved to be such a haven for the neurotically afflicted during the Middle Ages), the neurotic was forced to exhibit his neo-religionism in the open. Often he blossomed forth in some new form of religious segregation, which allowed him to compensate for his social defect and often gave him positive advantages.

The neurotic legacy which he thus bequeathed to the nation can still be seen all around us to-day in the extraordinary multiplicity of religious variations, not to say eccentricities, which dot the theological heavens in America. For the neurotic as a religion founder--or better, inventor--quickly gathered similarly inclined adherents, formed a sect, and moved a little further West, so that the country was rather plentifully sown with strange creeds. He was thus freed from the criticism which would have overtaken him in a more settled society and his neurotic disguise remained undetected to a degree no longer possible to-day. For if nowadays we still occasionally encounter a brand-new and crassly individual religion all registered and patented like any temperance elixir, we usually discover that its prophet is either a defective or even an illiterate person who has distorted some biblical text in favour of a bizarre interpretation, or else a psychopathic individual who already has highly systematized ideas of the delusioned type. This class of neurotic has tended to disappear by somewhat the same process through which the more flamboyant type of hysteric such as flourished in the Middle Ages has gradually succumbed to progressive exposure--an analogy to which I refer with some diffidence in the face of one of the supreme ironies of the 20th century, namely, the canonization of Joan of Arc. But that lapse into the darkness of mediævalism is probably to be explained as a by-product of the war mind.

The other great loophole for the early American neurotic was purely geographical. He could always move on. In view of the tendency towards social avoidance so characteristic of the neurotic, this was of inestimable advantage. It is, of course, generally supposed that when the embryonic American trekked Westward it was either in response to some external pressure of political oppression or religious intolerance or to the glad, free call of wider horizons and more alluring opportunities, as was the case with the earliest colonists in their flight from Europe. In both cases, however, the assumption may be challenged as a sufficient explanation. For it is extremely probable that a good many of these pioneers were, like Mr. Cohan’s “Vagabond,” fugitives from their own thoughts quite as much as from the tyranny of others. They felt an urge within them that made a further abidance in their social environment intolerable. This geographical flight of the neurotic has always been the most natural and the most obvious, checked though it is to-day to a large extent by the disappearance of further virgin territory and the sophistication born of the knowledge wrought by a world-wide intercommunication which says that mankind is everywhere much the same, a truth which can again be translated into an internal realization that we cannot escape from ourselves.

Certainly our pioneers have been too much romanticized. The neurotic legacy which they bequeathed to us can plainly be seen in many characteristics of our uncouth Westerners with their alternate coldness towards visitors and their undignified warmth towards the casual stranger who really cannot mean anything to them. There is something wrong about man as a social animal when he cannot live happily in a valley where he sees more than the distant smoke of his neighbour’s chimney. When at last the pressure of population forces him to live socially his suspicion and distrust are likely to turn him into a zealot and reformer and make possible the domination in American life of such a sub-cultural type as Bryan or the beatitudes of a State like Kansas. The favourite Western exhortation to be able to look a man in the eye and tell him to go to Hell is worthy of an anti-social community of ex-convicts, and the maxim about minding your own business can only be understood as a defence against the prevalent tendency of everybody to mind his neighbour’s business. Thus the self-isolating neurotic ends by revenging himself upon society by making it intolerable.

But this is to anticipate. It must be said that until after the Civil War America remained singularly free from “nerves.” This is perhaps largely due to the fact, as I have tried to show, that they were not known as such. The only serious epidemic was the witchcraft hunting of the 17th century. It is certainly most charitable towards a religion which had so many other repellent features to characterize this as an hysterical epidemic and let it go at that, though it also freshly illustrates the time-worn truth that intolerance does not seem to make its victims any more tolerant in their turn. The passing of this epidemic also marked the last irruption of State intolerance towards religion, with the exception of later incidents in connection with the Mormon Church, though it has rarely been understood that especially in this country State tolerance of religion was compensated for by individual and social intolerance in matters that quite transcended the religious sphere. The vast importance of this phenomenon in relation to our modern nervous tension will be referred to again later on.

