The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes, Greil Marcus (Introduction)

Gilbert Seldes, the author of The Stammering Century, writes:
“This book is not a record of the major events in Ameri­can history during the nineteenth century. It is concerned with minor movements, with the cults and manias of that period. Its personages are fanatics, and radicals, and mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements and figures with the primary forces of the century, and to supply a background in American history for the Prohibitionists and the Pente­costalists; the diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors and the Fundamen­talists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and possibly the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious excitements, and the relation of each of these to the others and to the orderly progress of America are the subject.”
The subject is of course as timely at the beginning of the twenty-first century as when the book first appeared in 1928. Seldes’s fascinated and often sympathetic accounts of dreamers, rogues, frauds, sectarians, madmen, and geniuses from Jonathan Edwards to the messianic murderer Matthias have established The Stammering Century not only as a lasting contribution to American history but as a classic in its own right.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Religion, American, Classics, 19th Century

414 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Gilbert Vivian Seldes (/ˈsɛldiːz/) was an American writer and cultural critic. Seldes served as the editor and drama critic of the seminal modernist magazine The Dial and hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz (1958). He also wrote for other magazines and newspapers like Vanity Fair and the Saturday Evening Post. He was most interested in American popular culture and cultural history. He wrote and adapted for Broadway, including Lysistrata and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1930s. Later, he made films, wrote radio scripts and became the first director of television for CBS News and the founding dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

He spent his career analyzing popular culture in America, advocating cultural democracy, and subsequently, calling for public criticism of the media. Near the end of his life, he quipped, "I've been carrying on a lover's quarrel with the popular arts for years ... It's been fun. Nothing like them."

Reviews

[Graychin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never let anyone tell you that the United States became a qualitatively different place after 1968 than it had been before. The changes that the sixties and seventies ushered in were real enough, but merely quantitative, and Seldes’ book proves it. First published in 1928, The Stammering Century is a history of the religious fads, radical philosophies, and communist experiments of the 1800s which, according to Seldes’ thesis, took root in the ferment of Puritanical Calvinism’s slow decay after the Great Awakening.

From the 1820s on, America is revealed as a near-hothouse of experimentation in free love, communitarian living, and prosperity gospelism. Special attention is paid to the Rappites, the socialists of New Harmony, the Oneida Community, and the spiritualists of the New Thought movement. With its portraits of the murderer-prophet Matthias, John Humphrey Noyes, Bronson Alcott, and axe-wielding anti-booze crusader Carry A. Nation, Seldes’ book is a perfect re-education for any anyone who ever imagined that America never produced any first-class eccentrics.

The book is often very funny. But Seldes, who was himself raised on a commune in New Jersey in the late 1800s, isn’t out to mock his subjects. “I came in the end to want to prove nothing,” he says in his introduction, and he’s right that the stories and personalities here complicate our temptation toward broad judgments. If Seldes can be faulted for anything, it’s that he throws too wide a net. He fairly effectively teases out the philosophical lines of connection, but his inclusion of vegetarians and prohibitionists alongside grandly deluded cultists is a bit jarring to us today.

[NancyKay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating though frequently frustrating account of America's history of (Protestant) religious weirdness, written in 1927 and focusing mostly on the 19th century. Traces it all back to the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards in the early days and up to the then-current New Thought movement (and first flowerings in the USA of yoga). While a period piece in some ways, the book shows admirably that nearly 100 years on, America is still very much in the grip of these strains of mystical, spiritual, fundamentalist, evangelical, revivalistic eccentricity, and that somehow we're a country made up of a substantial group of people who can be made, easily, to believe ANY DAMN THING.

[Daniel Polansky]

Tons of fun! A history of the19th century's fanatical religious movements, pseudoscientific dogmas, cranks, humbugs, and general lunatics, written in the early 20th century. (Sidenote: there anything more fun than reading a history book written in an earlier era? It's like getting two books for the price of one, because you get the added delight of trying to figure out how the prejudices of the writer's age reflect his opinion on the period in discussion, as well as the opportunity to question your own. Anyhow.) Seldes does a fabulous job of tying together everything from the revival movement of the Great Awakening to mid-century obsession with phrenology, showing how each eroded what was the bedrock foundation of Calvinist theology which the country was initially imbued with. Really enjoyed. As always, the Goddamn New York Review of Book is doing Goddamn great work. Goddamn.

