Fowler's phrenologists

 Fowler and
his brother Lorenzo pounded out books arguing against tight-lacing
in women’s clothes, and for daily bathing. Convinced that the
plasticity of the brain meant that there could be no such thing as
permanent depravity, Orson pestered the head of Sing Sing prison
to turn prisons into reforming institutions, and “declared war on the
gallows” with campaigns against capital punishment; he pointedly
published a magazine titled The Prisoners Friend, and vociferously
argued for the educability of the retarded and insane. And if, he
wondered aloud and loudly, we may all progress in our mental
development, what cause was there any longer for holding back
women? Or blacks?
Reformers flocked to the Fowler & Wells publishing house.
Margaret Fuller became one of Fowler’s authors: so did Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, Horace Greeley, and Susan B. Anthony.
Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, considered her youthful
consultations with Orson’s brother and ‘partner phrenologist Lor-
enzo as nothing short of a conversion (experience: “How can the
value of the results of that month, extending through a lifetime, be
put into words?” Educational titan Horace Mann went so far as to
name his own son after pioneering phrenologist George Combe,
explaining, “I declare myself a hundred times more indebted to
Phrenology than to all the metaphysical works I ever read.” As they
visited the Broadway store, these enthusiasts might have even
noticed one ardently idealistic Fowler employee—well, all of them
were ardent idealists. But this one, John, was especially exercised
over slavery—~“as though his own soul hard been pierced,” Frederick
Douglass marveled after meeting him. He eventually moved to
Kansas, joining a wave of reformist settlers struggling to outnumber
pro-slavery settlers. And it was that quiet and intense Fowler clerk
who, armed with two hundred “Beecher’s Bibles”-rifles financed
by New England reformists—made a disastrous raid upon the
federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
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 Sc Wells career guide Choice sf
Pursuits, and comport themselves brilliantly thanks to their Fowler
Manual of Business and Guide to Success. After 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 Cooh—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
like the Bandbox, the Inkwell, or—less imaginatively——
the Octagon House. They are the living remnants of a vision that
Fowler as he prepared to build his own family mansion in
upstate New York in the 1840s. “In looking about for some
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 Iefferson 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 builtiaround 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 fasti-
dious 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 I-lydropathic Establishment,
an Agricultural College, a Scientific Institute, a Museum of Curi-
osities 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
maprnaker 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 illustra-
tions in the Phrenological journal had pictured. Settlers had been
promised working gristmills, fine public buildings, and a veritable
fairyland of Kansan natural beauty. Vl/‘hat 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 for 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 settle-
ment’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.