The first typical manifestation of American nerves on an imposing scale began to develop in the sixties and seventies of the last century in the form of neurasthenia. Until then the typical American, despite his religious obsessions and his social deficiencies, had, to a large extent, remained externally minded, a fact which is sufficiently attested by his contempt for the arts and his glorification of his purely material achievements. He had been on the make, an absorbing process while it lasts, though rather dangerous in the long run because it never comes to an end. Neurasthenia developed rapidly as soon as it had been properly labelled, and claimed a notable number of victims among our captains of industry and high-pressure men: indeed, the number might easily lead to the perhaps rather unkindly conclusion that business dishonesty, even though successful, is likely to result in nervous breakdown in a generation piously reared on the unimpeachable maxims of a Benjamin Franklin or a Herbert Smiley. More fundamentally it was, of course, the logical penalty for cultivating the purely energetic side of man at the expense of his contemplative nature. The philosophy of hurry and hustle had begun to totter.

The discoverer, expounder, and popularizer of neurasthenia was Doctor George M. Beard, under whose ægis neurasthenia came to be known as “the American disease.” Dr. Beard was a sound neurologist within the limits of his generation of medicine, but with a dangerous gift of imagination. His conception of neurasthenia was truly grandiose. According to him this fascinating disease was endemic in the United States and was the result of our peculiar social conditions. Its cause, he claimed, was “modern civilization, which has these five characteristics--steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, the mental activity of women.” Among the secondary and tertiary causes of neurasthenia or nervousness he threw in such things as climate, the dryness of our air and the extremes of heat and cold, civil and religious liberty, our institutions as a whole, inebriety, and the general indulgence of our appetites and passions. In a remarkable chapter he also assigned as one of the causes of our nervousness the remarkable beauty of American women, though he does not clearly state whether this made only the men nervous or the women as well. Such a diagnosis was to turn sociologist with a vengeance and Doctor Beard lived up to his implications by saying that the cure of neurasthenia would mean “to solve the problem of sociology itself.”

The inevitable result of such a broad and confident diagnosis was to make of neurasthenia a kind of _omnium gatherum_ of all the ills of mankind less obvious than a broken leg. To explain the affliction in terms of America rather than in terms of the patient and his symptoms had about the value of a foreigner’s book about America written on his home-bound steamer after a six-weeks’ sojourn in this country. In fact, the wildest diagnoses were made, and such perfectly well-defined medical entities as tabes, arteriosclerosis, parathyroidism, myasthenia, and incipient tumours of the brain were frequently given the neurasthenic label. Various theories of exhaustion and nervous strain were also advanced and the attempt was made to feed and strengthen the nervous system directly on the analogy of Professor Agassiz’s famous assumption that the phosphates in fish could be directly absorbed as material for brain-cells, a theory which did not account for the fact that comparatively few intellectual giants have sprung from fisher-folk. This naturally opened up a wide field for quackery and ushered in the era of “nerve tonics” which are still with us to-day. The craze for sanitariums also started at about this time, and with every doctor having a little sanitarium of his own the public was pretty well fleeced both by its “medicine men” and its men of medicine.

Of course no treatment could possibly be successful in curing such a wide variety of diseases the very existence of many of which was hidden from the physician under the blanket term of neurasthenia; and in those cases where an actual neurasthenia was present the treatment as developed by Beard and his followers made only superficial progress. The S. Weir Mitchell formula, for instance, with its emphasis upon quiet, diet, and rest, remained, in the majority of cases, essentially a treatment of symptoms rather than of causes. The tired and over-wrought business man was given a pacifying vacation from his dubious labours and was then promptly sent back to them, like a dog to his vomit. The American woman, grown nervous from being insufficiently occupied, was initiated into a different form of doing nothing, whereat she felt much relieved for a time. Neurasthenia was soon moving in a vicious and ever-widening circle; the more it spread the more it had to include and thus became less and less digested medically; it played havoc especially among American women who exploited their “nervousness” much as their European sisters had exploited their “migraine” or their “vapours” in previous generations. By the nineties, however, neurasthenia had run its course as a fashionable affliction, other countries had succeeded in surviving without erecting a quarantine against it, and medical circles had begun to debate whether there was such a thing as neurasthenia at all.

But, despite the breakdown of neurasthenia and the sins that were committed in its name, it would be a mistake to be merely amused at Doctor Beard for the pretentiousness of his concept or to criticize him too severely for being too much of a medical popularizer. His insight was, after all, of considerable value. For he realized, however imperfectly, that the neuroses as a class are cultural diseases and that they cannot be properly understood without taking into account the background of modern civilization. This is a rare virtue in American medicine where the specialist is constantly in danger of isolating himself, a tendency which is particularly harmful in the study of the mental sciences. Unfortunately Doctor Beard did not follow through. He seems to have become frightened at his own diagnosis. For no sooner had he drawn the worst possible picture of American civilization as a breeder of neurasthenia than he turned around and assured the public that things were not so bad after all. He accomplished this by enriching his sociology with a philosophy which is a prodigy in itself. This philosophy of his he called the “omnistic philosophy” and claimed for it the peculiar virtue of being able to include “optimism on the one hand and pessimism on the other and make the best of both,” which is undoubtedly as uplifting a piece of American metaphysics as one is likely to find on the whole Chautauqua circuit. In criticizing the slow advance of American medicine as a whole it is always well to remember the atmosphere of intellectual quackery in which our physicians no less than our early metaphysicians so confidently moved.

By the end of the 19th century the study of functional nervous disorders in America was, as I have said, pretty well strewn with the _disjecta membra_ of neurasthenia which still breathed slightly under the stimulus of electro- and hydrotherapeutics and of the “health foods” industry. Meanwhile hypnotism also had come to do its turn upon the American medical stage, where it ran through a swift cycle of use and abuse. Neurology as a special department, like the rest of American medicine, had been greatly enriched by contact with continental medicine, and the works of Kraepelin had come into honour among the psychiatrists. Dr. Morton Prince had begun to publish some interesting studies of double personalities, and a number of tentative systems of psycho-therapy based on a rather mixed procedure had been set up only to be knocked down again as a beneficial exercise for the critical faculty.

But now the stage was set for the appearance of the two modern theories of the neuroses as presented in Europe by Janet and Freud. In the rivalry that immediately ensued between these two opposing theories that of Janet was soon outdistanced. His fundamental conception of hysteria as a form of degeneration was in a way quite as repugnant to American optimism as the sexual interpretation of Freud was to American prudery. Janet had indeed been of invaluable help to the hysteric by taking him seriously, but his presentation of the subject was so narrow and his theory in the end proved so static that his views have made little headway. Janet was also under the disadvantage of working as an isolated figure in a prescribed field and did not come into any revolutionary relation to psychology as a whole or find those immensely suggestive analogies in the field of psychiatry, especially in dementia præcox and paranoia, which have given the work of Freud such a wide range. He had, besides, the defects common to so much of French medicine which is often so peculiarly insular and, so to speak, not made for export. His contribution more or less began and ended with the theory of the dissociation of the personality which is not characteristic of hysteria alone and could not successfully be grafted upon the old psychology to which Janet clung.

On the other hand, Freud after an initial resistance rapidly became epidemic in America. As was the case in Europe, he enjoyed considerable vogue among the lay public while still violently opposed in medical circles. His visit to America, however, in 1909, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Clark University, created a very favourable impression and brought him to the attention of such American psychologists as William James, Edwin B. Holt, Adolf Meyer, and others. His works appeared in this country in translations by Doctor A. A. Brill, and in a short while Freud was “taken up” with a vengeance.

He has had both the advantages and the handicaps of a boom. His admirers have obscured or exaggerated him and his enemies have derided his popularity as proof of a reputation based upon sensationalism. In fact, Freud met with three fates: he was either wildly embraced, or rejected in toto with an appropriate academic lynching, or else he was accepted with “improvements.”

