Abstract
The mental health of turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban North Americans declined under the predations and indifference of laissez-faire capitalism—so much so that physician George Beard associated the emergence of a new and modern “nervousness” with a novel “American” disease: neurasthenia. Neither new nor particularly American neurasthenia did, however, give psychiatric and cultural geographic shape to the pyroclastic eruption of stress in modern urban circumstances. Neurasthenic anxiety had fatal consequences: for many this meant suicide—which reached pandemic proportions by 1900. Here, we encounter an agony we know little about: the suicide club, which affected not just North America but the Western world from Russia west to Hawaii. Does this earlier neurasthenia resonate genealogically in our own late-capitalist, neoliberal, and neo-Victorian anxieties?
There is a complex yet increasingly understandable relationship between stress and psychiatric illness.
1
Introduction
That scholars and popular writers mark the twenty-first century as the “age of anxiety” likely surprises none of its denizens. 2 Granted, modernity persistently offers itself as angst-making, contradictory, ironic, and paradoxical, W.H. Auden memorializing its consequent human wreckage as “[s]ad haunters of perhaps.” 3 Yet, whether we-the-anxious can substantiate it or not, our twenty-first-century malaise feels different, a malignity that harries all—children to older adults; those over 45 have the highest rates of suicide, usually male, dying by their own hands at virtually four times the rate of women, while nearly 40 percent of transgender adults attempt suicide. 4 What could behave so badly toward us, and even make us behave badly toward ourselves and each other? 5 Late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism. Both are apparently bold anti-social generators of “the proliferation of loneliness and anxiety, depression and a sense of endless futility” and, ultimately, of anxiety-forged geographies. 6
Late-Victorians and Edwardians would recognize in us what they saw in themselves: “neurasthenia,” a modernity- and especially city-induced anxiety derived from industrial capitalist discourses and practices, detailed below. These too-often inhumane methods of money-getting suborned the mental and physical health of everyday city people to the imperatives of capital circulation. Callous financial priorities put front and center the naked looting of the struggling social good, “peculations and frauds” in everything from government to streetcars. 7 Neo-Malthusian, neo-Lamarckian, and social Darwinist cities abetted stony capitalists who gave no quarter to the powerless and beleaguered workers who populated them. 8 Little wonder everyday people feared the “black dog,” an ancient but tenacious metaphor for depression over a century ago (Figure 1). 9
The “black dog” of depression howls at a desolate laborer strolling past a graveyard of suicides in a cartoon from the worker/socialist newspaper, The New York Evening Call. 10
How curious then that Michael Walzer, less than a century later, observed that our long-capitalized urbanism was extruding cities that “really are noisier and nastier than they once were,” as if he heard echoes of that earlier cruelty. 11 He did. Late twentieth-century urban nastiness flourished as revanchism, a revenge-against-the-urban-poor compulsion born in the cultural-economic landslide from Keynesianism into supply-side solutions to the 1970s inflationary stagnation, and manufactured in and nurtured by the bourgeois austerities and excesses of the 1980s and 1990s. 12 This indifference to inequality reaffirmed urban capitalist modernity’s historical paradox: “the divergent tendency of cities toward good and evil,” arguably birthed in mid-nineteenth century laissez-faire liberalism, which ultimately gave us laissez-faire capitalism. 13 Its city was a survival-of-the-fittest plane upon which a discursive “laissez-faire” imposed “not a little human suffering.” 14 Twentieth-century Progressives would spend decades trying to undo that city’s spatial and social devastation. Alas, they were capitalists, too, so their starkly uneven social liberal city left its own contradictions unresolved. Its weakly addressed race, class, and gender troubles, harrowingly detailed in representative works by Smith, Sugrue, Venkatesh, Wilder, or Hickey, now fester in the sterile, gentrified, condoized, privately owned, antidemocratic neoliberal rentier city (marked by accumulation by dispossession and the rent-seeking prerogatives of the private landlord and land speculator)—all described in Zukin, LeDuff, Hedges, Mitchell, Kern, or Rose. 15 These are cities as deeply committed to social and geographical inequality as were their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century antecedents, “the original rentier cities”; cities distracted by capitalist and neoliberal historical expectation; cities curating declining middle-class asset ownership; cities bloated on democratic decline; cities of perceived urban decay and moral turpitude and, consequently, transmogrifying into embourgeoisement on the one end and un-homing and displacement on the other; and, worse (if possible), cities of planned racial injustice. 16
Such spiteful and unjust cities, contemporary and historical, roil with “barbarous speculation” and “anti-social action” that makes a “joke [of] housing.” They wound and scar physically and emotionally those who “must sacrifice for mere shelter so much of their income and savings as to compel them to lower their standard of living or to appeal to charity.” 17 Furthermore, their injustice harms those condemned to witness it, often helplessly, every day—because as William Thompson observed in 1824, “the sight of distress is painful.” 18 This experience of urban political economic affliction is now so universal that an expanding literature addresses “social suffering in the neoliberal age,” and the sense of “doom” it elicits in patently neo-Victorian circumstances. 19 The pervasive effects of zero-sum capitalism and its neoliberal impulses (equal parts laissez-faire liberalism, neo-Malthusianism, and depoliticization) now generate outcomes established as negative determinants of physical and mental health, today and presumably historically. 20
All this dismal political economism widely manifesting as Weltschmerz suggests our general proclivity “to think with,” not against, discourses that reify inequality.
