The Mansion of Happiness (20 page)

Paul Popenoe’s business launched an industry; marriage clinics popped up all over the country. The
American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, founded in 1942, had, as of 2010, twenty-four thousand members, although the actual number of therapists seeing couples was much higher.
⁶³
But while 80 percent of therapists practiced couples therapy, only 12 percent were licensed to do so.
⁶⁴
In 2010, 40 percent of would-be husbands and wives received
premarital counseling, often pastoral, and millions of married couples sought therapy. Doubtless, many received a great deal of help, expert and caring. Nevertheless, a 1995
Consumer Reports
survey ranked marriage counselors last, among all other providers of mental health services, in achieving results. And the rise of couples counseling both coincided with and contributed to a larger shift in American life: heightened expectations for marriage as a means of self-expression and personal fulfillment.
⁶⁵

“I have a pretty good marriage,”
Elizabeth Weil wrote in a 2009 cover story for the
New York Times Magazine
, but “it could be better.” This is America. Why settle for pretty good? Weil and her husband sought the services of half a dozen therapists.
⁶⁶
Laurie Abraham’s 2010 book,
The Husbands and Wives Club: A Year in the Life of a Couples Therapy Group
, began
as a cover story in the
Times Magazine
, too. (The book’s tagline—“Can These Marriages Be Saved?”—seemed to allude to Popenoe, but Abraham never mentioned him.) Abraham spent a year observing five couples undergoing group therapy with the Philadelphia clinician
Judith Coché, whose work she admired. The group met for six-hour sessions, one weekend a month, including an annual Sex Weekend. Leigh and Aaron had been in Coché’s care for a decade; by the end of the year they had broken new ground: “they may still be using the vibrator more than she’d prefer but Aaron is ‘really there.’ ” Michael and Rachael had been discussing Michael’s desire to buy a motorcycle. Rachael was against it. Michael was angry. Coché explained, “Rachael is chastising herself for being too emotional and ‘overreacting,’ echoing her parents’ criticism of her; Michael is abruptly dropping his motorcycle dreams, capitulating rather than facing his wife’s disapproval and distress.” Later, Michael stated the problem differently: “ ‘Um, the trouble is,’ he says, ‘Rachael’s not a man.’ ” Between his first and second marriages, Michael slept with men. By the book’s epilogue, Rachael has had a baby. When Michael professed his love for his wife, “the therapist chuckles deeply. ‘That is so
wonderful.
’ ” Michael and Rachael have “wondered whether they’d still be married without the group.” This reader wondered, too.
⁶⁷

That same year,
Lori Gottlieb recounted her experience with
computer dating in
Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.
(Popenoe launched computer dating—an “Electronic Cupid”—in 1956, on a UNIVAC.)
⁶⁸
Gottlieb was forty-one and a single mother. Determined to find a husband, she tried every possible matchmaking method, from speed dating to something called Cupid’s Coach to signing up with
Evan Marc Katz, a “personal trainer for love,” who set about improving her marital fitness.
⁶⁹
“Understanding the science of marriage gives us a crystal ball of sorts,” wrote
Tara Parker-Pope in
For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage
, also from 2010. Did you know that the first three minutes of an argument are the most important? That “strong marriages have at least a five-to-one daily ratio of positive to negative interactions,” so that “for every mistake you make, you need to offer five more good moments, kind words, and loving gestures to keep your marriage in balance”? Parker-Pope, the author of the
Well
blog for the
New York
Times
, explained that she had investigated the work of “top scientists” because “the best insights about love and relationships are coming from the scientific community.” She cited a study
titled “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers” to argue that a woman shopping for a husband shouldn’t take the Pill, because it suppresses ovulation, and lap dancers command more tips when they’re ovulating. In a chapter titled “The Chore Wars,” Parker-Pope attributed the “
Housework Gap” (men don’t clean) to heredity, since cutting-edge research has proven that “natural selection pressures resulted in neurobiological differences related to domestic skill.”
⁷⁰