He was fortified by previous experience against the second alternative and probably resigned to the third: it was the embrace that most nearly proved fatal to him. For America was to see the most extravagant development of the so-called “wild” psychoanalysis, a danger against which Freud himself had issued a warning. In 1916, for instance, an informal canvas revealed that approximately five hundred individuals were quite willing to psychoanalyze patients in the city of New York alone, whereas there were probably not more than six properly qualified medical practitioners in the whole State. Advertisements offered to teach the psychoanalytic technique by mail and instructors in chiropractic included it in their curriculum. This gross abuse was due to the general laxness of medical law in this country which still remains to be remedied. It was not only the amateurs that offended; doctors themselves were often at fault. For it cannot be too often emphasized that a psychoanalyst must have something more than the conceit of psychological subtlety common to most of us; he must be a trained neurologist and must have had considerable experience in psychiatry if he would escape the pitfalls of differential diagnosis--a case of hysteria can be dangerously like an incipient tumour of the brain and a compulsion-neurosis may simulate a paranoid condition. These abuses are, of course, no criticism of the intrinsic value of psychoanalysis. It has been the history of so many medical discoveries that they are recommended as a cure-all; we need but recall vaccination, or the present vitamine craze. On the other hand, it is regrettable that the direct attack upon Freud in this country has rarely risen above the level of denunciation. Quite recently, for instance, one of our socially eminent neurologists allowed himself to indulge in the teleological, or rather disguised theological, argument that if the unconscious is really so full of dreadful things as Freud says, they should be left there. And yet it is just serious and sympathetic criticism of which the science of psychoanalysis stands most in need.

The attempts to assimilate Freud were of two kinds. The first of these, like Professor Holt’s book on “The Freudian Wish” or Doctor Edward J. Kempf’s “The Autonomic Functions and the Personality,” were sincere attempts of critical dignity to relate psychoanalysis to American behaviouristic psychology on the part of men who are not altogether professed Freudians. The second were more in the nature of somewhat pompous criticisms which attempted to reconcile and soften what seemed to be the more repellent features of the Freudian theories. There is a prevalent tendency among medical men in America to indulge in criticism without any due regard to the proportions between the magnitude of a subject and their familiarity with it, somewhat after the manner of the green theological student who is confident of his ability to subvert the theory of evolution in a casual thesis of his own. The scientist in many fields is constantly facing this debasement of standards, making science not too scientific or logic not too logical lest it should be misunderstood; it is certainly a commentary that the majority of Americans, for instance, look upon Edison as our greatest scientist. The tendency to sweeten and refine Freud has taken some peculiar forms, due, in great part, to Doctor Jung who, on having re-introduced the libido theory to American audiences with a number of philosophical and mystical trimmings of his own, felt that he had made Freud more palatable over here.

Ironically enough, it would have been a very simple matter to “put over” Freud in this country with all the éclat of the Bergsonian craze which just preceded him. It was merely a question of the right kind of publicity, for the problem of how to handle sex in America has been solved long ago. The way to do it is to sentimentalize it. If Freud, instead of saying that the incestuous longing of the child for the parent of opposite sex is a natural impulse, though normally sublimated during the period of adolescence, had put the same idea into the phraseology of so many of our popular songs which reiterate the theme about mother being her boy’s first and last and truest love, he would have encountered no opposition. And if he had given his theory of the unconscious a slightly religious setting by emphasizing the fact that the unconscious has no sense of the passage of time and cannot conceive its own annihilation, he would have been hailed as the latest demonstrator of the immortality of the soul. A little personal press-agenting to the effect that he led a chaste life and was the father of a flourishing family would have completed the prescription. He would have gone over with a bang, though he probably would have been quite as amiably misunderstood as he is now viciously misunderstood.