21
Land tax reformer Henry George puzzled over these discourses, with their “distress” and “common cause”: Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized . . . where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed—we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of enforced idleness.
George doubtless understood this “enforced idleness” in the context of capitalism’s “reserve army of workers,” and that it caused poverty to take a “darker” turn. 22 It seems our immersion in capitalist and neoliberal discourses, then and now, provokes darkness: psychic and alienating traumas, even violence. 23
Is it coincidence that as zero-sum capitalism, neoliberalism, and their moral economic calculations have intensified so too has suicide? In a milieu of political economic geographic emotional disruption and violence, we should expect rising suicide mortality. 24 For the United States alone, suicide rates have increased 35 percent between 2000 and 2018; Canada has proportionally similar rates of suicide and suicidal ideation. 25 Correlation is never causation, particularly in the motives of the suicidal dead, but the question stands (hence “speculations” in the title). 26 Yet some things we know: physical and mental ill-health, inequality, and geography connect; human well-being and welfare depend on levels of “advantage or disadvantage”; economic precarity can lead to despair and suicidal ideation; and finally, suicide disrupts the narratives of the human benefits of capitalist political economy. 27
So, to use neurasthenia, and the suicide that frequently attended it, to explore the role of historical political economy and laissez-faire capitalism in the generation of mental ill-health is both useful and seemingly novel. Certainly, political economists from Thompson to Karl Polanyi saw political economy’s hands on social misery, ironically molding the conditions that “denied the human shape of life.”
28
And Carlyle condemned it, It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died . . . But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in with a cold, universal laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of Phalaris’ bull!
29
For Carlyle, Victorian political economy tortured workers. Thorstein Veblen later noted the less torturous but still traumatic angst in middle-class workers’ struggle with bourgeois conformity, “losing caste,” “disesteem and ostracism,” both associated with the malaise-making pursuit of conspicuous wealth—and the cruel remorselessness of the “Dollar Devil.”
30
Peter Gay elaborates, No one was more bourgeois than a miserably paid post office clerk. Too often life in this subclass was shadowed by financial worries and status anxiety. Lowly civil servants or bookkeepers often earned less than skilled artisans, and while their occupation was usually more secure than that of factory workers, a grave illness or a reversal in their employer’s fortunes loomed as ever-present hazards. Even without these calamities, petty bourgeois had to watch over their budgets as over a sick child: attentively, patiently, and if one was so disposed, prayerfully.
31
If ill-health, mental and physical, afflicted that world, look to political economy as a source.
All this reflects in the history of the modern city (~1860 to ~1939), constructed for the unique servicing of capitalism. 32 A confederacy of money and municipal politics accelerated not only the era’s notorious corruption; a persistent suite of urban pathologies also erupted. Indeed, Philip Abrams believed “anomie, vandalism, public squalor and the slum” emerged simultaneously with economic growth; as “properties of a larger system of social relations,” they were “grossly concentrated and intensified” in the modern city. 33 City life itself through its animating capitalist impulses affected mental and physical ill-health. This claim is likely intuitive to those familiar with the twenty-first century’s mental health and health geography literatures, or to those who can extrapolate the findings of studies linking emotional and even physical ill-health to capitalism and neoliberalism. My sense is, however, that cities remain places of “multiple realities and partial comprehensions,” for most city people and those pretending to govern them. 34 Too many everyday North Americans overlook the causal connections between everyday living and broader political economic circumstances. 35
Given the linkage between the urban historical geography of capitalism and its social consequences, can we find a turn-of-the-twentieth-century analogue for the twenty-first century’s stress, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide? 36 Was acute mental ill-health at the turn of the twentieth century a consequence of the everyday experience of laissez-faire capitalism and the modern city? Was the psychic perturbation that originated in the shade of political economic decisions made by capitalists and politicians—men who likely understood the perverse somatic and psychiatric social consequences of their actions—the substance of neurasthenia? 37 And, if so, should we treat neurasthenia’s pandemic-like prevalence as a key attribute of both the Gilded Age (~1870 to ~1914), that historical period in part known for capitalists’ zero-sum approach to the social life of workers; and the Progressive Era (~1880 to ~1920), when urban and social reformers undertook “the search for order,” including identifying “the evils . . . traceable to laws creating privileges” for capitalists? 38 The following answers these affirmatively, arguing that anxiety and suicide were predictable outcomes of laissez-faire capitalist discourse in North American (and European) cities. Urban millions believed a new disease, neurasthenia, precisely described their worries.
