The Trouble with Tom (11 page)

Three times he, George Lippard, had tried to have this man's portrait hung in Independence Hall: and three times he had been denied. Decades before, no church would bury the infidel Paine. Now no city father would recognize him either. 'Who would not sooner be Thomas Paine there before the bar of
Jesus
," Lippard thundered to the crowd, "with all his virtues and errors about him, than one of those misguided bigots who refused his bones a grave? Think of the charity of Jesus before you answer." And with that stunning challenge, the most controversial novelist in the country ended his lecture.

A zealous writer on the subject of the Founding Fathers, Lippard had single-handedly created the iconic myth that the Liberty Bell cracked while ringing out news of the Declaration. Now, thanks to Lippard, it was Paine's turn for glory: he flooded back into the market in new editions, and America's most disgracefully neglected Founding Father was recalled from oblivion.

But up in New York, a much stranger resurrection was transpiring.
I had no choice in the matter
, claimed one minister from Rochester in the weeks after Lippard's speech. The spirit of the dead man had taken control of the Reverend Charles Hammond: "I would take my pen, and place myself in the attitude of writing, when all thought and care would be wholly abstracted from my mind. As my thoughts vanished, my hand would begin to move, and a word would be written. Then I would know what the word was." Soon customers wandering into the Fowler & Wells bookstore in Manhattan found these very same words published in a clothbound volume. For seventy-five cents, you could hear a dead man talk:

In the progress of the mind to the unseen world, there is no wonder within the range of human perception, analogous to transition of the spirit in what is called death. I will relate the incidents of my experience . . .

An unusual promise, to say the least. And even more unusual when you saw the title page:

Light From the Spirit World
The Pilgrimage
of
Thomas Paine
and others,
to the Seventh Circle
in
the Spirit World.

Lippard's listeners no longer needed to imagine their Man in the Brown Coat: Thomas Paine had come back from the dead to tell his own story.

I pace Broadway, imagining the faces staring out from the storefront of Paine's newest publisher. The skulls and plaster busts were arranged in an arc so that as you walked by the window the heads were always gazing out at you, both as you came and went past the store at 308 Broadway. Look up, and you would see the building's weatherbeaten facade, cracking away to reveal bits of plaster and exposed structural ribbing; staring down from above the doorway were two more mighty faces rendered in stone. Along the top of the store, a grand sign proclaimed FOWLER &WELLSP,HRENOLOGISTS &PUBLISHERS.

It's all gone now. The whole block is gone. The immense wholesale clothier shop of Carter, Kirtland & Company the grand sweeping staircases of the International Hotel, the white marble edifices owned by the Astors—all gone. Birds are crapping on the concrete, and plastic bags are rustling in the puny trees. What was once a thriving block of Broadway is now the Federal Plaza, an airless expanse with the brutalist monolith of the Federal Building at its center. I am utterly alone: even in these paranoid times, there are no security guards to be seen. You could imagine yourself in the empty heart of an emptied city here. Bordering one side of the plaza is a little street sign, looking impotent out here on a lonely Sunday, proclaiming itself AVENUE OF THE STRONGEST.

But 150 years ago this was an avenue of the weakest—the infirm—the doomed since birth. It was the avenue of the self-doubting and the self-seeking; where concrete bomb barriers stand now, signs once beckoned hypochondriacs inside. But it was also where you'd find America's most expansive poet pondering human destiny, and gazing upon all the varieties of Manhattan humanity. If you cared about changing the world, or simply about buying a grinning cat skull for a shiny quarter—and both pursuits had their fans—then 308 Broadway was where you went.

I walk across the plaza, trying to imagine where the store's entrance might have been in the 1850s. Skulls here; consultation rooms back there; books over here? But it's hard to picture it now. Nothing here; nothing back there; nothing over here. But I suppose the entrance would have been somewhere right around
there.
It's entombed under this slab of concrete. You'd push a door open—a little brass bell ringing to announce your entry—and inside the bookshelves and displays would stretch breathtakingly back. Hundreds of plaster heads gazed out of the recesses, their eyes closed and expressions relaxed in the calm of death. Curatorial notes and pamphlets accompanied each.

