III. DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS: HERBERT ARMSTRONG AND THE “WHININGSCHOOLBOY” REACTION FORMATION

 

            Stage Three in the Erikson Model, is the “Initiative vs. Guilt” period of growth. Typically it falls between ages three and five years and is connected by Freudians with the Oedipal Stage of first sexual awakenings and attempts to navigate between the contending roles of father and mother. Normal children will begin at age 5 to reattach back again to either the father (in the case of boys) or the mother (in case of girls). This development pattern sheds light on an oft-repeated anecdote by Herbert Armstrong. “At age 5 I can remember my father saying: ‘That youngin is always asking so many questions he’s sure to be a Philadelphia lawyer when he grows up.” This homey observation is evidence for the fact that Herbert Armstrong moved successfully through the Sensory Motor Period associated with Erikson’s Stage One, and that he passed through semiotic and imitative learning functions that Jean Piaget saw as important at the next phase of life, Erikson’s Stage Two.13 Stage One, Two and Three—so far, so good.

            What strikes the psychoanalytic biographer of Herbert Armstrong with particular force at this point, is his detestation--almost from Day One—of school and formal learning. The young Philadelphia lawyer of age 5 falls dramatically into attitudes reminiscent of Shakepeare’s own echo of the development cycle:

            And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel,

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school.14

 

This positive aggression towards what he would often call “the scholarly professors” shows up across seven decades in Herbert Armstrong’s writings and public pronouncements. Professional historians inside the WCG note a strong anti-intellectual ethos tracing to Armstrong’s functionalism, his Midwestern penchant for simplistic answers and a mistrust of the past in favor of the present.15 Armstrong’s Whining Schoolboy reaction formation at age 6 reappeared with much greater force in adolescence, a biphasic dynamic which, according to James Loder, is typical of human development. At age 18 Herbert Armstrong faced an important life choice: should he take university courses in advertising or journalism? He consulted his Uncle Frank, Iowa’s leading ad-man and a possessor (in Herbert Armstrong’s view) of unusual brilliance and insight. Here was Frank Armstrong’s advice:

Now I know that nearly everybody has the delusion that an education is something you get at school—and higher education is the university…But it has always seemed to me that traipsing across the door-sill of a college classroom or sitting in an armchair, is not putting an education into your mind. Education comes from study—from books—from lectures—from contacts—from travel—from thinking about what you see and hear and read—and from experience.

 

Some would interpret this as a typical analysis from a successful turn-of-the century Midwestern advertising executive. Indeed, the amount of space devoted to this in Armstrong’s Autobiography is evidence of a secret secreting: 

“The reason we have to maintain schools and universities is simply that most people are too lazy—most lack the ambition and persistence, the drive—to procure an education outside of schools and colleges. Most people must have someone do their thinking and planning for them, assign lessons and homework, and force students to study and learn by a system of rewards and punishments in the form of grades, and finally, a sheepskin with a degree.”

 

The diatribe continues, through the alleged “voice” of Armstrong’s Uncle Frank:

“Now if you have the initiative and the will to drive yourself to study, you van acquire just as complete an education outside the classroom as in…Actually, Herbert, a majority of corporate heads, presidents and board chairmen of New York and Chicago Banks are primarily self-educated beyond high school education.”16

 

Herbert Armstrong had early planned to drop out of high school but his father stopped him. Later he would publish that he had written testimony from Arthur Reynolds, president of the biggest bank in Chicago, that he had more than the equivalent of a college education. He took great delight in relating how he coached his brother-in-law, Walter Dillon, to defeat the “flowery, ornate debaters” of Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. He never tired of telling how one of his first graphic ideas for the Plain Truth magazine in the 1930s consisted of a teacher pouring “pre-digested ideas” down the heads of innocent students. He was incensed at sister-in-law Hertha for calling him an “ignoramus” for rejecting the theory of evolution in the wake of the Scopes Trial of 1925. In Volume Two he lets fly with the opinion that the “academic psychiatrists” in Washington, D.C. had shut down General Patton’s drive to Berlin so as not to offend the Russians! Here was the Whining Schoolboy Syndrome as a life-long pattern.

Developmentally, what was happening here?  