Neurasthenia
Neurasthenia uncloses a portal into this nervous urban historical geography. Its emergence by 1900 as catch-all diagnosis for a broad and inclusive social phenomenon, not exclusive to elite men and women, justifies my focus on late-Victorians and Edwardians, despite earlier instances of patent, capitalist anxiety. 39 Medical historians regard the era’s neurasthenia craze as important for many reasons: the impreciseness of its symptoms and their diagnosis; its role forming the “central components . . . of clinical assumption”; its intense cultural purchase establishing a common pattern of symptoms despite their “subjective character”; its contribution to the evolution, expansion, and complication of psychiatric and even physiotherapeutic diagnostic and treatment tools; and even how neurasthenia and its sufferers were moralized by clinicians. 40 Yet we find no historiographical curiosity about neurasthenia as the neuropathic and somatic manifestation of the traumas of capitalism and modern cities. This hardly diminishes the research of medical historians, but it creates a lacuna, and room for a political economic explanation for why multitudes exhibited mental and physical ailments in the first place; as Overholser and Beale concede, “[m]odern medicine sometimes struggles when differentiating a medical ailment from an emotional disorder.” 41 True, the primary and secondary literature show clinical diagnosis of neurasthenia covered all sorts of causes, among them poor diet, student fear of examinations, and even “unwholesome athleticism.” 42 Yet, viewing neurasthenia broadly as a corporeal and emotional gauge of capitalist stress pushes us to reconsider life in the modern city, especially since specialists believed the causes of neurasthenia originated in the modern capitalist lifestyle and its geographic and material organization. 43
In this context, neurasthenia seems as germane today as it was in 1903, the year Tom Lutz calls representatively neurasthenic—although Beard thought neurasthenia clinically evident by the late 1870s, while Abraham Meyerson showed its relevance to “modern life, with its hurry, its tensions, its widespread and ever present [sic] excitement,” by the early Interwar era. 44 Still, nervousness left modern adults and children feeling neurasthenic: nerve-sick and generally unwell in an age of worry. 45 To treat their relentless symptoms sufferers escaped to spas, ferreted out specialist physicians, and pursued dubious cures if these patients could or would afford them. Crucially, many neurasthenics attempted to take and took their own lives, violently, alone or, more surprisingly, in suicide clubs that spread across the Western world, explored below. 46
Durkheim suspected economic crises as not only causes of modern distemper but also as factors in suicide. However, he also imagined that Irish or Calabrian poverty was a protection from suicide through its terminal lack of expectation, a stoicism born of want. 47 (Rural poverty may well produce better psychological outcomes than urban, but the poor in general experience truncated psychological well-being.) 48 Alternatively, Jack London thought urban poverty unbearable—as evidenced in London UK’s impoverished, “very noisy and largely hungry” East End. 49 It was unexceptional for the cockney poor to stand on a bridge and “ponder[] the question,” “poverty, misery, and fear of the workhouse” the main causes of suicide among the working classes: 50
With life so precarious, and opportunity for the happiness of life so remote, it is inevitable that life shall be cheap and suicide common. So common is it, that one cannot pick up a daily paper without running across it; while an attempt-at-suicide case in a police court excites no more interest than an ordinary “drunk,” and is handled with the same rapidity and unconcern.
51
Can we call these desperate attempted and completed suicides neurasthenic (Figure 2)? Doubtless pauperized Londoners felt keenly what their chronic indigence denied them in the capitalist city of conspicuous consumption and leisure, where “the failure to consume in due quantity and quality bec[ame] a mark of inferiority and demerit.” 52
U.S. Age-Adjusted Suicide Mortality Rate 1900-2019. Incomplete suicides not included. Modified by the author. 53
J. London’s observations reflect Jacob Riis’ personal experience, ostensibly of the neurasthenic misery of poverty and its accompanying suicidal ideation in pre-amalgamation New York City; “suicide from poverty” appears commonly in contemporaneous newspapers. 54
Before earning his reputation as a housing reformer Riis, a “shabby” unemployable newcomer in his early twenties, haunted New York’s lower east side. 55 Shelter-less, penniless, he drifted among “the great army of tramps” by day, and was kicked onto his feet by constables by night—trogging along exhaustedly until morning, participating in what J. London called “carrying the banner.” 56 Among “outcasts as miserable as [him]self,” a starving Riis competed “for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or doorway.” Then, during “a cold October storm” in 1871, “finally and utterly alone,” a likely neurasthenic Riis perched forsaken and “shivering” on a pier on the Hudson River, pressed into suicide beneath a “chill downpour.” As he “hitched nearer” to the brink, a decision he would not forget “in a thousand years,” he was distracted by the whimpering of an equally cold and dispirited little black-and-tan dog, a “companion in misery” who had “shared a doorway” with Riis one night and had followed him since. 57 The “little friend’s” cry saved Riis’ life, which he then committed to “bettering the[] lot” of city people suffering as he did. Later, Riis would consider the city’s growing suicide rate and note the number had nearly doubled between 1850 and 1880. He thought of suicide as a contagious disease, like typhus or diphtheria, except the causes were poverty, financial panics, domestic hardship, and unhappiness—neurasthenia? 58
My point: a circumstance we can call political economic neurasthenia stressed everyone, a fact Durkheim under-appreciated. A range of stressed and anxious workers killed themselves. 59 Employees such as George Starnes, a 70-year-old accountant at Montreal City Hall, committed suicide after his annual salary was cut from $900 to $600. 60 Or workers attempted to end their lives, such as the pitifully paid woman garment worker in Toronto ($1.50 per week) whose “broken life and self-contemplated death is better kept, as it has been acted out, away from the gaze of the world.” 61 To be fair, the issue was not exclusively urban: newspapers reveal a broad preoccupation with suicide among likely neurasthenic farmers and their spouses.