[Liam · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I found the subject matter of radicals, revivalists, cults, minor movements, and fads of 19th century USA to be interesting, unfortunately the author of this book's fascination for minute details combined with his at times meandering and rambling writing style made for a difficult read. The book is also overly long, I think it would've been served well to be edited significantly and cut in length by almost half.

Despite the book's interesting subject matter I can't recommend this to anyone but the avid history buff.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wholeheartedly recommend this book

1) Because who doesn’t enjoy reading about quacks? Seldes is great at combining the high and the low. The comic interludes here are laugh out loud funny.

2) Because there are some excellent portraits in here, including Jonathan Edwards and William Loyd Garrison. These studies are well sourced, deeply reflected on, and, most interestingly, fleshed out by a close, trained, psychological reading.

3) Because it's an excellent cultural study. If I had to go back and do it over again, I would be an American studies student. These books that exist at the intersection of history, fiction, politics, psychology, and cultural studies are always fascinating. I get that the scholarship is out of favor right now, that we don’t talk about a macro-culture or speak in generalities about a country, its beliefs, or its people. And yet -

4) Because Seldes is making a forceful argument about America. He presents a timeline that demonstrates a degeneration of our society and of our idealism, a timeline which he ends with the worst example he can find, Dowie and the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. We should all try to answer the question he raises. For me, Seldes is writing not long after the Gilded Age, when the crassest materialism conquered America and a new puritanism was on the rise. But there is a way to see the same story as one of progress. Society definitively and completely rejected Calvinism. The rejection left society without a center, and without any clear answers on how to fill the void. So society did what it always does. It tries new answers to the persistent problems, when the old answers fail. The late 19th century and early 20th century was a creative explosion of new ideas and new answers. Those that failed were cut. Over-corrections were corrected. The regressive reaction of the 1920s was never the end Seldes suggests. And, really, a faith in people and in democracy requires a long view, a belief that balancing this ship of Theseus as it travels to an unknown end is a never ending process.

[Chuck LoPresti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow what a read. Such a complete cultural study of the history of American quacks. The writing is nothing less than top-notch and its so well researched. The final chapter of radicalism is worth the time it will take to get there. It's hard to describe this is full detail but somehow it's the experience more than the content itself that is so amazing. Each chapters stands on its own so an episodic reading causes no lack of comprehension. Seldes is a powerful thinker that is not afraid to offer his own insights instead of merely documenting history. Even if you aren't interested in the subject - the presentation and wisdom contained therein is so worth the effort. This should be of interested to anyone that loves to read history, read great writers or just love to read in general. What you will find inside is not what you expect in the best way possible. I will be seeking out more of Seldes' writing - he is a powerhouse of wit and knowledge. I don't know one would ever stumble on this book - but leave it to NYRB to provide an interesting cover that should peak the interest of anyone who knows that a complete understanding of a historical time doesn't just rely on the heroes. This collection of failures has a lot to teach the reader about early America and well....a whole lot more.

[Nicholas During · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating history of America during the the C19th, really a series of profiles of the leaders of religious movements, communities, and fads that follow after Jonathan Edwards and bookended, at least in Seldes's mind writing in 1928, by the passing of Prohibition. It's a pretty funny book. At one level, as Seldes says in his prologue, he is less trying to answer the question of why (though he does some strange psychological exploration, while at the same time denying a benefit of this), and more just laying out the historical events, mostly through the major figures as he sees it. And the book works because the figures are so interesting.

Personally I prefer the first half of the book which relates more with the religious movements stemming out of Edwards. I had read the famous "Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God" sermon in high school, like most other Americans I assume, but never really placed it in the Calvinist tradition. Basically Edwards, as Seldes sees it, is a complete failure in terms of American culture. His mixed message of an individual becoming closer to God with the traditional Calvinist idea that God's judgement is firm and not bent by an acts of piety or belief causes the weirdness that follows in the century after. The Pefectionists of Noyes, the Rappitie, the communists of Owen, and the evangelists after Finney all take this lesson to heart and completely subvert it in their own weird ways. Most of them belief that man can be close to God. Both low to the ground in his inferiority but also possibly close to God, evidenced of course by God giving birth to a son who is a man. This leads them into all types of weird stuff. The Rappities who believe that if neither God, Mary, or Jesus had sex and one wants to be close to them then you shouldn't too. The Perfectionists who believe that God is all and therefore why should man be possessive of their wives and why not share them—also an understanding that a community doesn't last very long without procreation, and if one has to commit the sin of sex why not involve some eugenics and holiness, i.e. the holy old men, Noyes himself, should be able to procreate more than the learning, and passionate, and possessive, young men. Finney removes the final Calvinist hurdle of limited membership but adopts the persuasive rhetoric of Edwards to show you a Hell that you really don't want to go to and a way out through conversion to his church. There are other strands of all over America at this time, Mormonism, Christian Science (later), and cults of individuals that pop up all over the place.