In Stage Four, “life must first be school life,” writes Erikson, “whether school is field or jungle or classroom.” 17 One cannot, of course, censure Herbert Armstrong for not choosing a college education in 1910. That career choice is an understandable pattern given the times, as was Frank Armstrong’s admiration of corporate leaders. This was the Production Era of America’s economic advance, a time when Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller were in their heyday.18 The lasting significance is this: All his life, Herbert Armstrong would be quick study. As a young man he claimed to study incessantly on his own outside the classroom. Tellingly, the evidence is unclear from his writings as to whether he graduated from high school. This is important, for, as Joseph Hopkins notes, Armstrong’s studies did have consequences for his later mass audiences. This anti-intellectual reaction formation is a major thrust in his development process. It is important to remember Erikson’s insistence that Stage Four is when the child’s exuberant imagination is “tamed and harnessed.” As Erikson says: “Many a child’s development is disrupted when family life has failed to prepare him for school life, or when school life fails to sustain the promises of earlier stages.”19 Freud labeled this the latency stage, the lull before puberty. By his own accounts, Herbert Armstrong loafed and lounged in school. The botany teacher called him a sponge: “Herbert Armstrong, you are just like a sponge. You never study your lesson, you never contribute or give out anything in class. You just sit there and soak up what the other pupils recite, and then, when final exams come along, you always get close to 100%.” 20

Or so he tells us. Later on, in young adulthood, Herbert Armstrong would stake the rest of his life on a self-motivated, intensive, day and night study on an important (to him) point of Christian doctrine. He would turn his positive aggression over his wife’s challenge that Saturday was the Christian Sabbath into an important moment in American sectarianism.   

III. Anomie, the Adult Guarantor, and Identification

As James Loder noted, development is biphasic. This means that the growing child of Stages One, Two, Three and Four, hits all the challenges of these previous phases with renewed force at Erikson’s Stage Five, the time of Puberty and Adolescence. We see this in the early life of Herbert Armstrong. His Whining Schoolboy syndrome at age 5 is matched by his urge to leave school and become a teacher at age 16 or 17. It is reinforced by his crucial decision not to attend college at age 18. Adolescence drove home the failure of his Stage Four development. The question to ask is: Why this failure?

A good clue might come from reflection upon his father, Horace Armstrong, and his attempts to cope with the economic challenges of the 1890s. Horace’s young family was situated at the nexus of one of the biggest socio-cultural shifts in American history—the move from a rural to a primarily urban culture. Herbert Armstrong’s excessive peregrinations around Chicago and back to Iowa in his early years were already prefigured by his father’s constant shifting around the De Moines area—from running a flour mill in Marshalltown, back to Des Moines, out to run a hardware store in Union, back to Des Moines. Finally, the family moves out West, to Idaho. Horace Armstrong seemed a victim of the rootlessness, depression and anomie of the times. That point was not lost on young Herbert. There is a revealing reference in Herbert Armstrong’s Autobiography about how he had viewed his father in Stage Four and how that view changed at age 33:

In 1912, when I was only twenty, I had felt rather sorry for my father. At that time I knew much more than he! But I was simply amazed at how much my father had learned in those 12 years. It seems most young men know more than Dad, but they grow out of it later. Now I had to look up to my father with respect.21

 

Though couched in ironic humor, there is much here to confirm that Herbert Armstrong lacked a real sense of identity with his father. It was his Uncle Frank who acted as his adult guarantor—a vital role. Frank even encouraged Herbert to stay with his first job because: “I’ve noticed that there has been a tendency in some branches of our family to keep shifting around all the time from one thing to another—never staying with one thing long enough to make a success of it.” There seems little doubt at whom Frank aimed this barb—his brother, Horace. Young Herbert Armstrong moved five times in nine years. Joseph Hopkins mentions with passing surprise that the newlywed Herbert Armstrongs changed locations ten times in three years and with two children coming into the world. In The Logic of the Spirit, James Loder reports on the protean personality often identifiable at the adolescent stage, the young developer facing more intensely earlier issues of “psychohistorical dislocation, flooding of imagery, the blurring of socially constructed boundaries.” 22

            For protean personalities, psychohistorical dislocation can undercut the stabilizing of identity which is a primary task of Erikson’s Stage Five, Puberty and Adolescence. Loder applies the protean personality type to the Generation X syndrome in our day, those churning around in  continuous change, trying to cope with “parenting of an absent sort.” Interestingly, historians William Strauss and Neil Howe propound a theory of recurring generations across American history. They compare Herbert Armstrong’s generation—those born from 1890 to 1910—with today’s Generation X. 23 There is much of Generation X rootlessness in Horace Armstrong’s peregrinations around Des Moines and Herbert’s marches and countermarches between Chicago and Iowa. One gets the impression from a careful reading of the Autobiography of fluid connections between rural Iowa and the new “monster city” of Chicago. Today’s proteans are much more mobile and affluent but the typology of identity confusion and diffusion can be spotted in Stage Four and Stage Five Herbert Armstrong. As is well-known in identity formation studies, the question “Who am I?” is fundamental. In “Theodore Dreiser: American Dreamers,” Philip Fisher offers a valuable character sketch of Dreiser’s leading protagonists, people in the early part of the 20^th century who are up against the psychologically jarring encounter with big-city “muscular capitalism.” Fisher’s literary sheds light on Herbert Armstrong’s wrestlings with school/career choices, a father who was almost the proverbial “rolling stone” and an identity diffusion beginning in adolescence.

In two novels, Sister Carrie (1900), and An American Century (1925), Dreiser portrayed a “dizzy, vertical, still unbuilt society” where the skyscrapers of new York and Chicago were pointers to the new world that was rising. “In a mobile society of types,“ wrote Fisher, “the central Dreiserian woman or man is on the run or on the make; living between worlds, exposed and fragile.” According to Fisher, the characters reflected in Dreiser’s fiction live in a society of invention, “a world of hotels rather than homes…roles and not identity.” Indeed, identity becomes a big issue for this “quick-change society,” where people “slip between worlds.” This industrial, urban world of 1890-1930 “gives special place to youth because it is the incomplete stage of the self where possibilities, opportunities, and the hold of its own future over one’s self-image make up the very stuff of life.”  

            In the world of Dreiser’s creation, the salesman—“too easy-going to be genuinely attached”-- is the only invulnerable character. Those ambitious strivers streaming in from the Great Plains to the big cities were exemplified in Herbert Armstrong of Iowa, a cohort of  a generation born to “savor the open and unpredictable.” In his fiction, Dreiser, claims Fisher, explored “the consequences of this economic system for the self and its improvised relations.”24 One consequence is that one cannot live by roles alone. Herbert Armstrong’s fascination with Chicago situated him on the boundary between rural and urban, made him a devotee of hotels, not houses, led him to adopt the “hustler” image in a society where being an achiever includes “being indifferent to personal identity.” Herbert Armstrong manifested in Erikson’s Stage Five and Sex that tendency toward identity diffusion noticeable in Stage Four. Uncertain of identity, cathecting on to Uncle Frank even more with his father and family having “gone west” to Idaho, an unfocused Herbert Armstrong began to try on roles. In Chicago he early became “the dandy” trying on items of apparel to compensate for a still-undeveloped identity. Buying a pair of silk gloves during a business trip is important enough to make his Autobiography. “Probably the main incentive was to ‘look sharp,’ rather than cold hands, but I bought taupe-colored silk gloves with three stripes of black braid trim on the back. If vanity is the main ingredient of human nature, I had a lot of human nature. I suppose a peacock feels about like I did.”25

            In short, from photos available, Herbert Armstrong early showed a relish for that ostentation and love of display that would show up in the Ambassador Auditorium. Only loosely connected emotionally to a father he could either not fully respect or bond with, Armstrong early embraced the “achievement ethic,” the more manic side of the American Dream. Later he would write and speak much about “The Seven Laws of Success,” one of his most popular booklets wherein bankers and industrialists from America’s Production Era were featured prominently. The child was truly the father of the man.

            It is noteworthy, than, to see what Herbert Armstrong later considered “the turning point” of his life.  It came at age 16 when Armstrong was waiting on tables in a hotel in Altoona, east of Des Moines. “He was complemented and praised ever so highly by the hotel owner. “He constantly expressed great confidence in me, and what I would be able to accomplish if I were willing to put forth the effort.” Anyone who heard Herbert Armstrong speak in later life would recall how much stock Armstrong put in this “Altoona Awakening.” At age 16 he burned with an intense but unfocused ambition to “make something of himself.” He returned to North High in Des Moines with an incentive to read and reread that paean to the success ethic, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. He specifically mentions that his own Autobiography was based on that of his fellow-Quaker, Ben Franklin. He drew a direct parallel between his Uncle Frank as a latter day Ben Franklin. There is no doubt who acted as adult guarantor for Herbert Armstrong.  

            All his life Herbert Armstrong, a victim of Stage Four identity diffusion, would seek the counsel of business types over the “scholarly theologians.” This helps explain his intense Stage Five identification with business writers and philosophers such as Elbert Hubbard and his youthful hero-worship of that 1890-1910 paradigmatic figure, Theodore Roosevelt. “Teddy “ Roosevelt is both a fascinating and somewhat bumptious figure in American history. His nicknames--“the Dude,” “the fighting cock,” “the literary feller”--merely added to his legend as a bustling populist dynamo. 26 One only has to watch newsreels of TR speaking and note the comparison to Herbert Armstrong’s platform style. Like his hero, TR, Herbert Armstrong came out of adolescence burning with an unfocused desire to “go somewhere,” to be somebody. Yet this intense exocentricity was not matched with a balancing sense of renewed centeredness or a strong identity formation. The collapse of Armstrong’s business ventures in Chicago from 1920 to 1922 fed this inability to achieve what Loder calls “an integrative vision.” Alice Miller has noted that “hiding behind a depressive mood there are often unconscious fantasies of grandiosity.” 27 This would fit Herbert Armstrong’s developmental pattern. He freely admits how devastated he was by the business defeats of 1920-22 and how the ex-puritanical Quaker found himself frequenting the Chicago bars. By this time, however, Armstrong had found a great source of centering on the level of the human spirit. This appears in Erikson’s Stage Six, where Armstrong appeared, from many accounts, to be lucky in love if unlucky in business.28  

 

ENDNOTES