Willpower

Willpower as self-control

Willpower signified an ability to resist temptations, to suppress feelings of desire, to practice self-denial, to overcome habits. This usage occurred in medical, moral, legal, political, and religious contexts. One type of self-control was control over one’s own body and its expressions. Captain Alfred Dreyfus exemplified it after his acquittal: “On reaching his residence the Major, who is affected with heart weakness, suffered a violent attack, but thanks to his strong will power the faintness soon passed away” (“Dreyfus is Decorated,” 1906). Related was an ability to control the expression of emotion, pain, and distress. Of Senator Roscoe Conkling, it was said:

He is a natural athlete and looks upon illness as a weakness unbecoming to a man. When he is forced to groan in pain you may take it for certain that it must amount to torture. His will power is strong, and he has exerted it to the utmost to overcome the impulse to groan and complain. (“His Chances Grow Slowly,” 1888)

Willpower expressed an ideal type of character, stoic in the face of pain. Women too were praised for this trait. Florence A. C. Carman, a defendant in a criminal case, manifested this restraint:

For a moment the muscles of her face twitched and she appeared about to cry. Her words came brokenly, and it could be seen that she was able to go on with her story only by the exertion of great will power. Then she regained the self-control which has amazed all who have seen her in court, and in a few moments was smiling again easily. (“Maid’s Story,” 1914)

Self-control was praised when exercised under distress, in grave illness, and in other adversity. In fact, it seemed that such self-control often made the story newsworthy.

Lack or weakness of willpower could have devastating effects. It was both a cause and an effect of alcoholism. Want of willpower caused pauperism, a disease like alcoholism, and the pauper needed discipline “to develop the self-helpful energies and enfeebled will power” (“Mental Disease,” 1886). Weakness of willpower was suspected in many a nervous disease. One man cured himself of “spinal trouble and nervous prostration” by use of willpower. When asked how, he replied: “I came to the conclusion that I could not profitably die at that time, and when they told me I would I made up my mind I wouldn’t, and didn’t” (“Stray Bits,” 1890). Such opinions must have been common, because the prominent neurologist George Beard (1877) argued that the nervous diseases were not caused by lack of willpower: “To say to such people [neurasthenics], ‘Exercise your will-power, and you will be cured,’ is like saying to a small-pox sufferer, ‘Remove some pustules and drive out the fever and fever-poison, and you are all right’” (p. 584).

Lack of self-control caused by a weakness of willpower proved in court to be evidence of insanity. A judge in 1878

charged the jury in effect that to become amenable to punishment a person must have not only intelligence enough to know that the act he is about to commit is punishable, but also will-power to enable him to choose between any gratification he may expect from committing it and the immunity from punishment he will secure by refraining. (“Could Not Help Himself,” 1878)

The defendant was acquitted because the jury “thought he lacked this will-power” in what has come to be called the irresistible impulse argument. In social psychological terms, willpower was (and remained) a dispositional attribution that emphasized an ability of the individual to exercise self-control in the face of situational constraints.

Willpower as resoluteness and effort

Related to willpower as self-control was willpower as resoluteness and unflinching effort. A close synonym to resoluteness was endurance. Many accounts depicted resolve as a kind of strength, often distinguished from (although sometimes dependent upon) physical strength. While willpower as resoluteness exemplified those who upheld social norms, it could imply a willingness to defy social convention. Marietta Reed both excelled and defied:

In common with those whose will power lifts them from the dull plane of life which is trod by the conventional many, she found herself often classed with the unconventional few doing this thing or that thing, which set wagging the tongues of the little. (“Society in Lent,” 1895)

Willpower in this sense, when isolated from other character traits, could mean ruthlessness. Thomas Mann, in exile from Germany, wrote of the Nazi character: “It was essential to be hard, to be all will power, to do violence to the self, heroically to kill one’s conscience and consciously, with iron determination, to weigh justice and truth against necessity” (“Mann Opens War,” 1937, p. 6). Hitler, Stalin, and other dictators were described as having strong willpower, and as Thomson (2006) reports, Mussolini in 1920s Britain was proposed as a model for “health and success by harnessing the full potential of the will” (p. 37). But the term was also invoked in the struggle against the fascists. Winston Churchill said as war began: “In past times the House of Commons has proved itself an instrument of national will power capable of waging stern wars” (“Text of Winston,” 1939).

