Stranger Things Have Happened: Psychic Spies

In a previous series, I spoke in great depth about Nazi occultism. Among many in the Third Reich, their nationalist and racial ideology was founded on a view that Germans were the descendants of lost race, and that the power of this race survived in ancient Norse runes, Teutonic magics, and legendary artifacts scattered around the world. Heinrich Himmler was the most prominent and influential of these true believers, and he started Das Ahnenerbe, the Institute for the Research and Study of Heredity, to investigate and prove the veracity of his obsessions. The man he placed at the head of this organization was Karl Maria Wiligut, a medium who claimed to be in psychic contact with the lost Aryan race Himmler imagined were his forerunners. Wiligut had previously been certified insane, but Himmler believed in his abilities, and under Wiligut, Das Ahnenerbe delved into more and more arcane areas of study, beyond the archaeological expeditions to prove their theorized heritage or the pseudoscientific conjecture about weird cosmological views like the Hollow Earth Theory or the World Ice Doctrine. Through the “Survey of the So-Called Occult Sciences,” they investigated spirit channeling, divining, astrology, and other forms of extra-sensory perception, or ESP. However, Adolf Hitler called all of it “nonsense” and complained about Himmler wanting to bring back the mysticism they had left behind when he had suppressed the Catholic Church. Indeed, in 1941, Hitler launched Special Action Hess to suppress the occult, arresting all known practitioners of ESP or the divining arts, be they fortune-tellers, astrologers, healers, or just anyone who claimed to be clairvoyant, and he seized all their literature and the trappings of their arts as well, including crystal balls and tarot cards. But Hitler had good reason for this outside of his distaste for their supernatural claims. The Special Action was named after Rudolph Hess, his former deputy Führer, who in May of that year had secretly flown to Scotland on an unauthorized peace mission and been captured. Hitler believed Hess had been encouraged in his plans by false horoscopes manufactured by the UK as propaganda, and this, it seems, was the real reason for the suppression of the occult in Special Action Hess. While the Nazis were earnestly studying divination and anomalous mental phenomena, British intelligence was making use of such practices in more devious ways. It is unclear whether Hess really was influenced by fabricated horoscopes, but it is known that British intelligence, aware of how many Germans trusted in astrology, did forge horoscopes as propaganda. In fact, they engaged the services of a woman famous for claiming to be a “witch,” Sybil Leek, to write these bogus horoscopes. Likewise, the most famous astrologer in America, Louis de Wohl, whose popular syndicated column, called “Stars Foretell,” usually focused on the war in Europe, was unbeknownst to his U.S. readers actually a propagandist for British intelligence, fabricating reports for the sole purpose of convincing Americans that the U.S. should enter the war. In the aftermath of the war, as U.S. intelligence competed with the Soviets to seize Nazi science, it was discovered that Das Ahnenerbe was taking ESP seriously, and much as the race for mind control began, this marked the very start of what would become a Cold War psychic arms race. 

If you haven’t read part one of this series, check it out before reading on. It’s not a single story, and you can enjoy this installment alone, but you should know that this series is an exploration of the historical and pseudohistorical basis of the popular Netflix series Stranger Things. As you may or may not know, the premise of that show involves a psychic character whose powers were studied and cultivated by a secret U.S. government experimentation program. In part one of this series, I discussed the very real human experimentation programs conducted by the CIA under the cryptonym MK-Ultra in search of mind control technology, and in this episode, we will look at government sponsored programs studying extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis. These categories of phenomena cover most of the capabilities of the psychic character in Stranger Things, who demonstrates the ability to move objects with her mind, see others’ thoughts or memories, and even spy on someone over a great distance as though through out-of-body experience, a technique that has come to be called “remote viewing.” Just as all of the dastardly human experiments undertaken by MK-Ultra were absolutely true, so too are the U.S. government studies and experiments with ESP. However, whereas Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA eventually came to accept that the elusive mind control drugs or techniques they sought did not actually exist, many of the scientists involved with ESP programs were true believers. What we must consider in this installment of the series is not just what happened, but also whether what happened was genuine anomalous mental phenomena or can be more rationally explained. Among the first government-sponsored ESP experiments organized after World War II were those in 1952, when the Department of Defense tasked J.B. Rhine with studying the psychic powers of animals. Rhine had coined the term ESP back in the 1920s and conducted some of the first experiments to study it in his Parapsychology Lab at Duke University. For the DoD, he conducted tests to determine whether dogs could psychically discern the location of landmines, whether cats could telepathically follow instructions to choose one food dish over another, and how homing pigeons made their way home. His experiments with dogs and cats yielded no results that couldn’t be explained by chance, and as for the abilities of homing pigeons, those remain a mystery today. After these failed experiments, the U.S. government’s interest in ESP resumed, perhaps unsurprisingly, when it coincided with its search for a viable mind control drug.

J.B. Rhine, Father of Parapsychology, testing subjects’ ESP abilities with Zener cards. Via NCDR.gov

Under the umbrella of MK-Ultra, Subproject 58, headed by Morse Allen, involved the search for the legendary “magic mushroom,” a fabled Mexican drug that it was thought could be useful, if not as a mind control agent then perhaps as a poison. The problem was that the “magic mushroom,” or teonanáctl, the “god’s flesh” mushroom, had never been proven to really exist. In his search for it, Morse Allen had sent a chemist to masquerade as a botany professor and infiltrate various mycology enthusiast groups, with little luck. Eventually, a man who had reportedly traveled to Mexico and been in contact with shamans who used the mushroom in their rituals came to their attention. They learned of him through a third party, Andrija Puharich, a towering figure in the study of ESP. Puharich had been fascinated with the topic since he was a child and believed he had calmed an aggressive dog with only the power of his mind. After serving in the armed forces, he earned a medical degree and published numerous papers theorizing that some unknown energy force connected to the brain and nervous system might explain anomalous mental phenomena. Dashing and charismatic, Puharich seemed to attract wealthy benefactors who gladly bankrolled his research projects, allowing him to start the Round Table Foundation, dedicated to experimentation that might take the topic of ESP out of the realm of parapsychology and into the realm of science proper. Among the admirable work that Puharich undertook was the study of human hearing, which he suspected may overlap with or provide insight into ESP. During the course of his foundation’s study of the topic, a revolutionary surgery to restore hearing was discovered by one of the doctors on his staff. Furthermore, during his study of psych ward patients who hear voices, it was he who discovered that a man’s dental fillings can actually receive the broadcast of nearby radio stations and thereby saved some otherwise mentally healthy individuals from unnecessary institutionalization. Puharich left his Foundation for a time to work for the government. Having delivered a speech to the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare, the Army thought ESP might just be a worthwhile field of inquiry and called him back into service, stationing him at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, and tasking him with finding “a drug that might enhance ESP.”

It was, of course, during his search for ESP-enhancing drugs for the Army that Puharich first took interest in the “god’s flesh” mushroom, which legend had it provided divinatory powers to the shamans who consumed them during rituals. However, when Puharich tracked down the explorer who had found the Mexican mushroom-eating shamans and brought him to the CIA’s attention, hoping to get security clearance and join MK-Ultra Subproject 58, there was a problem. Puharich was viewed as something of a crank, and for good reason. He had a habit of giving in to his confirmation bias and falling for the acts of stage mystics and charlatans, becoming obsessed with each new psychic he studied. In fact, his interest in the “magic mushroom” had only been stirred because a spirit channeler named Harry Stump had claimed while in a trance that it “would stimulate one’s psychic faculties,” and Puharich took this as gospel truth. In the end, Morse Allen chose not to grant Puharich security clearance and instead circumvented him, approaching the explorer, a man named R. Gordon Wasson, who happened to also be the vice-president of J.P. Morgan bank, directly. Financing his further expeditions, the CIA was then in on the ground floor when Wasson became the first white man in history to partake of the drug and returned to America with enough of the mushroom that the CIA could grow more. Once again, as with LSD, the CIA was responsible for the entrance of psychedelic mushrooms into our culture, and though Puharich had been cut out entirely, Wasson still gifted him a supply of the drug. Leaving the Army, Puharich returned to his Foundation and began further experiments, locking up the supposed psychics who obsessed him, like Harry Stump, in Faraday cages as a laboratory control and feeding them mushrooms. Gradually, Puharich’s personal life and his experiments would drift out of control, until both his marriage and his Foundation failed, but he always found a way to stay afloat. He sold his services as an expert in mushroom toxicology to the Army and later won funding from various other government entities, like the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA, for further ESP experimentation programs throughout the 1960s, all the while investigating a variety of purported psychics. In the 1970s, his study of one such individual, Uri Geller, would eventually bring the CIA around to working with him after all. As the Cold War had dragged on, it was feared that the Soviets had themselves a psychic super soldier. Therefore, we would need one ourselves, or at least we would need to seem like we had one.

Andrija Puharich, perhaps the most prolific tester of psychic phenomena on behalf of the U.S. government.

The CIA had good reason to fear Soviet progress in psi research, but they also had good reason to doubt it. The reason for this dichotomy was that intelligence reports had revealed the ESP and psychokinesis studies the Soviets were conducting, but there was always the strong possibility, especially in so fantastical a field, that what they’d learned was actually disinformation intended to mislead the U.S. about their capabilities. Certainly it was true that the Soviets were conducting psi experiments, and they had taken care to do so under euphemistic names, trying to present such research as strictly scientific since any mysticism or religion was anathema to good Marxists. So their research facilities were given pseudoscientific names like the Special Laboratory for Biocommunications Phenomena, and the topics of their research were equally coded. Psychokinesis, or PK, what we might call telekinesis today, was referred to as “emissions from humans,” which if I were a little less mature I might make a crude joke about. Likewise, telepathy was called “long-distance biological signal transmission.” But what troubled U.S. intelligence more than these was what they called “psychotronic weapons.” Intelligence suggested that the Soviets’ investigations in the area of so-called biocommunications were two-pronged; they studied individuals who claimed to be capable of the phenomena, but they also developed weapons meant to neutralize the capabilities of such persons, which meant devices that generated “high-penetrating emission(s),” typically microwave or electromagnetic, intended to interfere with brain function. Indeed, it was discovered in 1962 that such emissions were being actively transmitted toward the upper floors of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, which realization sent U.S. intelligence scrambling to study the technology themselves. Though their research could not definitively prove that the emissions were having a harmful effect on embassy staff, certainly the presence of the microwave radiation disrupted U.S. intelligence operations and had them chasing their tails for a while, secretly testing the health of everyone in the building. There are other theories and considerations with the Moscow Signal, of which I’ll have more to say in a patron exclusive, but perhaps that was the point of it, just to mess with their heads in a psychological sense. Such an objective could also be ascribed to the most terrifying of supposed Soviet breakthroughs in psi: the experiments conducted on Ninel Kulagina. This woman, a former Soviet soldier, was purported to be gifted with astounding psychokinetic abilities. The West knew this because state-run Soviet television had produced a special documentary about her, showing her moving small items like matches and salt shakers with her mind. Think of the scenes in Stranger Things when the psychic character sits staring at a Coke can, trying to crush it with her thoughts. But U.S. intelligence had acquired supposedly classified footage of Kulagina supposedly stopping a frog’s heart with her mind, which raised the possibility of a psychic assassin being able to perpetrate untraceable murders. Of course the American intelligence community recognized that it might all be fake, that the feats shown in the footage were a clever fraud, and that the TV program as well as the classified film in their possession was just propaganda. Just the same, it seemed the U.S. was in the market for our own psychics capable of telekinesis, or at least some people we could suggest were capable of it to the world and specifically to our Communist rivals.

The candidate that Puharich brought to the CIA’s attention was an Israeli man named Uri Geller who had made quite a name for himself. He performed in theaters like a stage magician, but he claimed his powers were real, not illusion. Not only did he perform feats of supposed mental telepathy, but he also bent spoons with only the power of his mind, or so it seemed. Unsurprisingly, Puharich took an interest and brought him to America for testing, and when he called up the CIA to say he had a genuine telepath capable of psychokinesis, the agency was so pressured by rumors of Soviet psychic soldiers that they took Puharich up on his suggestion of funding his research with Geller. However, the CIA still thought Puharich a liability, and furthermore, there were rumors that Geller was with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. If American and Soviet intelligence were in the business of finding or pretending to find psychic assets, then it followed that Mossad may have been following suit. Furthermore, the feat that brought Geller great international fame was when he appeared to predict that Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, had been killed, information that might have been advanced to him by his handlers to bolster his claims. The CIA therefore insisted that an agent of their own, Kit Green, oversee the study of Geller, and to distance themselves from association with Puharich and his foundation, they directed their funds to the Mind Institute of Los Angeles, an organization created by Edgar Mitchell, a former astronaut interested in the research of psychic phenomena whom they insisted be involved. Despite what seem to have been precautions taken to avoid exposure in the press, Uri Geller’s celebrity in America and the UK continuously rose, such that it was compared to Beatlemania. Considering the kinds of mystifying feats he performed and how much of a household name he was, I would compare him more to David Blaine today. The height of his fame came when he went on BBC Radio and urged all of the UK to concentrate with him at the same time, willing a spoon to bend, and the BBC’s switchboard was inundated with calls from listeners claiming to have bent spoons and other items in their own homes. Of course, these reports were never confirmed, nor could they be, really. But aside from the obvious doubts about Uri Geller’s abilities, which we will discuss next, there is the burning question of why the CIA, who were conducting classified research into his abilities, would allow him to parade them around the world on a press tour. On paper, Puharich was blamed for this breach of secrecy, but one cannot help but wonder if this is exactly what the CIA wanted: well-publicized reports that they too had in their employ psychics whose powers might rival those of the mysterious Ninel Kulagina.

Ninel Kulagina, moving a compass in what is certainly a Soviet propaganda film probably faked using magnets under the table.

With Geller’s fame arrived accusations of fraud. But these were not lobbed just by sardonic journalists in the usual skeptical editorials. Geller’s outrageous claims of possessing supernatural powers and his unprecedented celebrity were enough to galvanize the scientific community. Astronomer Carl Sagan, mathematician Martin Gardner, and psychologist Ray Hyman came together with magician James Randi, who insisted Geller was an illusionist rather than a genuine psychic, and formed the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a noted skeptic organization that is still active today, for the sole purpose of combatting the surge in irrational belief they were observing. Most criticism of Geller comes down to his act being a pretty typical stage magician’s act, using distraction to pre-bend spoons and then hold them in such a way as to dramatically reveal the bend, making it look as if it is only then being bent. Indeed, there have been times when Geller refused to even perform if magicians were present, likely because he knew they would see through his tricks. As for his telepathic demonstrations, he has even admitted that his manager, a young man named Shipi Shtrang, helped him to fake certain psychic feats like guessing audience members’ license plate numbers. As for secondary effects, such as the people who claimed Geller had somehow imparted to them the ability to bend spoons themselves, a simple explanation is that mass delusions can be encouraged by the power of suggestion, and that believing a thing to be true can have concrete effects that may seem to confirm its truth, a phenomenon related to the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy or the Tinkerbell effect, a sociological concept called the Thomas theorem, which states that “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” But regardless of skeptical opposition, the CIA continued their experiments with Geller. According to later declassified reports, Geller was the subject of experimentation by nuclear scientists working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who tested his ability to affect the computer program cards inside an ICBM, exploring the proposition that a person with psychokinetic abilities could feasibly deactivate nuclear missiles in flight. Strangely, after these experiments, the scientists involved experienced weird poltergeist activity at home, seeing unexplained phenomena like floating images and orbs. It was so bizarre that Kit Green, the CIA agent overseeing the experiments, reportedly came to believe that they had become the focus of a CIA psychological operation, using drones and holograms—the fact that a CIA man, and one who himself said he ran the ”weird desk,” would think this the likeliest explanation of such paranormal phenomena goes a long way toward supporting some of the theories about UFO disinformation programs that I discussed in previous episodes. Aside from this, though, it’s hard to know what to make of this bizarre report. What is more curious, to me, is the fact that the results of one of the Geller experiments was declassified in 1979, revealing that a magnetic program card had seemingly been erased when Geller was concentrating on it. If the result of this experiment is to be trusted, why would U.S. intelligence declassify it? It occurs to me that, if this were a genuine breakthrough in the use of psychic powers as nuclear self-defense, we would want to keep it secret at all costs. However, if it were not genuine, but we wanted our enemies to believe we were developing such capabilities, only then would we want it declassified. Framed in this manner, it makes one wonder how much of U.S. intelligence’s psychic experimentation programs that have remained classified were purposely falsified and leaked as disinformation, just as it was suspected that the footage of Ninel Kulagina had been.

Uri Geller was not the only psychic asset being studied by the CIA in the 1970s. Another man, studied at the same facility where Geller was often studied, the Stanford Research Institute, or SRI, was Ingo Swann, who formerly acted as a psychic test subject for the oldest psychic research organization in America, the American Society for Psychical Research. During his time with the ASPR, he began to undergo experiments involving the projection of his consciousness outside of his body, called travelling clairvoyance. These experiments involved suspending a tray in the air across the room and asking him what was on it. These experiments drew the interest of a physicist named Hal Puthoff, who invited Swann to SRI, a laboratory affiliated with the Defense Department, and reportedly tested him by directing him to agitate a magnetometer located several feet below him, encased in concrete. The story differs according to the telling, with Puthoff and Swann describing a perturbation of the device’s readings as having never been seen before or since, representing it as a successful demonstration of Swann’s psychokinesis, while other scientists have suggested it was a relatively common frequency variation for which Swann merely took credit, or that the machine had malfunctioned coincidentally and remained out of order afterward. One thing is certain, though; they never repeated the experiment, which any scientist worth his salt would have done before thinking to tout it as evidence of anything. During his time at SRI, Swann adapted his travelling clairvoyance routine and renamed the feat “remote viewing,” a name that Hal Puthoff and another physicist at SRI, Russel Targ, preferred because it sounded far more scientific. At first, their remote viewing experiments involved an individual going somewhere and concentrating on what they saw while Swann sat in a Faraday cage and tried to sketch what he thought the individual was looking at. However, since they were working for the CIA and clearly developing techniques for espionage, even if they weren’t openly acknowledging it, it became apparent that, even if this process produced results, it was pretty pointless, since if they were sending an operative into the field to infiltrate some site, they wouldn’t need the remote viewer at all. Rather, to be useful, Swann discerned that a psychic would need to be able to remote view any location, without a person present at the site sending back willful thoughts about the place. He came up with the idea that they would use coordinates. Kit Green asked an acquaintance for a set of coordinates, not knowing what was at the location, and Swann sketched the place. The results were rather vague, and at first didn’t seem to match the location Green’s acquaintance had provided: a family cabin. However, when another individual volunteered his remote viewing services, the details were far more precise, and it appeared the remote viewers were focused not on the cabin but rather on a top secret military facility called Sugar Grove just nearby the cabin.

