Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self -Control in Modern America

FOUR: Transitions

| 92 || F O U R| Transitions Between 1880 and 1920, Victorianism was substantially redefined and, in some respects, decisively rejected. A full statement of the characteristic twentieth-century patterns of self-control did not emerge until the second quarter of the new century, but the process of implicit reevaluation was launched well before this point. This chapter discusses some of the signs of transition before looking into the causes of these changes and more fully evaluating these innovations. Because these decades were transitional, the signals were mixed, so this is not a story of steadily advancing experimentation. Some elements of Victorianism remained intact, and there were striking shifts as well. Certain changes clearly represented attempts to accommodate old values to new needs. Finally, and most revealingly, innovation included important new standards of control that satisfied the quest for character in novel ways and with a novel vocabulary. Even in our overview of the intermediate decades—but with some spillover into the 1920s—the complexity of the relationship between Victorian and contemporary goals and methods of self-restraint shines through. Commonplaces One important though hardly surprising change involved the signs that elements of Victorian self-control were becoming so widely accepted that they no longer needed to be constantly reiterated. For example, laws and regulations continued to limit spitting in public places, but in fact it no longer was a big problem and so the public postings were withdrawn. Most Americans learned in childhood not to spit, without special assistance from advice givers. In addition, the greater acceptance Transitions| 93 | of the germ theory, particularly between 1910 and 1920 when the influenza epidemic demonstrated the theory’s relevance, quietly increased the pressure against spitting: the United States became a society of diminishing expectorations. The same trend applied to the advice about using fear to discipline children, which had been a staple of family manuals since the 1820s. The need to warn against this Christian/popular tradition, to use images of death and damnation or visions of bogeymen to keep children in line, was a deep-rooted tradition. And the use of fear surely persisted, as it was definitively undermined in American Catholic culture only after World War II. Even more recent studies of isolated rural areas show that parents are still using frightening animals or other objects of terror to stop their children’s crying. Nevertheless, the most blatant practices did recede, even in many immigrant groups, and by the 1920s the middle class and those who offered advice in its name clearly felt that the problem was in hand. Advice manuals began omitting this long-standard section. A new kind of concern took its place, however. Not only should fear not be used, but in the view of twentieth-century experts, children were so fragile that even courage should not be strenuously invoked. Children’s fright was common, but now instead of urging boys to buck up, parents should sympathize while exploring every means possible to avoid potential scares. Thus although the validity of Victorian advice remained, it had been internalized, and so attention turned to other parental tasks.1 Compromises Some developments reflected a desire to retain basic Victorian virtues while acknowledging that accommodations to a more complex modern reality also were necessary. The recognition of vice districts, the redlight sections of major cities, was an example after the 1880s, when police officials and policymakers conceded that certain activities would take place no matter how many laws were passed. The value of selfcontrol remained high, however; respectable people should not engage in such practices or at least should keep it secret. But there were impulses , particularly male impulses, that could not be denied. The solution was to situate the necessary outlets in a single, lower-class section Transitions| 94 | of town apart from the main business district, though usually close to it and carefully screened from the respectable residential areas. It could be further assumed that most of the people who used the prostitutes and gambling dens were not respectable anyway—they were Asian immigrants , workers, and other low types. But the districts did afford some middle-class men new opportunities for double-standard sexual behavior , and with this, the recognition that sexuality could not always be controlled in strictly Victorian terms gained ground.2 ‘‘Slumming’’ was a similar and related compromise that helped the middle and upper-middle classes in...