Freud, however, presented his case at its own value and, aside from informing an astonished American audience that Doctor Sanford Bell had preceded him in announcing the preadolescent sexuality of children, shouldered the responsibility for his theories. What he has said, carefully and repeatedly, is that ever since, for a long period in our development, the difficulties of satisfying the hunger impulse have been overcome in so far as civilized man has pretty well solved the problem of nutrition; it is the sex impulse to which the individual has the greatest difficulty in adjusting himself. This difficulty increases rather than decreases with the advance of culture and at certain stages leads to the group of diseases known as the neuroses. In a normal sexual life there is no neurosis. But our civilization has in many ways become so perverse that we find something akin to an official preference for a neurosis rather than a normal sexual life, in spite of the fact that the neurosis ultimately will destroy civilization. This is the vicious circle which Freud attacked. In doing so he had first to enlarge the concept of sexuality and show its complex relation to our whole culture. In studying civilization at its breaking point he naturally had to study what was breaking it up, namely, the individual’s maladjustment to his sexual impulses. But he has never attempted to sexualize the universe, as has been claimed, nor has he ever lost sight of the fact that while man as an egocentric being must put the self-regarding instincts first, man regarded as one of the processes of nature remains to be studied in terms of his reproductive instincts. Freud has been persistently oversexualized both by his admirers and his opponents, and the degree to which this has been done in America is at least some indication of how close he has come home to conditions here.

Freudian research in this country has been limited almost entirely to cases. Our physicians who practise psychoanalysis have lacked either the leisure or the culture to apply their science to wider cultural questions to which the Freudian psychology applies, and among the lay scholars using the psychoanalytic technique there has been no outstanding figure like that of Otto Rank who has done such notable work in Vienna. But the study of specific cases of hysteria and neurosis as they occur in America already permit of some general conclusions as to the character of the national matrix from which they spring. One of the most striking features of our emotional life is the exaggerated mother-love so frequently displayed by Americans. The average American, whether drunk or sober, can grow maudlin about his mother’s perfections and his devotion to her in a way that must shock the European observer. Not that the European loves his mother less: it is simply that he is more reticent about expressing an emotion which he feels has a certain private sanctity; he would experience a decided constraint or αἰδώς in boasting about it, just as a woman of breeding would not parade her virtue. The American adult knows no such restraint; he will “tell the world” how much he loves his mother, will sing sentimental songs about her and cheerfully subscribe to the advice to “choose a girl like your mother if you want to be happily married,” and then grows violent when the incest-complex is mentioned. This excessive mother worship has reached almost cultic proportions. It is reflected in our fiction, in our motion-pictures, in the inferior position of the American husband, and in such purely matriarchal religions as Christian Science where a form of healing is practised which is not very far removed from a mother’s consolation to her boy when he has bruised his knees. All this points to a persistent sexual infantilism and an incomplete sublimation, which are such fertile breeders of hysteria. One is involuntarily reminded of Doctor Beard’s rather enigmatic statement that the extraordinary beauty of our women is one of the causes of nervousness in America. In so far as they offer a maximum of enticement with a minimum of conjugal satisfaction the charge is certainly justified. It is as if they did not even know their own business in terms of their sexual function of weaning their husbands from their mothers and thus completing the necessary exogamic process. We thus have the condition where the husband, in further seeking to overcome his incest-complex, becomes everything in his business and nothing in his home, with an ultimate neurotic breakdown or a belated plunge into promiscuity. The wife, on her part, either becomes hysterical or falls a victim to religious or reformatory charlatanism.

The study of compulsion-neuroses and allied paranoid states which are so prevalent among us has given us further insights into the neurotic character of the American temperament. One of the most valuable of these is the recognition of the compulsive nature of so much of our thinking. This has also been well observed by a foreign critic like Santayana who says of America, “Though it calls itself the land of freedom, it is really the land of compulsions, and one of the greatest compulsions is that we must think and feel alike.” This is a rather fatal indictment of our boasted individualism, which is, as a matter of fact, an individualism born of fear and distrust such as already marked our early pioneers. We are indeed ultra-conformists, and our fear of other-mindedness amounts almost to a phobia. But such an atmosphere constitutes a paradise for the compulsion-neurotic because he finds it easy to impose his compulsions upon the rest of society. The fact that compulsion-neurotics are constantly indulging in neo-religious formations through which they are enabled temporarily to accommodate their taboos and phobias in religious ceremonials, enables them to make use of the general religious sanctions of society in order to impose their compulsions upon their fellow-beings.