Bly, Frederick.
Blind, yet with large order and locality he was able
to keep a bookstore with success.
. .
The cast shows very small color,
as
without sight that organ cannot be cultivated. Died in 1857.

Hunt, Miss S.
Large language, number and order. She would count
her stitches when knitting, and her steps when walking.

John.
A
Chinaman, thejrst one seen in America; brought by Dr. Parker, a missionary, in 1839.

Wilson, George.
Colored. Hung at White Plains,
NY;
July 25,
1856 for the murder of Captain Palmer,
of
the schooner Endora
Imogene, and the alleged murder of the mate, after which he scuttled
the vessel at City Island, in Long Island Sound.
. .
he declined to tell
the place of his birth, or given any history
of himself We attended the
execution, and took the cast of his head.

Some heads scarcely needed a label: there was Washington's, and over here was Napoleon's. Still others had never borne any name at all: "Excessive Digestion (Name Lost)'' was all one head had to say for itself.

Here were polished plaster busts of ideal heads—"
Varnished
Easily Cleanable! Decided Ornamental."
—each one dotted and phrenologically notated. Over there were skeletons, "wired and hung, ready for use" for a mere $30; over there were life-sized, gorgeously detailed French anatomical wax mannequins, each filled with a full and uncensored complement of removable organs, painstakingly colored and textured to visceral perfection, yours for a princely $950. And gazing out upon it all in the store was a curiously familiar face. It was the very plaster visage once cast by Jarvis on Paine's deathbed. Wander past it and the pyramidal display of animal skulls, and there were shelves of innumerable books for sale—fifteen-cent copies of
Elements of Animal Magnetism
and
Essay
on Wages Showing the Necessity
of
a Workingman's Tariff;
muslin-bound volumes of
The Philosophy of Electrical Psychology
and
Human
Rights and Their Political Guaranties;
ghostly octavos of
Supernal
Theology
and Thomas Paine's posthumous memoirs.

I open them up in my hand.
Light frm the Spirit World
is a pretty odd book, and not least because the Library of Congress dryly lists its author as 'Thomas Paine (Spirit)." Dying, according to—well, let's just call him Toms—turns out to be fairly straightforward stuff: it passes with little fanfare. As he lies in his deathbed in New York City in 1809, the first indication that Paine's number is up is the arrival of an unnamed lost love, a girl who had died when they were both in their youth. "Nothing but the form of marriage was wanting to make us one in the sight of the world," he muses; she leads him from his bedside through the portal of death itself. There he meets William Penn and is reunited with Franklin and Washington; they pass through circle after circle of heavenly purification. Fortunately, readers of Hammond's book have some help in visualizing the seven circles of heaven, since he includes an illustration of. . . um, seven circles. Within these circles there is endless Socratic dialogue, with Paine confronted by the same issue again and again: whether the violence he helped unleash upon the country was in fact justified.

"I have seen war," one spirit snaps. "I have seen the causes of war. I never saw a cause of war equal in wrong to the war. No cause, which hitherto has produced war, has ever been so wretched for minds to bear, as the evils of war . . . Thou hast no right to wrong thy neighbor, even though he may be thy enemy." In the afterlife's absolute reckoning of sin, arguments about sovereignty don't hold much currency against the fundamental crime of violence.

Back in the earthly realm, the corporeal Tom—let us call him Tom,, with subscript to indicate his burial—
this
Tom fares little better. Tom
^s
atches a grave dug for Tom,, while listening in on a philosophical gravedigger: "Ah!"opines the fellow between shovelfuls of dirt. 'There are many who respect the talents of the dead, but few who care for the living." But there is no respect left for Tom,, even in death. His body is stiffening, his corpse cold and unwanted. A clergyman duly mumbles over Tom,, without much enthusiasm, about how "There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again."

It had better: publishers would need the paper someday. Toms, the Reverend Hammond claimed, already had a sequel in the works.

