In Our Prime (14 page)

That is why in the early years of the twentieth century
, altering features because they were linked with racial and ethnic inferiority—like a Semitic nose, dark skin, or kinky hair—was considered a legitimate reason to apply the crude techniques of plastic surgery and other chemical treatments. Individual transformation was seen to depend less on social or political change than on biology.

The first plastic surgery specifically
undertaken to reverse signs of aging was performed by the German physician Eugen Holländer in 1901 at the request of a Polish female aristocrat who desired a rhytidectomy, or “facelift.” In 1906, Charles Conrad Miller developed a procedure to remove baggy eyelids. “Signs of maturity in women must go,” he contended. More innovations followed.

Attempts to treat severely maimed soldiers who returned from the Great War spurred technical developments in plastic surgery and widened interest in the procedures. While reconstructive surgeons initially took pains to distinguish themselves from aesthetic or beauty surgeons, discontent with aspects of one's appearance soon became an equally acceptable reason for the technique. Twentieth-century medicine adopted a new goal apart from its mission to combat disease: curing unhappiness. Over time, healthy individuals who were dissatisfied with a nose, chin, wrinkles, weight, or breasts could expect to be offered a full menu of treatments, from hormones to surgery, as if they were sick.

This sort of self-improvement was linked to a particular view of
humanity that spread throughout the nineteenth century: that individuals had control over their own lives. The sense of being in command was a relatively new experience. In the colonial era, most people adhered to the Calvinist precept that salvation was predetermined. In the divine cosmos, humanity was no better than a wretched worm, wholly dependent on God's grace.
Jonathan Edwards, the New England
preacher who became a leader during the First Great Awakening's religious revival, told his fearful congregation in 1741 that “the God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, . . . and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.” Piety was an individual's only option. The limits of a person's spiritual control paralleled the limits of his economic control. A farmer's son might follow in his father's footsteps or be apprenticed to a blacksmith or wheelwright. But a clear path leading from high school and college to a rich offering of different careers, lifestyles, and opportunities—in a word, choice—did not exist.

The fall-off in Calvinism in the first decades of the nineteenth century and the rise of evangelical Protestantism, with its emphasis on human effort, gave individuals a greater sense of mastery over their own spiritual fates at the same time political and economic progress was giving them more power over their material lives. The spirit of Protestant evangelism that underlay capitalism's advance also propelled the development of self-help.
What makes aesthetic surgery
a “truly modern phenomenon,” Sander Gilman argues, is that it depends on a “cultural presupposition that you have the inalienable right to alter, reshape, control, augment or diminish your body, assuming you turn to surgeons whose expertise you can buy.” And the right to improve your life (by altering your body if that is what you wish) is guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence as part of the inalienable right to pursue happiness.

The pursuit of happiness was also part of Freud's legacy. He reinforced the link between individuality and self-improvement when he turned the patient's gaze toward inward exploration. What is psychoanalysis if not a form of self-help, a person's intense and extended attempt to address his problems and failures through a deep examination of his unique experiences and feelings?
The analyst serves as the mostly silent
facilitator.
Happiness was the goal Christine Frederick cited in her
Ladies' Home Journal
columns when she urged women to institute Taylor's scientific management in the home. And happiness was a reason to undergo plastic surgery.
In 1924, the
New York Daily Mirror
ran a “Homely Girl Contest,” in which the contestant who best explained how ugliness marred her existence would win a surgical makeover.
Many surgeons considered the
new techniques a form of psychotherapy for women. In 1929, the beauty surgeon Adalbert G. Bettman wrote that aesthetic surgery would improve “patients' mental well-being,” and foster “their pursuit of happiness.”

There would always be people heralding the virtues of middle age, but the competition between positive and negative views of midlife became increasingly one-sided by the twenties. The emphasis on physiology—in the workplace, the culture, and the research lab—put middle age at a disadvantage compared with youth. Self-improvement through physical alteration promised greater happiness, a process that consumer capitalism adopted as its own. With its ingenious techniques for selling to a mass public, the burgeoning marketplace was able to exploit the fascination with the body. The market was modern, and being modern meant being young. A cult of youth seized the popular imagination after World War I and has kept a grip on it ever since.

Bruce Barton, the father of modern advertising

The large national advertisers fix
the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.

—Sinclair Lewis,
Babbitt
(1923)

An unexpected champion of middle age appeared in the twenties. G. Stanley Hall, after a career of rhapsodizing about the glories of youth, in retirement became interested in rescuing life after 40 from a growing malaise.

Hall collected his thoughts in
Senescence: The Last Half of Life,
a book he published in 1922, two years after he stepped down as president of Clark University and two years before his death. He was 78, and maintained his familiar neat long beard, though his sturdy face had thinned and his eyes had sunk a bit into their sockets.
He poured his reflections
and fears about old age and death into the 522-page text, roaming from discussions of aging's physiological features to meditations on Western civilization. Old age was the intended subject, but since Hall's target audience comprised “intelligent people passing or past middle life,” the period gets extended treatment.

Hall scorned the proliferation of fervid efforts to ward off aging. Labeling midlife “the dangerous age”—a term used at the time to describe the madness that supposedly afflicted women going through menopause—he warned that after 40 men exhausted themselves by trying to seem younger, “remain necessary, and circumvent the looming possibilities of displacement.”