Uri Geller, celebrity psychic, displaying a spoon he claims to have bent with his mind. Notice the film does not show the spoon bending. Gif uploaded by MindBob on Tenor.

This other, more accurate remote viewer was a Scientologist named Pat Price, and he presented himself to the researchers at SRI in a very strange way. He just approached them while they were out buying a Christmas tree for their lab and said he could help. Later, when Ingo Swann was in the process of attempting to remote view the coordinates provided by Kit Green, Price just called up Puthoff and offered his services. Curious, Puthoff gave him the coordinates, and a couple days later, Price called him back with an astonishingly detailed account. When it was discovered that the two men, Swann and Price, seemed to be viewing the Sugar Grove facility, Price’s reading raised alarms. Apparently, it was so precise that it described the color of filing cabinets and the names that appeared on the files therein. Even the rather credulous Hal Puthoff could hardly believe it and came to suspect Price was a CIA plant, ordered to approach them and test whether they could detect a fake who might have been feeding them sensitive intelligence as if it were psychic impressions. After all, Geller was still suspected of being Mossad, so the CIA had reason to fear they might be fooled. Very quickly, though, the interest of the agency shifted from Ingo Swann to Pat Price. Swann left SRI, perhaps a little resentful, and Price left to work directly for the CIA. This can’t necessarily be taken as evidence that he wasn’t working for them all along, however, as it’s quite possible that because of Price’s performance, the CIA decided the program at SRI was a liability, and Price left just to come back into the fold, his operation concluded. Certainly the CIA got out of the psychic research business after that, but not until after a very mysterious event. Pat Price was on a visit to Las Vegas in 1975 and met up with Kit Green and Hal Puthoff for dinner and reminiscence. At dinner, he left early, not feeling well. Afterward, he died of a heart attack in his room. An unidentified man arrived later with Price’s medical records and waived an autopsy. The researchers at SRI suspected murder, but who to suspect? The CIA themselves, or perhaps the KGB? Apparently, the Church of Scientology even came under suspicion. In the end, though, we don’t know what Price did for the CIA, or why he might have been killed, or whether he even was killed, for after all, he might have simply succumbed at 57 years old to a cardiac event.

After the CIA discontinued their funding of the psychic research at SRI, Uri Geller continued in his quasi-mystical, illusionist-esque career, fading slowly into relative obscurity and becoming something of a joke. Most recently, he threatened to telepathically prevent Brexit, and obviously failed to do so. While the CIA may have given up on remote viewing, though, the U.S. government in its entirety did not, and afterward, the Defense Intelligence Agency revived the endeavor under the codename Stargate Project. With a manual for training soldiers to remote view written by Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann, they kept psychics on the payroll, loaning them out to whatever agency or branch of the armed forces wanted to use them, until the project was declassified in 1995. At that point, as the DIA sought to transfer the project back to the CIA, two academics, statistician Jessica Utts and psychologist Ray Hyman, one a believer and one a skeptic, were engaged to evaluate the 20-year project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they came to opposite conclusions, but Hyman’s reservations, published in Skeptical Inquirer, show that, even 20 years later, much of the same fundamental problems with psychic research remained. The problem of inadequate laboratory controls has always been an objection of skeptics. For example, the original remote viewing activities of Ingo Swann and Pat Price, in which they described the Sugar Grove facility, were completed at home, with no supervision.  They could have researched the coordinates or received outside information. Additionally, the problem of the bias of the researchers who undertake these studies, like Puharich and Puthoff, who were always entirely convinced of their subjects’ abilities, was always an issue. Just the same, in the 90’s, Hyman’s central objection was that all the remote viewing studies, which involved the evaluation of sketches to determine likenesses to the target supposedly being viewed, relied on a single judge, the person conducting the experiment, who was invariably a believer. He pointed out that even statistically significant results, which seemed to indicate something more than chance, were suspect until independent judges could reproduce the same results. And the repeatability and reproducibility of supposedly successful results in psychic research has also always been problematic, with researchers routinely claiming that results cannot be reproduced if observed by non-believers, a difficulty that should not be and is not an issue in science generally. In the years since its declassification, remote viewing became the stuff of satire, like the book and movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, and today these experiments are something of a laughing stock to many, despite the former participants in the program and practitioners publishing numerous books and speaking regularly on the paranormal circuit. But even as far-fetched as their claims are, they still pale in comparison to the final and perhaps biggest inspiration of the series Stranger Things, which was an outright hoax.

The Stanford Research Institute group, from left to right: Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, Kit Green, and the mysterious Pat Price. Via Vice.

Until next time, remember, in science, experiments must devise positive tests to discern whether a phenomenon is present or absent, but no such tests have ever been devised for psychic powers, which are defined negatively: when normal explanations are eliminated, researchers claim that is evidence that psychic phenomena exist. But that’s not how science works. You can’t point to any fluctuation in the data of your study and claim it proves your pet paranormal phenomenon is real. 

Further Reading

Hyman, Ray. “Evaluation of the Military’s Twenty-Year Program on Psychic Spying.” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 20, no. 2, March/April 1996, pp. 21-23. Center for Inquiry,  cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1996/03/22165045/p21.pdf.

Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little Brown, 2017.

Stranger Things Have Happened: MK-Ultra and CIA Mind Control

In 1925, at the Geneva Conference for the Supervision of the International Traffic in Arms, world leaders took the initiative to renew the international prohibition on chemical warfare that had previously been affirmed in the Versailles Treaty, and to this prohibition was added a ban on what was then a new frontier in warfare, bacteriological weapons. Before World War II, every major world power had ratified the Geneva Protocols, except Japan and the United States, which actually would not ratify it until 1975. Before that time, though, the U.S. would undertake numerous secret experimentation projects that would violate these international standards as well as the forthcoming Nuremberg Code and many of our own laws, in order to keep up in an arms race that may have been, in large part, a paranoid fantasy. Intelligence reports in the early 1940s convinced the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, that the Japanese, that other holdout from the Geneva Protocols, was developing advanced germ weapons, and in response, President Franklin Roosevelt created the first American biological weapons research agency, the War Research Service. By 1943, upon the direct request of Winston Churchill, who feared Nazi Germany was preparing a biological attack on Britain, Roosevelt authorized the Chemical Corps to begin developing and stockpiling biological weapons at its newly designated Biological Warfare Laboratories at Camp Detrick, a training base under the command of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. At Churchill’s urging, the US began preparing 500,000 bombs full of anthrax spores, which were thankfully, never used. Throughout the war, administrators of the War Research Service were convinced that Nazis and the Japanese, who were engaged in experimentation on human subjects, were far more advanced in their biological weapons research, and when the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was formed for the express purpose of recruiting Nazi scientists, those at Camp Detrick took interest. Typically any individual who had been an “ardent Nazi” or had been guilty of war crimes could not be recruited and would have to face a tribunal in Nuremberg, but Operation Paperclip, so called because of the use of paperclips to mark the files of “troublesome” cases, offered a way to bring even the worst Nazi offender into the fold of American scientific intelligence. They simply “bleached” their files, erasing their history of involvement with the SS or the Gestapo and expunging any record of human experimentation. Operation Paperclip is a mainstay in many a modern-day conspiracy theory about the clandestine activities of U.S. intelligence. Regardless of the lack of support for some conspiracy claims that revolve around Operation Paperclip, it is well established that the program existed, and that the U.S. government whitewashed the crimes of Nazi mad scientists so that we could put them to work for ourselves. After all, if we didn’t take them, the Soviets would, or so the justification went. Among the notorious figures who were shielded from international prosecution in exchange for their efforts to further American biological warfare research were Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii, whose crimes were legendary. Blome murdered thousands of concentration camp prisoners by exposing them to nerve gas, infecting them with typhus, and experimenting with ways to give them cancer. Ishii, at his secretive Unit 731 labs in Manchuria, killed as many as 12,000 test subjects in some of the most horrific experiments ever conducted: exposing them to poison gas, electrocuting them, popping their eyes out in pressurized chambers, injecting subjects with air to cause embolisms, burning them alive with flamethrowers, and freezing them slowly to study hypothermia. He exposed his victims to countless diseases, including cholera, syphilis, bubonic plague, and anthrax. Frequently he concluded his experiments with vivisection, dissecting the subjects while they were still alive in order to better study their organs at the time of death. He was truly a monster, and rather than see him face justice, General Douglas MacArthur guaranteed him immunity in exchange for his expertise. This would prove to be the genesis of state-sponsored American mad science. We may never have committed atrocities at this level, but as you’ll see, we did not balk at secret human experimentation.

*

Besides reading thoughtful blog posts, I’m unsure what your preferences are for entertainment. I enjoy a good book, and I stream probably too many movies and series. If you’re like me, you recently enjoyed or intend to soon binge the latest season of Stranger Things. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the new season or even if you haven’t watched the show at all. I’ll reveal no spoilers here, beyond some vague references to its premise. This series will not be about the show, but rather about its historical and pseudohistorical basis. Recently I overheard someone talking about the program, telling someone else that it is based on real events. To clarify, the show prominently features a character who was the subject of human experimentation sponsored and overseen by the U.S. government. This person was referring to real CIA human experimentation programs and appeared to be suggesting that the American government really did conduct the kind of esoteric research and mad science portrayed in the show. But of course, this is only partially accurate. Clandestine intelligence programs did indeed engage in mind-bending experiments on human subjects, and these certainly did, in part, seem to serve as inspiration for what is portrayed in Stranger Things. You heard me refer to these programs before, in my series UFO Disinfo, which suggested that U.S. intelligence could feasibly be staging UFO sightings and encouraging UFO culture as part of a long-running psychological operation. That, of course, was, admittedly, a conspiracy theory, but it was supported by the fact that we know such psyops and programs that experimented on U.S. citizens definitely existed, having come to light despite being the subject of a massive government cover-up. This is no baseless conspiracy speculation. It happened. However, much of what is presented in Stranger Things, such as secret government development of psychic agents capable of remote viewing and telekinesis, derives from a combination of fact and fiction, and some of it, such as the idea of experimentation on abducted children and the opening of portals, entered the public consciousness through hoaxes and baseless conspiracy claims. In this series, I plan to reveal the astonishing truth of what U.S. government-sponsored mad scientists really did, after which I will descend into the realm of what is exaggerated or misrepresented and what is outright fabrication.

Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii, two mad doctors guilty of crimes against humanity in WWII whose work was studied and furthered by U.S. scientific intelligence.

After the Second World War, President Harry Truman dissolved the secret intelligence agency the Office of Strategic Services, but in signing the National Security Act two years later, in 1947, he formed a new clandestine intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Agency, to address the threats of Soviet Russia and Red China. Two years into its operations, in 1949, a particular event drove the agency into the business of mad science. That year, the show trial of  Hungarian Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty struck fear into the Western world. Mindszenty had resisted the Communist ruling party of Hungary, and after his arrest and confinement, he appeared befuddled during his show trial, speaking in an unconvincing monotone as he confessed to charges of conspiracy and treason. Senior CIA officials suspected that Mindszenty’s behavior proved that Communists had developed some revolutionary approach to interrogation or even some sort of mind control technique, accomplished with some drug or through hypnosis, or perhaps by a combination of the two. And the CIA were not alone. In response to the Mindszenty trial, the Chemical Corps formed a secret group at Camp Detrick to develop drugs specifically intended to be used for coercion. The next year, the CIA director approved a new project, called Bluebird, that authorized experimentation on prisoners, defectors, and refugees with the sole purpose of developing “Special Interrogation techniques” that could result in “control of an individual.” That year, as Project Bluebird got up and running, the CIA began to believe its own anti-Communist propaganda. An anti-Communist propagandist who formerly worked for the OSS created a media sensation with an article published in the Miami News alleging that Communist China had perfected a mind control technique the author dubbed “brain washing.” Believing this propaganda entirely, one CIA official who would later rise to become its director, Allen Dulles, focused much of the CIA’s resources on mind control projects. Project Bluebird established secret prisons and torture houses in Germany, and later in Japan, at which they employed former Nazi doctors whose records had been bleached by Operation Paperclip, at which they continued the legacy of Nazi human experimentation, studying all kinds of physical torture techniques and dosing prisoners with a variety of drugs, including amphetamines, heroin, and mescaline, all in an effort to see if these Special Interrogation techniques would make prisoners more cooperative, encourage them to reveal secrets, alter their personalities, or induce amnesia. These operations expressly violated the Nuremberg Code that such experiments be conducted only on witting and willing subjects, but those involved justified such violations through their belief that their enemies were doing the same, and such codes did not apply during conflicts with enemy states who themselves violated the codes. This rationalization was predicated on a fundamental error, though, as it would be revealed years later that Mindszenty and other prisoners who were believed to have been “brain washed” by Communists had not been the victims of some cutting edge drug-induced mind control, but rather had been worked over with rather mundane torture techniques and psychologically manipulated using the well-known, long-used approaches that interrogators had known for decades were effective at breaking spies and prisoners of war.

In 1951, amid the fearmongering of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was creating a paranoid panic by convincing many that Communists had infiltrated every level of American society, Allen Dulles put the CIA’s mind control program into high gear, hiring one Sidney Gottlieb to head the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff—in other words, Project Bluebird, or as they then renamed the expanded program, Project Artichoke. Gottlieb was an unusual fellow, a chemist with a club foot and a love of folk dancing who lived a strange double life, as a spiritual back-to-nature type at home and as a zealot devoted to perfecting mind control at all costs at work. Gottlieb would rise to become the CIA’s mind control czar, as well as its chief developer of poisons and poison delivery systems, and the programs he directed would be responsible for the destruction of countless lives. He is by far the most notorious of American mad scientists, our own Dr. Mengele. Under his auspices, and under the supervision of Morse Allen, the callous former director of Bluebird, the “Special Interrogations” evolved to become known as the “Artichoke Method” and to include far darker practices. Their torture techniques came to include ever more creative and cruel approaches, such as exposing subjects to radiation and extreme heat, and giving them electroshock treatments. Allen unsurprisingly found these practices less than effective, especially electroshock. While he could easily reduce his subjects to vegetative states using this tool, he could not use it to extract information from them, nor could it erase specific memories and leave them otherwise unaffected. It was simply a needlessly elaborate way to lobotomize. Their use of drugs on subjects evolved during these years as well. First they used tetrahydrocannabinol, or what cannabis users may better know as THC, which they referred to as TD, or “truth drug.” But finding that it mostly either relaxed the subject or induced fits of laughter, they moved on to cocaine, hoping that its tendency to induce talkativeness may be useful, but as that talkativeness seemed to derive from elation rather than relaxed inhibitions, it proved useless as well. From there, they tested heroin, but they found this only useful when withheld from addicts, who would be more likely to cooperate in exchange for a fix. Lastly, they turned to psychoactive drugs, more specifically mescaline, following once again in the footsteps of Nazi madmen who had experimented with the drug in Dachau. It is unclear how many of their test subjects at their secret torture houses in Germany may have died, or how comparable their death count may have been to those of their Nazi counterparts, but one document did indicate clearly that the disposal of corpses was “not a problem.”

One of the few extant images of Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra, seen here preparing to testify in 1977 about his career with the CIA.

Although Artichoke men did not find mescaline to be useful as a truth drug or mind control agent, another more recently discovered psychoactive drug piqued their interests. Lysergic acid diethylamide-25, more commonly known as LSD or just acid today, was derived by accident from ergot fungus in a Swiss laboratory in 1943. Although very little was produced in Switzerland at first, it showed up on the CIA’s radar, and Artichoke men performed some dosing experiments with it, finding it just as ineffective as other drugs they administered without further, more brutal Artichoke methods applied. Sidney Gottlieb, however, took especial interest in the substance, which he felt bore further study. As has long been common practice among chemists experimenting with drugs, Gottlieb and other scientists used LSD themselves in order to evaluate its effects, and Gottlieb was enamored of it. He marveled at how powerful an effect even the tiniest dose seemed to have and wondered what could be accomplished with larger doses combined with other Artichoke methods, like torture and hypnosis, deciding that LSD would prove to be the key to his quest for mind control. He sent men to Sandoz labs in Switzerland, who had developed the drug, bought out the world’s supply of it, extracted a promise from the lab not to produce any of it for Communist regimes, and then tasked an American pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, with cracking its chemical composition and synthesizing massive amounts for the CIA’s use. Furthermore, believing that environment and personality played a major role in each subject’s reaction to the drug, he convinced his superiors that their experiments must be expanded beyond their current scope. There was only so much they could learn by dosing themselves or dosing prisoners. They needed a variety of people from different backgrounds, who might be experimented on without their knowledge, outside of the specific context of captivity, which did not provide an accurate sense of how the drug might be used in the field. This required a massive domestic program to illegally experiment on civilians, a program that would be “ultra-sensitive” and require the utmost secrecy, with many levels of insulation to prevent all but a few from knowing its extent. Allen Dulles, now director of the CIA, authorized this program with Gottlieb at its head. Gottlieb named it MK-Ultra, using a prefix common for Technical Services Staff projects, along with a cryptonym that indicated how ultra-secret the program must be.

Some of Gottlieb’s early experiments on civilians appear to have been conducted brazenly, in public. In 1952, some agents lured a young American artist named Stanley Glickman to a café in Paris popular among expatriates. There it is likely they dosed Glickman, who panicked when the drug hit him and fled. Seeking treatment at American Hospital, which had a secret relationship with the CIA, Glickman later claimed he was further dosed with hallucinogens and given electroshock. Glickman’s life was ruined. He never resumed his artistry and was transformed into a paranoid recluse for the rest of his years. Meanwhile, in America, he engaged Dr. Paul Hoch of New York Psychiatric Institute to secretly dose one of his patients, a tennis player who was being treated for depression after a divorce. This poor unsuspecting patient, Harold Blauer, was injected with psychoactive drugs 6 times over the course of a month, and when he requested the treatment be stopped, Dr. Hoch injected him with a dose 14 times greater than the previous doses. He died after about 2 hours of flailing. Conscious of the fact that he would need to exercise more discretion, Gottlieb hired George Hunter White, a corrupt narcotics officer and alcoholic who had developed a taste for the drugs he confiscated, to set up a safehouse in New York in which subjects could be unwittingly drugged in a safe and controlled environment completely wired with surveillance so that Gottlieb and others could later examine the resulting behavior. White posed as an artist or a sailor and prowled Greenwich Village, luring underworld types back to the safehouse where he dosed them, confident that their various illicit lifestyles would discourage them from going to the authorities following their experiences, not all of which were unpleasant. And even when a subject inevitably sought medical attention and declared they had been drugged, White’s law enforcement connections protected both him and MK-Ultra. As this safehouse operation continued, Gottlieb remained interested in mental health institutions as useful environments for more terminal experiments, which could be taken to further extremes. In 1953, he arranged with Dr. Harris Isbell of the Addiction Research Center in Kentucky to perform the most egregious LSD experiments ever undertaken. Using drug addicted patients as subjects, many of them African-Americans who technically agreed to the experiments in exchange for a fix of heroin, Isbell administered lysergic acid in exponentially larger doses over the course of 77 days. Even the most ardent enthusiast of the recreational use of LSD will shudder in horror at the thought of tripping every day for two and a half months. It would be mind-breaking.

A photo of the notorious George Hunter White, on file at Stanford Special Collections in Palo Alto, via SFWeekly.

Astonishingly, Gottlieb directed these human drug experiments with immunity until 1953, when finally a slipup of his own caused him some difficulties and threatened to expose MK-Ultra. In the fall of that year, Gottlieb invited several Camp Detrick men to a classified retreat at a cabin on Deep Creek Lake, in Maryland. Among the attendees was one Frank Olson, an expert in the aerosol delivery of chemicals. Olson was a man privy to many sensitive secrets. He had played a role in Operation Sea-Spray, in 1950, when the U.S. Navy attempted to simulate a biological weapons attack by releasing what it believed was a harmless bacteria on San Francisco and ended up making numerous San Franciscans ill with urinary tract infections, one of whom died, and possibly causing a mysterious pneumonia cluster. Recently, after visiting European black sites where Artichoke work continued, he became disillusioned with his work. He confided to a friend that he was troubled by the CIA’s use of drugs and torture on prisoners, and their collaboration with Nazi scientists. Before attending the Deep Creek retreat, he had spoken of resigning. While at the retreat, he and several other Camp Detrick men were unknowingly dosed with LSD by Gottlieb himself, who only informed them after the drug had taken effect. Later reports indicate that, while he was under the influence of the drug, some of his colleagues may have confronted him about his decision to leave the CIA. Afterward, Olson became depressed and preoccupied. His family worried about him. The CIA assigned a psychiatrist to speak with him. He became increasingly agitated over the next several days, and paranoid about being dosed again or being arrested. Just before Thanksgiving, he was taken by his colleagues to New York, where he slipped away and wandered around the city in something like a fugue state. On November 28th, he plunged to his death from the window of a hotel room he shared with Gottlieb’s chief lieutenant, Robert Lashbrook. According to Lashbrook, Olson, in a state of undress, had run across the room and leapt at the window with such force that he crashed through the drawn curtains and the glass to fall to his death. Outside of the exact dimensions and extent of the crimes against humanity committed during the course of the program, Olson’s death is perhaps the central enduring mystery related to MK-Ultra. Was Olson dosed more than once during the days after Deep Creek, thus explaining his increasingly aberrant behavior? Was he targeted by his colleagues as a subject for testing because of his recent reservations about their work? Did he commit suicide, or was he murdered to cover up MK-Ultra? One thing is certain, as evidence would later show: a cover-up did occur. Police were told the death must be kept quiet as a matter of national security, Lashbrook’s background was falsified to investigators, and Olson’s family was handled by convincing them their patriarch had died from a “classified illness” and paying them off with survivor’s benefits. In the end, there were a few investigations, but it resulted, at the time, in nothing more than a memo stating Gottlieb had shown “poor judgement.” It was less of a genuine slap on the wrist and more a pantomime of one.

Afterward, MK-Ultra continued its work in renewed secrecy. George Hunter White moved to San Francisco and opened new safehouses wired for surveillance, this time staffed with prostitutes whom he trained to dose johns, engage in less than typical sex acts with them, and afterward to get their sex partners talking. It was part of a new initiative to study sex in conjunction with drugs as a means of eliciting sensitive information, an initiative White called Operation Midnight Climax. In practice, however, these brothels became dens of debauchery. George White spent most of his time sitting on a portable toilet behind a one-way mirror, watching sex acts and drinking martinis by the pitcher. MK-Ultra contractors and CIA agents, including Sidney Gottlieb, would visit regularly not on business, but rather for pleasure, seeking the free services of sex workers employed by the agency. Meanwhile, MK-Ultra’s engagement of medical professionals to perform horrific human experiments only increased, insulated through an academic organization, The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which they used as a front to dispense “grant money.” One contractor, who like others was unaware that he actually worked for the CIA, was Donald Ewen Cameron, president of both the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. At facilities in Canada, Cameron conducted experiments that on their surface seem very similar to those depicted in the fictional program Stranger Things, as they involved sensory deprivation, a procedure that is shown numerous times on the show. But Cameron’s work is far more horrific than it appears in Stranger Things. Believing that he needed to “depattern” the minds of his subjects before they’d be susceptible to the “psychic driving” he attempted in his mind control experiments, Cameron’s subjects were first sedated and then subjected to extreme periods of sensory deprivation. These were not a matter of hours but rather of weeks, and sometimes months, locked in dark water tanks. It resulted in patients forgetting how to walk. Afterward, he administered electroshocks far stronger than any other psychiatrists dared. Finally, the patients were fed LSD and fitted with helmets that played recorded phrases like “My mother hates me” on repeat. These horrifying experiments typically resulted in complete mental breakdown, with subjects reverting to infantile development stages. These were otherwise normal individuals who had come to him for help with issues like anxiety and post-partum depression. The destruction of their minds was nothing less than a state sponsored crime against humanity.

Donald Ewen Cameron, prominent psychologist and conductor of horrific torturous medical experiments funded by the CIA.

There is no telling how many lives were destroyed by the MK-Ultra program over the course of its existence, as after it was finally shut down, having failed to produce any working technological or pharmacological mind control techniques, the CIA had all records relating to the project destroyed during the panic caused by Watergate. What we know only emerged later in the 1970s, when the Presidential Rockefeller Commission, the Congressional Church Committee, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were formally tasked with investigating CIA crimes and abuses. By that time, Gottlieb had retired, and when questioned, he claimed to have little recall of the project’s activities. In 1976, journalist John Marks obtained boxes of redacted files under the Freedom of Information Act and wrote the first definitive exposé of MK-Ultra, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. By that time, the wider effects of Gottlieb’s experiments had been felt by everyone in America, if not the world, as it became clear that his encouragement of experimentation with hallucinogens extended to universities, where major counter-culture figures like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey helped to spread its use as a recreational drug and means of enlightenment among the general populace. And as the years have passed, more and more people have come forward to sue the CIA for being the unwitting subjects of their experiments, including Frank Olson’s family, who went on a crusade against the agency. We have further learned that their psychological experiments may have unexpectedly resulted in mass murders. It was in later years revealed that mafia figure Frank “Whitey” Bulger had been extensively experimented on early in his prolific criminal career, during which he murdered 19 or more. The Unabomber, Ted Kaszynski, was also part of an abusive, CIA sponsored psychological experiment during his time at Harvard, long before his reign of terror. And there is even a conspiracy theory that Charles Manson was the subject of CIA experiments, although I am not prepared right now to evaluate those claims, which smack a bit of unsupported conspiracy speculation. Suffice it to say that the extent of the terrible effects of these Nazi-esque crimes committed by U.S. intelligence can only be speculated on. And at the end of John Marks’ revelatory book, he speculates about the different directions that MK-Ultra mind control research may have taken afterward, under some other classified cryptonym. He mentions genetic engineering, a science that we know has grown by leaps and bounds, as well as brain stimulation, the domination of subjects by surgically inserting electrodes to remotely stimulate specific areas of the brain, a deeply unsettling prospect. Lastly, he suggests that they may have directed their funding toward secret research with a more fantastical focus, such as extra-sensory perception or other psychic abilities. This notion is certainly reflected in fiction like Stranger Things, which promotes the idea of secret government research in this area, and in Part Two, we’ll see to what extent this is, surprisingly, quite true.

Further Reading

Kinzer, Stephen. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Henry Holt and Company, 2019.

Marks, John. The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control; The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.

Gun Violence in America

In Manhattan, in January of 1911, satirical novelist and muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips took his usual route from his Gramercy Park apartment to the Princeton Club, a private club for the Ivy League university’s alumni. Phillips cut a tall, impressive figure, wearing light summer suits in winter, handsome with striking pale eyes. When he arrived at the club, a man he did not know approached him, lifted a handgun, and fired several bullets into Phillips, crying out “Here you go!” before shooting himself in the head. As Phillips slowly died from his gunshot wounds, he expressed confusion about who his murderer had been, but police had little trouble determining the motive, remembering that Phillips had not long ago come to them about a series of threatening letters he’d received. His killer was Fitzhugh Goldsborough, the deranged son of a wealthy family whom he believed Phillips was lampooning his fiction, some of which satirized rich, entitled youth. The coroner who examined their corpses, who regularly corresponded with the press to offer them grisly statistics on New York deaths, afterward spearheaded a campaign against the easy acquisition and public carrying of concealable handguns, a campaign that was met with much public support. Just five months before the murder/suicide outside the Princeton Club, a dockworker had shot popular New York Mayor William Gaynor in the neck. Gaynor had survived, but the incident had touched off a robust debate about whether mental illness, or the media, or our national culture had contributed to the crime. After the Phillips murder, the debate shifted to focus on the fact that a disgruntled and violent individual had been so easily able to acquire a gun and carry it to the marina where the mayor was waiting to board a steamship. The push for gun legislation in 1911 was further championed by a State Senator named Timothy Sullivan, who framed the campaign as a solution to gang violence. The reign of terror of certain street gangs was very real to New Yorkers. Less than ten years earlier, the Jewish-American-dominated Eastman Gang of the Lower East Side had clashed with the Italian-American dominated Five Points Gang in a bloody shootout on Rivington and Allen Streets. When police arrived, the two gangs turned their guns on the officers. The streets had been transformed into a warzone, and in the intervening years, the gang wars had continued. Senator Sullivan introduced gun control legislation in 1911 that instituted licensing for the possession of any firearm and left the decision of whether to issue a carry license up to the licensing authority, the police, who rarely granted the privilege of carrying firearms in public. This gun control law has been criticized as a way for Tammany Hall politician Timothy Sullivan, portrayed by his rivals and critics as a crime lord himself, to have his adversaries arrested by having firearms planted on them. Indeed, it’s been said that some street toughs took to sewing their pockets shut so that police could not plant handguns on them. It has also been argued that police racially-profiled members of immigrant communities when enforcing the law, which certainly seems to be the case. The first man imprisoned under the law was an Italian, and in an editorial after his conviction, the New York Times praised the judge for the 1-year sentencing, saying that it “suitably impressed the minds of aliens in New York that the Sullivan law forbids their bearing arms of any kind,” while also, to their credit, asking, “would it not be well to ‘get after’ the notorious characters who are not aliens?” and conceding that “’frisking’ such persons is less common, perhaps, than it ought to be.” Regardless of such ulterior motives or corrupt enforcement policies, though, the Sullivan Law shows us that there was a time, before the rise of the powerful gun lobby, that gun violence could be responded to with reasonable gun control legislation. While there is evidence that this law greatly reduced suicide rates, there is no evidence that it reduced New York homicides, and certainly it did not prevent Payton Gendron from legally buying a Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle at a gun shop in Endicott, New York, and opening fire on the patrons of a Buffalo supermarket in the recent racially-motivated massacre. I would argue, though, that it is difficult to quantify what heinous crimes by mentally ill individuals might have been prevented just because they were discouraged by the licensing process. But regardless, what the law shows us is that, a hundred years ago, it was not portrayed as un-American to consider gun control legislation in order to reduce gun violence. But as I sat down to write this, it was in the news that the conservative activist justices packed onto our Supreme Court, who also just overturned established precedent in order to reduce civil liberties and rescind reproductive rights, have also ruled this New York gun control legislation unconstitutional. And they have done this in the wake of the most heinous school shooting since the Sandy Hook Massacre, just one month after nineteen children and two teachers were shot dead at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. To put a little perspective on this, the same gun rights activists who protest the push for sane gun control measures in the wake of every mass shooting, arguing that it’s more appropriate to mourn quietly than to demand real social change after such a tragedy, are simultaneously applauding the erosion of established firearms legislation during a mass shooting’s aftermath. This is Historical Blindness. I’m Nathaniel Lloyd. And I don’t want to hear that “Now is not the time” evasion. It is long past time to talk about Gun Violence in America.

Welcome to Historical Blindness. Whenever a gun rights proponent tells you that it’s not appropriate to discuss change or legislation in the wake of some gun violence, they are displaying a clear blindness to history. In modern America, that is the only time when significant gun control legislation has ever been passed, and it used to be that the Nation Rifle Association supported such legislation and even helped draft it. Among these reactive gun control measures were the 1934 National Firearms Act and the Federal Firearms Act of 1938. These measures were enacted in direct response to the gangland gun violence of the Prohibition Era and mass murders such as the St. Valentines Day Massacre of 1929, when seven Irish gangsters were stood against a garage wall and gunned down. The more direct impetus, though, was the attempt of a lone gunman on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s life in Miami in 1933, when he was President Elect. The attempt failed, though the Mayor of Chicago was killed in the hail of bullets fired by the assassin. Recently, a conspiracy theory emerged that the assassin was working for the mafia and that the mayor was his true target, but at the time, the fact that a lone fanatic with a revolver bought from a pawn shop could come so close to ending his life put a fire under Roosevelt to push for gun control legislation. At first, the National Firearms Act was intended to require the registration and prohibitive taxation of all firearms, including handguns like the one that had nearly killed Roosevelt, but in the end, it ended up only focusing on “gangster weapons,” including machine guns and short-barreled shotguns and rifles. The later firearms act of 1938 made licensing a further requirement of gun sellers, and prohibited the sale of firearms to certain persons, such as felons. The NRA again supported these measures. They were, after all, founded as a sporting and marksmanship club focused on promoting gun safety. In fact, the year after the 1938 legislation was passed, the President of the NRA, Karl Frederick, stated “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” 30 years later, in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, after learning that Lee Harvey Oswald had acquired the murder weapon through the mail on the cheap with an NRA coupon, the NRA agreed that the mail-order sale of guns must be prohibited. And again, after the further assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the NRA was very involved with the drafting of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which replaced and updated the two existing firearms acts, introducing serial numbers, a minimum age for gun ownership, a restriction on sales across state lines, and the prohibition of sales to known drug addicts and the mentally ill. What those without historical blindness must see is that there is a long history of passing gun control measures in response to acts of gun violence, and that the NRA used to champion the gun control legislation that today they call unconstitutional.

The aftermath of the attempted assassination of Roosevelt in Miami, when Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was shot.

Although the NRA supported and helped craft the Gun Control Act of 1968, we see the beginning of their transformation about this time, as they used their influence to block the most sweeping of the bill’s measures, including the licensing of all gun carriers and a national registry of all firearms. President Lyndon B. Johnson called them out for this in a speech, saying “The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby,” and within a couple years, the entire platform of the NRA would change after an ill-fated raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, during which an NRA member who was believed to be stockpiling weapons illegally, was shot and paralyzed. After that, the NRA began to oppose any federal enforcement of gun control legislation, and began to tout the Second Amendment as a protection of an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, which it was never intended to be. I’ll explain and support this further later in the episode, but suffice it to say that the argument of individual gun rights being protected by the Constitution never even came up in the debate over the sweeping gun control legislation of the 1930s, and such rhetoric had previously been the domain of militant groups like the Black Panthers, whom the NRA had vehemently opposed and whose supposed right to publicly carry firearms they refused to recognize when just a couple years earlier, in 1967, they had supported the Mulford Act in California, a bill to prohibit the carrying of loaded firearms publicly without a permit. Ever since this turn to the right in the 1970s, when new leadership set out to become the obstructive political force they remain today, the NRA defined and constructed gun ownership as a social identity, and for many gun owners, including some close family members of mine, it is one of the major pillars of their personal identity. They cultivated this notion of gun ownership as a social identity principally through their longstanding publication, American Rifleman, and thereafter politicized this social identity, such that support for gun rights has become a conservative Republican litmus test. Because of the NRA’s influence on their constituency, as well as because of their large campaign contributions, the major political figures and media apparatus of the right have further encouraged the notion of gun ownership as a distinct and legitimate social identity, one that Republicans claim as their own. Like the modern Republican Party generally, seemingly devastating scandals have arisen that should have caused the NRA’s dissolution entirely. After the 2016 election, it was revealed in a U.S. Senate Committee on Finance Minority Staff report that the NRA had become a Russian asset in its election meddling campaign, demonstrating that NRA officials sought out Russian money and facilitated the political access of known Kremlin agents, including Maria Butina. Republican apologists for the NRA argue that they were acting as individuals rather than on behalf of the NRA, but subsequent investigations by the New York Attorney General have revealed widespread fraud and cronyism in their organization. But the NRA simply left New York for Texas, declaring bankruptcy, and appears to be no less influential after these scandals. As one President who took money from them to further their agenda once said of himself, they could probably shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters.

Despite the growing power of the NRA to kibosh any gun control legislation, they have been unable to stop certain major gun control legislation, especially when it is enacted on a wave of outrage after an infamous act of gun violence. Early on they even found themselves at odds with their Republican allies. After he was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., in 1981, Ronald Reagan supported the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, more commonly known as the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks and a waiting period. By the time the act was passed, the NRA was able to get the five-day waiting period replaced by an instant computer background check, and until such a system could be put in place, they sought to fight the mandate. They financed a series of lawsuits in an effort to take the bill to the Supreme Court, which they succeeded in doing in 1997, winning an opinion that compelling law enforcement to run background checks was unconstitutional. The decision had little effect, though, since state and local law enforcement mostly chose to continue running the background checks of their own accord, and soon the background check database was in place. By this time, though, there was a much broader piece of gun control legislation for the NRA to fight, this one too passed in the wake of an act of gun violence that could not be ignored. On January 17th, 1989, a station wagon full of fireworks that had been parked behind Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, not far from my own home town, was set on fire, creating something of a distraction as a deranged and suicidal drifter in a flak jacket named Patrick Purdy set foot on the school’s playground, took position behind a portable building with an AK-47 that he had acquired quite easily at a gun shop in Oregon, and started firing. He wounded more than thirty that day, and he murdered five children before taking his own life. The unthinkably heinous act resulted in numerous pieces of gun control legislation. In California, the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989 prohibited the transfer and ownership of more than 50 different semi-automatic assault weapons, the George H. W. Bush administration banned the importation of assault weapons that the ATF determined had no “sporting purpose,” and in 1994, a Federal Assault Weapons Ban was passed along with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of that year. The Assault Weapons Ban prohibited large capacity magazines and, much like the California law, banned the manufacture of specific semi-automatic assault weapons for use by civilians. Rather than restrictions on handguns, it is measures like these, meant specifically to fight mass public shootings, that gun control advocates have been urging after every mass shooting for the last 20 years. We have had them in place before, and it did not result in tyranny. The only reason we must advocate for these restrictions again is that the Assault Weapons Ban had an expiration date, and in 2004, it was not renewed.

Portraits of the children murdered by Patrick Purdy, from clevelandschoolremembers.org

Let us look further at the ten years 1994 to 2004, when the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was in place. Perhaps this seems rather a recent time period for a history podcast to be discussing, but since gun rights proponents act like banning assault weapons would spell out certain doom for our democracy, it seems memories are so short that we must remind many that less than 20 years ago we had such a federal law and it wasn’t the end of the world. In fact, it appears to have had a measurable effect on gun violence. The entire rationale behind the ban was that violent incidents involving assault weapons and high-capacity magazines typically involve more shots, more victims, and more wounds, and statistics support this assertion. Rather ridiculously, assault weapon apologists argue that the recoil of these weapons means worse aim and thus we cannot assume assault weapons are better able to strike more people. If that were the case, of course, it just makes them even more useless for sport or home defense, rendering them suitable only for spraying rounds into crowds. In other words, it just proves they are unsuitable for civilian use and especially dangerous in the hands of a mass murderer. Critics of the Assault Weapons Ban also claim it had little to no effect on crime, but the hard data disputes this. According to a 2001 study of the impacts of the ban in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, not only did criminal use of assault weapons decline in the years after the passage of the Assault Weapons Ban, but gun murders generally declined around 10%. Critics contend there is no proof of causation, that this reduction in gun homicides may have been due to other factors or the cyclical nature of crime stats, but since the ban’s expiration, the share of crimes involving high-capacity semiautomatics has increased from 33% to 112%, according to a 2018 study in the Journal of Urban Health. Still, mass shootings continued to occur during the years of the ban, including one of the worst school shootings in our history, the Columbine High School Massacre of 1999, whose perpetrators used weapons that remained unbanned, including a variant of the banned semiautomatic TEC-9 pistol that because of its slightly different name, the TEC-DC9, remained legal. Rather than proving that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was pointless, though, this instead proves that it was, if flawed, still working, and rather than abandoning it, such a ban should be improved, and such loopholes closed. Looking closely at data on mass shootings collected by Mother Jones, we can see that 18 mass public shootings occurred during the decade before the ban, while 15 mass shootings occurred during the ban. The difference between these decades may not appear striking, but let’s look at the decades since the ban’s expiration. During the ten years after its expiration, mass public shootings more than doubled, to 36, including the devastating Viginia Tech and Sandy Hook Massacres. And in the following 8 years, up to today, 61 mass shootings have occurred, and actually more, since Mother Jones’s data ceases in mid-June and these horrific crimes seem to be perpetrated weekly at this point. (In fact, as I was editing this podcast episode, I was compelled to record this insert to acknowledge that on Independence Day, a shooter in Highland Park, IL, injured 47 and killed 7 by firing at parade-goers with a high-powered rifle from a nearby rooftop. During the aftermath, a Republican state senator urged everyone to “move on.”) It is certainly true that not all of these mass shootings were committed using assault weapons, but almost all are committed using semiautomatic weapons with removable high-capacity magazines. As of 2017, according to the aforementioned study published by the Journal of Urban Health, “Assault weapons and other high-capacity semiautomatics appear to be used in a higher share of firearm mass murders (up to 57% in total).” Furthermore, a 2019 comparative study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that during the decade of the federal ban on assault weapons, mass shootings were 70% less likely to occur. But even if we were to discover that banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines did not reduce the growing number of these mass shooting incidents, perhaps it would at least make a difference in the average number of victims, making such incidents far less deadly. There is no logical reason that I can see not to update, improve, and renew the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Only conservative ideology and an entrenched, uniquely American gun culture stand in the way.

What makes America different from other Western democracies, and other nations generally, that we have developed this deep-rooted gun culture? Make no mistake, we are different. Among the top 10 countries that tolerate civilian gun ownership, we simply own more, at an estimated 120 guns per 100 residents, more than twice that of the next highest country in gun ownership, Yemen, according to the 2018 Small Arms Survey. When we look at gun murders as a percentage of all homicides in 2020, as reported by the BBC, it appears one is far more likely to be shot to death in America than in any other democracy of comparable size. In the UK, gun homicides made up only 4% of gun-related killings, unsurprisingly, considering the UK’s ban on military style weapons and handguns. In Australia, which passed sweeping gun control legislation after a series of mass shootings in the ’80s and ’90s, gun murders stood at only 13% of 2020 murders. In Canada, which generally ensures gun accessibility but maintains stricter controls of the same kind as the US, 2020 saw gun murders comprise 37% of the total. But here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., a whopping 79% of murders were gun-related. And probably because of our spotty and lax laws and the sheer number of guns in hands here, 73% of all mass shootings worldwide between 1998 and 2019 occurred here in America, as determined by a study in the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. Our reluctance to address this problem with strong legislation is also pretty unique. Take New Zealand’s response to the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch as an example. Within a month, the government had passed legislation banning semiautomatics and magazines, and within a few more months, they created a national firearms register and tightened restrictions on gun licensing. Their quick action to address the problem should make Americans feel ashamed of our own government response. We may be tempted to blame the NRA for this gun culture entirely, but that would be inaccurate. The connection between Americans and guns stretches back a long time before the NRA was ever formed in 1871 as a marksmanship club. Some have suggested that gun culture originated in the Wild West, when it is thought that every man must go about armed, and good guys with guns stood down bad guys with guns on a daily basis, but much of the tales of the American West are exaggerated. In fact, an opposing argument could be made that the Wild West was actually the origin place of American gun control laws, as Western towns nearly universally decreed that no one within town could carry a firearm, according to gun policy scholar Adam Winkler, and these “blanket ordinances” resulted in actually very low crime rates in such notorious towns as Deadwood, Dodge City, and Tombstone. Others might see the origin of American gun culture being related to the carrying of pistols by gentlemen, replacing the rapier around 1750 as the symbols of their masculinity, which they wielded in duels over perceived slights, but this fashion originated in Europe rather than the Americas. Certainly guns remain the phallic symbol of many an American male’s sense of manhood today, but in France and Britain, for example, where the most recognizable pistol dueling methods were established, the masculinity of men is no longer dependent on their gun ownership. So what makes American gun culture different?

Image of al old frontier town with the gun control ordinance clearly posted: “The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited.” Courtesy Saint Joseph’s University

Americans’ love affair with deadly weapons can be traced all the way back to our independence, and even earlier. Much can be attributed to the fact that early Americans were colonizers and frontiersmen. By frontiersmen, I don’t mean gunslingers. I mean settlers—farmers, hunters, trappers. Those who sought to tame the wilderness relied on firearms for survival and subsistence. Wild game was a major part of their diet, and occasionally they had need of a firearm for defense against not only some human aggressor, but a dangerous wild predator. Farmers too relied on varmint guns to dispatch vermin that threatened their crops and predators that threatened their livestock. During the many conflicts and skirmishes that can loosely be called part of the American Indian Wars, the average settler’s firearms were used to maintain possession of land they had taken in their encroachments on Native American territories, viewing themselves as acting in self-defense against marauding savages. Therefore, it was not uncommon for young boys to be given rifles as a symbol of their passage into manhood. The frontier and its dangers are long gone now, though, and have been for more than a hundred years, and other nations that began in recent history as a colonial settlement of wilderness, such as Australia, have proven better able to put down the wild gun culture that helped them tame their frontiers. No, America remains different, and this difference can be attributed to our Founding Fathers’ insistence that a right to bear arms is a God-given, inalienable human right—a right not recognized by any other Western democracy. How did gun ownership come to be viewed as a human right here and nowhere else? It all boils down to the politics of the American Revolution. In colonial America, English Whiggery was a popular political force, and the radical Whigs’ distaste for militarism contributed to revolutionary sentiment in America. According to this political position, “standing armies” represented the greatest threat and evil to man’s liberties. To American Whigs, George III’s stationing of troops in the American Colonies was an act of tyranny. After the Boston Massacre, when British soldiers shot five Americans in a crowd that was hurling insults, snowballs, and stones at them, John Adams called it “the strongest proof of the danger of standing armies.” This Whiggish aversion to standing armies, or to George III’s army in particular, is further reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which bemoans the fact that the King “has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” and can be seen to have still been on the minds of legislators years after the ratification of our Constitution, when they amended the Constitution to prohibit the quartering of soldiers in civilian houses. To radical English Whigs and American Whigs, or Patriots as they’re sometimes called, the solution to the evils of standing armies was a well-armed citizen militia, members of which could be trusted to act according to civic virtue. George Washington himself saw the folly of this early on, as he found the citizen militiamen under his command “incapable of making or sustaining a serious attack.” A historical myth has been perpetuated that America’s independence was won by the heroism of armed civilians, but in truth, militia troops performed quite poorly compared to Washington’s Continental Army. And after the Revolution, in their effort to bolster their citizen militia, our Founding Fathers endorsed gun laws that today would probably chafe even the most dyed-in-wool gun rights advocates: a 1792 law required all eligible men to buy a gun, report for muster, and register their weapons with the federal government.

It would not be long before the inadequacy of militia forces became apparent to all. In the War of 1812, when undisciplined militiamen embarrassed the country in failed stands against British troops, it became clear we needed to expand our own standing armies and could not rely on a militia. But by that time, the Constitution had already been amended with the Second Amendment, which states, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” I think most people know the argument in favor of gun control pointing out that this amendment only protects the rights of “the people,” meaning the country generally, to bear arms as part of “a well-regulated militia.” That much is apparent in the text. This “right” appears intended only to ensure the existence of a militia, not a well-armed general populace. What I don’t think many citizens realize is that this amendment, like the third amendment about quartering troops, is an artifact of an obsolete political view that America should rely more on militia forces than on a standing army. The fact that the U.S. promptly course-corrected after the War of 1812 and now has one of the largest militaries, and arguably the best equipped military, in the world, means this amendment is logically obsolete and should be subject to repeal and replacement. But even if one refuses to acknowledge that this amendment is only focused on strengthening and safeguarding militia forces, it actually explicitly urges regulation and in no way suggests that such regulation would infringe on the right being described. And it should be emphasized that this is not only the interpretation of modern gun control advocates. Until the latter half of the 20th century, it was the interpretation of legislators and the Supreme Court. In 1886, in their landmark decision on Presser v. Illinois, the Supreme Court held that “state legislatures may enact statutes to control and regulate all organizations, drilling, and parading of military bodies and associations except those which are authorized by the militia laws of the United States [emphasis mine],” clearly finding that the Second Amendment only applied to official national militias. In 1934, when Congress worked to restrict gangster weapons, the Second Amendment was not raised once during congressional testimony, clearly indicating that it wasn’t seen as relevant to such legislation intended to restrict individual access to firearms, and in 1939, when the law was finally challenged under the Second Amendment in the case of the United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court again ruled that the Firearms Act’s restriction of certain guns was entirely Constitutional, in that its provisions did not have any “reasonable relationship to the prevention, preservation, or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” So there was strong judicial precedent here for the interpretation that the Second Amendment is not even about the individual rights of gunowners and therefore has no bearing on either state or federal gun control legislation. But just as today’s Supreme Court is bent on overturning established precedent based on ideology, conservative justices recently managed to overturn this decision as well. In the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the interpretation that the amendment protects an individual’s gun ownership rights, independent of militia affiliation—but even that ideologically split opinion, misguided as it may have been, confirms that “the Second Amendment right is not unlimited” and specifically seeks to preserve longstanding prohibitions on gun possession by felons and the mentally ill, and even suggests that the only firearms protected at those that were in common use at the time of the amendment’s ratification, leaving the door open for the banning of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

The focus of the Second Amendment on a “well regulated militia” specifically reflects Whig politics at the time and the distrust of “standing armies,” much of which goes back to the Boston Massacre, pictured.

Rather than really contend with this argument about the true intention and purpose of the Second Amendment, though, gun rights activists employ fallacious arguments to present gun control as itself an evil. They will claim, rather absurdly, that the problems of gun violence can only be resolved with more guns, using the “Good Guy with a Gun” argument that if only more people were packing in any given gun crime situation, then criminals could be better stopped before they commit their acts of violence. According to this logic, an increase in unregulated exchanges of gunfire between civilians is viewed as a best case scenario and a solution to violent crime, and a society in which firearms have become as common as cell phones is dreamed of as the safest of societies, despite the obvious additional increase in suicides and lethal gun accidents that such a society would inevitably see. Really clever sophists will even twist history to make gun control laws look evil. These “twistorians,” if you will, point out that the first gun control laws were racist, disarming slaves and free Blacks in order to enforce White Supremacy. There is truth to this argument, which makes it rather insidious. Think of my episodes on the Wilmington Insurrection, when White Supremacists acted to prevent Black citizens from arming themselves against the violence that they were openly planning. The South, and even some Northern states, had always disallowed gun ownership among slaves and free Blacks, for the obvious reason that they feared rebellion, and following the Civil War, many Southern states adopted Black Codes that continued denying firearms to Black citizens. Enforcing this disarmament were armed white posses, called Regulators, who ran roughshod through Black communities. Some of these went about their marauding masked and called themselves the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, in the 1860s, legislation like the Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the first Civil Rights Acts, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, were indeed intended, at least in part, to guarantee freedmen the same rights to bear arms in self-defense that their white oppressors enjoyed. Yet still, Southern states remained intent on disarming Black communities under Jim Crow. In the 1880s, faced with the growing scourge of lynching, Southern Blacks armed themselves and in several cases fought off bands of murderers. Through the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, Black communities continued their tradition of arming themselves to fight back during race massacres, like those in Colfax, Louisiana; Wilmington, North Carolina; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Even during the Civil Rights Movement, passive resisters were aided by armed community defense organizations. And the Black Panthers, as previously mentioned, were the OG gun rights absolutists. All of this is absolutely true, and yet entirely irrelevant to the self-evident fact that stronger background checks and laws prohibiting the ownership of high-capacity assault weapons are necessary to reduce mass public shootings.

While statistics on gun ownership are lacking without instituting a comprehensive national system of gun registration, according to Pew Research Center, as of 2017, white men are twice as likely to report owning a gun as non-white men. And I’m willing to go out on a limb and predict, in the absence of firm data on the subject, that it’s white men by far who possess high capacity assault rifles of the sort that most gun control advocates today want to ban in order to reduce mass public shootings. However, Black Americans far more commonly report having been shot or threatened with a gun compared to white Americans. The simple fact that, today, gun violence disproportionately affects Black Americans, making them 10 times more likely to die by gun homicide, and making their children 14 times more likely to be shot and killed according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, certainly highlights the fact that any reduction in gun violence achieved through stronger gun control legislation will logically save Black American lives. Let us not forget that many recent mass shootings, like the recent massacre in Buffalo, the 2021 shooting in Winthrop, MA, the 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso as well as the Dayton, Ohio, Entertainment District shooting literally hours later, the 2015 shooting at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and the 1999 Independence Day weekend spree killings across the Midwest, were committed by white supremacists as hate crimes against one race group or another. Times change. Gun rights used to be a racial justice issue, but now gun control is. Gun rights proponents who raise the issue of the racist origins of gun control either haven’t thought out their argument or are deflecting with a bad faith argument. No legislation to disarm some races and not others is proposed by advocates of stricter gun control, nor would any such legislation ever be passed as long as the 14th Amendment remains in place. So if these gun rights advocates are worried about inequality before the law and selective enforcement, about gun laws disarming minorities unfairly because of discriminatory implementation by authorities, then they are essentially acknowledging the existence of systemic racism, which, at the risk of stereotyping, a lot of these guys don’t really want to do, as fixing that would mean restructuring society, especially when it comes to the justice system and urban planning. We don’t fight systemic racism by refusing to pass necessary laws for fear they will be inequitably imposed; rather, we fight it by exposing and correcting the inequities themselves.

Howard Unruh, whose “Walk of Death” is widely regarded as the first mass public shooting of the modern sort.

The bare fact that mass public shootings have evolved since the time of our Founding Fathers, in ways they likely did not imagine, to become a unique societal evil today, stands as evidence that something must be done, and especially here, where it may not have begun, but where it is by far at its worst. The first mass shooting as we might define it today occurred in Hyderabad, in what is now Pakistan, in 1878, when an Iranian infantryman murdered his lover for her infidelity and then went on a shooting spree. However, the United States, shamefully, may be the origin of the mass school shooting. Some point to a massacre at a school during Pontiac’s War in 1764 as the first, but I would count that as a raid perpetrated by a band of Delaware during a time of war. Rather, the first genuine school shootings in U.S. history, according to our more modern understanding of such acts, occurred back to back in 1891, when one man attended a school exhibition in Liberty, Mississippi, and fired his shotgun into a crowd of students and teachers, and another man, only twelve days later, entered a parochial school in Newburgh, New York, and fired his shotgun at students on a playground. But it was not until the mid-20th century, 150 years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, that the true horror of mass public shootings began to reveal itself, when Howard Unruh, a disturbed veteran, took his “Walk of Death” in 1949, strolling through his neighborhood and shooting thirteen men, women, and children dead. The 1960s saw mass shootings evolve to sniper attacks, when a California teen injured ten and killed three by taking potshots at vehicles on the highway with his father’s rifle before killing himself, and when a Marine sharpshooter perched in the University of Texas clock tower managed to murder fifteen people and wound thirty-one others before being killed by authorities. After a spate of mass shootings by deranged postal workers in the 1980s and ’90s, as well as since, the narrative around mass shootings was focused for a time on workplace shootings, and the term “going postal” was coined, referring to being driven to violence by anger and frustration related to one’s occupation. But today, mass public shootings have become so common, and have evolved with the weapons being used to become so much deadlier, that the old terms spree killing, postal killing, workplace shooting, sniper attack, and even mass murder, seem inadequate, either too narrow or too vague to really describe the problem. Mass public shootings are a national dilemma that the Founding Fathers just could not have anticipated. To use a frequently raised but I think apt analogy, the problem can be likened to automobile deaths. Because of the unsafe and sometimes reckless use of a technology that was not around at the framing of our Constitution or the ratification of our Bill of Rights, annual deaths in motor vehicle accidents were exceedingly high for a long time. Just as the gun lobby today resists regulation, automobile manufacturers then resisted vehicle safety legislation, but it was passed regardless, increasing safety standards for automobile manufacturers and requiring the installation of seat belts. Legislators recognized a uniquely modern public safety hazard and took legislative action to remedy it, resulting in a significant reduction of road fatalities. I guess we are just fortunate that, in that case, there was not some outmoded constitutional amendment about the freedom of saddle makers to decide on what safety straps to manufacture, or the rights of stagecoach drivers and carriage passengers to sit on their benches unencumbered by restraints.

To clarify my position, I am not urging total civilian disarmament. I firmly believe that the populace should have access to well-regulated firearms for home protection and sport. And I even have some sympathy for the central conviction of most gun rights advocates that the right to bear arms is an important safeguard against tyranny. But the threat of tyranny was far more imminent in the wake of American Independence, whereas today it only seems to fuel the baseless conspiracy fantasies of paramilitary militia men and seditionists. These gun rights advocates have feared an oppressive government declaring martial law for decades, imagining that every mass shooting is actually a staged “false flag” operation to be used as justification for a clampdown and a total disarmament of the populace that never actually occurs. For 8 years, the gun-toting right was certain that Obama intended to disarm the populace so he could establish some kind of socialist dictatorship. What really happened was that he urged the passage of sane gun legislation, which was killed by the Republican Senate minority through the abuse of the filibuster. In fact, the closest we’ve come to a President actually declaring martial law was when Obama’s successor, a gun rights advocate who took a lot of money from the NRA, looked into imposing martial law, not to take guns but rather to overturn lawful election results in a coup d’état. The hypocrisy of gun rights advocates who fear an oppressive government turning around and supporting a literal attempt to overthrow our government is profound. As is the hypocrisy of our conservative-packed activist Supreme Court bench, who defend the authority of state governments to interfere with women’s bodily autonomy but deny the authority of a state government to regulate firearms. The fact is, gun control must be viewed as a pro-life issue, as the Catholic Church has long argued. Those who believe themselves the moral champions of life need to start advocating for the protection of it after birth. The fact that we, as a country, did not come together to protect our children from mass shootings after Sandy Hook, and that now, after the recurrent horror that occurred at Uvalde many continue to resist, is a national shame. And it will only get worse if we don’t wake up and smell the blood of our children.

Further Reading

“America’s Gun Culture – in Seven Charts.” BBC, 25 May 2022, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081.

Briggs, William. How America Got Its Guns : A History of the Gun Violence Crisis. University of New Mexico Press, 2017. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.libdbmjc.yosemite.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1423319&site=ehost-live.

Christopher S. Koper, and Jeffrey A. Roth. “The Impact of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapon Ban on Gun Violence Outcomes: An Assessment of Multiple Outcome Measures and Some Lessons for Policy Evaluation.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, vol. 17, no. 1, 2001, pp. 33–74, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007522431219.

Clarke, Kevin, and James Martin. “A History of Violence: Gun Control in America.(VANTAGES Ql NT: 1967-2013).” America (New York, N.Y. : 1909), vol. 215, no. 2, 2016, p. 31–.

Coleman, Arica L. “When the NRA Supported Gun Control.” TIME, 29 July 2016, time.com/4431356/nra-gun-control-history/.

Depew, Briggs. “The Effect of Concealed-Carry and Handgun Restrictions on Gun-Related Deaths: Evidence from the Sullivan Act of 1911.” The Economic Journal, vol. 132, no. 646, August 2022, pp. 2118–2140, doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueac004.

DiMaggio, Charles et al. “Changes in US mass shooting deaths associated with the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban: Analysis of open-source data.” The journal of trauma and acute care surgery vol. 86,1 (2019): 11-19. doi:10.1097/TA.0000000000002060.
Duwe, Grant, et al. “Forecasting the Severity of Mass Public Shootings in the United States.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, vol. 38, no. 2, 2021, pp. 385–423, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09499-5.
Eddlem, Thomas R. “The Racist Origin of America’s Gun Control Laws.” The New American (Belmont, Mass.), vol. 30, no. 18, 2014, p. 35–.

Fortgang, Erika. “How They Got the Guns: A Look at How School Shooters Are Getting Weapons So Easily.” Rolling Stone, 10 June 1999, www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/how-they-got-the-guns-175676/.

“Gun Violence Is a Racial Justice Issue.” Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, 2019, www.bradyunited.org/issue/gun-violence-is-a-racial-justice-issue.

Hofstadter, Richard. “America as a Gun Culture.” American Heritage, vol. 21, no. 6, October 1970, www.americanheritage.com/america-gun-culture.  

Kopel, David, and Joseph Greenlee. “The Racist Origin of Gun Control Laws.” The Hill, 22 Aug. 2017, thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/347324-the-racist-origin-of-gun-control-laws/.

Krajicek, David J. “How Author's Death Over 100 Years Ago Helped Shape New York's Gun Laws.” New York Daily News, 19 Jan. 2013, www.nydailynews.com/news/justice-story/1911-shooting-led-ny-gun-law-article-1.1240721.

Lopez, German. “How Gun Control Works in America, Compared with 4 Other Rich Countries.” Vox, 14 March 2018, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/4/9850572/gun-control-us-japan-switzerland-uk-canada.

Lacombe, Matthew J. “The Political Weaponization of Gun Owners: The National Rifle Association’s Cultivation, Dissemination, and Use of a Group Social Identity.” The Journal of Politics, vol. 81, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1342–56, https://doi.org/10.1086/704329.

Platt, Daniel. “New York Banned Handguns 100 Years Ago ... Will We Ever See that Kind of Gun Control Again?” History News Network, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/141708.

Silva, Jason R. “Global Mass Shootings: Comparing the United States Against Developed and Developing Countries.” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 21 March 2022. Taylor & Francis Online, doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2022.2052126.

Spitzer, Robert. “How the NRA Evolved from Backing a 1934 Ban on Machine Guns to Blocking Nearly All Firearm Restrictions Today.” The Conversation, 25 May 2022, theconversation.com/how-the-nra-evolved-from-backing-a-1934-ban-on-machine-guns-to-blocking-nearly-all-firearm-restrictions-today-183880.

Winkler, Adam. “The Secret History of Guns.” The Atlantic, Sep. 2011, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/.

The Deluge and the Ark Seekers

The literal interpretation of the Bible has throughout history resulted in conflicts with and repudiations of science. The view of the Earth as round or of the Sun being the center of the solar system, for example, were strongly contested by biblical literalists who believed that, if the revelations of their ancient scriptures appeared to contradict a scientific revelation, then science must be wrong. Perhaps no field of science has come into greater conflict with religion than that of geology. According to Judeo-Christian tradition, God created all things over the course of six days at the beginning of time, which was almost universally placed by theologians around 4000 BCE. Thus, the discovery of fossil remains became problematic. As early as the 6th century BCE, philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon recognized that fossils were the remains of living creatures, and the great age of these remains was apparent. The presence of lifeforms that may have preceded Adam challenged two biblical notions: that no life existed prior to Adam’s creation, and that death did not exist until after the Fall of Man. Early attempts by Christian theologians to address these problems tended to the absurd. They claimed that fossils represented the early models of abandoned creations, a notion that conceives of God as a kind of tinkerer in a workshop and would seem to undercut the claim of God’s omniscience and infallibility. Otherwise, fossils were thought of by churchmen as “sports of nature,” or “capricious fabrications of God,” hidden purposely within the Earth, likely as a test of mankind’s faith in the Bible. This notion of scientific discoveries that contradicted biblical claims being tests of faith would be asserted again and again. But men of faith had another explanation up their sleeves to account for fossils: the Flood of Noah. Most of us likely know the story. Angered at the sinfulness of mankind, as well as the sexual escapades of certain rebel angels among humanity, God sent forth a deluge to wipe the slate clean. The fountains of the deep broke up, and the windows of heaven opened, and it rained for forty days and forty nights, drowning the entirety of the earth, even the highest mountains, killing all living things, even every creeping thing, except for Noah’s family and a breeding pair of every animal, who were saved from the flood in a massive boat constructed according to God’s design to preserve life. This was the perfect explanation for fossils as it was supported by the Bible and did not threaten Judeo-Christian belief, and thus early Christian apologists, like Tertullian and St. Augustine, took it up and spread it wide. In the Renaissance, though, it began to be questioned by thinkers such as Leonardo DaVinci and Bernard Palissy. In the 17th century,  Nicholas Steno pioneered the science of stratigraphy, laying the foundation, so to speak, of our modern geological principle of the superposition of rock strata, and in the 18th century, the father of modern geology, James Hutton, by examining such strata, first began to recognize the enormity of the geologic time scale. The science was irrefutable, and despite some orthodox holdouts, like Cotton Mather and others in the 19th century who believed mastodon bones were actually the bones of Nephilim giants destroyed in the Flood, gradually the thinking men of Christianity defected and came to recognize that the findings of geologists could no longer be denied, necessitating some change in their understanding of the age of the Earth and the narratives in the Bible. The fact that science and reason won out in the late 19th century may be surprising to those of us today, who, like me, were raised to believe that dinosaur bones were baked into the earth at Creation just to mess with our minds, that the Grand Canyon was formed by the Biblical Flood, and that Noah’s Ark was sitting atop a mountain in the Near East somewhere, waiting to be discovered by some brave Indiana Jones-esque archeologist. What happened between then and now to so reverse the victory of science over religious superstition?

There is a name for what happened after the 19th century victory of science over biblical literalism to explain the commonality of modern belief in the literal and inerrant truth of the Bible. We can identify as the principal reason for this change the rise of Fundamentalism, a global religious phenomenon at the beginning of the 20th century that sought to move society away from secularism and revert to a religious order, enshrining spiritual traditions over democratic or humanistic values. Specifically, in the United States, the Christian Fundamentalist revival reacted strongly against the influx of non-Protestant immigrant populations and their growing awareness of other world religions, as well as against the perceived elitism of educators who taught concepts they felt were at odds with the teachings of their scriptures. Sound familiar? One of the principal scientific doctrines that Christian fundamentalists opposed was that of evolution, which, because of the great time frames required, they felt contradicted the story of a 6-day creation in Genesis and the long formerly held notion that Creation had occurred only about 6000 years ago. In opposition to the teaching of evolution, Fundamentalists began to call their literalist biblical view Creationism, and to suggest it was an equally scientific alternative. Formerly, Creationists were content to alter their views of the Biblical story of Creation to accommodate science. These Old Earth Creationists suggested that each day of Creation actually represented an entire geological age, or that there was a gap of millions of years between the creation of heaven and earth and the creation of light, a gap omitted and unacknowledged in Genesis chapter one. But more and more, such an accommodating view seemed unacceptable to fundamentalist Creationists. One writer who rejected anything but the most strictly literal reading of Genesis was George McCready Price, a Seventh-Day Adventist. Price adhered to the teachings of his religion’s founder, Ellen G. White, who emphasized the infallibility of scriptures and who wrote extensively about visions she’d had regarding the global flood described in Genesis. Price published his pseudo-scientific Creationist writings extensively, between 1906 and his death in 1963, and even posthumously. His writings attacked evolution by exposing what he claimed were logical errors made by theoretical geologists. He criticized all the principles of stratigraphy and propped up a form of flood geology updated for the 20th century. The scientific community did not take his work seriously and his writings even drew refutation from prominent fossil experts like David Starr Jordan, the President of Stanford University, who pointed out that his claims were predicated on “scattering mistakes, omissions, and exceptions against general truths that anybody familiar with the facts in a general way can not possibly dispute.” Nevertheless, when the Scopes monkey trial, the ultimate challenge to evolution in schools, came along, Clarence Darrow relied on Price’s claims in his arguments against the Old Earth Creationist arguments of William Jennings Bryant, who saw that religion could accept science without conflict. After Price’s death, his writings on flood geology were taken up by the next generation of Creationists, who touted the idea of “Creation Science,” a contradiction in terms, of course, since such an event as divine creation cannot be observed and tested and is, therefore, outside the purview of science. Creationists John Whitcomb and Henry Morris even managed to enshrine Price’s version of flood geology as the orthodox position of fundamentalists in their 1961 book, The Genesis Flood. So-called Creation Science was eventually ruled unscientific and kept out of public school science curriculum, as was its successor, “Intelligent Design.” Both were declared little more than thinly-veiled religious crusades pretending at science. But the culture war waged from every fundamentalist preacher’s pulpit has been very successful in turning the minds of congregants like, for example, my parents, against consensus scientific fact, and organizations like the Institute for Creation Research and the Discovery Institute, as well as countless Creationist websites and groups, continue to cast doubt on the scientific reality of the great age of the earth, which has since been empirically confirmed through observation and testing countless times, such that it is beyond reasonable doubt.

George McCready Price, the resuscitator of flood geology and champion of “Creation Science.”

Ever since the Renaissance, believers in a literal global flood and Noah’s Ark have attempted to demonstrate how this fantastical story is actually very believable. Since it was taken for granted that, being in the Bible, the story must be accurate, Renaissance thinkers tried to determine how such a ship must have been designed to accommodate so many creatures. According to the scriptures, the ark was constructed out of 450 cubed cubits of gopher wood and sealed with pitch against the floodwaters, as well as supernaturally sealed up by God himself according to Genesis 7, with only one window described, apparently in the top of the vessel to let sunlight in. So there was some question of how the occupants disposed of their feces. Early 15th century Spanish theologian Alphonso Tostado handily explained this issue away by imagining the interior of the ark, with Noah’s living quarters on the upper decks and a series of stairs that allowed him and his sons to feed the animals in their stalls as well as to carry away their waste, which they must have fed into the bilge of the craft, he claimed. Hand waving the foul stench that must have emitted from such an arrangement, he explained that “[o]ne could also believe that the odour of the dung was miraculously carried off so that the air was not corrupted.” In the next century, French geometer Johannes Buteo did Tostado one better, calculating the precise interior measurements and determining how much space animals of certain kinds would require, as well as how much space would be needed for feed, and how the ship might accommodate all of this, as well as a gristmill and smokeless ovens for Noah and his family’s subsistence. From the Renaissance to the modern age of Creationism and science denial, thinkers have postulated just how the feat of housing a breeding pair of each creature could have been pulled off. Logically, they could do without pairs of any hybrid creatures, like mules. They would need only a breeding pair for all the animals such hybrid species originated from. Just how they would determine that the pair they chose would be successfully reproductive is unclear, but you could always hand wave that by suggesting God had pointed out which pairs to take aboard. However, they must have had more than a pair of some creatures so that they could feed them to the carnivores. Certain animals, of course, required more room than others. For example, snakes, some thought, would be content to wind themselves around beams and would need no chambers of their own, though I can’t imagine having loose snakes on a boat would be a great idea, especially those of a venomous variety. Johannes Buteo even considered where Noah might have fit aquariums to save species of marine life, hitting on one of the major problems with the Flood Myth: why marine lifeforms would even be destroyed by a flood. Buteo considered that perhaps fish were without sin and thus allowed to swim free outside the ark, in the waters of the Deluge.  But this was far from the last of the problems with the story. When naturalists in the Age of Exploration began to document the variety of unique animal species in different regions of the world, the question was raised, if these creatures had been made at Creation and then preserved on the same Ark, and their presence was explained by the dispersion of species after the landing of the Ark, then why were some species only found in one place while others were found in many places? This would not be the last problem with the Flood myth with which biblical literalists would have to perform mental gymnastics to contend.

One of the principal impossibilities of the story of Noah’s ark comes from the construction of such a massive and seaworthy vessel itself. Creationists will say that God himself gave Noah the ship’s specifications, or they would vaguely suggest that ancient man was capable of many great feats of engineering, as seen in the Seven Wonders of the World. The problem is, if ancient man really had this divine knowledge of massive shipbuilding, then it unaccountably disappeared afterward. If Noah lived for hundreds of years after making it back on dry land, why was this God-given science of naval architecture promptly lost? We’re meant to believe that Noah traveled to all kinds of different habitats to acquire all kinds of different animals, which would certainly mean that some species he was entirely unfamiliar with, not knowing the dangers they posed or the requirements for how best to house them. Yet somehow, he was able to design quarters for each that would allow him to water each at an appropriate height and keep each from injuring itself within its enclosure. All within a boat the size of a skyscraper that could withstand the buffeting of violent waves. It would have been the greatest feat of engineering in all human history, and if we’re to believe God provided Noah with complete instructions, blueprints, if you will, then it beggars the imagination that Noah would have been capable of reading and following them. After all, he was just a humble farmer. On that topic, how could a farmer have paid for all the timber and all the labor it would have required to build such a construct? The only comparable ancient feat of engineering, the pyramids, is estimated to have required the labor of 100,000 people. Moreover, he would have needed many tons of pitch to seal it up as the scriptures state he did, but pitch, a natural hydrocarbon formed underground at extreme pressures, would not have existed in the antediluvian world if we are to subscribe to flood geology. Lastly, there is the simple impossibility that 40 days of rain could possibly drown the entire world, even its highest mountains. Ancient apologists, using the hints in the scriptures about the firmament separating the waters above and below, as well as the verse about the fountains of the deep being broken, held the belief that there had formerly been a great mass of water suspended overhead, as well as a watery abyss below ground, all of which waters crashed down and sprang to the surface at once. But even if one were to credit such a weird cosmogony, it doesn’t explain how so much water would disappear so quickly, such that the ark could find land again after only 150 days, and after a year and change the earth was all dried out again. The suspension of disbelief required is extraordinary, leading some believers to concede that maybe it wasn’t worldwide, but rather a regional flood.

1493 artist's depiction of the construction of the Ark.

As I reported in the beginning of my series on giants, in 1872, a British banknote engraver named George Smith who was such an enthusiast of the British Museum’s collection that they hired him to study some clay fragments taken from Ninevah, cried eureka one day when he had translated a portion of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh that appeared to confirm the biblical story of the Flood. In this passage, the story of Uta-Napishti or Utnapishtim is related, in which he is forewarned by the god Ea of a catastrophic flood that would be sent by the god Enlil, and therefore urged to build a ship for the survival of his family and animals that he preserves. In this version, the storm subsides after only 7 days, when his ship lands on a mountainside. As with the biblical tale, there is an account of Utnapishtim releasing a bird to ascertain whether the floodwaters had sufficiently receded. Unsurprisingly, George Smith thought he had discovered proof of the literal truth of the Bible and evidence against the geologic time scale and evolutionary theory. Unfortunately for proponents of this claim, the math doesn’t precisely line up. Those who believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible typically place Creation at around 4004 BCE, and the Flood at around 2348 BCE, judging by the dubious genealogies I discussed in the previous episode. The oldest surviving version of the Gilgamesh poem is dated to around 2000 BCE, but it purports to tell the story of a Sumerian king who, based on surviving Sumerian sources, like the Sumerian King List, likely lived around 2700 BCE. Now, to qualify this, the lengths of the reigns of antediluvian and post-diluvian kings in the Sumerian King List are just as problematic as the genealogies of Genesis, with figures ruling for many thousands of years before the flood and many hundreds of years after. Nevertheless, all signs point to the Epic of Gilgamesh being a mythical tradition that predates the story told in Genesis. And since Smith’s discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, other Near Eastern flood myths that predate Genesis have turned up. There is the Mesopotamian Epic of Atra-hasis, which appears to have preceded the Gilgamesh epic and to have served as the source for the story of Utnapishtim found in that poem. In this epic, Atra-Hasis is the Noah figure, warned again by Ea of Enlil’s intentions and told to build a roofed boat sealed with pitch. The predecessor of the Atra-Hasis epic, the Eridu Genesis or ancient Sumerian creation myth, was discovered in 1893 on a tablet in the ruins of the ancient city of Nippur, founded around 5000 BCE, and it was translated in 1912. In it, one Ziusudra is commanded by the god Enki to build a boat and preserve his family from the coming storm. So as we can see, rather than going to prove the veracity of the Genesis flood myth, these other Near Eastern flood myths actually show us that the Genesis flood story is just a common myth of the region, passed down from Ancient Sumeria, to Babylonia, and then incorporated into Judaism, whose founder, Abraham, is believed to have lived in Sumerian Babylon.

If the Genesis flood is merely a retelling of the Sumerian flood myth, then it would stand to reason that it is the story of a localized flood, perhaps relating to the annual flooding of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers in Mesopotamia, which may have seemed to drown the whole world for Mesopotamians, but was certainly not a global Deluge. Some will protest this, pointing to other flood myths not originating from the region, such as the Greek myth of Deucalion, but of course, the myth of Deucalion seems to have been borrowed by the Greeks, a migration of myth, which did not require an actual flood to have taken place. It has sometimes been argued that the lack of flood myths in Asia proves that all flood myths describe a regional rather than a global event, and this certainly holds true when no flood myth appears to have been preserved by ancient civilizations. However, there were Asian flood myths. In India, the story of Manu tells of a sole survivor of a flood, who built a boat and ran aground on a mountaintop. And in China, there were no less than four separate flood myths, those of Nü Kua, Kung Kung, Kun, and Yü. Even as far away as Central America, a variety of Mesoamerican peoples appear to have had their own flood myths. This is no proof of a worldwide flood, however, but rather evidence that people everywhere are the same. If they live in an area prone to flooding, they fear the flooding, and believe it was sent by a god, and any who survive a flood in a vessel come to believe they have been spared by a god, and they tell their children as much. The variation in these more distant traditions is enough to prove that they hold little resemblance to the Near Eastern traditions and represent the separate legends of distinct regions, based on local floods if based on any actual event. In Mesoamerican myths, the survivors do not preserve animals, just themselves, in hollow logs, and afterward are turned into dogs or are obliged to repopulate the world by lying with a weird supernatural dog that takes the shape of a woman. In the Indian myth, Manu is more like Adam, being the first man, and he is told of the coming catastrophe by a fish to whom he had previously been kind. Again, not preserving animals, Manu alone survives, and creates woman by pouring sour milk into the sea after he lands. The Chinese myths are perhaps the most distinct, as they do not tell of a sole survivor that rides out the flood on a boat but rather of a hero who saves the world by controlling the flood. These myths clearly seem to have originated from flood-prone regions around the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, where inhabitants had to develop flood management techniques, such as retention barriers and drainage, in order to survive.

The so-called Flood Tablet, containing the flood myth preserved in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In 1997, a new, seemingly credible scientific hypothesis was published by two marine geologists, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, proposing that around 8,000 years ago, the Black Sea, which had previously been a freshwater lake, was suddenly and cataclysmically inundated by seawater that broke through a natural dam. According to them, this “sudden infill” hypothesis would mean the displacement of a great many Neolithic farmers, whose oral tradition about the catastrophe may have been the origin of Near Eastern Flood myths. By their estimation, an earthquake caused the natural dam to break, resulting in a violent jet of water they figure was 20 times more powerful than Niagara Falls. To support their theory, they produced sophisticated computer models, cited certain seafloor features they argue could only have been caused by the currents of this catastrophic inundation of saltwater, identified a “debris fan” in the area where they believed the flooding would have deposited materials, and pointed to saltwater mollusk fossils in a certain sedimentary layer that they argue must have appeared suddenly. I am not much opposed to this theory myself, as at its heart, it argues for a non-literal interpretation of Genesis. First of all, if the theory were proven accurate, it would not prove anything about the origin of the flood myth. And if one chose to believe it did, it necessitates a non-literal reading of the Bible. It would mean the flood was local, not global. It would require acknowledgement that the Genesis story is just one mythologized iteration of a mytheme passed down through multiple cultures, and it would mean the time frame of Creationists is dead wrong. The world could not have been created 6000 years ago if the flood described in Genesis occurred some 8000 year ago. However, the scientific community has not been so open to the possibility. In the years after the first work of Ryan and Pitman appeared, a great deal of peer-reviewed scholarly research was published refuting their claims. According to academic consensus today, all evidence suggests that the Black Sea gradually filled with saltwater over thousands of years prior to the date that Ryan and Pitman pinpointed. Their evidence comes from cores taken from the Black Sea floor that show sediment laid down under several meters of water at a location that Ryan and Pitman claim would have been dry at the time. Moreover, they mapped an entire history of the slow rise of water levels by identifying on the Black Sea floor the lagoons and beach ridges that steady rise must have caused. They even discovered a delta where sea water was pouring into the Black Sea 10,000 years ago. Ryan and Pitman offer alternative explanations for all their findings, but the scholarly community rightly points out that they are outliers, and that they have proceeded in their investigations on very unscientific grounds. Ryan, it seems, had been obsessed with the myth of Noah’s flood for 30 years, and all his findings are colored by his desire to prove the truth behind the myth in some way. This may have made for more popular science, grabbing the attention of news organizations and the general public, but it did not make for a sound scientific process.

William Ryan is not alone in his obsession with the Flood myth. For most, however, the object of their obsession is not geological evidence of a flood but rather the ark itself, a kind of MacGuffin artifact that many Christian wannabe Indiana Joneses have sought for about a century. These ark seekers follow clues in ancient writings as well as more modern rumors. Their first clue is in Genesis, Chapter 8 verse 4, when it says the ark came to rest “upon the mountains of Ararat.” But where is that? In the first century, CE, Flavius Josephus recorded a rumor that the ark could be found in eastern Turkey, or Armenia, a rumor that would be repeated by numerous other writers, including Eusebius of Caesarea, over the next several centuries.  Likely because of this well-known rumor, a certain mountain in Turkey came to be called Ararat by medieval Europeans. Then in the 14th century, the Travels of Sir John Mandeville was published. In this work, which I discussed in my episode on Prester John, the English knight Sir John Mandeville writes of a monk who found the ark on Ararat and managed to bring back a plank of it as proof. Mandeville gave precise details about the abbey at the base of the mountain where the plank was kept, but no such abbey has ever been found, and most scholars now believe the Travels of Sir John Mandeville is entirely fantasy, and that even its knightly author is a literary construct. In the late 19th century, rumors once more surged. In 1883, a New Zealand newspaper printed a hoax about an avalanche revealing the ark, and the story circulated widely. In 1887, one John Joseph Nouri claimed to have summited Ararat and discovered the ark. Something of a mysterious figure, he made a career out of this claim, traveling widely and lecturing about his discovery without every offering any proof. In 1940, ark seeker fever arrived in America, when a Christian fundamentalist pamphlet called New Eden published the claim that a Russian pilot named Roskovitsky had discovered the ark on Ararat in 1917. In the first example of a recurring theme about atheists attempting to hide the discovery of the ark because it represented evidence of the Bible’s accuracy, the story claimed that the Bolsheviks promptly destroyed Roskovitsky’s report on the discovery as soon as they took power. In 1982, one Violet Cummings published a book entitled Has Anybody Really Seen Noah’s Ark? in which she promoted numerous unverified rumors and fired up a generation of would-be ark-seekers. Though no one had ever found proof of Roskovitsky’s actual existence, she claimed to have tracked the story down to Roskovitsky’s widow. She also repeated a story told to her by a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher who claimed an Armenian peasant once told him about a group of British atheists hiring his father as a guide on their expedition up Ararat. They intended to prove the ark was not there, but upon finding it, they supposedly “went into a Satanic rage” and swore the peasant’s father to secrecy, threatening to torture and murder him if he ever revealed that they had found the ark. Beyond the conspiracy of atheists to cover up the truth of the Bible, the old Smithsonian cover-up chestnut also shows up in the lore of the ark seekers. In 1972, a story appeared about a joint expedition between the Smithsonian and the National Geographic Society in 1968. Supposedly, this expedition recovered all the remains of the ark, as well as the alabaster coffin of Noah, which still contained his remains. Unsurprisingly, the Smithsonian investigator, whose existence has never been confirmed, was said by the pseudonymous author, whose identity has never been revealed, to have hidden all this evidence because it would pose a problem for evolutionary theory, which it wouldn’t.

John Joseph Nouri, mystery man who claimed to have found the Ark, was at one time committed to an insane asylum in America, and was later crowned Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church.

There have been numerous real expeditions to Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. Let’s have a look at how those turned out. In 1829, Friedrich Parrot ascended Ararat, and in his account of the expedition, he claimed Armenians believed the ark was atop the summit and, conveniently, prevented anyone from getting near it out of a sense of respect for the artifact. In 1876, James Bryce climbed Ararat and claimed to have found a piece of cut wood. This represents the first of many claims of recovering ark fragments that cannot be proven genuine. In 1955, French adventurer Fernand Navarre scaled the mountain and brought back a piece, not of gopherwood but of oak. He had to lie to the Turkish government about why he was entering the country, a common aspect of more modern ark expeditions, and he took many photos of himself and his son during their climb. He claims to have found the ark, covered in ice, and to have sawed off the piece he brought back. Suspiciously, he took no photos of the actual ark. Afterward, he claimed to have had an expert in Cairo date the wood to between 4,000 and 6,000 years old, but his piece of wood has since been carbon dated to around the 7th or 8th century CE. In 1982, fundamentalist Christian astronaut James Irwin, who had undertaken an Ararat expedition after resigning from NASA, fell 100 feet down the mountain and was knocked out cold. He returned a month later, despite his wife’s concern that his head injury had left him less than rational, as he insisted his family join him and that they could do without the proper equipment. When that expedition likewise failed, he came back in 1983, this time with a guide, and he found some wood sticking out of the snow during his climb. He was sure he’d found it, but had to descend without it due to a blizzard. When he managed to find it again 11 months later, he discovered that it was, in fact, a pair of abandoned skis. So it went with Irwin’s expeditions. In 1985, Kurdish guerillas prevented his ascent. In 1986, Turkish authorities detained him and his film crew on suspicion of espionage. Eventually, he gave up, and his ill-fated attempts represent well the attempts of all ark seekers. When they aren’t lying, they are simply failing.

The efforts of Creationists to prove their flood geology and of ark seekers to discover Noah’s big boat continue today. In fact, in 2016 in Kentucky, a Creationist theme park opened called Ark Encounter, complete with a 500-foot ark that they claim is “life size” and “historically accurate,” including exhibits that show you how Noah was able to fit and feed all those animals, though the supposed replica ark is only a façade with just three decks open to the public. Elsewhere in this theme park, one can take children to visit a Creation Museum, attend presentations at the “Answers Center” that reveal “Answers in Genesis,” and even enjoy an entertaining virtual reality experience called the “Truth Traveler.” As this is all clearly an elaborate indoctrination center, children unsurprisingly receive free admission. But, today, the search for the ark is more like the search for UFOs. Rather than mounting arduous expeditions, ark seekers pore over satellite imagery and point at “anomalies,” arguing they have finally found the ark. Despite all the weight of reason and evidence to convince the world that the story of Noah’s Ark is just a myth, fundamentalists anchor their faith on the literal truth of this tale and every other tale in their religious document. Surely much of this urge can be attributed to xenophobia and ethnocentrism, for if a fundamentalist admits that the stories told by their religion are mere myths used as analogies and metaphors to teach spiritual lessons, then they must admit that other religions have about as much claim to truth as theirs. Now don’t get me wrong. Archaeology has proven the literal truth of certain elements of the Bible. For example, the real existence of Gath, home of Goliath, or the actual site of Jericho, the city in Canaan whose walls miraculously fell when the Israelites sounded their trumpets. But archaeology tends to discredit at the same time that it confirms. Excavations of Gath turn up no giant skeletons, nor do excavations of Canaanite cities like Jericho for that matter, and excavations of Jericho show that it was not highly populated and was never a walled city at the time when Joshua is supposed to have assaulted its walls. But Christians should not take the findings of science as discrediting their beliefs. Those beliefs hinge on the idea that a moral code has been vouchsafed to them by a deity. The Bible’s inherent worth is as a moral document, not as a historical record. Disproving the literal accuracy of any story within it does not reduce its value as a vehicle to convey moral lessons. If fundamentalist Christians would place more value on the spiritual content of their scriptures than on their value as any kind of accurate chronicle, they would find themselves mostly impervious to the discoveries and criticisms of scientists.

American astronaut and failed ark seeker, James Irwin.

Further Reading

Birrell, Anne. “The Four Flood Myth Traditions of Classical China.” T’oung Pao, vol. 83, no. 4-5, BRILL, 1997, pp. 213–59, doi.org/10.1163/15685322-90000015.

Conant, Eve. “In Search of Noah’s Ark.” Newsweek (International, Atlantic Edition), Newsweek LLC, 2003, p. 46–.

Holden, Constance. “‘Noah’s Flood’ Theory Questioned.” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 296, no. 5577, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2002, pp. 2331–2331, doi.org/10.1126/science.296.5577.2331a.

Kerr, Richard A. “Marine Geology. Support Is Drying up for Noah’s Flood Filling the Black Sea.” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 317, no. 5840, 2007, p. 886–.

Montgomery, David R. The Rocks Don’t Lie : a Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood. 1st ed., W.W. Norton, 2012.

Moore, Robert A. “The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, Winter 1983.  National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo/impossible-voyage-noahs-ark.

Schiermeier, Quirin. “Noah’s Flood.” Nature (London), vol. 430, no. 7001, 2004, pp. 718–19, doi.org/10.1038/430718a.

Toumey, Christopher P. “Who’s Seen Noah’s Ark? (controversial Ark Sightings).” Natural History, vol. 106, no. 9, Natural History Magazine, Inc, 1997, pp. 14–17.

Weber, Christopher Gregory. “The Fatal Flaws of Flood Geology.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, Summer 1980.  National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo/fatal-flaws-flood-geology.

The Secrets of Enoch (An Apocryphal Catechism)

In Genesis, Chapter 5, a written account of the family line of Adam is given. This genealogy states, in every major translation and in no uncertain terms, that Adam lived for 930 years. His son Seth lived 912 years, and Seth’s son Enosh lived 905. Enosh’s son Kenan lived to 910, his son Mahalalel lived to 895, and his son Jared lived to 962. The oldest was Jared’s grandson, Methuselah, who it’s said reached the astonishing old age of 969. Those who insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible must therefore explain why early mankind enjoyed such extreme longevity while we, today, who enjoy far longer lifespans than many in the past, still have an average life expectancy of only seventy years and change. According to one obsolete explanation, there had once been a solid dome around the earth, referred to as the “firmament” in Genesis, which somehow enabled such longevity, perhaps by shielding us from ultraviolet radiation? Apart from outmoded cosmological notions, there is the rather simpler, faith-based explanation that, since it was sin that took from us our immortality, shorter lifespans simply reflect the greater influence of sin in the world. That would seem to suggest that, since we live longer today, there is actually less sin today than there was in, say, the Victorian era, known for its strict morality and religiosity, or even the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church’s power was at its height. I’m not sure many Christians would actually agree with that. Luckily, the very next chapter of Genesis offers a handy explanation, right before acquainting the reader with the Nephilim, giants that issued from an unholy union with fallen angels, according to most understandings. In verse three of Chapter 6, God, seeing that angels were marrying human women, declares that his “Spirit” will not always be with mankind, and since people are made of flesh and are therefore corrupt, our “days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” So it would seem people only lived to such advanced age because of God’s Spirit, which somehow was present and lengthening our lives at least through the flood, when Methuselah’s grandson, Noah, lived to 800 years. Only over the next dozen or so generations did the longevity fade, until Moses reached only a paltry 120 years old. Again, does our increase in lifespan today mean God’s Spirit has returned? Or is it more likely that these unbelievably great ages are the result of an error, as some religious scholars defending the scriptures have claimed. It has been argued that their real ages had simply been multiplied by ten, but Genesis 5 also shares what age these men were at when they fathered children, and though most seem far too old to be fathering children, this solution would mean some of them were fathering children at only 6 years old! Another has suggested that the great longevity of the first patriarchs was a mistranslation, counting months as years, which does seem reasonable, making Methuselah more like 80 years old rather than almost a thousand. Further rational explanations are that generation gaps existed in the record, requiring ages to be lengthened to account for a greater passage of time, or that each patriarch listed was actually just the most prominent figure of their epoch, making of the chapter less a genealogy and more a who’s who of those millennia. Being no apologist, I would offer the additional explanation that Genesis is mythology and should not be defended as a legitimate historical record. But there is one entry in this list of long-lived patriarchs that bears further scrutiny. Great-grandfather of Noah, and father of Methuselah, Enoch, he who was said in magical traditions to have received the hidden knowledge of the world from angels and to have preserved it from the Flood’s destruction, is revealed in verses 23 and 24 to have only lived 365 years before “he was not; for God took him.” If one wants to learn more about Enoch, and his being taken by God, one must look beyond the canonical books of Judaism and Christianity, to the apocryphal book that bears his name, a book steeped numerous mysteries.

*

I am happy to finally be making another entry in this thematic series after a couple years. Anyone who has not listened to the first Apocryphal Catechism, called Gnostic Genesis, may want to go look for it and listen first. In it, I discuss the concept of apocrypha and pseudepigrapha as well as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which is somewhat required knowledge for this episode. I have been wanting to discuss the apocryphal Book of Enoch for a while now, ever since my episode about Hermes Trismegistus, in which the character of Enoch figures prominently, as Hermetic tradition conflates the two. Furthermore, after my episodes about Giants, in which I discussed the Nephilim of Genesis 6 as well as ideas about Flood myths and the lineage of Noah, previously discussed in my episodes on the Lost Tribes of Israel as well, it seemed the perfect time to tackle the topic, as Enochic traditions are deeply connected to these topics. To start a conversation about The Book of Enoch, though, we must first clarify which books of Enoch we mean, as there are several. The book most think of when one says The Book of Enoch, which is now called 1 Enoch, is a text that was long believed lost. The prophecies of Enoch were referenced in Jude, but no written source for them had ever been turned up. Some manuscripts, Ethiopian in origin, appear to have circulated during the Renaissance, but still the book remained legendary, with many not believing the rumors of its existence. Not until the 18th century were authentic copies of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch discovered and brought back to Europe by Scottish adventurer James Bruce, during his expedition to find the source of the Nile, and these were not translated into English and properly recognized until 1821. Some fragments of 1 Enoch were found in Greek and Latin, but its great antiquity was not confirmed until 11 fragments of it, written in Aramaic, and three in Hebrew, turned up in caves in Qumran in 1948, as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery. But even within this first Book of Enoch, there are several different works, The Book of the Watchers, The Book of Parables, The Astronomical Book, and The Dream Visions, each of which scholars believe originated from a different time period, with different authorship, making 1 Enoch more of an anthology than a coherent work. To further confuse matters, there are also a 2 Enoch, which is the work more specifically called the Secrets of Enoch, a 3 Enoch, and a Book of the Giants, which is often lumped together with the others because of its subject matter. Like the different sections of 1 Enoch, these other three works appear to have been composed in different eras, though there is no firm scholarly consensus on the origins of certain of them. To simplify, we will speak more generally in this study of Enochic tradition, taking all the literature as a corpus, in the sense of a group of works on the same subject instead of works by the same author, since all of them are doubtless pseudepigraphal.

James Bruce, a Scottish explorer who found the source of the Blue Nile and rediscovered the Book of Enoch.

Of course, the principal reason why I’ve chosen to discuss Enochic traditions now is that they offer retellings of the story of the Nephilim from Genesis 6, about which I spoke in some detail in Part One of my recent series on giants. I spoke of the few places in which the word Nephilim had been used and why it was translated as giants, and I also gave some alternative views on who the bene Elohim or “sons of God,” who fathered the Nephilim, may have been, other than angels have sexual intercourse with human women. Some, however, may look at the same story, as told in Enochic tradition, as a disproof of any rationalist interpretation of Genesis 6. In the Book of the Watchers, by far the oldest of the Enochic texts, as well as in other texts in the corpus, it is made explicitly clear that the sires of the Nephilim were indeed angels, called “Watchers” here. In fact, these rebel angels are even named, chief among them Shemihazah and Asa’el, and their crimes were more than just lusting after women. They are said to have taught mankind the evils of sorcery, thus providing a separate origin myth for magic, different from that which blamed Zoroaster and the Magi, as I spoke about in a previous episode. The evil magical practices taught by the Watchers were such abominable traditions as metalworking and using cosmetics. I can almost hear the gasps of horror. With these and other variations on the story of Genesis 6, it becomes the story of the origin of all evil, a kind of demonology. The offspring of the Watchers with human women are clearly said to be not only giants, but murderers who drink blood and practice cannibalism and bestiality. The fallen Watchers, in the end, are bound and imprisoned in a pit, and their evil offspring are wiped out by the Flood God sends as punishment, although in this tradition, it seems rather a punitive act against these Watchers and giants that drown the rest of humanity rather collaterally. And even then, it didn’t do the trick, as it’s said that, though the evil giants’ bodies were destroyed in the Flood, their spirits were not, and this was the origin of demons, who resented, oppressed, and even occasionally possessed surviving humans.

Just to nip in the bud any argument that the Enochic corpus represents evidence of the truth of the Nephilim story in Genesis 6, it should be noted that even the oldest of the works, The Book of the Watchers, is believed to be no older than the 3rd or 4th century BCE. Whereas Genesis, although supposed to have been written by Moses, who is sometimes believed to have lived in the 13th century BCE, has been shown by scholars to have actually been written in the 5th or 6th century BCE. This means The Book of the Watchers was written hundreds of years after, clearly as a kind of expansion on the mythology that was already out there. Some scholars assert that the early chapters of Genesis were not composed until the 3rd century BCE, but even if that minority position were proven accurate, it would still only mean that both accounts were writing about events that had supposedly occurred about 2000 years earlier. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the accuracy of the accounts. Moreover, the story of the Watchers fathering Nephilim with human women is told over and over in the Enochic corpus, varying with each telling, and in some cases appearing to be midrashes, or rabbinic interpretations, of the story. In other words, it is clear from the Enochic literature alone that the story of the Watchers and the Nephilim was a mythological tradition that had been and continued to be retold in innumerable variations, as the basis for differing philosophical and doctrinal positions. It is even told as an allegory in 1 Enoch verses 83-90, in what is called the Animal Apocalypse, which uses animals to tell the story much like George Orwell’s Animal Farm. In this passage, it recounts how certain stars fell from the heavens and then had sex with cattle, producing offspring that were entirely different species, including donkeys, camels, and elephants, which then devoured the cattle. If the story is treated in such a clearly metaphorical manner here, could it not have served some metaphorical purpose in every iteration?

A symbolic painting by George Frederick Watts (depicting the ideas of Love and Life and unrelated to the subject at hand) that some think illustrates well the story of the Watchers taking human wives.

With the suggestion that the story of the Watchers and the Nephilim may be allegorical, we are led to a variety of interpretations that reveal what meaning, other than literal, that the myth may have always had. For example, an astrological meaning has been found in the story. The names of the Watchers, it is pointed out, correspond with those of meteorological phenomena and identifiable heavenly bodies, such that it is really a story about the ill omens of irregular astronomical phenomena or of stars that alter their paths. The example from the Animal Apocalypse perfectly illustrates this interpretation, as the Watchers are depicted as stars that left their proper place and cause all kinds of trouble. Other interpretations require some further discussion of historical context. As discussed in my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel, in the 8th century BCE, Assyria conquered the Kingdom of Israel, during which ten tribes were lost. After that, during the 6th century BCE, the Kingdom of Judah saw their temple destroyed and their people placed in captivity by the Neo-Babylonian Empire. After the Persian conquest of Babylon, Cyrus the Great allowed their return and the reconstruction of their temple, and it was later in this Second Temple period, after Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Mediterranean and the age of Hellenism that followed his death, that Enochic literature became popular. One theory is that the story of the Watchers actually represent the Diadochi, Alexander’s generals, who defied Alexander’s wishes after his death to seize control over parts of his kingdom. The allegory works well, as the Watchers are described in decidedly martial terms as the generals of their own armies of angels, and they rebel to seize power for themselves, going native, as it were, on the Earth. Presenting the intermarriage of the Watchers and human women as an evil that results in corruption may also be seen as a lesson for the Jews not to mix with outsiders, and especially not to breed with them. Another interpretation suggests, rather convincingly, that the story of the Watchers was really a criticism or satire of all the neighbors and enemies of the Jews, whether Assyrian or Babylonian or Persian or Greek. The very nature of the Watchers as heavenly beings that lust after human women can be seen as a spoof of polytheist religions popular among their enemies in which deities were known to father children with human women. Think, for example, of the comparison I drew between Heracles and the Nephilim in a recent patron exclusive. If this were the purpose of the story, it would seem to have been an effort to subordinate the gods of their neighbors, suggesting their lustful deities were actually nothing more than the disobedient servants of the most high Jewish god.

Interestingly, just as the apocryphal Enochic corpus greatly expands on the tradition of the Nephilim, it also greatly expands the mythology surrounding the cataclysm that destroys them, the Deluge, and especially the lore surrounding Noah. According to the Enochic traditions, Noah was not necessarily a regular man. It is reported in 1 Enoch that, when Noah was born, his father Lamech was concerned about some unusual features of his appearance. His skin was unusually white, with platinum hair and eyes that shined. Lamech took the child to his grandfather, Enoch, was known to be wise. As we know from elsewhere in the Enochic corpus and from alchemical lore, Enoch had come into possession of divine knowledge, either from visions bestowed upon him by angels and written down in a book, or from the mysterious emerald tablet he discovered in a cave. Regardless of the source of his wisdom, it is clear why Lamech would come to him with his concerns, for Lamech believed his infant son’s strange appearance meant that he was actually the offspring of a Watcher, and Enoch knew all about the Watchers. It is striking here that whiteness and blondeness and bright eyes, features that Nazis and other white supremacists would later claim make one pure or superior, are here seen as an indication that Noah was of corrupt or mixed blood, the progeny of fallen spirits, and thus a demon like the other Nephilim. It may be the first indication of someone being viewed as a white devil. Enoch, however, says that is not the case, and that rather, these features are a sign that Noah had been chosen by God. As it turns out, Enoch already knows that the Deluge is coming as a judgment on the corruption of the Watchers and Nephilim, and he asserts that his great-grandson has been chosen for deliverance from this flood. This is a remarkable straying from the Biblical story of the Flood, in which Noah is chosen because of his righteousness and learns of the Flood directly from God. In the Enochic tradition, he was chosen before he could really display righteousness, and his family had known about the coming destruction for generations. As the story unfolds, Enoch bestows his divine wisdom on Noah before his ascension and transfiguration, either in the form of a book or the Emerald Tablet, and Noah becomes a magician and a healer, specifically an exorcist, able to expel the spirits of the demonic Nephilim when they enter people. Interestingly, Noah’s whiteness corresponds with insidious ideas about race after the Flood, with people of color having descended from one of his sons, Ham, who was supposedly cursed with dark skin. However, according to the Enochic tradition, it seems pretty clear that the strange whiteness of Noah, which may have passed to some but not all of his sons, appears to be something of an aberration, like albinism. I’m sure a white supremacist will look at this story and argue that it confirms whites are God’s chosen people, but an alternative interpretation is that it depicts whiteness as an inherited disorder and shows the earliest whites believing themselves superior to all others, such that they believed God wanted them to live and everyone else to die off.

The Birth of Noah by James Tissot

The Enochic corpus and other Second Temple apocrypha seem to refer at times to a Book of Noah that some scholars doubt ever existed. If it did exist, then the palimpsest that is Enochic apocrypha is further important in that it may be reproducing passages of a lost work. The simple fact that lost books of scripture exist cannot be denied. 1 Enoch itself had been a lost book outside of Ethiopia for centuries. Moreover, there are numerous proposed lost books, such as a proto-gospel that preceded the others, a certain “Severe Letter” written by the Apostle Paul, and the “Ascents of James,” said to be a heretical text. These are just some of the lost texts of Christianity. There are numerous Judaic texts that are believed to have been lost, and several Manichean texts. Moreover, we know the custom of Jewish pseudepigrapha to attribute works to major biblical patriarchs, and it would seem unusual if there had never been a pseudepigraphon attributed to so major a figure as Noah. Finally, there are explicit references to Noah writing a book, or to the “writing of the words of Noah,” in various apocryphal works and fragments. However, skeptics find it suspicious that content said to be from these writings of Noah seems to vary from work to work. On the other hand, when the content of other books is alluded to, it is usually pretty faithfully rendered. This has led some doubters to suggest that references to a Book of Noah are only literary devices, such as when the trope of the Book of Life is used in scriptures, with the metaphor of being blotted out of it. If there is no literal Book of Life for one’s name to be blotted out of, it has been suggested that references to a Book of Noah may only refer metaphorically to the wisdom of Noah or the lessons to be learned from his story.  Others have suggested that the Book of Noah is merely folkloric, much like the Emerald Tablet or the book containing the wisdom of Enoch, which certainly doesn’t seem to be the same as the pseudepigraphal works of the Second Temple period that I am discussing in this episode. By this view, it is as ridiculous to theorize about a real Book of Noah as it is to entertain the literal existence of Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon, a book that only exists in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.

The way in which this question of whether there existed a pseudepigraphical Book of Noah butts up against the question of whether there ever existed writings penned by the man Noah, and whether Noah the man ever actually existed, is similar to one of the central mysteries of the Book of Enoch, which revolves around the chronology of when certain passages were written and what they refer to. This is because some parts of the Enochic corpus appear to refer to Christ, and since some portions of it predate Christianity, it is argued that these passages represent a pre-Christian prophecy that has been fulfilled. This mystery has to do with the cryptic phrase “the Son of Man,” a term that is used frequently in scriptures just to mean humanity, as in, the sons of man, but in some cases, with the definite article “the Son of Man,” has been interpreted to mean a specific heavenly being, one who is seen in certain visions, such as those of Daniel, as being in the presence of God and in a position of authority. Christians interpret this vision as depicting Christ, the son of God, who was given human form, “like a son of man,” as Daniel states, and who it is believed will stand at the right hand of God. Despite the fact that with this language Daniel only appears to be describing a a man, or someone who looked like a man, being in the presence of someone he calls the Ancient of Days, never actually calling him God, the Christian interpretation has led to many mentions of a “son of man” being interpretated as references to Christ. As it happens, in the Book of Parables, the second section of 1 Enoch, the protagonist is called “the Son of Man,” used as a proper noun. Now we may presume that this was an allegorical trope, like naming your protagonist John Everyman to indicate that he represents all mankind, but many Christians take it as evidence that the Book of Enoch foretold the coming of Christ. The problem with this interpretation is that most scholars see the Book of Parables as a later addition to the Enochic corpus, suggesting that these Christian themes and some veiled allusions to events in the 3rd century CE, indicate that it was actually written in Christian times, making these passages far less prophetic. Indeed, this section, the Book of Parables, was never found among the fragments of the Book of Enoch among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A depiction of Enoch’s ascension.

These references to the Son of Man, far from confirming the beliefs of Christians, should actually be rejected by those who adhere to an orthodox view of Christianity. Indeed, this aspect of the book begins to approach why Enochic literature was excluded from the canon, as it leads to the notion that there are two powers in heaven. The vision of Daniel told of multiple thrones, and spoke of this one who was like a son of man being given “authority, glory and sovereign power.” Likewise, in the Book of Parables, this Son of Man sits on God’s throne, in glory and judgment. The Christian doctrine of the trinity was promulgated to explain scriptures that appear to indicate that there may be two coequal powers, as these passages indicate, arguing that Jesus is one and the same as God, along with the Holy Spirit, so it’s all just one godhead. But the Enochic corpus suggests a different interpretation. In the lore of this tradition, prior to Christ, there was another man, or son of man, who had ascended to heaven. It was Enoch, who was taken up by God instead of dying. Thus, the most common interpretation of this passage is that Enoch is the Son of Man, and it is further developed in 3 Enoch, when Enoch’s transfiguration into an angel is described. Later traditions suggest that Enoch was transformed into an archangel named Metatron. The name Metatron, which sounds like a transformer, was never mentioned in the Enochic texts, and some argue that it is derived from phrases elsewhere used for the Angel of the Lord, and this accords well with the interpretation that Enoch, the Son of Man, who was raised above other sons of men and raptured into heaven, was transformed into an angel and given his own throne and power equal to that of god, an idea so dangerous that it would lead to the Book of Enoch being suppressed and lost for centuries.

While the doctrine of two powers in heaven was heresy to orthodox Judaism, since Christians applied their bit of sophistry to explain away these multiple gods as one, it shouldn’t have been so problematic to them. However, there was a further problem posed by the Enochic literature, that may explain its exclusion from Christian canon at the Council of Nicaea. This problem is that, the story of Christ, in several respects, appears to match in key regards, the story of Enoch. Let us consider these parallels. Like Enoch, Christ ascends and is transfigured and then sits enthroned in heaven in judgment on mankind. And just as, according to 1 Peter, Christ descends into Hell and condemns the rebel angels there, so too did Enoch visit the disobedient Watchers and declare their punishment to be eternal. While some of these similarities may be explained away if the Book of Parables is indeed a later, Christian-era addition, some elements originate in portions of the Enochic corpus that are considered definitely pre-Christian, which raises the question of how much of the story of Christ may actually have been recycled myth. Of course, to suggest the Council of Nicaea excluded Enochic texts to hide this may be something of a conspiracy theory. The Council of Nicaea may simply have excluded Enochic traditions because they had already been excluded from the Jewish canon or because they were pseudepigrapha, and thus, by definition, a kind of forgery. But knowing as we know now that 1 Peter and all the canonical gospels are widely considered pseudepigrapha as well, with the exception of John, whose author remains a mystery, it rather seems more like the church fathers just picked and chose among a variety of dubious texts falsely attributed to famous figures in order to best reinforce that creed they chose to adopt. Regardless of whether the story of Christ is really the story of Enoch, or vice versa, though, the lesson to be taken here is that all such doctrine and dogma should be viewed with skepticism, based as it is upon a hodgepodge of antiquated writings that, despite all the claims of the faithful, are clearly crafted by man.

Further Reading

Baxter, Wayne. “Noachic Traditions and the Book of Noah.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, vol. 15, no. 3, May 2006, pp. 179–94. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1177/0951820706066633.

Boyarin, Daniel. “Beyond Judaisms: Meṭaṭron and the Divine Polymorphy of Ancient Judaism.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period, vol. 41, no. 3, 2010, pp. 323–65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24670476. Accessed 21 Jun. 2022.

Elliott, John H. “1 Enoch, 1 Peter, and Social-Scientific Criticism A Review Article on a Major 1 Enoch Commentary.” Biblical Theology Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 1, Feb. 2009, pp. 39–43. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1177/0146107908100115.

Etz, Donald V. “The Numbers of Genesis V 3-31: a Suggested Conversion and Its Implications.” Vetus Testamentum, vol. 43, no. 2, 1993, pp. 171-187. BRILL, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/156853393X00034.

Lumpkin, Joseph B. The Books of Enoch: The Angels, the Watchers, and the Nephilim (with Extensive Commentary on the Three Books of Enoch, the Fallen Angels, the Calendar of Enoch, and Daniel’s Prophecy). 2nd ed., Fifth Estate, 2011.
Mearns, Christopher L. “Dating the Similitudes of Enoch.” New Testament Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, 1979, pp. 360–369., doi:10.1017/S0028688500004975.

Paz, Yakir. “Metatron Is Not Enoch: Reevaluating the Evolution of an Archangel.” Journal for the Study of Judaism: In the Persian Hellenistic & Roman Period, vol. 50, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 52–100. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1163/15700631-12501239.

Roark, Kyle. “First Enoch 8 and the Origins of Civilization.” Henoch, vol. 41, no. 2, July 2019, pp. 188–203. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=145759442&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

The Myth of a Lost Mound Builder Race

The first European explorers and settlers to set foot in North America during the 15th and 16th centuries found many large conical hills dotting the landscape of certain regions. During Hernando De Soto’s expedition across what is today the southeastern United States, he and his men passed by many of these and believed them to be nothing more than hills, but others he saw in the midst of populous native cities, with temples and the houses of chiefs built atop them, and he understood them to be manmade. By the time of French and English exploration and settlement, after De Soto’s expedition had decimated indigenous populations by introducing European disease, the cities too had disappeared, leaving only the earthen mounds, which looked to many an untrained eye like natural features of the landscape. Eventually, though, it became common knowledge that these were actually tumuli, or burial mounds, akin to the barrows of the Old World, and they were frequently destroyed by farmers seeking to level their fields, or by treasure-hunters who never found the riches they dreamed of within, just skeletons and artifacts that would only be of interest to antiquarians. Before the Revolutionary War, the consensus among the educated and scientifically-minded was that, of course, they had been built by the tribes of Native Americans who had first been encountered in the New World and who still remained there, in constant conflict with white settlers, but gradually, this belief came to be replaced by the idea that Native Americans, whom they considered “savages,” simply did not have the wherewithal to build such monuments. Rather, they must have been the work of a predecessor race, a superior breed of people more like Europeans and thus probably white, who had been wiped out by the native peoples they believed to be so barbarous. This myth of a lost race of mound-builders would breed countless theories of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact, as did the question of the origin of Native American peoples, and eventually, it would be enshrined in a uniquely American religion. It seems to have started with the vivid imagination of a Congregationalist preacher named Solomon Spalding, who encountered theories about the Old-World origins of a Mound Builder race in college at Dartmouth. After giving up preaching, he lived first in Western New York, before moving to Ohio, both regions with numerous ancient mounds, about which locals and visiting antiquarians told many stories and shared many theories. Eventually, Spalding shared his own, very publicly, telling many an acquaintance about a historical romance, or fiction, that he was writing, and sharing various drafts of it with whoever wanted to read it. The principal conceit of his story was that it was a translation of an ancient scroll found in a burial mound, which revealed the hidden history of the Mound Builder race. His manuscript would never be published, but, as some testimony reveals, it may have been taken from a printer’s office and copied by a young Baptist minister named Sidney Rigdon. After that, a young burial mound treasure-hunter in Western New York named Joseph Smith began claiming that an angel had revealed to him the location of a book of gold plates buried within a mound, which once translated by Smith, likewise told the story of the lost Mound Builder race. The fact that, later the same year that Smith published The Book of Mormon, Sidney Rigdon and several members of his congregation in Ohio would be converted to the new religion, and Rigdon would become Smith’s chief lieutenant, has led many to suspect that Rigdon planted the seeds of this new religion by secretly providing Solomon Spalding’s manuscript to Joseph Smith for use as a model. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, the entire basis of Mormonism, a religion claiming nearly 17 million converts today, remains that the ancient Mound Builders of America were actually a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel who found their way to the New World. According to the Book of Mormon, Native Americans too are descended from these Lost Tribes, but are derived from a separate tribe that engaged in idolatry and therefore were cursed with dark skin and descended into savagery, destroying the light-skinned Mound Builder tribe. This is the core of a quintessentially American myth, that the impressive ancient earthworks of our land were not constructed by the ancestors of the Native Americans we know, but rather that Native American peoples savagely wiped out this noble and white antecedent race. It is a myth that reveals the foundational racism that our country was built on, and that, despite having long been irrefutably debunked, survives today, in the dogma of the Latter-Day Saints, in the deceptive pseudohistorical work of several influential authors, and among the thickets of false claims blithely made online.