Resolve could be more pedestrian. The famous pedestrian Edward Payson Weston attempted a walk of 500 miles (not his longest). Dr. William Schmidt prescribed a method to achieve such a feat: “[T]o walk or march without fatigue, imitate the three steps of waltzing, counting mentally or humming one, two, three as you step, with the emphasis or motive will power always thrown on step number one” (“The Great Pedestrian Feat,” 1874). In 1880, Dr. Henry S. Tanner, a clergyman, went on a forty-day fast to show the superiority of the mind to the body. On Day Nine, he said: “If I wanted to feel hungry I could feel hungry enough. But I have the will-power to keep it down, and I am keeping it down” (“Nine Days,” 1880, p. 5). That Tanner’s efforts drew such notice indicates that it was not assumed that what he was attempting was possible. At the completion of the fast, the Rev. C. S. Williams remarked:

Man is a child of God, and the will-power in humanity is perfectly tremendous when it is called out and energized by any great motive. We have a power in us that we don’t understand. Contrast the self-restraint of this faster with the selfishness, baseness, and self-indulgence we see everywhere around us. The kingdom of God is one of self-control. (“A Clergyman,” 1880)

Not only did willpower indicate resolve, individuals could deliberately challenge themselves to heroic effort, in order to prove that they had the resolve to be faithful to what they held dear.

Willpower as the testing of the limits of endurance

A shift in emphasis and willpower tests the limits of endurance, perseverance in adversity. A common usage praised individuals for exerting themselves in a fight against disease, against fatigue, and for a fighting spirit in the face of death. They were not simply descriptions; they were laudatory, testimonies of good character. When Senator George Hurst was gravely ill, the New York Times reported:

Mr. Hearst, who is a man of very strong individuality and who has conquered disease once before by will power, has asserted two or three times when he has recovered sufficient consciousness to be able to express an opinion that in spite of the auguries of half a dozen skillful physicians who have hung about him to see him die, he was not going to die, but would recover. (“Senator Hurst Better,” 1891)

Willpower was manifest in the fight against fatigue: an account described a boxer coming back for a tenth round to avoid a humiliating defeat: “[I]t was sheer will power and not physical strength which sent him out to the centre of the ring” (“Shugrue Subdues,” 1922), losing the fight but saving his reputation.

This fighting spirit had its limits, and the weakening of willpower in the battle against disease meant not a deficiency of character but recognition of the frailty of the flesh. When the illness that had threatened the life of Senator Oliver P. Morton returned, readers saw the following account: “Since the commencement of this last sickness . . . his immense will power, upon which so much reliance has always been placed, appears to have been broken, and he has not been able to summon it to his aid” (“Mr. Morton,” 1877). Even if death were only briefly postponed, however, that was occasion for praise. The fight was more important than the ultimate victory.

Willpower as the ability to lead or influence others

In contrast to the previous uses of the term was willpower as a trait that made one a leader, that enabled a person to influence others. This sense of the term continued the way it was used in mesmerism, when it was at times described as a kind of force that emanated from a person, typically through the eyes, to fascinate others. Here in particular we see the interactive character of this category, for mesmerism and hypnotism were taken up by ordinary people and by the courts and medicine sometimes literally and sometimes metaphorically. Mesmeric influence, via willpower, became a means to explain or at least depict the interpersonal effects of some persuasive people.