The Progressive era’s conservative campaign to defend, protect, and improve marriage never really ended, either. Marriage is a stage of life in which the state plays a greater role than in any other. In 2009, the name Popenoe came up in
Perry v. Schwarzenegger
, a California case testing the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the state’s 2008 anti-
same-sex marriage act, which was modeled on the federal government’s 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. Under cross-examination by
David Boies, the plaintiff’s attorney, a flustered
David Blankenhorn, the founder of the
Institute for American Values, exposed as having no scholarly expertise whatsoever, cast about for academic authorities to support his opposition to same-sex marriage. “Popenoe says that same sex marriage will reduce hetero marriage rates,” Blankenhorn told the court. “I cannot prove in exact word formulation what he said. If he were sitting here, I believe that’s what he would say.” “I am asking you to tell us what these people have written,” said Boies, “not what you think they’d say if they were here.” Popenoe wasn’t there, but he wasn’t a ghost, either. Blankenhorn meant not Paul Popenoe but
David Popenoe, Paul Popenoe’s son, who once wrote that the institution of marriage “would surely be compromised by incorporating the marriage of same-sex couples.”
⁷¹

David Popenoe, a sociologist from Rutgers, was best known for his work on single mothers. In his most influential book,
Life Without Father
, he described what he called “the human carnage of fatherlessness.” The nation, he worried, was at risk “of committing social suicide.” In the “family values” 1990s, his controversial findings about the damage divorce does to children informed everything from
Dan Quayle’s attack on Murphy Brown to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act itself.
⁷²
Blankenhorn and David Popenoe had edited a book together, and each year, Blankenhorn’s Institute for American Values and the
National Marriage Project, founded by David Popenoe, published “The State of Our Unions,” a report on marriage in America. In 2010, “The State of Our Unions” warned of a “mancession”:
during an economic downturn, more men than usual were working fewer hours than their wives, making for unhappier husbands and angrier rows. A spike in the divorce rate was anticipated.
⁷³

Paul Popenoe stepped down as the director of the
American Institute of Family Relations in 1976 and died three years later. David Popenoe wrestled, earnestly and openly, with his father’s legacy. “What has puzzled me,” he once wrote, “is how fast my father’s name passed into oblivion.” But, well into the twenty-first century, Paul Popenoe was all over the place, in Sex Weekend, in Cupid’s Coach, in the hereditability
of
housework, in Proposition 8. David Popenoe, who had served on the board of directors of his father’s American Institute of Family Relations, declined an invitation to take over the institute. In the 1980s, the institute floundered, then disappeared. In 1992, he went out to Los Angeles and drove down Sunset Boulevard, to see the place, near Hollywood and Vine, where his father had worked. Nothing looked familiar, except, on the side of the building, embossed on stucco, the faint shadow of a sign, long gone. He could just make out the letters.
⁷⁴

O
rdering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to a science in October 1910 when
Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from Boston, held a meeting in an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts, including Frank and
Lillian Gilbreth, who, at Brandeis’s urging, decided to call what they were experts at “
Scientific Management.”
¹
Everyone there, including Brandeis, had contracted “Tayloritis”: they were enthralled by an industrial engineer from Philadelphia named
Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had been ordering people around, scientifically, for years.
²
He made work fast, and even faster. “Speedy Taylor,” as he was called, had invented a whole new way to make money. He would get himself hired by some business; spend a while watching everyone work, stopwatch and slide rule in hand; write a report telling them how to do their work faster; and then submit an astronomical bill for his invaluable services. He is the “Father of Scientific Management” (at least, that’s what it says on his tombstone) and, by any rational calculation, the grandfather of management consulting.
³

