The Age of Anxiety: A History of America's Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers (review)

This colorful history of tranquilizers in America reveals a rich tapestry of factors that produced a cultural fascination with medicating panic, fear, and anxiety. Tone masterfully knits together a compelling narrative that draws from medical literature, popular and commercial advertisements, legal decisions, Food and Drug Administration regulations, medico-scientific correspondence, pharmaceutical company materials, and patients' recorded reactions. These sources provide substantive details that help Tone chart how American culture became entangled in what appears to be an irreconcilable pursuit of modernity marked by an individualized quest for secular medico-scientific salvation.

The study is framed by wars, events that create fertile conditions for producing cultural anxieties. Beginning during the Second World War, Tone shows how America became home to war-torn European scientists, psychoanalysts, and pharmaceutical firms. The combination of war-related anxieties, anti-Semitism, and a substantial degree of social and economic uncertainty in Europe made the United States an attractive destination, particularly for Jewish scientists but also for individuals and companies seeking stability and opportunity. This migration, along with an injection of funds, meant that the search for tranquilizers was renewed on American soil.

The optimism this move afforded, however, was dampened somewhat by the onset of the Cold War. As tensions escalated, anxiety became a normal feature of American life amid the ever-looming threat of atomic warfare. Anxiety in this setting took on new cultural meaning as it became wedded to national preparedness, but it also infected human behavior, as everyday activities at home and work involved additional levels of stress under the pervasive fear of nuclear attack.

The development of tranquilizers was also kindled by cultural attitudes toward anxiety. Tone develops this idea most clearly in a detailed analysis of Miltown, the first minor tranquilizer commercially available in 1955. The scientists involved in its creation, as Tone explains, were not entirely convinced that it would be successful. But cultural products, from jokes to popular magazines to television shows to celebrity endorsements, quickly demonstrated that Miltown was becoming a household name. As consumption levels soared, Miltown crept into popular parlance as an antidote to nervousness, worry, fatigue, boredom, and a whole host of experiences that might have otherwise been considered normal reactions to the stress of a modern lifestyle.

Woven throughout this study are gender and class analyses that direct focus away from the context of war and look more closely at personal reactions to anxiety. Tone uses candid accounts to show how anxiety, depression, pill-popping antidotes, and, later, addiction ravaged the lives of many Americans and brought the issue into popular discourse.

The study ends after 9/11, amid another moment of cultural and political upheaval that refreshed concerns over pathological anxiety. Although tranquilizers had never completely disappeared from the marketplace, growing concerns over addiction and quick fixes had decreased rates of use. After 9/11, however, rates grew again and fed pharmaceutical companies' desires to tailor their marketing to the contemporary quest for selling calm during anxious times. Yet the connection between global instability and pathologized, personal anxiety is somewhat underexplored.

At the heart of Tone's book is a provocative and at times subtle questioning of how we understand the pathology of anxiety and how the story of tranquilizers helps to explain modern American culture. Commercial, political, personal, and gendered expectations have combined over time to create a willing market of anxious consumers ready to purchase salvation in the form of a pill in an effort to meet the overwhelming demands of coping in a stressful and unstable world. Tone's analysis, then, suggests that anxiety is a combination of biochemistry and culture and, perhaps, is also a symptom of modernity.