Set down Paine's ghostly tome and walk father back in Fowler &Wells, and a large sign directs you toward the consultation room:

If anyone sniggered at the wording, it has been politely ignored by history. But a steady stream of customers came in each day, in search of self-knowledge, in search of understanding and hope. For phrenology, as first formulated in the 1790s, claimed that the human brain grew and atrophied with use, and that
thought itself
was a tangible physical process.
Phrenologists carefully mapped which mental functions corresponded with which different parts of the brain and matched them with dozens of physical parameters of the skull.

I walk toward the invisible back of the store, to where the examining room stood. Phrenological charts and heads stared from every corner and flat surface: a thousand eyes upon you. Orson Fowler might invite you to sit down and take off your hat; then, calipers in hand, he'd set to examining thirty-seven dimensions of your head. The very top of your skull down to the beginning of your nose alone comprised five separate carefully measured arcs. Sometimes he'd pause to work his hands through your hair, gently feeling your bump of Destructiveness just over your ear, and feeling at the back of your head for a depressed organ of Amativeness. When was the last time you, strange customer, had someone running their fingers through your hair? And for the purpose of self-knowledge?

"The skull," Fowler would explain, "yields and shrinks in accordance with the increase and diminution of the brain within." This brain was a constantly changing organ, with the skull simply reflecting the changes within, like the bark upon a twisting and knotty tree. "The exercise of organs absorbs the portions of the skull which covers them, so as to render them thin," he said, "while inaction, and also excessive action, reduce their size, and allow the skull to become thick." Stop exercising parts of your brain and you'd literally become thick-skulled: a
bonehead
. But an overdeveloped organ could be a problem too. Fowler would talk of a girl who received a fracturing blow to her head that dangerously inflamed the Tune organ of her brain: ever since, she could scarcely stop singing. Ah, and then there was that case in Pennsylvania: a woman, a known glutton, who proved in Fowler's postmortem to have a skull whose Alimentiveness section was paper thin.

"So very thin"—Orson leaned in to listeners—"as to be
transparent."

And you? Why, of the thirty-seven dimensions of your skull, perhaps a few were over- or underdeveloped. Perhaps more than a few. But—there was hope! A phrenological chart, you see, was not your destiny: it was not descriptive but rather
prescriptive
, a guide to what you needed to work on in order to achieve a well-balanced brain. By conscious effort at regulating and altering your behavior, you could build up your mental organs and effect a permanent change in the very physical structure of your own brain. "Self Made or Never Made," declared the store motto. Whether people realized it or not, they were perpetually making themselves anew: the question was whether they were consciously working to make themselves
better
.

"Improvement
is the practical watch-word of the age," Fowler would insist. The patent office was bursting each week with new smokeless furnaces, new steel temperings, new fabrics and dyes; settlers were improving the westward lands; newspapers floated grand civic schemes for rising metropolises. Why, was not the New World itself an improvement on the Old? Right here in the store were two busts of Benjamin Franklin: one as a strapping young man, one as a wise old statesman. Very accurate, as a glance at his portrait over at Peale's Museum will confirm. Now, note how
different
the two heads are! Here, in his early days of siring bastards, we see Amativeness overly enlarged; later, as he crafted treaties and bifocal lenses, we see his bumps of Benevolence and Causality both more fully developed.

Fowler's measurements would continue around your bewildered head. Did you have children, then? Indeed. Just at the back of your skull, parallel with the top of your ears, was your organ of Philo-progenitiveness, regulating one's love of offspring. Too little, and you were cold and neglectful: too large, you were liable to be a doting and ineffectual parent. Ah, but there were even worse kinds of parents than that. "Children should never be governed by
punishment
," he'd say, wagging his finger. "Because all its forms and degrees constitutionally excite and therefore enlarge those very propensities you would subdue. No chastisement can ever be inflicted without the exercise of Combativeness and Destructiveness in the punisher, and therefore without increasing them in the punished." Thrashing a child really did hurt you more than it hurt him: you both eventually ended up with bad, criminal-looking skulls. But even the worst skull could be reformed with enough effort. Self-knowledge was but the first step.
All
in time—all could be fixed. The utterly ineffable thought, our very cognition, was coming within the reach of science.