Some of this is inspired by the changes in America outside of theology. Many of these followers live in very faraway parts of America, in a rapidly expanding West that was a hard life, little companionship, and probably not much moderate fun. At the same time the advances of the industrial age were throwing thousands of lives into the gapping jaws of mechanized machines, low wages, and brutal slums. America was founded, somewhat, in a theory of freedom and rights, it was also a land discovered by Puritan who judged harshly and rejected unconventional thought. The original institutions that founded the country were quickly broken down however, the country grew faster than the government, the traditional church fell under growing capitalism, prosperity, and science. The aims of the citizens did not change though, people still looked for salvation. And there were offers of it coming from many new places.

The other interesting part of this book is the look the reader gets in to Seldes's own time. It seems pretty clear that he is trying to understand why America would pass Prohibition. Why a country with strong libertarian roots would go so far to curtail people's behaviour and choices? It's also a breakdown of this religious phase, rather than preaching temperance from the pulpit it was enacted and codified in the law of a national government. Seldes also explores the self-help movements, the spiritual movements coming out of both Christianity but also the "Orient" (like yoga), and more mundane things such as diet and fads. This is a history of America that most people don't spend too much time thinking about, but they probably should, and reading this book will get them there.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

My expectations based on the byline- the tale of wacky 19th century cults- may have been set too high, but there’s still plenty to love here, plenty of characters and ideas floating around that are hard to come by 100 years from its writing and 200 years from the events in it.

One of the central ideas of this is the transitioning of 19th century alt-communities from “radicals” to “reformers”- quotations because the way Seldes uses these terms is very different from the way they would be used today. Radicals hoped to change the world by creating their own slice of heaven, by creating their own world through their community isolated from broader society. Reformers instead sought to change the world through the changing of laws; this is as broad as abolitionists to prohibitionists to woman suffragettes. Seldes’ tends to see the radicals as beatific saints, even in their failures, beautiful and shining in their purity of thought and action even as they failed time after time. The reformers he tends to see more as imposers, seeking to force their will upon society through force of law.

Speaking of the will, if there’s a central idea to this book that he traces, it’s that of the will. His framing for the whole book is Jonathan Edwards, certainly a crank but not an eccentric- but through Edwards inventing the idea of the will, namely God’s will, that man could be saved only through God’s smiling upon him or not and through no good deed or faith could man be saved, this opened the can of worms for all sorts of heresy and crankery. For if God could have the will to save man, couldn’t man have the will to save himself? The tracing of the idea is a little sketchy; he tends to avoid it for chapters at a time and then return it, so obsessed with historical cataloging he is; but it’s a compelling one that I struggled to follow at times his logic.

All sorts of funny details in here due to the time period, both from the cranks themselves to Seldes writing. At one point, he tries to reference the pull out method because a cult “invented it”; however he says he cannot because he’ll get sued for it (a real concern at the time of his writing). Seldes’ description of the revival meetings and the seizing takes a tack that makes it all seem understandable, by starting with the conditions of the American frontier; lonely, isolated, hard living, with seeing people outside of your immediate family rare, when all of a sudden tents roll into town and you’re surrounded by a crowd, all set to an emotional fever pitch. There’s the cults started mainly so a leader could have sex with his friend’s wife, the cults that banned sex and thus died off gracefully from old age despite economic prosperity and community cohesion, the cults that believed man could achieve perfection on Earth and to prove it would lay naked with a beautiful woman (to predictable results and scandal). And then there’s of course, the ultimate legend, the prohibitionist Carry A Nation, who would go to bars and (ineffectively) sing 12 verses of a song to try to get the drinkers to stop, started throwing rocks at bars when that didn’t work, started bringing a hatchet for when she ran out out of rocks, who once drove a young unwed couple to suicide after catching them having sex (and was proud of having done so).