Why Neurasthenia
In 1912, a deputation of local dignitaries, from the Toronto Local Council of Women, Associated Charities of Toronto, and Daughters of the Empire, urged trustees of the new Toronto General Hospital to create a ward for the treatment of neurasthenia in the new College Street expansion. 62 For years, the old Gerrard Street hospital had maintained a ward for “nervous patients,” but because the Trustees had determined in 1911 that space was needed to train nurses for the new hospital, the nervous were slighted. 63
Today, most of us have no idea what neurasthenia is or was, but the term was ubiquitous by the 1900s. Indeed, a New York Sunday Times report on neurasthenia in 1907 suggested Americans in great number were suffering from mental and physical exhaustion, from ennui and insomnia to headache and stomach ache. 64 Toronto’s Globe, two years earlier, used the term in a solicitous discussion “on nervous prostrations.” For the Toronto paper, “neurasthenia and neuritis” called “for the most enlightened, the most sympathetic, subtle and accurate treatment on the part of the medical profession,” to “stem the tide of suffering and incapacity”: persistent fatigue, “nervous exhaustion,” weakness despite rest, irritability, and moodiness from “overwrought nerves.” 65 These new neurasthenic moderns were experiencing stress. Cortisol, the hormone that spurs the body’s instinctual “fight or flight” response, produces long-term ill-health, decreases immune system effectiveness, and increases chronic disease risks. 66 Indeed, stress generates all the symptoms the Sunday Times, the Globe, and hundreds of newspapers across the continent identified as quotidian maladies. 67
Circa 1900, most city people knew no such thing—although some doctors had begun to link stress with physical illness. 68 When overworked, underpaid, hurried, often malnourished, and sedentary city people experienced stress, those “who work ‘society’s treadmill’ to the breaking point,” the culprit was nervous “exhaustion” or “prostration”—neurasthenia. 69 Many went undiagnosed, prey to their “insomnia, nervous indigestion, depression of spirits, and palpitations of the heart,” the likely refractions of the “traumas of 19th Century capitalism.” 70
Neurasthenia, as an earlier form of our “anxiety and depression,” looks uncannily like a corollary of capitalized modernity (Figure 3). It seems to have emerged from unregulated labor and its working conditions and the cities supporting both, which obstructed the attainment of a “richer existence for the toilers . . . with respect to mind, soul, and body.” 71 Such urban spatial pathologies imposed “disjunctions, dislocations, and disorientations,” while modernity’s unrelenting hurry, excitement, and impatience, resulted in the “evil usage of body.” 72 This put it “to wrong purposes”—and, in the case of the modern city’s impoverished millions, heaped upon them an “abuse” which left them “oppressed, ground into dust, half fed and half clothed.” 73 Conspicuous consumption, and exclusive and elusive material prosperity, enervated moderns in ways theorized by Lears, described Beard, and implied by Veblen. 74 Neurasthenia flourished in the capitalist city “when worry [wa]s added to overwork.” 75
Neurasthenic office workers in Washington’s Evening Star, 1906, implying wrongly that neurasthenia was exclusively a middle-class labor issue. 76
Whose overwork? Everyone’s. As one newspaper put it, neurasthenia was “no respecter of sex or rank. Men and women are alike its victims . . . [from] the queens of society, humble housewives, stenographers, sewing girls and washwomen . . . [to] the giants of finance, clerks, and mechanics.” 77 For such workers, “seasons of excessive anxiety or seasons of stress,” of “wear and tear,” recurred under industrial capitalism’s predatory labor practices. 78 These included everything from a patent disregard for humane housing and adequate nourishment to neglecting broad public health measures and policing graft and corruption before the welfare state—all affirming the now common belief that “capitalism coincide[s] with a deterioration in human welfare.” 79 Little wonder the New York Times asked: “Has the American reached the end of his [sic] endurance? . . . Is the individual deteriorating mentally and physically? Is his mode of life shortening his years? Are his mental and physical labors excessive?” To each question yes with examples provided: schoolteacher, typewriter (clerical worker), city official, all overworked into “mental distress.” Why? An “[i]mproper mode of living”: “They do not sleep enough and at the proper time, they eat too much . . . improper[] food, [and] they are irrational in their recreations.” 80 And while all this may read like moral prescription, we know precisely the circumstance the Times is lamenting, because we see it in our own sleep-deprived, malnourished, alcoholic, overworked, and binge-watching lives—or in the lives of others.
. . . and the Modern City?
We have long-known the modern city’s bemusing novelty produced intense demographic, spatial, and political economic pressures—generating an “impoverished exoticism” whose social and cultural consequences affected the twentieth century. 81 Can we combine the modern city’s industrial geographies, existing as both effect and cause of the spoliations of laissez-faire capitalism, with the city’s efflorescent mental ill-health (apiece with Simmel’s “mental life”)? 82 Certainly capitalist geographical indifference made the modern city an unjust dystopia for millions—confirmed in images or descriptions by photographers and writers, including inter alia Charles Dickens, Jack London, Arthur Morrison and Israel Zangwill (on London), Emil Zola (on mill towns in France), and Jacob Riis, Theodore Dreiser, Robert Hunter, and Upton Sinclair (on Chicago and New York).
The somewhat orderly, colonial urbanity of pre-Victorian times collapsed under the grubby intensity of Victorian North American cities, the ones popularly called “Dickensian.” 83 These existed for many as “perpetual” or “eternal slums” asphyxiating on “the pestilential breath of want,” immiserating legions of city people. 84 This is highlighted in contemporaneous studies such as Matthew Smith’s 1883 Sunshine and Shadow in New York or Helen Campbell’s 1897 Darkness and Daylight. 85 The deleterious urban geographies detailed in these and other works have been evaluated in a rich historiography composed by twentieth-century writers such as H.J. Dyos, Roy Lubove, Jane Jacobs, Anthony Wohl, Paul Boyer, and David Ward among many others.
Such literature forms the ground for neurasthenia as urban spatial malady. Yet consider, counter-intuitively, those dystopian geographies bourgeois urbanites typically do not regard as such: Beaux Arts corporate buildings, hotels, department stores, the stately homes of the urban rich, and numerous others whose city presence secured the radical inequality of Gilded Age zero-sum capitalism, part and parcel of what Richard Dennis calls “spaces of empire.” 86 Their existence established the day-and-night-sunshine-and-shadow contrasts visible to Victorian and Edwardian observers.
Hence the modern city and its bifurcated dystopian spatial inclination. Below New York’s Millionaire’s Row on Fifth Avenue for Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, or Fricks, sat the squalid—and often fatal—Five Points to the south (and so-called “Hell’s Kitchen” to the west). 87 Chicago’s Prairie Avenue unrolled grandeur prepared for the likes of Field, Armor, and Pullman, but which posed awful counterpoint to the agony of the near northside tenements and so-called “alley cribs.” 88 Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, for Cassatts, Wanamakers, and Weightmans, contrasted predictably with Black “slum districts” and their woes, especially at “Seventh and Lombard and Twelfth and Kater.” 89 Boston’s Beacon Hill homed Holmes, Harding, Alcott, and Lodge, while its infamous North End kettled diseases of poverty—and, later, mid-twentieth-century urban renewal, “‘megalopolis’ in the last stages of depravity,” Jane Jacobs writes sarcastically. 90 Toronto’s elite graced homes in Rosedale, Parkdale, or the Annex, and Gothic Revival “castles” or Arts and Crafts “cottages” in Wychwood Park, belonging to financier Sir Henry Pellatt and the tonalist painters George Agnew Reid and Mary Hiester Reid, respectively; the city’s immigrant poor occupied hovels in underserviced neighborhoods like “the Ward,” King/Niagara, Earlscourt (“Shacktown”), or Corktown. 91 Montreal’s plutocrats swanned about Mount Royal and looked down, literally, on “the city below the hill,” especially the desperate west end. 92
We may speculate that neurasthenia haunted such deprived neighborhoods, because the average one-worker family earned approximately $1.50 a day (about $40 CAD now), if they worked—because in Shacktown, only two of seven men were employed. Working women in Toronto earned roughly 25 to 50 percent of men’s wages, single women earning as little as $1-2 a week—in part because as one local garment manufacturer boasted: I don’t treat the men bad, but I even up by taking advantage of the women. I have a girl who can do as much work, and as good, as a man; she gets $5 a week. The man who is standing next to her gets $11. The girls however average $3.50 a week, and some are as low as $2.
93
In fact, $1 a week was not uncommon for women garment workers (roughly $26 CAD now) who lived miserably in intolerable circumstances—urging the suicidal ideation of at least one woman garment worker, above, and generating neurasthenia among garment workers generally. 94
Such cities routinely possessed urban geographical disparities which, for the poor and struggling (day laborers, factory and garment workers, low-wage clerks and office staff), created persistent public health nuisances/crises—nutritional, epidemiological, environmental—that could turn psychiatric. Moreover, the bifurcated view of dystopian neighborhoods promoted here (dystopian daylight as well as darkness) means that all those Victorian and Edwardian city yearbooks that boosted cities by glorifying grandiose city people, homes, and neighborhoods—e.g., Henry Pellatt’s Casa Loma and its gardens, in Beautify Toronto, 1911—transform into moral geographical volumes of dystopian inequality.
So, we can feel the derision in and draw an insight from Dreiser’s observation of New York’s labor-based, social geographical injustice: These streets and boulevards, these splendid mansions and gorgeous hotels, these vast structures about which thousands surge and toward which luxurious carriages roll, are the fair flowers of a rugged stalk. Not of color and softness and rare odor are the masses upon which as a stalk these bloom; not for fresh air and sunshine are they; and down in the alleys and byways, in the shops and small dark chambers are the roots of this luxurious high life, starving and toiling the year through, that carriages may roll and great palaces stand with brilliant ornaments. These endless streets which only present their fascinating surface are the living semblance of the hands and hearts that lie unseen within them. They are the gay covering which conceals the sorrow and want and ceaseless toil upon which all this is built. They hide the hands and hearts, the groups of ill-clad workers the chambers stifling with the fumes of midnight oil consumed over ceaseless tasks, the pallets of the poor and sick, the bare tables of the hopeless slaves who work for bread. Endless are the rows of shadowy chambers, countless the miseries which these great walls hide . . . forever moaning and crying “for shame.”
95
Remember that “a utopia of opulence and consumption” associates with “a dystopia of scarcity and environmental degradation.” 96 Note, too, that Dreiser implicitly layers dystopian social geography, neighborhoods of sweated and/or shamefully remunerated labor, onto Thompson’s dictum that “[l]abor is the sole parent of wealth.” 97 When we imagine “the Gilded Age with its robber barons, privately dependent welfare system, and painfully visible public misery,” paradoxically prominent and occluded in streets and alleyways, shouldn’t we also imagine embedded mental and physical ill-health walking hand-in-glove with the lived experience of laissez-faire capitalism? 98 Too many, today, similarly endure the sad experience of our aptly named “New Gilded Age.” 99
Recall that by the late century the efforts of industrial capitalists to bribe boodling politicians into adopting an economic system of laissez-faire had paid off (generating the corruption and looting detailed by Lincoln Steffens in McClure’s Magazine, or William Riordon’s Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, or Charles Russell’s Lawless Wealth). 100 Businessmen and politicians armed with contracts, “honest . . . and dishonest graft,” and “a gospel of self-reliance,” now freely constructed an urban industrial nightmare, “the most incredible that was ever organized for plunder and rapine . . . for eternal iniquity and impunity.” 101 This let them do whatever they pleased—to anything and anyone, anywhere—to make money. 102 Hence the “City Pathological,” a term Peter Hall uses and which gives physical and temporal shape to what Anthony Vidler calls “spatial pathologies”: modern cities infamous for both their real and perceived environmental and social excesses. 103 The City Pathological sanctioned too much: unaccommodated immigration and in-migration; decrepit housing and shelter and unaffordable rents; air, water, waste and noise pollution; mud and dust from industrial and animal sources (because of too little prophylactic infrastructure); intolerable work and labor conditions; hurry, mobility, and immobility pressures; poverty, malnutrition, disease, misery, and mortality; corruption, greed, gambling, and loan sharking; alcoholism and addiction; sex work and drug use. Juxtapose this with too little pure water and food, hygiene and sanitation, public health and education, physical and social infrastructure, and too few parks and green spaces. 104 Intolerable climatic circumstances worsened this list of calamities: particulate air pollution from coal-overuse and smell generated by the agricultural-industrial exploitation of urban animals. 105 And it all occurred because an insouciant laissez-faire capitalism organized the wealth, comfort, and security of the few at the expense of the many. 106 How could mental ill-health not arise from the dystopian sunshine and shadow of the capitalist city?
Let’s briefly reprise the issue of urban hurry, because (1) our own era founders in commuting stress; and (2) the historical ubiquity of neurasthenia makes the modern presence of “architectures of hurry” relevant. 107 Moderns obsessed over the urban geographical facilitation of the “requirement cum desire [that] people, goods, money, information and even weather . . . ‘be somewhere,’ at some ‘when’”; and these epitomized modernity’s clash of conveniences and securities and its ambiguities and absurdities. 108 Hurry birthed mobilities cultures—around bicycles, buses, trains, streetcars, automobiles, ferries, even elevators and escalators inter alia—that organized, moved, and even identified people in novel ways, all mediated by a preoccupation with time and space compression. 109 Did all this capitalist, hurrysome motion and its daily compulsion elevate urban anxiety (Figure 4)?
Notice the proximity of “Automobile Accidents for Ninety Days” and the “National Malady” article. Did the Times intuit a neurasthenia/hurry correlation? 110
Consider the vexation associated with accessing horse drawn or electric streetcars, the queueing (and waiting without shelter), crowding, strap-hanging, running board-riding, schedule failures, service withdrawal, labor disruptions, streetcar-pedestrian collisions, and rider injuries, all castigated in the press and exploited by bicycle companies soliciting tormented streetcar users (Figures 5 and 6). Little wonder the sarcasm of Harper’s Weekly: Street-car Salad Never full! Pack ‘em in! / Move up, fat man, squeeze in, thin. Trunks, Vallises, Boxes, Bundles, / Fill up gaps as on she tumbles. Market baskets without number, / Owners easy—nod in slumber Thirty seated, forty standing, / A dozen more on either landing . . . Toes are trod on, hats are smashed, / Dresses soiled, hoop-skirts crashed. Thieves are busy, bent on plunder, / Still we rattle on like thunder. Packed together unwashed bodies, / Bathed in fumes of whisky-toddies; Tobacco, garlic, cheese, and beer / Perfume the heated atmosphere . . . Aren’t we jolly? What a blessing! / A Street-Car salad, with such a dressing.
111
The Globe, decades later, insisted “the journey to work and back [should] be a pleasure . . . not an ordeal to be feared” by the “millions of men and women . . . who . . . are obliged to use street cars every day.” 112
“Street-Car Salad” on the horse-drawn New York street railway system. 113
A Massey-Harris bicycle ad visualizes the opinion of Saturday Night’s Joe T. Clark:
For doctors, endemic hurry, “the frantic pace of urban communities,” caused neurasthenia: “there exists no reasonable doubt that modern life with its hurry, its tensions, its widespread and ever present excitement, has increased the proportion of people involved” with “neurasthenia . . . the disease of modern times”; so too “the increase in the size and number of cities.” 115 The Atlanta Constitution agreed. Neurasthenia clearly extruded from the “stimulation of urban life, with its clang of telephone bells, hurrying vehicles and whirring factories, its bustle of strenuous business alternating with equally strenuous amusements.” 116 Apparently, the city and its hurried capitalist imperative; its indifference to quality of life; its dystopian housing that made hardscrabble poverty in streets a verity; its underemployment, bad wages, extortionate rents; persistent generation of overwork, malnutrition, stress—and purposelessness—all substantiated Beard’s diagnosis of neurasthenia. 117 Was the emergence of neurasthenia only coincidental with an environment and discourse of hurry, especially when hurry “motivates, describes, and, seemingly, conditions human action,” and is both the “symptom and ailment of modernity?” 118
Neurasthenic Suicide
If neurasthenia predominated in anxious North American (and Western) cities, then the prevalence of suicide fit the harried times. As we have seen, the pervasiveness of late-Victorian suicide caught Durkheim’s attention and, before him, Henry Morselli here preempting Durkheim: The relation between the number of suicides and the general economical conditions is demonstrated by the continuous growth of the former in the century which beyond all others has witnessed the developement [sic] of commercial relations and the perfecting of the industrial arts by science. It seems almost as if the character of our epoch is reflected in . . . the increase of psychical aberrations . . . It will suffice to mention the dearness of necessary food, want of work, commercial stagnation, bankruptcy, the lowering of the exchange, and especially the depreciation of the value of money. Nor has the influence been trifling which the substitution of machine for hand work has had on the number of suicides and cases of madness in the industrial and most populated regions of central Europe.