This hypnotic power to influence others was recognized legally. In 1895, the Kansas Supreme Court sustained a decision acquitting a man who killed another, as well as the conviction of a third man who had hypnotized the killer and caused him to kill. The New York Times reported that a court “for the first time admits that hypnotism is a defense for murder” (“Hypnotism,” 1895). The article quoted Judge McAdam of the New York Superior Court, who described hypnotism as a form of insanity: “The mind of the victim becomes blank, his will power passes absolutely and without the possibility of resistance into the control of another. He does what he is told.” It was a common criticism of hypnotism that it weakened the will. To combat the influence of a fascinating person, one’s own willpower was needed.

In 1895, a man sued his estranged wife for return of assets he had signed over to her on the grounds that she had hypnotized him to do it. The court asked him: “When did you recover your health and will power?” (“Says He Was Hypnotized,” 1895). Not all were impressed with hypnotism’s alleged powers, however. A French prosecutor, using Charcot’s theory of hypnotism to refute that of the Nancy school, claimed that “a person who was hypnotized retained sufficient will power to resist the operator’s will” (“Eyrand to be Guillotined,” 1900); the defendant was convicted and sentenced to death. William Livingston Alden (1900), reviewing a new novel, was surprised

that any one should in the year 1900 venture to write a story based on the absurd theory that hypnotism is the result of the use of “will power,” and that the possessor of this power can hypnotize people against their will by merely looking at them, is certainly strange.

He was wrong, however, as the psychologist Henry Rutgers Marshall (1908) criticized the Emmanuel Movement’s use of hypnosis precisely for its effects on the will of the patient. Marshall did not allege direct mesmeric influence over the patient, but asserted:

An individual’s acquiescence in the reception of radical forms of suggestion is an abrogation by him of his power of willing, and the process by which this suggestion becomes effective is dependent entirely upon the subserviency of the mind of one individual to the mind of another.

The problem was that such acquiescence goes against “the development and strengthening of character.” Having a will and being a leader were two sides of the same coin.

“Magnetic influence” was employed metaphorically. Leadership could mean an ability to fascinate others. According to an article in the Dallas Morning News, Cornelius Herz “exercised the most extraordinary will power in getting the Rothschilds to embark in a concern out of which they wanted to keep” (“Boulanger’s Backer,” 1887). The article claimed that Herz had “created” General Boulanger through the force of his will: “the magnetic man, whose little, gleaming eyes had looked through and through Boulanger, and taken note of all the ‘stock’ that was in him.” Mary Philipse, an 18th-century colonist, was opposed to the American Revolution: “She was a woman remarkable for her fascination and will power, and, as she herself calmly remarked, had she married Washington he might never have been the Father of His Country, for she would not have allowed him to be a rebel” (“Women of the American Revolution,” 1900). Most frequently, however, willpower as an ability to lead others was devoid of any reference to hypnotism. It was asserted that a great leader had strong willpower, and its absence was a source of criticism. In another article about George Washington, it was declared: “Those who knew him best would not quarrel with what we now see in him: an unbending will power, in which physical and moral courage were inherent” (“A Greatness Undiminished,” 1938).

Willpower made for leadership because it showed an ability to withstand external and distracting influences. Roscoe Conkling received praise because he had “the will power to compel the lesser chiefs to pull together” (“Roscoe Re-enters the Race,” 1886). Mayor William Lafayette Strong of New York was described in such terms: “The Mayor’s appearance indicates a man of resolute and determined will power, and, judging him by his past, I feel confident that he will do the proper thing and disapprove the bill” (“No Bi-partisan Board,” 1895). Typically, indomitable willpower was one of the traits listed in praise of a leader, both in politics and in commerce. A weak leader was irresolute and would bend to the wind, rather than sticking to his principles. Mayor Hugh J. Grant of New York, a Tammany Hall Democrat, was criticized for lack of “sufficient will power to insist upon making first-class appointments” (“Views of Ex-Mayor Grace,” 1890). William Russell Grace, one of Grant’s predecessors, was an opponent of Tammany Hall, so the depiction of Grant’s character was politically charged. Depictions of unsavory and dangerous leaders included reference to their willpower. Stalin was described in these terms near the beginning of his rule: “Ruthlessness, an iron will power and an almost fabulous tenacity are among the main characteristics of this born adventurer, conspirator and fighter. Uncommunicative, reserved and silent, he seems to distrust and to suspect Everybody” (“Stalin Emerges,” 1926). One measure of someone’s power was willpower.