This book is pretty long, and Seldes’ can get caught up in minutia. I think it’s probably best as a pick up once every two weeks or so book rather than a read continuously one. But it’s all fascinating, and he does a good job of diving into detail and not coming to too many conclusions- he mostly ends up shrugging his shoulders and saying he’s just as confused at the modern and ancient condition as any. This includes the ending, which starts with him exalting and claiming to aim at a normal life, then pointing the finger at scientists, Roman Catholics, and classicists as salvation hunters in the line of the cranks in the book, then quotes Proust saying that all great works of art, all religions, all human achievements comes from the neurotic, obsessed, eccentric, and then, as a final shrug of the shoulders, just says “And yet-” as if to point at the shenanigans that the previous 400 pages consisted of as evidence enough that eccentricity is a dark path. There’s a crank in all of us, I guess.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1928 Gilbert Seldes wrote this history of fads, cults, religious revivals and frauds of the 19th century in America. He was writing at a time when people where trying to understand how prohibition got voted in and why hard core religious movements where sweeping the country. Seldes was then a well known journalist and writer.

Seldes was fascinated by his subject. He read all of the three volume autobiographies and endless issues of newspapers they issued. He also thought hard about how these various fads and cults where connected. For example, he explains why the evangelicals hated the Universalists more than than the atheist. The Universalists gave people a false sense that they could be saved . the atheist might find the true path. The Universalist found it and rejected it.

Interesting stuff;

"Bloomers" were named after Amelia Bloomer, an early woman's right advocate who invented them as a sensible and practical item for woman. Seldes outlines her full life. She started by removing "obey" from her marriage vows in the 1830s. She edited her newspaper, wrote many books and lectured across the country on woman's rights. She was a qualified physician who worked as a field surgeon in the Civil War where she wore men's clothing. She was captures as a prisoner of war. She was awarded the Medal of Honor. She campaigned against divorce laws. Seldes concludes," Mrs. Bloomer would hardly have cared to be known by her costume alone."

Seldes shows in detail how even the most radical reformers in pre-Civil War America thought the abolitionist went too far. He says, "The abolitionist was the arch-enemy of established society."

J. H. Noyes established the Oneida community in upstate New York in the 1830s. It was a communist free love association. It lasted for years because it was run on sound business principals. Seldes explain that the product which saved the community financially was a new improved animal trap which they manufactured. The Oneida trap was "lighter in weight, simpler in form and more certain and deadly in its spring." It is hard to imagine a free love communist commune these days going into that business.

I never understood how Carrie Nation, the early prohibitionist, got away with storming into saloons in Kansas and breaking up the place with her hatchet. Why wasn't she put in jail for destruction of private property? Seldes explains that at the time, the 1880s, liquor was illegal in Kansas. The local law officials just ignored the illegal saloons. Since there was no right to own liquor in Kansas, Carrie Nation could destroy it with out legal risk. Now I know.

Seldes was clearly fascinated by the cranks, mountebanks, deluded fools and foolish saints who flourished in America in the 1800s. He thought hard about them and he wrote an interesting and entertaining book.

[Zoe Wilkerson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book seemed pretty dense to me. I would recommend it as a supplement for anyone interested in the time period but not as a primer. The author refers to some things as common knowledge that just aren’t anymore. The chapters overlap quite a bit time period wise and there’s not really a way to keep track of them internal to the book. It has moments of clarity and interesting points but I found it to be mostly a slog. I preferred the later chapters to the ones focused on specific “movements” that really seemed to be just like… five people? One red flag for me is this guy says he admires rather than wonders at complex marriage and some of the stuff there was weird but overall an interesting look at how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of this is totally fascinating but the author does have the annoying habit of assuming his readers have a better knowledge of this subject than most of them probably do. Perhaps the names, places, events, etc., that I did not understand were in the realm of common knowledge when this was written (late 1920s). Perhaps I'm just dumb. Anyway, it took me almost a month to get through this but it was worth it. Despite the ultimate dated "psychoanalysis" of some of his subjects, most of his insights and conclusions are, I think, valid, and still relevant today.

[Eric Klopfenstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This history covers American cults & religious fads of the 19th century.

If you are interested in learning how long the United States has "been like this", Mr. Seldes' tome proves the answer is: forever.

Since this book was written in the 1920's, there is a dated quality to some sections (the guy really has an issue with vegetarians) but it is an irreplaceable overview of the dreams & derangements of the antebellum US.

My personal favorite chapters were on the Millerites, Oneida Community & the beginnings of the Temperance Movement.

[Wampus Reynolds · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars may be excessive in relation to enjoyment overall. I give it that despite some extremely overlong passages and some dense and impenetrable history and prose. But the thoughts and approach of the author seem still innovative 94 years later and the last chapter thrills with its frank assessment of human nature, American history and the truth of God.

[Dakota · Rating 4 out of 5]

They don't write them like they used too.

