Frederick Law Olmsted: Tormented Genius

Review of Justin Martin, Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted: Abolitionist, Conservationist, and Designer of Central Park (Cambridge, MA: De Capo, 2011), i-xiv, 461 pages, ISBN 978-0-306-81881-3, Hardcover, $30.00.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is best known as the father of landscape architecture, with Central Park in New York City being his greatest achievement. Olmsted did more, however, than “just” design some of America’s greatest parks (as well as model suburbs, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol and other public spaces, Stanford University, and the Biltmore Estate). Justin Martin, journalist and author of the best-seller Greenspan: The Man Behind Money (2000) and Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon (2002), provides a life study that is as lively as it is comprehensive of the troubled man who left an indelible imprint on the country’s social and political landscape.

Martin, whose notes detail his meticulous research, devotes considerable time to Olmsted’s formative years and long string of careers, some ill-fated. Olmsted experienced misery as a sailor, failure as a farmer, and frustration as a gold mine supervisor as well as success as a journalist and as leader of the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. For the psychohistorian and psychobiographer, Genius of Place is of particular interest for two very different reasons: it is the story of how Olmsted significantly shaped the American psyche and the darker story of the demons that simultaneously fueled and sabotaged his personal and professional life.

Martin declares on page one that “Olmsted may well be the most important American figure that the average person knows least about” and makes a compelling case for this assertion. Certainly, Olmsted worked aggressively, and successfully, to influence the way people thought and lived. Like many antebellum Northerners, Olmsted was a gradualist, believing that slavery should be phased out over time. In 1852, the newly launched The New York Times hired Olmsted to provide a factual, non-emotional assess-

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ment of the arguments implicit in the best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its imitators. Olmsted travelled through the South, admiring its natural beauty but gradually coming to see the complete inefficiency of slavery: “Whites didn’t value work because work was fit only for slaves. Slaves—lacking incentive—didn’t do much of it either” (p. 85). He became, in the words of one of Martin’s chapter titles, “a red-hot abolitionist.” In a series of Times dispatches, Olmsted appealed to reason rather than emotion to bolster his arguments that the South’s culture as well as its economy was suffering from the region’s Peculiar Institution. His articles not only helped change the mindset concerning the South for untold Northerners, but when updated and published as The Cotton Kingdom in Britain in 1861, they, according to Martin, helped bring about a shift in loyalties, contributing to the British decision to withhold from the South any further military support and to refuse to recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate government.

Olmsted was also a pioneering environmentalist, serving as a catalyst for the early efforts to preserve both Yosemite and Niagara Falls. Preservation and conservation were foreign concepts to most Americans, who still celebrated their nation as one of limitless land and resources. It was again Olmsted’s rational arguments, based in extensive study, rather than emotional claims and predictions, that led to his success.

Olmsted grasped early the psychological need for spaces dedicated to recreation in crowded cities designed only for work and housing. Parks offered the masses an emotional safety valve: a place to play, to meditate, to commune with others and with nature. Parks were vital to healthy urban living. Olmsted was particularly proud of the fact that the tens of thousands who visited Central Park every day came from all walks of life. He termed Central Park, like the other public spaces he designed, “a democratic development of the highest significance” (p. 153).

During the Civil War, Olmsted witnessed soldiers so demoralized by poor diet, miserable conditions, and exhaustion that they were suffering from what he called “mental disease” (p. 189). As the leader of the United States Sanitary Commission (forerunner of the American Red Cross), he insisted that the government recognize that to be successful, soldiers needed healthy food, rest, and proper

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medical care as much as winning military strategies. Overseeing the relief efforts at Antietam, Olmsted was immensely gratified to see that his persistence paid off in the form of dry goods, food, and medical supplies. Colleagues praised his integrity and talent for organization but feared his “impracticable temper [and] his irritable brain” (p. 216).

For all his brilliance concerning mass psychology, Olmsted suffered enormously when it came to his own emotional life. His mother died when he was four. Martin devotes only five paragraphs to this event and its aftermath. The official cause of death was an accidental overdose of laudanum (an opium-based painkiller). Martin speculates that Charlotte Olmsted might have been a suicide, the result of either post-partum depression (Frederick Olmsted’s younger brother had been born six months earlier) or self-doubt and recrimination following a religious revival. As for the effect of this death on her four-year-old son, Martin notes only that Frederick Olmsted immediately “began working to blot out the memory” of the scene of his mother’s deathbed, and for the rest of his life refused to discuss it. The fact that the second wife of Olmsted’s father was the daughter of a druggist does not figure into Martin’s assessment of young Olmsted’s somewhat strained relationship with his rather puritanical step-mother. Martin treads lightly when it comes to assigning childhood influences to Olmsted’s later character. Although Martin uses the term “bi-polar disorder” only once in his assessment of Olmsted, most of his writings suggest that Martin sees Olmsted as suffering from problems induced by his brain chemistry more than the dynamics of early relationships.

After many women spurned Olmsted’s affections (Martin suggests they were as turned off by “his foibles, his quirky behavior, [and] his wild notions” as they were by his inability to settle into a lucrative profession), he married the widow of his beloved brother. They suffered the deaths of two children—one died at three months from cholera only eight days after being in a carriage accident (Olmsted fell asleep at the reins, sustaining a leg injury that left him permanently crippled). Suffering from what Martin terms similar to today’s post-traumatic stress syndrome after witnessing some of the horrors of the Civil War, Olmsted was treated

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with mercury for his nausea and perpetual ringing headache. He soon developed jaundice, furious itchiness, and became hypersensitive to both exertion and excitement.

Martin calls Olmsted “a bouillabaisse of symptoms,” which included periods of frantic activity followed by bouts of depression, a sequence recognized today as the hallmark of bipolar disorder. Olmsted’s pettiness and tendency to pick fights and nurse hurts exhausted and exasperated even his friends and family, as did his penchant for working non-stop for days. Insomnia plagued Olmsted. A doctor who specialized in nervous disorders noted that Olmsted’s “over-exertion does not produce the sensation of fatigue” (p. 379). Instead, Olmsted’s mind raced, and he found it nearly impossible to focus on any single project for long. “His energy level was staggering,” notes Martin, making what he was able to accomplish “quite simply amazing,” but he also became “increasingly prone to both despondency and panic” (p. 206). He suffered periodic breakdowns, including a bout of hysterical blindness.

As he aged, Olmsted suffered increasingly from what Martin terms “Alzheimer’s or some other kind of senile dementia” (p. 392). Olmsted’s father had been a director of an insane asylum, and it was Olmsted’s worst fear that he end up in such a place. That fear was realized in 1898 when his family committed Olmsted, then in his 70s, to the McLean Asylum in Belmont, Massachusetts, whose grounds he had designed.

“Tormented genius” has become something of a cliché. Resisting the jargon of armchair psychology for the most part, Martin reveals the terrible beauty of the truth of this term in conveying a life that was equal parts torment and achievement.

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