Willpower as a visible sign of character

Willpower was perceptible and so was portrayed in narratives, novels, and paintings. The description of Cornelius Herz, cited above, offered one example, drawing on the stereotype of the mesmerist. One prominent representative of willpower was General Ulysses S. Grant, who attracted praise in this respect not so much for his wartime leadership or for his record as president as for his struggle, when dying, to complete his memoirs: “[T]he effort [according to a physician], if not wholly forced, was largely one of will power” (“General Grant,” 1885). At the dedication of his tomb, General Horace Porter, praised Grant in similar terms:

Even his valor on the field of carnage was not superior to the heroism he displayed when, in his fatal illness, he confronted the only enemy to whom he ever surrendered. His old will power reasserted itself in his determination to complete his memoirs. During a whole month of physical torture he with one hand held Death at arm’s length, while with the other he penned the most brilliant chapter in American history. (“At General Grant’s Tomb,” 1897)

Other depictions of willpower also intoned the heroic. In a description of a painting, The [Two] Guides, by Winslow Homer, we read of the younger of the two guides:

The youngster has an axe in his hand, and supplies an American type which Mr. Homer, almost alone among our artists, gives us only too rarely. He is finely masculine. The way his head is set on his shoulders indicates will power. He grips his axe like the man who knows how to wield it by ancestral right as well as early training. There is something free and audacious in his pose. (“Art at the Union League,” 1890)

Accounts of the American character repeated the emphasis on strong willpower: A French artist visiting New York early in the new century observed of the New Yorkers he saw on the streets: “[U]pon all these faces, in all these eyes one reads the same will power, the same indomitable energy” (“New York,” 1906). Willpower here was the obverse of “American nervousness.”

The literary depiction of willpower was a recurrent theme over the time covered here, and the development of willpower was part of the protagonist’s coming of age. An advertisement for one novel summarized the main character’s story:

The girl makes mistakes. Temptations come her way. Natural weaknesses almost tear her from her course. But she learns and grows and as the battle progresses, she gains in strength and will power. … A splendid novel of a woman who mastered her own destiny. (“Advertisement,” 1916)

In other novels, weak willpower played a significant plot role. The struggle of wills made for many a story:

“The Making of Jane” is the title of a new novel. … It is a study of will power, the heroine becoming a slave to the will of her cousin, Mrs. Jane Saunders, into whose family she was adopted. Mrs. Saunder’s mysterious power also affects the fortunes of two men in the drama, both of whom are in love with Jane. (“Notes and News,” 1901)

So triumph over someone else’s willpower was as much a literary theme as the establishment of a will of one’s own.

Measuring willpower

One could perceive the extent of a person’s willpower. Beyond ordinary assessments of the amount of willpower an individual had were more formal estimates. The New York Times reported that the psychologist Edward Wheeler Scripture had devised a means to measure traits important in education: “memory, mental activity, powers of attention, sensitiveness, ability to stand fatigue, will power, and many other conditions of the mental and physical systems” (“Women and Children,” 1895). In his studies, participants squeezed a dynamometer to measure the force of a muscular act as “an index of will power” (Scripture, 1897, p. 84). Scripture noted that “an act will grow steadily stronger although not the slightest change can be seen in the muscle” (p. 84). (This observation conformed to the oft-cited difference between muscular strength and strength of will.) Dr. Maingot, a Paris radiologist, developed a more direct version, drawing also on vigor of movement, to assess willpower. His phrenoscopy measured the movements of the diaphragm by radioscopy, and he claimed to be able to examine character by means of them: “In a certain subject the doctor pointed out that the respiratory movement was amply sustained. He stated that this indicated a man of a practical nature and much will power” (“Traces Character,” 1923). Kaempffert (1945) reported on an article on German psychological testing: “As in the army there is will-and-action analysis to discover ability to concentrate, perseverance, will power, agility, willingness to cooperate and the gift of leadership.” The recent surge of interest in willpower in psychology marks in some way a return to this earlier preoccupation.