"The theology of Jonathan Edwards suffered the most spectacular defeat in the history of American religious life, bus methods gained the greatest victory" (16).

Many flaws with the claim, but many truths too. The cast of characters is wild.

[Richard Subber · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried this one, but just not for me, not right now.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading.

[Rivers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Swirling, bewildering but worth the trouble if you want to go down a 19th century rabbit hole of "old weird america"

[Chris Knutson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some amazing insights into the American psyche, many things that are hilariously visible still today but a really slow read and probably at least five chapters too long.

[Ezra Schulman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting review of radicalism seen through the lens of theology, but pretty marred by Seldes' boosterism.

[Ben Helzner · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know, you really think you know all there is to know about 19th century american cults, but apparently there's a lot more that you just sadly aren't taught in schools nowadays!

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

We can see a little more clearly into the matter if we substitute other words for the sense of sin, and banish from our minds all association with the seventh commandment and the denunciations of moralists. If for the Protestant sense of guilt, we substitute the Hellenic feeling of life as a magnificent contest between man and fate in which man may fight gloriously, but is certain to be defeated; or if we substitute the feeling which many noble and healthy men have had that life is largely made of up woe, that it is all trivial when it is not terrible; or, even the modern tragic sense of life in which we say that, though life is tragic, the tragedy itself gives us deep satisfaction: in any of these cases we still come back to the feeling that, if we could be "born again," we could lose the sense of tragedy and emerge into a happier world. We listen to an extremely successful man, such as Goethe, worshiped by a nation, adored by a sex, and admired by the world, all in his own lifetime, and we hear him say that, at bottom, his life has been "nothing but pain and burden," and he can affirm that "during the whole of my seventy-five years I have had four weeks of genuine well-being." If to Goethe life was nothing more than "the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever," what can it be for the common run of mankind? The observer who withdraws from religious controversy can note with amusement the irony of the last century, in which all the Scriptural authorities for universal damnation were destroyed by scientists at the very moment when science was creating hells of its own: the hell of the struggle for existence, the hell of heredity and, last of all, the hell of the unconscious. The doctrine of predestination goes out and the doctrine of prenatal influence comes in, to check whatever grandiose illusion a man may have of his own freedom. Before there is an end to determinism, we begin to believe that the taboos of our primal ancestors and the sights and sounds of our infancy can create the "immitigability of our mortal predicament." One might as well be damned with Calvin as with Schopenhauer, by Edwards as well as by Freud. We want deliverance. The energetic want only deliverance from difficulties; the feeble, deliverance from since; the merely neurotic, deliverance from themselves. It remained for a psychoanalyst to assure us that, deep within ourselves, all of us crave, from the day of our birth, deliverance from life itself; that death is not only the end of life, but its purpose and culmination.

[Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book itself, as an artifact, is almost as interesting as the content. Grail Marcus certainly liked this more than I did, but as he points out in his intro, when the subjects are given room to espouse their beliefs in their own words, the book moves to another level of fascination. The historical prose is riveting, if for no other reason than as a representation of a mastery of the language long since departed. It doesn't always make for casual reading, though. The chapter on phrenology, for example, is interminable, filled with bunk science initially entertaining then mind-numbingly absurd, and barely salvaged by the author's brief analysis in the chapter's last few pages.

[Jeff Randall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important work. American history is so rich and seems to gloss over the religious aspects that influence our society. Likewise the 19th century is typically not explored other than the Civil War and the movement from rural to industrial society. Written in the late 1920's and very much under the influence of the new science of psychoanalysis Seldes views the cults, misfits and dreamers that sought utopia if only for a short while. Extremely interesting subject matter, and also as a way to explore another time through the lens of yet another age. Bright guy that Gilbert!

[Geoffrey Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uneven but brilliant exploration of radicalism and revivalism in 19th century. Some chapters are better than others but Seldes is witty and insightful throughout. As relevant today as it was in the 1920s.

[Joe Stinnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. Really good, maybe too long, but an amazing, almost Borges-like roundup of charlatans, nuts, religionists, spiritualists, revivalists and so forth that is basically an alternative history of America in the 19th century. Great read and I learned a lot.

[Alex Rosenthal · Rating 2 out of 5]

That this book is two stars instead of three is due to disappointment. Fascinating subject matter is bogged down by a pedantic and meandering writing and overreliance on long block quotes. I would be interested in reading a treatment of this material by a writer with more focus and an editor.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author was too impressed by his own cleverness to the detriment of narrative clarity.