January 2011

In the words of historian William Bronson, it was “the last grand adventure,” and there is no denying the dimensions of the event: in 1897 and 1898, at least one hundred thousand people took passage to the scruffy little towns of Dyea and Skagway in the Alaskan Panhandle, inched over the mountains through Chilkoot or White passes, then floated, walked, and dogsledded the remaining five hundred miles to a new Golconda called Dawson in the heart of the Klondike gold fields.

Four years ago a small band of New York City executives suffered a bad shock. The Penn Central dropped (a full seventy-five years after it might have been expected to) their Southport car, a flossy private coach that bore them to their Connecticut homes behind drawn curtains, well-attended by stewards. A businesswoman named Dorothy Melford immediately stepped in with an alternative—a special bus which, she said, was “very, very luxurious, and everybody has their own swivel armchair, their own table, their own ashtray and plenty of room to stretch out.”

While touring the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens visited the Shakers at New Lebanon, New York. It was not one of his happier experiences. Dismayed by the strict beliefs of America’s largest communal sect and disgruntied by their simple life-style, he reported, “We walked into a grim room, where several grim hats were hanging on grim pegs, and the time was grimly told by a grim clock.”

The curiosity that led Dickens and thousands of other people to visit the Shakers made this famous Utopian society one of nineteenth-century America’s top tourist attractions—a somewhat ironic status for a religious sect that from the beginning had turned its back on the world.

In 1774, Shaker founder “Mother Ann” Lee had led eight followers from England to America to create a new order based on celibacy, equality of men and women, and communal property. Convinced that separation from “the World” was their only hope of survival, early members established independent communities they regarded as literal heavens on earth.

The candidates are all in the field now, and you couldn’t find a nicer bunch of people. They admire each other with an openness of heart verging on reverence, and only the exigencies of the present hour could have forced them into the position of vying with their good friends for the Presidency.

Television has a good deal to do with this numbing, faintly surreal politeness; the camera is said to transform even mild pique into something approaching hysteria. Then, too, many candidates are veterans of the cloistered life of Capitol Hill, where, until an office holder is actually incarcerated, he remains an “honorable gentleman.”

In 1908 the American medical profession was becoming aware of a new method of treating mental disease. It had first been advocated during the 1890’s by two Viennese doctors, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. Breuer ceased to practice the method, but Freud had developed the theory on which it rested, had described its applications to everyday life in a number of books, notably The Interpretation of Dreams , and had become the center of a small group of supporters. A main contention of psychoanalysis, as Freud called his method, was that sexuality began in the earliest years of a human being’s life and that much mental trouble sprang from the repression into the unconscious of events connected with this natural instinct. The theory had aroused such opposition that Freud was surprised to receive late in 1908 an invitation from Stanley Hall, president of Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, to lecture on his controversial ideas at the university’s twentieth anniversary celebration the following year.

Carl Jung, who went to the same places that Freud did, ate much of the same food, met many of the same people, and was equally overwhelmed by the bustle and size of the country, reached different conclusions about America. He liked it and returned frequently during his life. In 1909 he recorded his American journey in letters to his wife, Emma.

New York 31 August 1909

My Dearest ,

The most confident prediction that can be made about the 1980 presidential campaign is that the nominees will invest enormous energy, time, and money in stumping the country. Even though television can now bring them effortlessly into the nation’s living rooms, candidates eagerly commit themselves, sometimes against the advice of their most expert strategists, to the grind and risk of the campaign tour, a hullabaloo of marching bands, pressing throngs, outstretched hands, the candidate fatigued and hoarse, shouting platitudes about the beauty of the countryside, the virtues of its citizens and of their sterling leaders—provided they belong to his party.

Reader William F. Hamilton of Lakewood, Ohio, recently wrote to author Paul Engle and was kind enough to give us a copy of his letter. Portions of it follow: