It is 1942, and the United States has been at war for nearly a year. The men of America, however, are too excited about their moms to focus on fighting Nazis. Day by day, the defenders of democracy are turning into crusaders for “gynocracy.” Under the threat of global tyranny, even “drill sergeants are spelling out ‘MOM’ on the battlefield.”
And who, anyway, is Mom? She is a “human calamity” and “a cause for sorrow.” She “has “enfeebled a nation of once free and dreaming men.” She is “ridiculous, vain, vicious, and a little mad.” She is “cursed, unclean,” “reckless and unreasoning.” With her sinister psychic powers, she’s really a lot like Hitler.
Or so declares the writer Philip Wylie in his essay “Common Women.” First published in his best-selling 1943 collection Generation of Vipers, “Common Women” offered Wylie’s account of the “cult of mom worship”— “Momism,” as he notoriously deemed it—in contemporary life. By the time of Vipers’ publication, Wylie had already made a name for himself as a writer of popular science fiction novels such as The Smuggled Atom Bomb and Gladiator. A number of his books became the bases of successful Hollywood films, including the 1949 drama Night Unto Night, starring a young Ronald Reagan. But Vipers would become his most notorious and enduring work: a frenzied critique of American culture and institutions that encompassed everything from clergymen to chemistry. Over Vipers’ twelve bilious essays, Wylie painted an America of spineless conformists, incapable of recognizing or defending value. And yet Wylie saw himself as a patriot. His hope was that, by excoriating the nation—by exercising what he pedantically called his “critical attitude”—he could redeem it.
Reading Vipers—a book that roasts its readers, their moms, and the military for some three hundred pages—feels as patriotic as pantsing Ben Franklin. And yet Vipers sold some fifty thousand copies between 1943 and 1955, as Wylie boasts in the footnotes to the revised edition. I had learned of the book in a sort of Wikipedia-induced fugue state, clicking through a series of embedded links until I landed on Vipers and then on Wylie, a writer with the spiritual imprint of boarding school still visible in his face. Who were these readers, I wondered, who were willing to pay for put-downs from an Exeter graduate obsessed with nukes and Carl Jung? Apparently I was one of them.