The Trouble with Tom (13 page)

John Brown's last letter before he was led to the gallows was to . . . his phrenologist.

If John Brown couldn't achieve utopia with guns, Orson Fowler would through books. Fowler readers woke up in the morning and bathed themselves according to the precepts of Fowler's
Water Cure Library
; after tending to a garden raised from seed packets sold by Fowler's Broadway store, they then ate a virtuous breakfast of porridge and cold water from
The Economy of Food:
Or, What Shall We Eat ("Without exception, both rich and poor in America eat extravagantly of animal food . . . Every family should eat beans and peas."); then they could go to the job they'd been phrenologically directed toward by the Fowler & Wells career guide
Choice of Pursuits
, and comport themselves brilliantly thanks to their Fowler
Manual of Business and Guide to Success
. Mer jotting a few business meeting notes in Fowler shorthand learned from his Phonographic Teacher, they could go to lunch on food prepared from the Hydro-pathic Cook-Book, perhaps while perusing a volume of poetry or a novel from Fowler's press. Then, once their day was done, they could work out in a Fowler-approved gymnasium, and finally arrive back home to the gigantic octagonal mansion they had built in accordance with Fowler's blueprints in
Home for AlL Or a New, Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building
.

This last book left Fowler's most visible legacy. Scattered across the United States to this day are a motley collection of half-baked gingerbread Victorians built by Fowler's disciples. They go by local nicknames like the Bandbox, the Inkwell, or—less imaginatively—the Octagon House. They are the living remnants of a vision that seized Fowler as he prepared to build his own family mansion in upstate New York in the 1840s. "In looking about for some general plan," he wrote, "I said to myself, Why not take our pattern from NATURE? Her forms are mostly SPHERICAL . . .What should we think of a square apple, or right-angled egg?"' Building a truly spherical house with all the walls bent like a barrel, he reasoned, would be beyond the skills of most local carpenters. But an octagon—why, that should be hardly any trouble at all.

The idea was not a new one: the Founding Fathers whose skulls Fowler so admired were all well familiar with the form. The ruling gentry in Thomas Paine's hometown had their own octagonal temple, and Thomas Jefferson had built an octagonal house for his daughter. In fact, Jefferson was so delighted with the result that he also built her a pair of octagonal outhouses to accompany it. But Fowler brought a new and nearly religious fervor to octagons. They allowed more windows and thus were lighter, healthier structures, he insisted—and his readers all knew how essential good health was to the moral improvement of the world. Fowler imagined cement and glass houses built around a strange array of new inventions-an inviting showcase kitchen that formed the center of the house, taps with running hot and cold water, a central heating system, and most shocking of all, indoor toilets. "To squeamish maidens and fastidious beaux this point is not submitted," Fowler snapped, "but matrons, the aged and the feeble, are asked is not such a closet a real household necessity and luxury?"

Home for All
was a hit: the eight-sided panacea was immediately demanded by fashionable homebuilders across the country. Henry Ward Beecher built himself an octagonal house; so did P. T. Barnum. Clarence Darrow spent his childhood in one. In many towns, the builders of these homes came from the two intersecting groups of readers that Fowler's works had always appealed to: doctors and ministers. Some of the latter wryly claimed that the octagonal form was ideal because they couldn't be cornered by the devil—and, as was alleged of one minister in upstate New York, "so he could see the Lord coming from any angle." Imitators upped the ante to twelve- and even sixteen-sided houses.

Circulars distributed from Fowler's store in 1855 announced a Vegetarian Settlement Company, a joint-stock venture to create an "Octagon City" in Kansas of four miles square—or rather, almost square, as it was to be a giant octagon—in which vegetarian settlers living on octagon-shaped parcels of land would build octagonal farmhouses that radiated outward from an octagonal downtown of octagonal public buildings, culminating in one immense central octagonal structure and an octagonal public green. Octagon City was also raising capital to construct "A Hydropathic Establishment, an Agricultural College, a Scientific Institute, a Museum of Curiosities and Mechanic Arts, and Common Schools"—all octagonal, of course. It was to be a glorious vision of the progressive future, with neither slavery, meat, nor alcohol tainting its purity. Checks poured into 308 Broadway, with prospective settlers committing anywhere from $50 to $10,000 in funds toward the project.