A goal of education and training

This aspect of willpower does not specify a meaning of the category; it rather identifies it as a reflexive trait that can be improved. In many contexts, the importance of cultivation of willpower was affirmed: “[S]ubmission to discipline strengthens the will power, and the man who is fit to be a soldier learns to command himself before he is fit to command others” (“Discipline,” 1915). Many accounts argued for the development of willpower in schooling. Le Fétra (1904) claimed “the prompt and accurate execution of commands is of great value in developing the will power, as well as coordination.” This was important because one of the goals of education was moral development. In a straightforward plea for the education of the children of railroad workers to prepare them for work, Edgeworth (1886) listed the virtues which result from good schooling: “Vigilance, conscientiousness and hardihood concur in this class of laborers with a maximum of intelligence and will power.” In the commercial world, programs for strengthening willpower for purposes of success and wealth abounded, and there were classified ads in which someone claimed good willpower as a selling point to potential employers. A writer seeking work sought to make himself attractive by depicting himself as having “character and insight, brains, and will power, managerial and sales experience” (“Young Man,” 1918). The cultivation of willpower helped to reproduce the values of American society.

In the first two decades of the 20th century, ads for a great number of books and institutes claimed to teach strengthening of willpower. The Pelman Institute promised to “strengthen such immeasurable qualities as willpower, concentration, ambition, self-reliance, judgment and memory. … It [Pelmanism] teaches how to develop personality, how to build character, how to strengthen individuality” (Creel, 1920; see also Thomson, 2006, for a discussion of Pelmanism as an applied psychology). Macy’s published a series of books that had will-training programs. These examples illustrate how willpower was important for self-knowledge and self-development.

Deposing and displacing willpower

Admonitions that self-control and conscious goals were insufficient or futile occurred frequently in the record. One version of this warning was that will was less important than the grace of God. While this objection to the glorification of willpower often came in articles about disease or alcohol, a Baptist minister, Daniel Fuchs, refuted the widespread belief in New Year’s resolutions, arguing that the Christian must “cast everything upon the Lord” (“New Year’s Vows,” 1935). Less theological and more psychological was the following advice: “Not effort and will power but inspiration produces the most important results in the world, the Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick told the congregation at Riverside Church” (“Inspiration,” 1936). The fact that willpower was otherwise lauded shows that this Christian view of character was widely challenged in everyday society, largely by a stress on self-control and by a general turn away from Calvinist versions of Protestantism (see White, 2009, for a study of liberal Protestantism and its use of psychological categories like willpower).

New was an emphasis on the stirrings of the subconscious and of the imagination as more important than willpower. When Émile Coué arrived in New York the year after Self Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion (1922) had been published, he was something of a celebrity (see Thomson, 2006, for Coué as an applied psychologist). He stated: “[F]or many years it has been known that the subconscious mind is able, through an exercise of the imagination, to overcome the conscious mind in the exercise of will-power” (“Coué Here,” 1923). Coué and others advocated a more interior look into the self.

Some in the new social sciences argued that willpower was a de-individualizing social force. William Osborn (1929), a sociologist from the University of Chicago, observed that “the whole socializing process of breaking individuals into group conformity leads to a repression of tendencies to function. Without such repression there could be no directed organized activity and no such thing as will power.” Such criticism, seen also in existential psychology some years later, explicitly rejected the “looping effect” of willpower from popular culture into the social sciences.

An earlier humorous essay poked fun at a man because his willpower kept him from drink (this on the brink of Prohibition in the United States):

My friend really feared that a steady diet of alcohol would make him a great genius—he is a painter—and he had a horror of ever becoming one. … Now, my friend had reckoned without his complexes. In keeping down the lid so tightly on himself he had reckoned without that little Imp of the Perverse—that little Contrary Cuss—that slumbers under every lid with one eye always open waiting for things to happen to the cellar door right over him. (De Casseres, 1920)

This paragon of willpower succumbed to alcohol’s temptation, and the author found his friend drunk: “urged, he said, by some unaccountable subconscious being that he said was his genius.” This opposition of creativity and willpower was a common theme. Morgan Robertson, whose novel The Wreck of the Titan or, Futility (1898) foreshadowed the fate of the Titanic, found his inspiration in a form of auto-suggestion that weakened his willpower, a dream-like state that for Robertson was telepathic connection with others around the world (Brock, 1904). Autosuggestion was commonly opposed to willpower, as in this story of an alleged healer:

This is a late day for exploiting the theory that the suggestionist, the hypnotist, the “mental healer” of any sort, uses up “will power” or some even more mysterious store of energy when he exercises his art. It is now perfectly well known that he does no such thing, though he can by auto-suggestion make himself think so. (“No Evidence,” 1911)

In contrast to willpower, autosuggestion acted through the imagination or the subconscious. In this criticism, the center of our being was unconscious. It is important not to overstate the opposition; Thomson (2006) indicates that in the 1920s, self-control via willpower was combined with subconscious powers to cultivate personality.

Willpower was pronounced passé in 1922, when Silas Bent reported the deposing of “King Will” by the psychology of the subliminal self:

The newer psychology appeals to what it regards as a higher authority [than the will], the subliminal self, shrouded in the subconscious mind. Suggestion has superseded command, and effortless imagination is thus recognized as the source of health, right conduct and reform. … King Will has been dethroned. (Bent, 1922)

Bent cited Freud, Jung, and Coué as advocates of the subliminal self in this “ancient conflict between the subconscious and the will.” For several decades, a psychoanalytically oriented psychology, with an emphasis on the complex and the libido, deposed the older psychology of the will. Outside this professional circle, however, King Will endured. He established a court in exile in popular psychology, and even in scientific psychology he had continued influence: for Skinner (1971), “the evolution of culture is a gigantic exercise in self-control” (p. 215). The purpose remained, even if the ways of self-understanding changed radically. With the waning of behaviorism and psychoanalysis, King Will again assumed the throne.

Willpower was suspect because it evoked older conceptions of the mind with its spiritual powers. Willpower was an illusion because “the predominant scientific and social philosophy of our age” (“Dr. Link Protests,” 1938) argued against it. Willpower was often said to be of no or little use in the fight against such disorders as alcoholism, cigarette smoking, and obesity. “Chronic alcoholism, Dr. [Edward Spencer] Cowles said, is not a matter of morals or will power, but a brain chemistry disease” (“New Light,” 1936). Being a popular misconception, willpower could be used as a straw man to highlight the superiority of scientific treatments for psychological disorders (as in Jeffrey & Christensen, 1975). However, popular culture also ridiculed exaggerated claims for it. In a limerick-completion context, the lines provided were: “Paying coal bills is rot, / By will power I shall keep hot.’ / Whereupon his nose froze, / and likewise his toes” (“List of Prize Winners,” 1907). The winner completed the poem with the line: “Fit to print, his remarks? I think not.” Willpower had its limits and was rarely presented as an absolute monarch.

Even though willpower was found wanting, psychology found its equivalents, pretenders to the throne. While courses in will-training are not common today, “motivational courses” abound, claiming to provide the wherewithal for success and happiness. Danziger (1997) traces the substitution of “motivation” for “the will” in psychology in the early 20th century. Whereas “motive” belonged to discourses of the will (in Upham, 1834, for example), the newer terms “motivate” and “motivation” and new uses of “energy” served a “naturalization of the will” (Danziger, 1997, p. 115). Other candidates include empowerment and assertiveness, and, as with motivation, these terms resonate as scientific concepts and social representations. Finally, in some domains, notably alcoholism, despite the fact that Alcoholics Anonymous rejected reliance on willpower in favor of a Higher Power, there remains a belief in the inner power of the will needed to overcome this ambiguously moral/medical condition (Valverde, 1998).