The Compulsive Energy Building America

Review of Joshua Kendall, America’s Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2013), ISBN 978-1455502387, 304 pages, hardbound, $27.

What do the University of Virginia, Heinz ketchup, the hanging file, Youth Dew bath oil, and the first transatlantic flight all have in common? According to Josh Kendall in America’s Obsessives, they are all achievements of obsessionally driven innovators:

Thomas Jefferson, Henry Heinz, Melvil Dewey, Estée Lauder, and Charles Lindbergh, respectively. To this list of hyper-achievers, Kendall adds Alfred Kinsey, “The Rabid Orgasm Counter,” and batty batter Ted Williams, with passing reference to Steve Jobs. This collection makes for a fascinating popular introduction to the world of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), potentially a stimulus for achievement, which Kendall rightly distinguishes from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), a paralyzing force.

Kendall coins his own term, “obsessive innovator,” but he might have drawn on Andrew Brink’s open obsessionals, those “able to make creative use of adverse early experiences” (Obsession and Culture, p. 16) and his pioneering applications of attachment theory and object relations to biography, particularly as Kendall’s book is dedicated to Brink.

Nevertheless, Kendall does suggest that his heterogeneous innovators all suffered “adverse circumstances in early childhood” and responded by attempting to control their worlds, focusing on tiny details rather than people or events. They are the victims of “extreme parenting,” whether domineering, neglectful, or absent through loss or abandonment. As a consequence, they tend to become “friendless loners” incapable of forming mutually satisfying emotional bonds. Instead, they manipulate others and frequently

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the details of their own pasts, making them “fragmented individuals.” When Kendall does slip in a term from object relations, such as transitional object, he does not define it, which may be a problem for the intended audience of general readers.

Each chapter begins with a defining moment in his subjects’ lives, an effective narrative strategy. With Thomas Jefferson, it is the morning of July 1, 1776 when, among other things, Jefferson recorded the temperature three times, an obsession he maintained despite—or rather, because of—anxiety-producing situations, such as the resolution that the American colonies would separate from Britain. In fact, Jefferson was obsessed with minutiae his entire life. For example, he kept track of every penny he ever spent, and he even created the penny as we know it today.

Kendall then provides details of his subjects’ early lives and the various traumas they suffered. Jefferson’s mother was overbearing, and his father died when he was 14, leaving him with a lifelong rage against authority (or in attachment terms, an avoidant resistant pattern). Jefferson’s difficulty in forming intimate bonds does help explain why, after his wife died at a young age, he took up with her half-sister and his slave, Sally Hemings, 30 years his junior, whom he could control. Perhaps just as startling is his attempt to “re-write” the Bible, “by slicing and dicing eight Bibles” in order to reconstruct the life of Jesus, without any supernatural events—an effort he called “The Jefferson Bible.”

Such eye-opening glimpses into the complexity of these characters make Kendall’s book a compelling read. Henry Heinz, who attempted to relieve his psychic ills by eating a third of a pound of butter a day, successfully pioneered global branding (It sometimes seems that there is no other ketchup but Heinz?) and introduced Britain to canned baked beans, still a national obsession, suggesting yet another unexpected and far-reaching consequence of one person’s drivenness. Several of the men were notorious womanizers, not surprisingly, but in the case of pioneering librarian Melvil Dewey, this was unusually combined with an obsession with measurements and multiples of 10, which would become the basis for his library cataloguing decimal system, and for Alfred Kinsey, the sexologist, this grew out of an obsession with gall wasps.

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Charles Lindbergh represents the extreme example of a sex addict, who eventually maintained three German mistresses and his illegitimate children, as well as his American family. He was addicted to flight (in both senses) and had the connections in the air industry to carry out this subterfuge, although when on the ground in Germany he curiously relied on a VW Beetle to make his assignations. Lindbergh’s secret life was revealed by some of his German children about a decade ago, but Kendall has extended our knowledge in this text by interviewing a son.

Estée Lauder, who put on a face and an assumed identity to meet the faces that she compulsively made over all through her life, is the only woman in the collection. It would have been helpful to know why this is the case, whether there are fewer female obsessive innovators, or fewer ones who reach such prominence. Indeed, the selection process for the entire group is never made clear. Superstar slugger Ted Williams, whose biography closes the collection, seems to be the odd man out, although his single-minded focus—in his case on batting and his despicable treatment of women—matches that of the other men. It may be that this piece suffers a little from too many statistics for all but the most devoted baseball fan, perhaps revealing one of Kendall’s own obsessions?

Kendall claims to have been inspired by Lytton Strachey’s ground-breaking biographical collection Eminent Victorians, but Kendall is not as scathing as Strachey. To his credit, he does point out that mainstream biographers overlook the evidence for obsessionality and inexcusably ignore the findings and insights of psychology in general, or go so far as to put a positive spin on the impairments of their subjects. Yet, like Strachey, Kendall demonstrates some ambivalence towards his subjects, as hinted at in his book’s over-reaching sub-title, “The Compulsive Energy that Built a Nation.”

In his conclusion, he asserts that “particularly in these tense economic times, America could certainly benefit from a new generation of obsessive innovators” (p. 264). Surely, however, it could be argued that these emotionally stunted, self-involved (and admittedly suffering) individuals who tend to accrue vast wealth partially through stingy treatment of their employees, must bear some responsibility for bringing America to its current state of extreme ine-

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quality and economic dysfunction. Obsession and its various manifestations in collecting and hoarding are endemic in our consumer culture, and Josh Kendall gives us a lively depiction of some of the extreme cases, but the darker consequences of this drivenness on our social fabric, the environment and international relations will need to be further probed.

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