Whether he was also a shameless fraud is a matter of some debate,
but not, it must be said, much: it’s difficult to stage a debate when the preponderance of evidence falls to one side. Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success. Why did it appeal to Louis Brandeis, who wasn’t easily duped? Brandeis, born in Kentucky in 1856, was so young when he finished Harvard Law School, in 1876, with the highest grades anyone there had ever received, that
Charles Eliot, the university’s president, had to waive a minimum-age requirement to allow him to graduate. Brandeis swiftly earned a reputation as a hardheaded and public-minded reformer, the “people’s attorney.” The man who wrote
The Curse of Bigness
earnestly believed—and plainly, to some degree, he was right—that scientific management would improve the lot of the little guy by raising wages, reducing the cost of goods, and elevating the standard of living. “Of all the social and economic movements with which I have been connected,” Brandeis wrote, “none seems to me to be equal to this in its importance and hopefulness.”
⁴
Scientific management would bring justice to an unjust world. “Efficiency is the hope of democracy,”
⁵
he believed, and that’s where it’s possible to see what
Dean Acheson, who clerked for Brandeis, meant when he said his boss was an “incurable optimist.”
⁶

In October 1910, Brandeis gathered Taylor’s disciples—Taylor, busy man, sent his regrets—because he was preparing to argue in hearings before the Interstate Commerce Committee that railroad companies ought not to be allowed to raise their freight rates.
⁷
Brandeis had met Taylor and had read at least one of his books,
Shop Management
(1903), and he thought the railroads, rather than raising rates, should cut costs by Taylorizing: hire a man like Taylor, have him review their operations, and teach them to do everything more efficiently.
⁸
Taylor often called what he did “Task Management.” The Gilbreths dubbed their system the “One Best Way.” For the sake of the case, Brandeis wanted, for the whole shebang, one best name. At that October meeting, someone suggested calling it, simply, “Efficiency,” the watchword of the day, but in the end the vote was unanimous in favor of “scientific management,” which does have a nice ring to it, just like “
home economics.”

Scientific management promised to replace arbitrary standards—rules of thumb—with accurate measurements. Before the ICC, in a case for which he accepted no fee, Brandeis began by establishing that the railroads had no real idea why they charged what they did. When he questioned
Charles Daly, the vice president of a New York railroad, Daly said that setting prices came down to judgment, and when Brandeis asked him to explain the
basis for that judgment, Daly fell right into his trap. “The basis of my judgment,” he began, “is exactly the same as the basis of a man who knows how to play a good game of golf. It comes from practice, contact and experience.”

Brandeis next set about demonstrating that freight rates could be determined—scientifically—by introducing, as evidence, Taylor’s work at
Bethlehem Steel Works. Before Taylor went to Bethlehem, a gang of seventy-five men loaded 92-pound pigs of iron onto railcars, at a rate of 12.5 tons per man per day. By timing the workers with a stopwatch, Taylor established that a “first-class man” could load pig iron at a rate of 47.5 tons per man per day, if only he would stop loafing. A boss could speed up a man, Taylor believed, the same way he could speed up a machine: with oil.
Ironworkers, Taylor thought, were as dumb as dray horses, and ought to be dealt with accordingly. Most of them were also, to Taylor, the wealthy son of Philadelphia aristocrats, altogether foreign, something he made sure to underscore. He told the story of managing a man he called Schmidt.

(“Who is this Schmidt,” journalists asked, “and what ever happened to him?” Taylor wouldn’t, couldn’t say. He had more or less made him up.)

Brandeis’s star witness turned out to be Frank Gilbreth, who, with his wife, Lillian, specialized in
motion study. Where Taylor dissected a job into timed tasks, the Gilbreths divided human action into eighteen motions, which they called “therbligs”—it’s an eponymous anagram—in order to determine the One Best Way to do a piece of work. Where Taylor used a stopwatch, the Gilbreths used a motion picture camera. On the stand, Gilbreth, a burly former bricklayer and consummate showman whose enthusiasm was contagious, grabbed a stack of law books, pretended they were bricks, and built a wall, explaining how to eliminate wasted motion. The commissioners, mesmerized, craned their necks and leaned over their desks to get a better view.
¹¹
“This has become sort of a substitute for religion for you,” said one of them, awed. (The gospel of efficiency, Taylor called it; some people called it the gospel of hope.)
¹²
With this, Gilbreth could only agree. (In his diary, Gilbreth once jotted down plans to write a book called
The Religion of Scientific Management.
)
¹³
Then Brandeis hushed the room by making an astonishing claim. The
New York Times
reported it this way: