BackStory; The Pursuit: A History of Happiness

This is backstory. I'm Ed Ayers. Well, do you want to be really happy? You could stay here in America or move very far away. This is coverage of the World Happiness Report. It ranks the happiest countries on Earth. A few years ago, America was 11th. But in 2015, the news is not so happy. Out of 158 countries, the United States came in 15th. The US might be slipping in the rankings, but Americans have long held that the pursuit of happiness is their self-evident right. Today, on backstory, we'll explore how the meaning of that pursuit has changed cross time. From the 19th century origins of the self-help movement to why Americans in the 1920s were obsessed with recording the sound of happiness. Oh, people. Oh, people. What's suing happiness in America today on backstory? Don't go away. Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities,

the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guy. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Bellow, and I'm here with Peter Oath. Hey, Brian. And Ed Ares is with us. Hey, Brian. We're going to begin today with a big debate over a tiny mark, a period, or maybe a comma. It's found in the declaration of independence. The sort of thing scholars love to argue about. I don't buy the Diacritical Mark's explanation as an explanation for why those dashes are there in Boat Island. The abandonment of heavy capitalization, the rational use of italics and caps and small caps. I'm not sure he really distinguishes between a period and a dash for instance. Well, no.

If you have no idea what any of that means, neither do we. But that's okay. We sent reporter Jessica Smith to cover a recent conference at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. called punctuating happiness. And we asked her to help us unpack this controversy. Yeah, Peter, it was very dense. And for a non-ecademic like me, it was very intimidating. And I will admit to you that for the first hour or so, I sat in the back googling terms like Diacritical Mark and so it was just like trying to follow the discussion. But when I calmed down, it started to come into focus. And the question they were debating was pretty clear. The question was, is there a comma or a period after the phrase pursuit of happiness? A comma or a period. It's not an easy question to answer actually. The Declaration's original parchment is really faded. All you see in that spot now is a smudge. The most common reproduction of the Declaration and what you see on souvenir mugs and textbooks shows a period.

But that version was copied from an engraving of the original made in 1823. And Peter, it doesn't help that Thomas Jefferson didn't include a period in any of his drafts of the Declaration. Sometimes used a comma, sometimes a semi-colon. And so all these scholars were packed into this conference at the National Archives to settle the issue. They fell into two camps. Let's call them team comma and team dot. So you're in the dot camp. I'm pro dot. So that is Woody Halton. We can call him team dot. He teaches history at the University of South Carolina. What I do when I see a period, I breathe. And it's while you're breathing, you're sort of inhaling that last thought. And so I'm pro dot because I think it will cause people to pause when they read that key phrase, which certainly is my personal favorite phrase. And I think it is for most Americans, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And so there's actually, I think,

some danger in removing that dot. Team comma was led by Danielle Allen. She's a scholar at Harvard University and her research into the punctuation question set off the whole debate. And she was the driving force behind this whole conference. So during the conference, she shared this story about why to her the comma is so important. I stood behind a group of high school kids reading out a text of the declaration that had this period in it. And they got to that, you know, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And they said, yes. And they turned around on their heels and they walked away. They didn't finish reading the sentence. Allen's point is that if Thomas Jefferson didn't use a period, and he used a comma instead, that means he wanted us to keep on reading. He wanted us to read the entire sentence, including what comes after pursuit of happiness in order to get the full meaning of the sentence. But here's the problem. Most people don't know what comes next. I had no idea until this conference. Do you guys?

Yeah, I should. I'll let Allen tell you in. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments, or instituted among men, driving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Well, I can understand why those kids stop. Yes, it's really, really long. Now, you might be saying to yourself, and you probably are, why does this matter? What does this sense have to do with my happiness? But it matters, and Allen says that when you read the whole sentence, the logic changes. She says ideas like laying a foundation of new government pop out, and she elaborates a bit on this when I spoke to her after the conference. My reading returns focus on the responsibility of citizens

to take responsibility for their government, and to see that that responsibility involves balancing individual rights with collective safety and happiness. In other words, the pursuit of happiness isn't just about your individual happiness. Allen's arguing that her comma binds the pursuit of happiness to the whole nation through choosing the government. The debate in the end isn't so much about the smudge itself. It's about how Americans ought to read the words around it. Jessica, locked in this conference with a bunch of academics at the archives, were you tempted to slip out and actually take a look at the declaration itself, maybe get some on-the-fly interpretation from passing tourists? I did, I did. I left the auditorium. I left the world of academic inside baseball, and I went into the world of mortals. I visited the hall,

where the parchment is kept. I even went to the coffee shop as people were digesting the whole experience of seeing this incredible document. So I asked me, I wanted to know what people thought. They heard the phrase, pursuit of happiness. What does it mean to them? And here's a sampling of the responses that I got. To me, pursuit of happiness is also about choice and that you can have the ability to make whatever choices you want in your life. It means that we all have a responsibility to care for one another and pursue in our own happiness, ensure that as a community that we reach out to those less fortunate. Everybody deserves to go for what makes them happy and in their own way, with the help of government and that's my thought on pursuit of happiness. And those were the voices of Bevin Rolf Spenser from Denver, Colorado, Natania Holmes from Houston, Texas, and Daniel Takayama from Hawaii. Wow, it's almost like those tourists are as divided as the academics.

Everyone seems to think they've got their own right to interpret the pursuit of happiness anyway they want. And in fact, one really interesting thing that Daniel Allen told me during the conference is that even as the founding fathers were writing the declaration, they were arguing over the very meaning of the word happiness. You might even say that disagreeing about happiness makes Americans happy. It appears to be an American tradition. Every few months a new survey is released claiming to measure in one form or another American happiness. This year alone we've seen headlines about the happiest states in the union, the happiest jobs, even what political leanings are most likely to make you happy. These surveys rely on polling Americans about whether they consider themselves happy. But what should we make of their answers when the meaning of happiness is so subjective?

Across history, how America has to find happiness has fluctuated as much as any opinion poll. In fact, as we just heard, it's been shifting ever since the right to pursue happiness was enshrined in the declaration of independence. Today we'll map those shifting meanings and explore what versions of happiness different generations of Americans have pursued. We'll explore the 19th century origins of the modern self-help movement and also find out why some of the most popular recordings of the 1920s prominently featured the sound of happiness laughter. Yeah, but for right now, Peter, I want to know something. Jessica told us something that is really no laughing matter at all. It really has to do with the foundation of the nation. She said that even the founders themselves weren't exactly sure what they meant by the pursuit of happiness. We all know you've read a lot of Jefferson

probably too much. Given all your reading, Peter, I want to know what did Jefferson mean by the pursuit of happiness? I mean, was he talking to me about my happiness as an individual? Or was he talking to the nation about pursuing a kind of collective happiness? Well, he's not doing either one directly right. I think you've got to split the difference. And it's a nice way to put it. Is he speaking to you? Well, I'd return the question, who are you? And if you are someone who is a citizen who's active in creating this society, and that speaks to your drive as an individual to create a family, to secure its prosperity and welfare and flourishing, and that's going to contribute to the larger good. Oh, gosh, Peter. That sounds so wonderful, but no.