Hall acknowledged that these fears were well-grounded. The trends that had worried 40- and 50-something laborers early in the new century etched deep, disfiguring scars into the lives of the working class. By the twenties, machinery was replacing as many as two hundred thousand workers each year, bringing a new term, “technological unemployment,” into circulation.
A few years later
, Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd reported in their classic study
Middletown—
in reality, the recently industrialized town of Muncie, Indiana—that men of the working class “reach their prime in their twenties, and begin to fail in their late forties.”

In 1923, the Lynds and a corps of younger surveyors settled for eighteen months in this town of about thirty-eight thousand in order to capture what was happening in “average, midsize cities” in the middle of the country. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Lynd and his team noted the anxiety and discouragement among factory employees and their wives over what one plant superintendent called “the age deadline”
for men. “I'd say that by 45 they are through.” Middle age meant a dead end. “I think there's less opportunity for older men in industry now than there used to be,” the head of a leading machine shop said. “The principal change I've seen in the plant here has been the speeding up of machines and the eliminating of the human factor by machinery. . . . [In] general we find that when a man reaches 50 he is slipping down in production.”

The personnel manager of another machine shop agreed: “Only about 25 percent of our workers are over 40. Speed and specialization tend to bring us younger men.” For those over 40, sweeping floors was one of the few jobs available. The wife of a patternmaker, the job that Frederick Taylor himself once held, said of her husband, “He is 40 and in about ten years now will be on the shelf. A patternmaker really isn't much wanted after 45. They always put in the young men.”

More surprising was that anxiety over an age deadline had extended to the white-collar world. In Muncie, such employees made up about a third of the town's workforce and those on the lower rungs of this class felt the pressure. Retail salespeople and clerical workers were learning that middle age could be viewed as a potential liability. “
Even in the professions such
as teaching and the ministry, the demand for youth is making itself felt more than a generation ago,” the Lynds noted. For young men in the business class, “they reach their prime in their thirties.”

Periodicals more broadly echoed
the plaint. An
American
magazine article warned that after 50, men “go to pieces.” Another article noted it was common to think “a man has reached the point of greatest efficiency at around 45, is at death's door at 50 and at 60 has cheated the undertaker.” Advertising, the industry that was helping to set the nation's tastes and standards, was considered a young's man game in which those under 35 were most likely to excel.
It was widely believed, said Stanley Burnshaw
, a copywriter for the Biow Agency in the late 1920s, that a copywriter or layout man lasted no more than ten years before being “thrown on the ashheap.”

Evidence of the waning appeal of middle age in comparison with youth was displayed on Broadway as well as in the Midwest.
Elmer Rice's 1923 play
The Adding Machine
revolves around the 45-year-old Mr. Zero,
who is fired after twenty-five years on the job and, in a rage, murders his boss.

In
Senescence,
Hall
noted that men can be seized by a “meridional mental fever” or “middle age crisis,” but the death they fixated on was their own. “Certain temperaments make a desperate, now-or-never effort to realize their extravagant expectations and are thus led to excesses of many kinds; while others capitulate to fate, lose heart, and perhaps even lose the will to live,” he wrote.
This fever, which can strike
anytime in the 30s or 40s, is clearly the precursor of what we have come to know as the midlife crisis. Men who were struck often put furious energy into trying to appear young.
In Hall's view, passing as
youthful was self-defeating. Such deception wasted vital energy and interfered with the “normal” development of a meaningful old age.

The venerable psychologist turned
the telescope around and defined middle age from the perspective of old age: “At forty old age is in its infancy; the fifties are its boyhood, the sixties its youth, and at seventy it attains its majority.” Women embark on the same journey earlier, he said, but end it later. In his tract, Hall divided a human life into five fifteen-year segments. He labeled the middle segment, which spans 30 through 45, as midlife. But what we consider middle age today is the onset of what Hall called “senescence.” He staked out his opposition to the neurologist George Miller Beard, who believed man's most productive years were fixed between 30 and 45. In contrast, Hall wrote, “Modern man was not meant to do his best work before 40.” The intricate problems of the modern world required maturity, wisdom, and experience. Those could be provided only by a “superman,” said Hall, referencing the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In Nietzsche's cosmology, Christianity had saddled humankind with a spurious set of precepts that hamstrung its potential. What was needed was a new savior, a “superman” to serve as a flesh-and-blood replacement for God, establish a new set of values appropriate to contemporary life, and lead humanity to greatness. Hall predicted: “The coming superman will begin, not end, his real activity with the advent of the fourth decade.”

Hall argued that the human race “within the past few years had passed its prime,” and “those higher powers of man that culminate late” are
civilization's best hope for salvation. By the time
Senescence
was published, though, public attitudes toward the virtues of life's latter half had hardened. Four gangrenous years spent fighting the Great War tore down confidence in mature judgment.
Writing from the front
, the 22-year-old John Dos Passos (who later wrote a touching eulogy for his friend Randolph Bourne after his 1918 death from influenza) insisted that joy, desire, and hope rested with youth and not with “the swaggering old fogies in frock-coats.” Young men like Dos Passos, who were sent into battle, were profoundly disenchanted with the middle-aged civilian and military leaders who had entangled them in the bloody enterprise. By the 1920s, youth had been all but sanctified as the savior of a corrupt and moribund European civilization that an older generation had dragged into years of ruinous war.