The past often looks curiously familiar. In 1899, the ostentatiously macho Teddy Roosevelt urged American men to follow him to new heights of masculinity. Decrying what he called the “soft spirit of the cloistered life,” he advocated the hard, martial regime of the “strenuous life” as a kind of salvation for upper-class men who had become overcivilized and flabby. Roosevelt called for a resolute reassertion of testosterone at home and abroad. “Boldly face the life of strife,” he bellowed, “for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.”
The parallels between Roosevelt and the current occupant of the White House should by now be perfectly evident. Like Roosevelt, who conflated military and sexual prowess in talk of the “big stick,” George Bush has combined a love of generals with anxious concern over his privates. Throughout his political career Bush has faced ridicule as a wimp–real Texans, humorist Molly Ivins noted, don’t describe trouble as “deep doo doo.” He’s expended considerable energy trying to overcome this image. As the comedian Dana Carvey has observed, Bush’s voice is an equal mixture of Mister Rogers and John Wayne. Of course, the John Wayne part is a pure affectation; listening to Bush’s speeches, I can’t help thinking he’s doing an impersonation of a man.
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“We’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” Bush announced shortly after the war in the Middle East ended, as if the slight restraint America had shown in its post-Vietnam foreign policy had been a debilitating disease to be cured through action. The aggressive edge to Bush’s voice indicated that he felt he had kicked the “wimp syndrome” as well. As Roosevelt and Bush both learned–to the detriment of their many innocent victims–the personal is political. Last winter a sign at one antiwar demonstration wryly lamented this fact: “I’ll never call you wimp again.”
American Nervousness is largely the story of how American political and cultural discourse has been psychologized. As the George Bush example shows, psychological discourse is still central to our understanding of the world. Lutz traces the beginnings of this crucial typically modern development, which arose at the turn of the century.
Lutz notes that by 1903 neurasthenia had become “both a medical speciality and a central new cultural articulation of psychological, moral, physical, social, and economic understandings, especially understandings of . . . change.” The turn of the century was a watershed in American culture: America passed from the Victorian age to modern times. “Neurasthenia,” Lutz contends, “was the primary discourse available to mediate these transformations in 1903, and it was available in numerous forms and packages, from many sources, and advertised with numberless promises.” Lutz’s book particularly excels in articulating the diversity of these packages and promises.
Lears argues that neurasthenia–or its cures, at least–helped to prepare the way for the “therapeutic ethos” that has characterized 20th-century American culture. Those attempting to cure the disease turned in the early 20th century from the repressive strategies of men like Dr. Mitchell to therapy based upon what Lears calls “a new faith in psychic abundance.” These therapists, like their predecessors, advocated personal solutions to social ills, but their solutions differed from the older ones because increasingly they offered self-realization through the enjoyment of abundance. Often viewed as a kind of liberation, even today, to Lears’s mind the new ethos offered only a more palatable psychic slavery. “[T]he therapeutic outlook,” Lears charges, “has . . . undermined personal moral responsibility and promoted an ethic of self-fulfillment well attuned to the consumer ethos of modern capitalism.”