Right here, along this Manhattan counter—this mahogany counter that no longer exists, that wind blows through-and filed in these rolltop desks that our eyes can no longer see, the letters came each day, excited and hopeful. A blacksmith from Rahway, a mapmaker from Philadelphia, a printer from Tennessee, and a whole contingent of farmers from Pontiac, Michigan; envelopes both scrawled out and finely inscribed by idealistic tradesmen and farmers rolled in from across the nation. Utopia at last!

What families transported by their Fowler magazine articles into visions of pure country life among the glorious octagons found at the end of the trail, though, was not quite what the woodcut illustrations in the
Phrenological Journal
had pictured. Settlers had been promised working gristmills, fine public buildings, and a veritable fairyland of Kansan natural beauty. What they got was mud and desolation. The splendiferous Central Octagon building proved to be a windowless mud-plastered cabin of about two hundred square feet. . . and it was
square.
The founders had promised tools for every farmer: settlers found precisely one plow provided to serve the entire city. The bewildered vegetarian pioneers contemplated these woes in wretched lean-tos and huts built of bark, shivering miserably on their dirt floors, since there were only two stoves for one hundred settlers. The promoter fled, and his eager and trusting Octagonians were quickly decimated by malaria and Indian raids. The settlement's few survivors lacked even the wood to build coffins for their dead children.

By the following spring, all trace of Octagon City was gone.

Bedraggled Octagonians returning back East found yet more death and despair. The Panic of 1857 hit Fowler's business badly, and he was forced to rent out his own giant octagonal family home as a boardinghouse. It was not a great success. His newfangled cement walls had been improperly sealed, with fecal matter from the house's cesspool seeping through the walls and into the drinking water. The tenants of his octagonal palace-the healthiest building in America-died in fevered agony, killed off in a horrific plague of typhoid.

The talking heads are all silent now. Here, where the faces of worthy men stared, and the plaster heads of even worthier men stared back—they are all gone. The heads are scattered to auctions and attics, shattered into dust or stowed in trunks. The women's rights that Fowler fought for, the slaves' rights that his assistant was hanged for, even the dietary and antidrug crusades that customers went upon, these are the ordinary tasks of thousands of federal workers in this building. The rights of women and minorities are enshrined in law; food safety laws and public health statistics are pored over here. This place that was once the fringe of head-reading oddballs now sees some of their very same notions made mundane, filled in with black ink, and submitted in triplicate. But if there are any phrenological busts, it is as the stuff of quaint decoration; all memory that this little plot of Broadway had once carried on the Founding Fathers' of belief in human perfectibility, and carried it out under the approving stares and immortal death-gazes of those Fathers—all this was lost.

Yes, here was a place of Improvement. Indeed, this
place
was improved and improved upon until there was nothing left to improve. After spending decades as Fowler &Wells, 308 Broadway was a travel agency, then it was a 1930s Automat, a shining chromium vision of the beautiful waiterless future, where pies and sandwiches were delivered to you through coin-op slots. By the 1960s, 308 Broadway was back in the business of reshaping brains, so to speak: it became a liquor store. But then one day all the tenants of this building, and the clothier's next door, and the Italian-language newspaper
Il
Progressive
farther down—and everyone, all the way down the block—received eviction notices.

Get out in eight days.

Do you see that tall, tall Federal Building, silent as the grave on a Sunday afternoon? It crept in upon little concrete feet: although it was the U.S. government's second-largest building, second only to the Pentagon itself, it opened to deafening silence in August of 1968. There was no ribbon cutting, no press release—nothing to acknowledge its existence, save for its addition to local postal routes. The whole thing was a shameful affair, and everyone knew it: the Architects Council had deemed the project an "architectural disaster" as early as 1962, long before the first piling even went into the ground. And when the first piling did go into the ground, it really
did
become an architectural disaster. See, this stretch of Broadway—the building where Fowler & Wells once stood, as well as all its neighbors—it's still supposed to be here. The buildings be find them were slated to get knocked down and replaced. But when the first Federal Building pilings were driven in, the ground shifted and settled all the way down the block: load-bearing walls of scores of neighboring buildings suddenly cracked and crumbled.