I mean, because if you're a citizen, it sounds like you better be a guy, and you better be white. You better have some property, right? Yes, you have to be a household head. You have to have civic standing. You have to be a citizen. You have to be part of it. Those ideas all come together. But if you are, for instance, a child, a wife, a daughter, son, or a servant or a slave, then it's much different. Then it works like this. Jefferson uses the term happiness to describe that state of well-being for those who are dependent on him. You'll be happy if you're well-fed, Ed. That's right. You'll be happy if you can go to sleep at night not worrying about how you're going to feed yourself and your dependence the next day. No, you're entirely dependent, and I can make you happy. Let's ready, Peter. We appreciate that. So to answer Brian's question, Jefferson was talking to everybody

but through the lens of a household and of a certain kind of hierarchy. Yes. He lives in a completely different world, and I think that's what we need to keep in mind, and we tend to abstract from what he says in the Declaration, which is addressed to those people who can pursue. Remember, there are people who are in no position to pursue anything in the world that he lives in. Peter, we know that the whole nature of the political economy has changed. It no longer resides inside the household. It's dispersed to factories, to the service sector. We also know that the nature and hierarchy of family themselves have changed. They're really much more egalitarian. Talk to my kids about that. So after all these centuries of pursuing happiness and all of these changes in family and the political economy and government, have we achieved happiness?

What would Jefferson say? Well, it's up to you, Brian. You happy? I'll tell you. I think what's changed is it's a matter of scale and that idea of the patriarch's responsibility for the happiness of those dependent on him. That's no longer there because the household is no longer the unit of production and the family head, whether it's a father or a mother, doesn't have the power to deliver the goods. I mean that literally. I think we tend to look to the government with deep ambivalence. We may think that we are self-sovereigns. We determine our own course in life. But at the end of the day, we look to the larger economy, to the market, and those who are responsible for managing the market to deliver those things, to make it possible to achieve the satisfaction of our needs, to make it possible for us to enjoy family life

and the tranquility of ease. That's why we're not happy with them because they're not making us happy. I think that's right. And why is it that at every presidential election and the real question is, how has the economy been doing under the stewardship of the current regime or administration? I think that you were four years ago. Exactly. Exactly right. I think it comes back to those very fundamental questions of somebody's responsible for creating the conditions in which we can enjoy this happiness and we define it very subjectively now, very personal. But it actually comes down to the same thing. I think it's a sense of possibility and satisfaction, opportunity and enjoyment, that they're all out there and they're all present in Jefferson's formulation, but it's much more starkly defined and it's defined in terms of the household and household governance. So Peter, pursuit of happiness and seems like a fairly weak foundation in which to build a new nation,

did Jefferson know that we were always going to be pursuing and never actually capturing happiness? Is that why that part of that phrase is there? I think for Jefferson, the pursuit of happiness has to be understood on two entirely different time scales. Happiness is something that we can grasp as individuals and feel in our family lives and in the satisfaction of knowing that we're providing for the next generation. But what that adds up to over time is a diffusion of happiness both across through time and across space. He sees that there's land out there in the West for the thousands to the thousands generation to create new farms, new families, new households, new opportunities to achieve that thing, happiness, and to provide for the happiness of succeeding generations. So Peter, you're saying the pursuit part of pursuit of happiness actually implied a kind of open idleness that could actually be a kind of a map for our own happiness and the world that we live in today?

I think that's absolutely right, Ed. And he knows things will change. He doesn't know how they will change. Music Speaking of change, Jessica Smith, the reporter we heard from earlier, says the National Archives is considering posting an alternate version of the Declaration on its website, one that features a clear comma after life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Happy days are here again, the skies above are clear again. We're going to take a quick break when we get back an eccentric clockmaker figures out what's making unhappy Americans tick. You're listening to back story. We'll be right back. There's no one who can doubt it now. So let's tell the world about it now. Happy days are here again.

For your sake. We're back with back story. I'm Peter Onof. I'm Brian Bellow. And I'm Ed Ayers. Today on the show, we're exploring the different ways that Americans have pursued their happiness. Now, for most women in the 1800s, the path to a happy life as they saw it was pretty straightforward. I certainly think a happy marriage is the highest condition of human life. Marriage, in its truest type, is a spiritualizing life, the union of the mightiest and subtlest forces, working for the noblest results. These are lines on the diaries of two New England women, Catherine Sedgwick and Gail Hamilton. Considering their obvious reference for marriage, you may be surprised to hear that neither of them ever married and that was not for lack of suitors, but by choice. Sedgwick proudly wrote that it was her high opinion of marriage that kept her from, quote, adventuring in it. Meaning that precisely because she thought

that it was such a happy condition that if she thought she couldn't reach that happiness with that particular man, she wasn't going to get married to him. This is sociologist, Juja Beren. She studied the diaries of North Eastern spinsters, as they were called, in the decades before the Civil War. So if you marry someone with whom you can't be that happy, you also fail the public duty to make the world a better place, somehow, by kind of increasing this happiness and generating more morality and raising happy children. So I think they took that kind of seriously. Beren says that giving up on married life didn't mean these women had to opt out of happiness. Instead, they focused their energies on careers, often as teachers, writers, and nurses. If you think this career-centered happiness sounds like a very 21st-century notion of self-fulfillment, think again. 19th-century spinsters

weren't just asking themselves, what can I do to make myself happy? I think that they first asked about usefulness, and usefulness and happiness were very intimately connected. So they didn't ask how can I be happy, although, obviously, they also thought about themselves, but they also thought about what am I doing in the world? Why am I here? And that was a very troubling thought if they couldn't answer it. Beren says the diaries of these women show just how much they agonized over making themselves useful, seeing it as nothing less than their obligation took God. Little women author, Louisa May Alcott, maybe one of the most famous spinsters of the era, enlisted as a wartime nurse in the 1860s. I love Louisa May Alcott's diary as she's going off to the Civil Wars and nurse. Yes. And she's very explicit about this. What am I to do to be abuse? And even though she feels poorly suited to being a nurse,

and she really was. Yes, she was. But bless her heart, as we say in the South, she did her best. And then she had to be bailed out. Her father had to go and get her. Yeah. She got sick. Yeah. Yeah. Alcott's nursing career ended with typhoid fever and nightmares about treating hundreds of men who never healed. It's not a story that sounds very, well, happy. And like Alcott, many of the women whose lives Beren studied, didn't experience much personal pleasure from their pursuits. And Beren actually sees many of them as sort of sticks in the mud. You know, I wouldn't have liked to be there since there are a friend, I guess. But they really worked very hard to find some meaningful pursuits in life. One thing Beren does admire in these diary writers is their persistence in looking for happiness outside of themselves. We think of happiness as a very private emotion that we either have or don't have or should work toward.

But for the 19th century, certainly the Ant-Ballum 19th century, private and public was entwined. The understanding that private emotions carried the seed of public responsibility was very much taken for granted. So I think that is definitely something we could learn from them. Mrs. Beren is a professor of sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. We'll post a link to her article, The Best or None, Spinsters and 19th century New England on our website, backstoryradio.org. We're going to turn now to an industry very much defined by actively pursuing one's own happiness. Self-help. For decades, Americans have relied on a slew of authors and motivational speakers to better themselves. Now, self-help books have been around

for centuries. But this story takes us to the same time in place of those spinsters we just heard about. We begin in 1830's Maine, with a colorful clock worker and part-time mesmerist who had an equally colorful name, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. Quimby observed that many of his neighbors felt prey to deep bouts of sadness and he saw their religion as a major cause. Their religion was to say the least a gloomy one. This is writer Barbara Aronreich. What you were supposed to do on this Earth if you were a good Christian was constantly examine yourself for any signs of sin, you know, sinful thoughts, any slothfulness. You're supposed to be diligent, stoical, hardworking, and prepared to live and die in this awful situation God had created for us. This obsession with her own sin

led to a spiral of depression among many Calvinists. Some wrote of suicidal thoughts and were even bedridden by a vague illness called invalidism. For Calvinists, all this suffering was highly pious. But for Quimby, it was totally unnecessary. And his great contribution was to see that the people around him in the flight middle class who were suffering from invalidism and depression and all these kinds of complaints that their physical problems originated in unhappiness. And their unhappiness originated in a religious view that happiness itself was suspect. Quimby believed that all these patients needed were happy thoughts. He didn't reject Christianity. What he said was that God wanted them to be happy.

There was no need for doctors, just a better attitude. So he set himself up as a healer in Portland, Maine, and started offering so-called mind-cures, basically pep talks. Aaron Reich says he was kind of like a life coach. And, you know, he would talk to people so I just can't get out of bed. I have no energy. I feel terrible. Headaches all the time and say, you know what? You don't have to. You don't have to look like this. You don't have to suffer like this. This is not God's plan. Get off that couch. Get off that sofa. Come on. Get moving. It was only after his death in 1866 that Quimby's ideas really took off. His mind-cure theories developed into a popular movement called New Thought. Like Quimby, New Thought followers felt that sickness was only in the mind and that thinking positively had a curative effect. As the movement grew, its focus broadened too. It's not so much about health.

It's more about success. That you can have anything. You can succeed at anything you want to. Just by exerting the power of mind over matter. Mind over matter. Sound familiar? Models like that have been popular since the early 20th century. When New Thought authors turned out self-help titles like the attainment of happiness or prosperity through thought force. This was an era when happiness transcended religion. Happiness became about more than simply serving God. As American industry prospered, more Americans saw a better life in wealth and material comforts and self-help writers were there to offer advice. For generations now, they have presented positivity as the key to attaining a happy life.

And in the past few decades, self-help philosophy has still sounded a lot like early New Thought. Positive thinking works wonders by changing you. He can make you think differently. And that is based on what we're thinking and feeling. It's not the other way around. So what you're saying is that the choices that we make are fueled by our thoughts. So our thoughts are the most powerful thing that we have. We have to discipline ourselves to focus on the positive. Many people don't realize the reason they're not happy, the reason they're not enjoying their life is simply because they've trained their mind to worry. Those were preacher Norman Vincent Peele, author of the power of positive thinking, writer Rhonda Byrne, interviewed by Oprah for her 2006 bestseller, The Secret,

and mega-church pastor, Joel Osteen. Barbara Errinreich says they've all played their part in saturating American society with unrealistic expectations. I think in our culture now, and if in the late 20th and the early 21st century, there is a lot of pressure on people to act happy, to act positive. Errinreich's reflections on positive thinking are personal. In 2001, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. During treatment, she says supporters all pushed a similar mantra. Stay positive. But Errinreich heard a different message. She felt like they were saying, think happy thoughts, and you'll have a better chance of survival. I mean, there was not actually much evidence for this, and certainly I am living proof that you could get to her cancer with a very bad attitude. I have come across people who were in terminal stages of cancer.

We're definitely dying. And we're being told they were not being positive enough, enough and that's why it was happening. Now, that's really, to be horrendous, that kind of victim blaming. The experience inspired Errinreich to write a history of American positivity. In it, she argues that the country's pervasive culture of optimism is ultimately damaging. The irony is that the person who is very concerned with becoming more positive or becoming more mindful and constantly changing themselves internally is a little bit like the Calvinist, who always was searching his or her mind for signs of sin or slothfulness or even joy and trying to wipe them out. With positive thinking,

you have people trying to expunge the negative thoughts from their minds at all times. That becomes this business of constantly working on yourself. In other words, she thinks Americans need to stay positive as created a sort of cultural paralysis. Ironically, it's a lot like the very problem Phineas Quimby was trying to solve in the first place. By what Errinreich helped us tell that story. Her book is right-sided how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America. It's time for another break. When we return, one of the earliest popular records in the 1920s had very little music but a whole lot of laughter. You're listening to backstory.

We'll be back in a minute. This is backstory. I'm Ed Ayers. I'm Peter Onof. And I'm Brian Ballot. Today, we're considering how Americans have defined, pursued, and expressed their happiness. Now, over the past couple of years, it's been pretty hard to avoid one song about happiness. Because I'm happy that my long gift you feel like a room without a room. But because I'm happy that this is for real Williams' happy. It's just the latest in the line of chart-topping songs about feeling good. From the turtles happy together a half-century ago, to Bobby McFarons, don't worry, be happy in the late 1980s. Don't worry, be happy. But in the late 19th century, a whole subgenre of recordings cropped up that was devoted to one particular expression

of happiness, laughter. And by the 1920s, these recordings were hugely popular. How did these early recordings, which, let's face it, weren't exactly musical, or even spoken word, have such widespread appeal? We asked producer Bruce Wallace to find out just what was so funny. The record starts with a solo cornet playing in my younger days, a 19th-century German tune. But then, the performer's soldiers on a little bit more. Things carry on like this for two more minutes, laughter and bits of aborted melodies. That's it. The album is called

the OK Laughing Record. OK was the name of the label that put it out in the US. It was released in 1922 when the recording industry was still in its infancy. I think it would have sounded pretty smart. In Nagasaki, runs Canary Records in Baltimore, which researches and re-releases music from the early 20th century. He's a guy who first played the laughing record for me. Hip. I think is basically what I'm saying. It was like the first season of Louis. The record was an immediate hit. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies of knockoffs, somber horn solos interrupted by laughter. Others were variations on the theme, like the OK Laughing Dance Record. And the OK Laughing Record number two, the singing lesson. And the OK Laughing Record

number two, the singing lesson. And the OK Laughing Record! Not all of them involved laughing. One feature to performance interrupted by contagious coughing. Another, uncontrolled sobs. And the OK Laughing Record number two, And the OK Laughing Record number two, the singing lesson. Now that one's a real downer. Jacob Smith is a professor at Northwestern University. He wrote about laughing records in his book, Vocal Tracks. He says that laughter has an important place in the early history of sound reproduction. It was often what people responded to most when they first encountered a phonograph. There was something about that laughter that seemed to compel people or fascinate them. For the first time in history, people could hear a human voice coming out of a wood and metal box, seemingly from nowhere.

Smith says the experience could be unnerving. And I think something so seemingly spontaneous and embodied as a laugh would help to smooth over any of that uncertainty or disturbing experience of a disembodied voice. I think that's part of it. Smith says the popularity of laughing records wasn't just about easing nerves, though. By the time the OK laughing record came out in 1922, he says audiences were a little more familiar with phonographs. But they weren't totally comfortable with the music being pushed by record companies. Labels in the 20s were going all in on classical music. They slapped fancy red labels on their symphonic offerings to make them seem special. And peppered magazines with advertisements for them, trying to convince people that this is what they should be listening to. But for many Americans, classical music was unfamiliar and listening to it a bit awkward. So again, laughing eased the transition. I think this drama of bursting a very solemn musical performance event with these flooding out moments, these gales of laughter, would be a kind of cathartic moment for many listeners.

But there's still the question, what caused these gales of laughter in the first place? We can get a good sense of what American audiences thought by looking at the OK laughing records imitators. In all of them, the laughter starts after the performer flubs a note. Like in this 1950s text-avery cartoon, which mimics the laughing record nearly note for note, except here. But listen to the original, there's no flub, the guy nails that note. So if it's not a mistake, what is it? Ian Agaski thinks you have to look at where the recording on the laughing record came from in the first place. It was actually recorded a year or two earlier in Germany, a country that had just been devastated by World War I. Hyperinflation was taking off, wrecking an already teetering economy. This is a sharp contrast to the Americans of the roaring twenties who were listening to the laughter and hearing a lighter reason for it.

Agaski's theory is less happy. I think that the laughter actually comes from a sense of deep felt absurdity in having to listen to this trite middle of the road sentimental song in the face of an absurd moment in history. I think that's where the laughter comes from. So there are different ways to hear the laughing record and to think about what exactly made it such a hit. Agaski sees these varied interpretations when he tours around the US and Europe, giving talks about early 20th century music. He always closes the talks with the OK laughing record. He figures he's played hundreds of times at this point.

The reactions are always strong and fall into two main camps, overjoyed or overwhelmed, sometimes even a little freaked out. Agaski for one is firmly in the former camp. Yeah, the whole thing of when they break down and they kind of get it together and they're not going to laugh anymore and he starts playing again. And then the whole thing falls apart again. It's just incredible, like that's it's so good, it's so good, oh man what a great record. That story was brought to us by producer Bruce Wallace. If you're just joining us, this is backstory in this hour we're looking at America's

changing pursuit of happiness. We've heard how happiness has been defined and refined across history from high-minded civic notions of happiness to ideas about positive thinking and material well-being. But what does science have to say? Well it turns out that happiness research has its own peculiar history. In 1939 Harvard began tracking a few hundred young men. These were undergraduates, the university officials deemed the finest specimens we have. You know, the best and the brightest among well, the best and the brightest. The aim was to study normal young adult development. So when you do that of course you want to pick all white men from Harvard, right? This is Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. Waldinger has been in charge of the study for the last 13 years because get this, it's still going on. The surviving men are in their 80s and 90s.

They include the original undergrads, but also a second group of low-income teenagers from Boston who were added in 1942. The study was supposed to predict which young men would become the most professionally successful adults. It was funded at first by department store magnate WT grant. And what he really wanted to do was find out what sort of men made the best store managers. While the study subjects were supposed to remain anonymous, we do know they weren't all destined to be retail execs. John F. Kennedy and legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradley were among the participants. But where does happiness come in you might ask? Well, somewhere along the line, the data began to reveal hints about how to lead a happy life. Something the designers at the so-called grant study never intended to track. Happiness was not a goal in 1942. People would talk about contributing to society. The inner city guys would talk about making a family.

There were missions in life, if you will, more than there was the sense of, I want to be happy. I want to be self-fulfilled. That is a concept that came more into being in the 60s and 70s. Of course, the study's findings are mostly limited to white men born in a very specific time period and Waldinger is careful not to speak for any other populations. But he still thinks there are important lessons to be drawn from the data. For example, happiness grows with age. We actually notice the positive more than the negative as we get older, and we remember it better. That's very much in contrast to younger adults who notice the negative more than the positive. There are curmudgings that get more curmudgently as they age, but by and large, we all get to be a little bit more like polyanna as we get older and interesting. In some ways, evolutionarily, that may be adaptive in that when you're a young adult, you want

to see some of the dangers on the horizon and be able to anticipate them. But one argument about why older adults pay more attention to the positive is that they have a sense that time is short, that life is not going to go on forever, and they begin to ask the question, am I really taking time to enjoy what's here? But what this was about initially, as I understand it, was trying to identify characteristics that led to leadership, not particularly the happiness. How did this morph into what some people have called the happiness study? Well, it morphed into the happiness study because one of the things that we know, of course, is that success and even leadership are not equivalent to happiness. And we found, no surprise, that some of the happiest people were not the most successful in publicly recognized terms.

And some of the more unhappy people were quite successful if you look at their resumes. So could you give me an example of the profile of a happy person who was, quote, not successful? Yes. One of the happiest men was a history teacher at a private school. He started right after college. He had to work summers as a fuller brush salesman going door to door to make ends meet because he made so little money. He stayed teaching at the same prep school for decades, and he had these warm, rich relationships with his wife, with his children, had hobbies that he loved, really enjoyed his work. So successful in the sense of being fulfilled and engaged and happy, not successful as measured by income level or status, exactly.