119
Morselli omitted “neurasthenia” yet established its preconditions as incentives for suicide .
Durkheim posited “anomic suicide” fashioned by laissez-faire, “economic progress” and “industrial relations” “free[ed] from all regulation.” 120 In studies by not only Durkheim but works ranging from Social Gospeller Henry Nelson to Georg Simmel, anomie meant existentially disconnected social-industrial relations; for Durkheim, anomic suicide was “a regular and specific factor in suicide in . . . modern societies; one of the springs from which the annual contingent” fed. 121 “Anomy” appears in myriad theological treatises as the enemy of Christian spirit and, for Nelson, a synonym for sin. 122 Yet anomie chaperoned the urban-anxious, yielding something approximating the spiritual and psychic melancholy allied with suicidal ideation. Anomie resonated with “the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli,” or “the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational, and social life” or “‘the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions” of Simmel’s totalizing and hurrysome modern city. 123 And if Durkheim could not confirm “the relationship between neurasthenia and the social suicide-rate,” we can be open to the idea. 124
Because the presumption by doctors, newspapers, and even potential suicides was that neurasthenia did cause suicide. In 1898, the Globe doubted the influence of neurasthenia on suicide, calling suicide “the last refuge of a cowardly nature.” 125 By the 1900s, however, it was reporting not only on the social intricacies of neurasthenia but also neurasthenia’s role in suicide—from the suicide of “C. Theoret, publisher of La Revue Legale” in Montreal in 1905, from “acute neurasthenia,” to the neurasthenic suicide of Lord Kilmaine, in Paris in 1907, to neurasthenia causing a “suicide epidemic” in St. Petersburg in 1909. And when Anglican Archdeacon Llywd died “of neurasthenia” in his Huntsville, Ontario, home in 1903, the Globe politely skirted his likely suicide. 126 With doctors, coroners, and officials around the world ruling “neurasthenic suicide” as cause of death, neurasthenia as a suicide factor had become discursive in less than a decade. 127
It was a fact of life. The press burgeoned with examples of people “commit[ing] suicide in a fit of neurasthenia.” Readers were warned that Russia had redoubled its efforts to “fight the spread of neurasthenia and suicide.” 128 A New York City coroner determined the death of a 25-year old woman was “suicide while suffering from neurasthenia.” 129 Albert Pulitzer, founder of the New York Morning Journal (brother of famous Joseph), killed himself after years of “incurable neurasthenia”—doubtless chronic depression. A 40-year old widow in Hartford, CT, jumped from a window in a fit of neurasthenia. 130 A thirty-three year-old woman, a neurasthenic stenographer, hanged herself at the Beechurst Sanatorium. 131 Examples proliferated.
Neurasthenia, “the Moloch of modern life,” affected everyone, everywhere, to some degree, from Russia westward to Hawaii. 132 Its presence not only explains this “epidemic of self-destruction” but something more gruesome: the suicide club. 133 The first sensational reporting of a suicide club in North American newspapers was the depopulation of a club in the small city of Bridgeport, CT. “The Seventeenth Dead” an 1891 headline declared, “only two members remain alive,” the latest suicide completed by a cabinetmaker, John Kopp. 134 Deceased members bridged social classes: city editor of the Bridgeport Farmer, diamond expert, saloon keeper, butcher, cabinetmaker; indeed, newspaper reports of club memberships across North America reveal suicides from every demographic, day-workers to the “wealthy and prosperous,” all ethnicities, sexes, and probably genders, queer history “strikingly similar to the history of suicide.” 135 Clubs existed in cities large and small: New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia but also places like Ottawa, Ontario and Compton, Kentucky (Table 1). The clubs listed men and women. There was a “poor women’s” club in New York; a university students’ club in Madison, WI; a student teachers’ club in Cedar Falls, IA. A New York City club, whose members consisted of “the poor foreign element,” used a teetotum and a “Round Robin” scheme to end their lives. This inflamed Toronto’s Mail and Empire, which linked the clubs with “moral degeneracy” and “discontent among the masses,” both interpretations wrong. The same club claimed the lives of seven immigrants over the course of four months; one member, Henry Plugger, arrested for attempted suicide, admitted that members had “no particular love of life and most of us are very poor.” 136 Club rules generally required that, once a member’s number came up, they had 12 to 24 hours to die (but sometimes longer). In Bridgeport, a “Thirteen Club” had been running since 1888 (Figure 7). By 1901, it had 13 victims over thirteen years, its mandate dictating one life per year. 137 The 1891 Bridgeport club ruled that the only legitimate methods of dispatch were revolver, rope, knife, or train. The club prohibited drowning—and poison, usually by carbolic acid. The latter was “too easy”; the caustic chemical proliferated in kitchens and bathrooms everywhere and was a favorite, if excruciating, suicide method among young women (Figure 8). 138
Incomplete List of Suicide Clubs and Club Locations in North America, as Indicated in Newspapers.
“Baltimore Suicide Club.” The Norfolk Virginian, February 22, 1898, 4.
“Road Trials Were Theirs.” Bisbee Daily Review, January 6, 1914, 5.
“Last of the Suicide Club.” [Fredericton] The Herald, May 5, 1890, 1.