The spirit of Thomas Paine speaks no more here. The face that Jarvis modeled no longer gazes out upon New Yorkers: the very place itself is gone. Court orders condemning the block were issued, demolition crews came out from Brooklyn, and soon it was all gone: the luncheonette, the synagogue, the jewelry store, the clothier's shop full of summer wear. They dynamited this block's past, knocked down its present, and for all I know bulldozed its future too. This barren plain was left in its place, and what was once the shining light of Fowler's empire was carted out to the Meadowlands in lumbering dump trucks, like trash in so many giant dustbins. But every now and then, a random bit of glimmering debris shines out from all our trash: the sunlight catches it just right, and you pause and try to figure out what it could possibly have once meant to someone.

Look—here, look at this paper. Just another useless head-reading chart from Fowler's Broadway office, this one dated September 27, 1856. Large Benevolence and Philoprogenitiveness, but far too little Cautiousness in this skull.

"Rev. M. D. Conway," reads the patient's name.

Personal Effects

TICK TICK TICK
.

A librarian, clicking a pencil against her teeth, is sitting at the head of the two long tables, watching over us like a headmistress watches children eating porridge.

Tick tick
. Tick-a click-click.

I'm the only one in Columbia University's rare-book room without a laptop. I've nothing but a grubby notebook that I bought at a bodega as I walked up Broadway I believe the stationer who produced it is the illustrious
Made in China
, these being the only words to appear anywhere on its yellowed cover.

I am also the only one looking
up
in this room: everyone else looks down, absorbed in work. Even the librarian looks down, particularly while she observes us: her eyes roll up and over her spectacles, and then back down to her own desk, all without any wasted motion. Chittering away around me are the innumerable key clicks of a dozen other scholars at long tables, picking through boxes of manuscripts and personal effects, all the while recording their findings into ones and zeroes, tip-a-tick-a-tip-a-tick-tick, like little mice gnawing through an immense Cheshire cheese. That is all you hear in this room: the quiet whoosh of humidity-control ventilation, the clicking of keys, the shuffling of papers, the whump of archival boxes, and the occasional sound of a magnifying glass being set down.

"Ahem."

The book trolley arrives on noiseless casters, and I retrieve a thick green archival container from it: BOX 45, MONCURE CONWAY. I untie the string and ease open the box carefully, and a sheaf of photographs instantly spill forth like a dead body slumping out of a murder mystery closet. I look up, embarrassed, but nobody notices. They're all still looking down. The security camera hovers above in an upside-down black glass turret jammed into the ceiling, but I don't think it's watching either. I look down and see scattered Victorian and Edwardian faces, family photos of the dead and forgotten, and atop them all is an ancient monochrome view over open fields, leading the eye to a string of snow-covered houses. "Falmouth, VA," the caption reads. I stare at this one for a long time: it seems impossibly far from here, from this deadened room of clicking laptops: the smoke in the chimneys, the horses and the carriages, the crunch of snow underfoot.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are dead.

Only for the moment, please: you will have the opportunity to make it permanent at a later date. Now, imagine the contents of your desk, your bureau, and your closets, as they stand at this exact moment, without your having time to sort them out, imagine those drawers being emptied into
fifty
or sixty archival boxes and sent to a local library.

Okay. Now a
hundred years
pass. Nobody looks into your boxes because, I am sorry to say, you are not very interesting to your grandchildren. But eventually, after you have passed from all living memory, someone
does
open a box. This will be a young man you have never met, and who cannot have met anyone who ever knew you: in other words, a total and utter stranger.

Could he, I wonder, make any sense of who you were?

"Moncure Conway, box forty-four," the librarian tells me, and I carry it back to my seat. This one appears to be the vertical contents of the deceased's office: the pictures off his walls. They are still in their frames and jumbled together, as if they had been hurriedly swept aside to make space for the next tenant. And they are of everything and anything: an old 1873
Punch
cartoon about a school board dispute; a signed Rosetti print with part of its frame ripped away, an engraving of the Harvard campus in 1850; a daguerreotype labeled "Inglewood, Our House." One is a pencil portrait of a man, without any caption or identification at all. The back simply reads: