End Riff

Ed Ayers: So Brian, that is the recurring theme throughout these different episodes in the story of wellness in America. It’s always a battle in some ways over who’s in charge, who has the authority to tell us how to be well. And I just wondered, do you agree with that? And if you do, what sort of pattern do you see in that claim of expertise?

Brian Balogh: Well, I noticed that theme so I agree with you Ed. And I also noticed a recurring period of time which I’m told we’re supposed to pay attention to as historians.

Ed Ayers: Yes, time is important.

Brian Balogh: That period between the Civil War and let’s say the 1920s, it seemed like there’s just a lot up for grabs and it seems like many of our segments kind of go back to that period. So here’s my theory about the time period and the theme.

Ed Ayers: Okay.

Brian Balogh: To oversimplify a bit, I think that spiritual and moral authority is in pretty good shape for the first two thirds of the 19th century. In fact, I’ve learned from you that religiosity actually intensified in the 1820s and 1830s. But I think after the Civil War, those who are in charge of our moral and spiritual well-being, well who that should be was really kind of up for grabs.

Ed Ayers: Why is that?

Brian Balogh: Well, I think the authority of ministers was being challenged. I think that a lot of Americans were uncomfortable with more and more women disproportionately filling the pews of churches. There was talk about religion becoming feminized. And after the horrible carnage of the Civil War by the end of the 19th century, I think there was a little bit of concern that perhaps we were growing soft. That we really needed to demonstrate our kind of masculine Christianity, so to speak.

Ed Ayers: So that suggest that the concern with wellness doesn’t really grow from a less well population. Do you think there’s a correlation between the need for wellness and our concern with it or is this something generated as something else in the culture?

Brian Balogh: Well, I think if we fast forward to the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, I do think it’s fair to say that it has something to do with wellness because people are living longer and they’re expecting to live longer. And even more than that, they were expecting to feel good well into their 60s and 70s. So I think that’s a period in which the term wellness for me really seems to apply.

Ed Ayers: Before that, people are just determined, hoping to stay alive.

Brian Balogh: Yeah. And if you look at the average lifespan, it turns out that we are living longer and there’s good reason to believe in the new authority including kind of a moral authority on the block, and that’s doctors, that’s science.

Ed Ayers: Brian, anybody who has looked at American culture after World War II, it seems like you see sort of traces of Freudianism everywhere you know. Everybody understands about what it means to get on the couch, right? And go to see a shrink and Woody Allen jokes and all that. So there seems to have been a long-standing fascination with or adoption of Freudian ideas. Do you think the United States was especially searching for that kind of expertise?

Brian Balogh: Well, I think that the United States found in a kernel of Freud’s theory an approach that matched really well with American individualism, and that was power.

Ed Ayers: That we all have our own unique problems.

Brian Balogh: That’s exactly right. And as the end of that segment we heard pointed to, there was a real optimism, which I’m not sure Freud entirely sure at himself given his success rate. But what was taken from Freud was the popularization of a kind of optimistic sense that one can improve themselves, which you know Ed existed in the United States long before Freud ever came over.

Ed Ayers: And it’s one of the great through lines of all the things that we’re talking about. The idea of wellness in America is that you can in fact become more well, right?

Brian Balogh: That’s right.

Ed Ayers: And that it’s our right, and in some ways even her obligation to become more well. And so I thank Freud embodied a certain kind of wholeness that we’ve been looking for in other ways ever since. If we’d eat this diet that we’ll be complete. If we would figure out this technique of child-rearing, we would all be well.

Brian Balogh: That’s right. And not only have we imbibe kind of basic tenets of Freudian psychology. We even have terms like reverse psychology. It’s such a given, these psychological expectations. We have counter psychology, reverse psychology. It’s very much woven into our culture.

Ed Ayers: Yeah. I’ve heard so much about this. I kind of have a complex about it. So how do we get to the present day then, if we have these sort of contestations. You had a doctor like Kellogg, and then another doctor like Freud who are claiming this expertise at least out of some sort of institutional base. Today, the people who seem to be telling us what to do are people who have no claim whatsoever to that, but are successful and happy. And I think about Gwyneth Paltrow and her infamous company, Goop, in which side she’s imagining all kinds of beneficial effects from most unlikely kinds of techniques and substances and so forth. But we also look to Oprah Winfrey, other people like that to tell us how not just to be healthy but to be well. We have more experts than ever now, Brian. So why would we turn to popular culture figures for our source of expertise?

Brian Balogh: Because that expertise has not not solved all of our physical problems, for one. I turned on the television and I will confess I watch kind of mainly cable network news and C-SPAN, which doesn’t have commercials-

Ed Ayers: Well, I’m deeply surprised.

Brian Balogh: Exactly. Now C-SPAN doesn’t have commercials, but cable network knows it does and almost everything advertised these days, it ranges from indigestion to rather esoteric diseases that still exist is my point. And so these experts haven’t solved everything, even though we’re living longer and presumably a little bit more healthy. But they haven’t solved that problem we started with, which is moral authority. How do we feel spiritually good about ourselves? Well, one way we do it is we jog, we go to the gym exercise.

Brian Balogh: Now doctors will recommend exercise, but the people who have popularized that are people that we can really identify with, not because we drive in limousines or we have millions of dollars, but we see them on television. They are those celebrities that you know a lot more about than I do.

Ed Ayers: It’s interesting the celebrities that we seemed to turn to now don’t ask anything of us other than to buy their products. At least when there was Jane Fonda, she wanted us to work out and sweat, right? And I’m sure buy a leggings and leotards too. And I know that you’ve actually had a dalliance with the aerobics craze, is that right Brian?

Brian Balogh: Well, dalliance maybe an overstatement Ed. And it came about because my doctor actually suggested that I get more exercise. And so I signed up for an aerobics class, and in many ways takes us back to the beginning of the discussion Ed, because I discovered just how gendered that aerobics class, and I gather most, were. So this was taught at intramural rec. I show up at the old, unairconditioned, I might add, gym at UVA.

Ed Ayers: I’m impressed already Brian.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, exactly. Well, you would have been less impressed if you saw me because I just wore my regular sweatpants. And to make matters worse, I forgot my sneakers. So I figured what could be what could be the big deal if I just show up in my socks? Well, I was the only guy in a class of like 30 people. Everybody stared at me and then looked at my footwear-

Ed Ayers: Yeah, I’ve had that dream. You’re a fraud.

Brian Balogh: This was a nightmare. And it seemed to me that everybody in the class had taken at least 15 other aerobics classes because they certainly were moving around to rhythm, which I was not, even if I hadn’t been sliding around the class. So I was so embarrassed. I never went back again. Part of it was poor wardrobe choice, but most of it-

Ed Ayers: That’s never stopped you before.

Brian Balogh: It has not. But most of it was being the only guy in this class. And it never even occurred to me.

Ed Ayers: It’s not only being the only guy, but also being the least adept to what everybody was doing.

Brian Balogh: That also is not the first time I was the least adept, but this really underscored what a lot of the second-wave feminist criticized about aerobics. That everybody was thin in this class, everybody was already in good shape. And they use of term ‘undisplay.’ I don’t know how the women felt, but boy did I feel undisplay. It’s almost as though I needed years of therapy to get over that experience Ed.

Ed Ayers: Well, it almost worked out. You seem very well to me now Brian.

Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org or send an email to BackStory@Virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio.

Ed Ayers: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Executive Vice President and Provost at the University of Virginia, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 6: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.