“Left Can of Poison to the New York Suicide Club.” New York Times, July 27, 1902, 11.
“Two More Girls in Iowa Poisoned.” Chicago Tribune, May 17, 1907, 5.
“British and Foreign.” [Toronto] The Globe, July 28, 1909, 1.
“Pledged to Suicide.” The Chronicle-Tribune, March 7, 1902, 1.
“Cremated on the Lake Shore.” New York Times, July 18, 1892, 1.
“A Suicide Club.” [Patterson, NJ] Evening News, October 25, 1893, 5.
“Alarmed by a Suicide Club.” The Fort Wayne News, November 14, 1899, 1.
“Only Three Left.” Topeka State Journal, December 29, 1900, 9.
Going to Klondike to End His Life.” San Francisco Chronicle, October 18, 1897, 15.
“Omitted to Kill Himself.” Anaconda Standard, June 17, 1895, 8.
“President of Suicide Club.” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 17, 1906, 35.
“Has Madison a Suicide Club?” Chicago Tribune, September 27, 1898, 3.
“Ninth Victim of Suicide Club.” The Guthrie Daily Leader, June 28, 1902, 3.
“Was Suicide Club Member.” New York Times, May 5, 1908, 3.
“Left Can of Poison to the New York Suicide Club.” New York Times, July 27, 1902, 11.
“The Hoodoo Thirteen.” Greenville Daily News, March 16, 1901, 4.
“Hari Kari for Maidens.” Boston Globe, July 17, 1897, 5.
“In League of Death.” Chicago Sunday Inter-Ocean, April 8, 1900, 39.
“Man’s Death Laid to Suicide Club.” San Francisco Examiner, September 19, 1909, 1.
“Suicide Club at Ottawa.” Toronto Daily Star, June 19, 1902, 7.
“Suicide Club in Prison.” New York Times, July 3, 1914, 1.
“A Sociable Suicide.” [Toronto] The Globe, December 29, 1898, 9.
“Third U. of P. Suicide.” New York Times, January 25, 1914, 19.
“He Drew the Fatal Number.” New York Times, November 28, 1897, 6.
“Found Dead in Office with Gas Turned On.” [Toronto] The Globe, May 28, 1912, 9.
“The Suicide Club.” The Wichita Star, May 16, 1889, 1.
“Belonged to a Suicide Club.” Buffalo News, May 6, 1896, 7.
Cartoon from a 1901 investigation into “Thirteen Clubs.” 139
Cartoon from the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Hard to notice are the small bottle of carbolic acid in the woman’s right hand and the pistol in the man’s. 140
Only a portion of suicidal North Americans embraced suicide clubs, yet clubs flourished across the continent (and the globe). One “well-known” suicide club in New Jersey (perhaps the Jersey City Suicide Club which garnered considerable press-attention) was reputed to have “broadened the scope of its operations and was establishing clubs all over the country.” 141 In response to the now-common reporting on suicide clubs, one newspaper decided in 1903 to reprint Robert Louis Stevenson’s, “The Suicide Club,” from his 1882 New Arabian Nights; it was picked up by papers across America. 142 Many reported that Stevenson’s story was the source of the club-menace, despite clubs existing prior to its publication. 143
Conclusion
By the late century, stress was becoming a leading cause of somatic illness: “Clinicians sometimes explained the development of cancer, diabetes, and thyroid disease, or the appearance and severity of influenza, in terms of the debilitating effects of over-work and over-worry.” 144 It takes little imagination to connect work—and what the Globe called work’s “unnecessary conscientiousness”—to capitalist imperatives, and the stress this created to neurasthenia. 145 Neurasthenia seems to have been visceral to Gilded Age and Progressive Era capitalism. And while medical historians view neurasthenia as clinically suspicious, when framed differently, the “disease” blends the callousness of capitalism with the misery in modern cities. And if this conclusion is speculative, it nevertheless correlates with the conspicuous mental ill-health documented in cities everywhere, and its grisly consequences. Is it merely happenstance that as capitalism “chase[d] the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,” sowing “connections everywhere,” suicide sprouted “everywhere,” in cities throughout the West? 146 And if capitalism’s evident social benefits were—and are still considered to be—“incontrovertible,” why the omnipresence of neurasthenia and suicide? 147 In the context of twenty-first century economic grief and mental and physical unwellness, how curious that neurasthenia lets us trace genealogical threads from our psychic and somatic stress to that of our forebears. 148
As our world bends in thrall to the capitalist impulse to wring profit from every adult and child, extract it from every environment, exact it from every built space in every city, psychic dissolution—and, alas, democratic fracture—follows. I’m convinced stress and anxiety and depression are the twenty-first century’s neurasthenia, befitting a capitalist antidemocratic commitment to laissez faire and zero-sum that makes those of us fettered to capitalism’s wants sick in mind and body.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Smiling thanks to Anneleen Arnout, Sarah Curtis, Richard Dennis, Michael Driedger, the late Clyde Forsberg, Deryck Holdsworth, Jeannie Mackintosh, and Dan Malleck for their useful comments on drafts of this paper, and/or for helping me solve the neurasthenia-puzzle, even if I did or did not adhere strictly to their advice (which may be apparent). I appreciate a peer-review process that made this a better paper. Finally, I’m especially grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Brock University’s Council for Research in the Social Sciences, for supporting this research.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author(s) received funding support from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Brock University’s Council for Research in the Social Sciences.