Looking back and looking at this remarkable treasure trove of data, what were the big surprises for you? I think the biggest surprise was how much warm, close relationships determine not only how happy you are but how healthy you are, and that relationships really get under your skin in a good way, and the absence of relationships or very acrimonious relationships get under your skin in a bad way. That's probably the biggest surprise. But isn't that a chicken and egg kind of thing? Don't happier people establish better relationships, I mean, which comes first? It is a chicken and egg kind of thing, so that it's almost impossible to tease out which causes which, as with so many things in human development. However, some of the physical effects, and actually the physical effects too, that if your

health is terrible, you're less fun to be around, you're less likely to reach out to other people, so the relationships are never one way. Yes. If we go back to the founding, early America, the pursuit of happiness had a very particular meaning in those days, what would you say the pursuit of happiness means today? I think that the happiest people in our study are the people who are engaged in the world in pursuits that they care about. Interesting. It could be in raising kids, it could be in gardening, it could be in being present of the United States, but it's that quality of engagement in things that you find and meaningful, that I think is really where happiness shows up. So it's not so much hedonism, it's not, am I happy right this second? It's more about the longer term.

So for example, that man who taught history at a prep school, his whole career, loved mentoring kids. Robert, if relationships are so important, how can we spend most of our time thinking about stuff? Well, things, things we can buy. Partly because our media knows that they can promise us all kinds of satisfaction with stuff and quick fixes. And so we are bombarded with stories that if we just get this or that next thing, we will be happy. We may even have happier relationships. Yeah, exactly. Oh, I mean, look at Viagra commercials and see us commercials. They're all about happy relationships. What two people in two separate bathtubs are doing and how that works, I don't understand. And then looking out over the ocean together in a cold, kind of metallic bathtub, I don't get it.

But you know, life is hard and life is full of unhappy and difficult stuff. And there are these promises out there in the culture that you can avoid all that or you can get away from all that. And that, I think, is what turns people away from what's right here, including their relationships toward these kind of mirages. Well, I'm happy that you took the time to share the results of this fascinating study with us today, Robert. Thanks so much for joining us on Back Story. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot. Robert Waldinger is a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. We would be remiss in a show about happiness if we didn't bring up what for us is a very unhappy topic. Our founding senior producer who's been with us since 2008, Tony Field is moving on. He's been the heart and soul of the show for all of that time.

And in true Back Story fashion, I'd like to know what you think about that, Ed and Peter. Well, Brian, if we sound good, we sound Tony. He's been marvelous. He's made us into something we weren't before and it's been a great gift to us. Now, that's not to blame him. But Peter's right, Tony has really taken us in hand and taught us really how to talk to people on the radio. He's been in some ways humbling, Ed, when you've had me to do those things over and over again. I used to think that once I said something, it's totally brilliant. It's for the ages, but I learned better. We got better. Wait, Tony makes us say it over again. And Tony, also imagine what it would be like to not be interested in this history stuff and to be tuning into our show and this thing. And that's always the voice that we have in the back of our minds. Why should people care? So Tony, it makes us happy that you're moving on to pursue great things. And it actually makes me happy that I've internalized some of your lessons and that you're leaving

a remarkable staff and place that will continue to make us sound better than we are. Brian, that was pretty good. Could you do it again? Very good, and Tony, we wish you all the happiness in the world. As for you, dear listeners, let us know if today's show made you happy. You can leave a comment on our website, backstoryradio.org. And while you're there, share your stories and questions about our upcoming episodes. We're working on shows about satire, fire, and even meat. You can also find us on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, backstory radio. Whatever you do, don't be a stranger. Today's episode of Backstory was produced by Nina Ernest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones, Emily Gattick, Robert Armagall, Bruce Wallace, and Bridget McArthur.

Jamal Milner is our engineer. We had help from Henry Winsack, special thanks this week to our reader Kelly Libby and to the National Archives. Next story's executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Major support for Backstories provided by the anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, humanities, and the environment, and by history channel, history made every day. Brian Ballot is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Oniff is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstories distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.