A depiction of Joseph Smith, who in his youth had been a treasure hunter, excavating a mound after he had founded a religion on the idea of a lost Mound Builder race.

The subject of this episode is one for which I have laid an extensive foundation. Many topics that have long been of interest to me, and that I have written about, in the podcast and in my historical fiction, are closely related to the myth of a lost Mound Building race in ancient America. Most recently, obviously, my series on giants ties directly into it, as 19th century claims of uncovering enormous skeletons in Native American burial mounds were encouraged by the idea that Native Americans could not have created such gigantic earthworks, and that instead they had been constructed by a mythical lost race in antiquity. In fact, as I mentioned briefly, Aaron Wright of Conneaut, Ohio, who is said to have claimed that he found a giant skull that fit over his head like a helmet, actually knew Solomon Spalding and gave testimony regarding the similarity of Spalding’s manuscript to Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon. The claims about giant remains in Conneaut mounds were certainly one among the many stories about Mound Builders that inspired Spalding, and probably, by extension, Mormonism. If you want to learn more about the relationship between Mound Builder legends and treasure-hunting and Mormonism, including a depiction of a likely scenario for how the Book of Mormon was composed and what influenced its composition, I wrote a historical novel all about it, which I researched and wrote over the course of a decade. Some of the subject matter relevant to both Mormonism and the Mound Builder myth I discussed at length last year in my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel, and I followed up that series with a survey of the many inscribed stone frauds that have been perpetrated to support the pre-Columbian transoceanic contact claims and, more specifically, the supposed Hebraic origins of Native Americans, a few of which I also dramatized in fiction. In fact, this story, of the quintessentially American myth of a lost Mound Builder race, even corresponds with the myth of an Aryan race, which I devoted most of an episode to discussing in my three-part series on Nazi Occultism years ago. In the late 18th century, an English linguist in British-controlled India named William Jones, remarking on the connections between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek and unable to conceive that something of value might have been contributed to mankind by a people of color, came to the baseless conclusion that an unknown white race had first brought this Proto-Indo-European language to India, and had since “degenerated” through racial admixture with the dark-skinned native peoples of India. This, of course, was the birth of a doctrine that would drive Nazi racial theories more than a hundred years later in Germany, and that survives today, sadly thriving in the dark dens and bastions of White Nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, neo-Confederates, the Christian Identity movement, and the Alt-Right. But long before it inspired these groups, it inspired the white inhabitants of a newly-independent United States of America to likewise imagine that there had once been a white predecessor race in their country as well, one quite superior to the Native Americans with whom they were locked in a perennial struggle for possession of these ancient lands.

Just as there were many theories about the racial heritage of Native American peoples, many and varied were the pet theories about the origins of the Mound Builder race that, by the mid-19th century, were believed by most Americans to have preceded them. Reflecting this connection to the myth of an Aryan race that was popularized by scholars in British India, some theories suggested the Mound Builders had been “Hindoos.” Of course, the term “Hindus” actually refers to a specific religious group, but these Mound Builder claims used it more generally to mean supposed ancient immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, likely meaning the mythical Aryan race posited at the time. It is ironic that these theorists refused to believe that the peoples they wrongly called “Indians” were responsible for the mounds, preferring instead to credit peoples more accurately called “Indians.” James McCulloh’s Researches on America, for example, suggested that the ancient Asian ancestors of Native Americans who crossed into the Americas via the land bridge at Beringia were more specifically from India, and that they had been trapped here by the sinking of Atlantis. Likewise, John Clifford’s “Indian Antiquities,” a series of letters published in Western Review, perceived similarities between the myths of Native Americans and the cultures of India, and though Judeo-Christian tradition had nothing to do with either, he believed the Bible provided insight into the construction of mounds in America, suggesting they had been further attempts to build to the sky after the fall of the Tower of Babel. Both men actually suggested that, though descended from “Hindoos,” it was indeed Native Americans who had built the mound—but not the native peoples of North America, whom they agreed were incapable of such feats. Rather, they argued it had been those indigenous to Mexico, the so-called Toltec peoples, who had been known to build impressive stone pyramids in Central America. This notion that the Toltec or Aztec Mesoamerican cultures actually originated as the Mound Builders before moving southward was quite popular, and it retained the critical element that the Native American tribes of the day were inferior, could not of built the mounds themselves, and likely drove the superior mound-building culture southward with their violent depredations.

Painting of Mound Builder Myth proponent Caleb Atwater.

The arguments of McCulloh and Clifford were further promoted in 1820 by Caleb Atwater, in his Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States. Close listeners to the preceding series on giants may recall the antiquarian Atwater had been excavating mounds in Conneaut, Ohio, and had declared that the skeletons there were very small, effectively refuting the claims that local man Aaron Wright had found giant skeletons in Conneaut’s tumuli. Atwater’s work borrowed heavily from John Clifford, and Clifford’s partner, French polymath Constantine Rafinesque, took umbrage, afterward engaging in a lifelong feud with Atwater, whose theory of Native American origins he vehemently opposed, so much so that, taking a cue from Joseph Smith, he would eventually resort to perpetrating a found manuscript hoax of his own to convince the world of his more traditional view of the Asiatic origins of Native Americans, a fraud I plan to discuss further in a patron exclusive episode. But attempting to disabuse the intellectual elite of their quickly multiplying historical fantasies was a losing battle. The Hindu/Toltec theory was only one among a plethora of popular notions about who the lost Mound Builders had been, and most of them were popularized by the work of one man, Josiah Priest, an undereducated leatherworker who started his writing career in 1825 publishing a work, The Wonders of Nature and Providence Displayed, that pieced together the work of other writers, including Ethan Smith, whose work View of the Hebrews had popularized the notion that Native Americans were actually Jews from the Lost Tribes of Israel. But in Priest’s later 1833 work, American Antiquities, and Discoveries in the West, he attempted to synthesize numerous competing theories about the origins of the Mound Builders. No longer were they merely lost Israelites, but also Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Norwegians, the Chinese and the Welsh. To give an example of his arguments, let’s look at the last group, the Welsh. Priest raises the Welsh myth of Prince Madoc, who was said to have sailed to America in the 12th century, and he shares certain claims about Native American tribes that some believed, without convincing evidence, could be of Welsh extraction. This legend had formerly been used by Queen Elizabeth to assert a claim over the new world, but the legend itself only appeared after Columbus’s voyage, in poetry, seemingly adapted from medieval tales such as the legendary voyage of the Celt, Brendan the Navigator. This is a good example of the unreliability of the claims of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact that were folded into the myth of a lost Mound Builder race, which Josiah Priest gathered and attempted to stitch together in his work, whose subtitle describes well the claims of this myth generally: “Being an Exhibition of the Evidence that an Ancient Population of Partially Civilized Nations, Differing Entirely from Those of the Present Indians, Peopled America Many Centuries before Its Discovery By Columbus, and Inquiries into Their Origin, with a Copious Description of Many of Their Stupendous Works Now in Ruins, with Conjectures Concerning What May Have Become of Them.” By this time, theories about Mound Builders had moved from a highly debated topic among an intellectual elite to a fashionable issue for discussion among less educated folk, who were Josiah Priest’s readership, and the notion of a lost Mound Builder race, whatever their origin, had proven entirely more popular.

That wasn’t always the case. In fact, prior to the Revolution, it was common for those who took an interest in mounds to logically assume they were the work of the only known residents of North America. In fact, as detailed in one of my principal sources, the exhaustively researched The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a “Lost White Race” by Jason Colavito, a founding father and one of probably the earliest scientific investigators of mounds, Thomas Jefferson, strongly believed that Native Americans had built these tumuli. He had good reason to believe it, since he had several times seen local Native Americans make pilgrimages to a mound on his property known as Indian Grave. Later in life, he made a study of the country’s tumuli, noting the difference between temple platform mounds that had been observed by the Spanish and burial mounds like the one on his property, and in order to answer questions of whether these were cemeteries used over generations or mass graves used in the aftermath of battle, he undertook a cautious and systematic excavation of Indian Grave. In doing so, as Colavito notes, he essentially invented the practices of modern archaeology, in stark contrast to the haphazard and destructive excavations of antiquaries of the day. Jefferson’s study, which presumed as an undisputable given that all such mounds were the work of “Aboriginal Indians,” would be spread far and wide, and in fact would end up reproduced in the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1797 to 1823. However, the encyclopedia placed Jefferson’s description in its section on barrows, tacitly comparing this practice with Old World funerary customs and thereby contributing to the growth of the myth that they had been constructed by some culture other than that of Native Americans.

Depiction of a cross-sectional mound excavation like that which Thomas Jefferson pioneered.

This implicit suggestion in the Encyclopedia Britannica was still something of an outlier view in the 1780s, but it came to be the view of Daniel Webster, of Webster’s Dictionary fame, who accepted Jefferson’s conclusions about Native Americans being responsible for smaller burial mounds but insisted that larger mounds and temple platforms must have been the work of Spaniards, a common enough claim at the time, or of ancient Celtic immigrants, given their similarity to European barrows. But such a view was certainly not commonly accepted yet and was even controversial. One who took exception to Webster’s claims was Brigadier General George Rogers Clark, a great American patriot called “Conqueror of the Old Northwest” for his role in winning the Northwest Territory from the British in the Revolutionary War. Clark had seen many a mound in that region and scoffed at the idea that De Soto’s expeditionary forces could possibly have constructed them during the few years of their inland exploration. Moreover, in contradiction to a central tenet of the Mound Builder Myth, that extant Native Americans had no knowledge of who had built the mounds, Clark informed Webster that, in his communications with leaders of the Kaskaskia and Cahokia tribes, they explicitly told him that the mounds had been built by their ancestors, in a time when they had been far more populous and gathered in “large towns,” specifically indicating that mounds were not only burial grounds and temple platforms, but also served as the location of the “palace” of a tribe’s leader, which supports our modern understanding of the uses of some mounds. Again, in 1803, the Reverend Dr. James Madison of the American Philosophical Society argued that the mounds were the work of Native Americans, but he was countered a couple years afterward by Unitarian minister and Harvard librarian Thaddeus Harris, who argued that Native Americans simply were not ingenious enough to accomplish such works, taking instead the view, which would become so popular, that they were the work of a Mexican native culture. So we see at the turn of the 19th century the myth in its infancy, still resisted by the rational and scientific-minded, but it was not long before it exploded, making this fiction into consensus reality. 

The growth of the myth was helped early on by the claim that another Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, took a view opposite that of Thomas Jefferson. According to Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, a French consul who claimed to have travelled in America with him, Ben Franklin scoffed at the notion of an Asiatic origin of Native Americans, preferring the notion that Inuit peoples had immigrated to the continent from Scandinavia and the tribes of the American South from Mexico. Writing in 1801, Crèvecoeur says Franklin likened burial mounds to European barrows and insisted, like others, that Native Americans had no knowledge of their construction, which of course was blatantly false, as Clark had already shown and as other evidence which I will later review further shows. Crèvecoeur writes that Franklin believed the Mound Builder “much further advanced in civilization than our Indians,” and looked forward to a time “[w]hen the population of the United States shall have spread over every part of that vast and beautiful region,” believing that “posterity, aided by new discoveries, may then perhaps form more satisfactory conjectures.” As Jason Colavito astutely discerns, this grasping after some grand lost history does indeed seem to represent a desire for the creation of a history for America that could rival the storied pasts of European nations, but more than that, these words about spreading across the continent reflect the growing desire for westward expansion, a tendency that would find its apotheosis, later that century, in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. In reality, Crèvecoeur had entirely fabricated the remarks of Benjamin Franklin, plagiarizing and adapting the words of others and placing them into the Founding Father’s mouth. Franklin actually believed the unsupportable argument that Spaniards had built the mounds of North America. We know this to be false, since the chronicles of Spanish explorers actually record their expeditions’ encounters with native cities and make specific mention of mounds.  Nevertheless, the remarks Crèvecoeur falsely attributed to Franklin would later be reprinted, devoid of context, in an encyclopedia and would be read and believed by many.

Portrait of Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, literary hoaxer and plagiarist.

While Franklin’s sentiments on this topic may have been falsified, other prominent politicians of the day evinced genuine belief in the Mound Builder myth. In 1811, DeWitt Clinton, Mayor of New York City, Lieutenant Governor of the state and soon-to-be presidential candidate, gave a speech to the New-York Historical Society in which he stated that the mounds were not temple platforms or burial places but military fortifications built by a lost race that had been destroyed in a race war by extant Native Americans, and he suggested that any native peoples who claimed they were the work of their ancestors were simply trying to take credit for feats their people did not actually accomplish. Years later, after acceding to the governorship, Clinton refined his claims to argue that this lost Mound Builder race was in fact the Scythians, which, as you may recall from my episode about the Tartaria delusion, was a vague racial designation applied to all peoples residing north of the Black Sea and east of Europe. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson devoted much of his State of the Union report to promoting the myth of a lost Mound Builder race, stating, “In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the west, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for the existing savage tribes.” And in 1837, future president William Henry Harrison addressed the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, stating that an ancient people, ancestors of the Aztecs of Mexico, had originated within the boundaries of the U.S. and built the “stupendous” earthen mounds here before fleeing “from the face of a tyrant, and the oppressions of unfeeling taskmasters,” suggesting the Mound Builders “had been made to yield to a more numerous…people…. Forced to fly before a new swarm from some northern or southern hive.” Jackson was a Democrat, and Harrison a Whig, but in this point there was broad bipartisan agreement. Indeed, both men had distinguished themselves in the American Indian Wars, which still raged and would continue to the end of the century. And here we approach the real heart of darkness within the Mound Builder myth: that it was a tool of propaganda used to justify their subjugation of Native American tribes.
In case you weren’t paying attention in your high school history class or your Survey of American history course in college, or in the likely event that your curriculum gave this aspect of American history short shrift, allow me to highlight it here. From the colonial period, through the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, The Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War, the United States was in a sporadic but near constant state of war with Native American tribes. These are typically better known by the names of individual conflicts with specific tribes or regions, such as the Cherokee-American Wars or Chickamauga Wars, the Northwest Indian War, Tecumseh’s War, in which William Henry Harrison was intimately involved, and the Creek and Seminole Wars, fought ruthlessly by General Andrew Jackson. Then, during his Presidency, with the passage of the Indian Removal Act, Jackson, with Congress’s approval, used the full power of the U.S. government to forcibly relocate Native American tribes to land promised them beyond the Mississippi, an unfathomably destructive displacement involving concentration camps and death marches and precipitating further conflicts, such as the Second Seminole War. Among the numerous tribes forced to take the “Trail of Tears,” the Choctaw, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, and the Seminole, historians estimate as many as 15,000 perished from diseases like cholera and dysentery. Those who survived would see their treaties broken once again as white settlers continued to press westward and settle the frontier lands that had been promised to them, triggering battles like Little Bighorn, and massacres like Wounded Knee. Surviving tribes would find themselves hemmed into reservations, and see their children taken and indoctrinated in draconic reeducation camps they called schools. The terrible irony is that Native American peoples had built impressive and populous cities and had established healthy trade relations across a vast and prosperous culture that was laid low by European disease and massacre, reducing their cities to abandoned mounds and their peoples to nomadic warrior tribes. Yet the pale-faced interloper had the audacity to tell them that those cities hadn’t been built by such as they, that some superior race had constructed those cities, and that they deserved to be driven from their lands and hunted to extinction because they had done the same to the builders of those cities—their cities! It is difficult to find a more appropriate word for our treatment of Native American peoples than “genocide.” Indeed, our push westward for more land to settle and our concomitant annihilation of the Native Americans that stood in our way would eventually inspire Hitler and the Nazis in their push for lebensraum, and the race myths they used to justify genocide were not unlike our own.

As belief in the myth of a lost Mound Builder race became the political dogma of the U.S. government during Indian Removal and thus became common among the public, it gradually came to be considered empirical truth even by the scientific community, thus entering textbooks and furthering its propagation. During the 1840s, the most ambitious survey of these earthworks, excavating some 200 mounds, was undertaken between 1845 and 1847 by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, and their report, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, ended up being the first publication of the Smithsonian Institution. In it, they draw the conclusion that, since the earthworks themselves and some artwork found within was supposedly “immeasurably beyond anything which the North American Indians are known to produce, even to this day,” the mounds must have been the work of some superior race, likely related to Central or South American civilizations. With this work’s flawed conjecture, the myth was for several decades enshrined as unassailable science, and in 1847, we see the first example of a textbook, History of the United States of America, Designed for Schools, promulgating the falsehood. A quarter century later, the myth was still going strong in history primers like that written by George Quackenbos, and even in grammar texts, like that of John Jacob Anderson. One of the most ambitious history publications of the 1870s, the mostly cribbed and ghost written 39-volume history of eastern North America by Hubert Howe Bancroft, further disseminated the myth. Among the evidence leveraged by many of these scientists, historians, and textbook compilers were a variety of hoaxes that had been perpetrated with the express purpose of providing evidence for the lost race hypothesis. One was The Traditions of De-Coo-Dah, a book written by antiquarian and Mound Builder myth believer William Pidgeon, published in 1852, in which he dubiously claimed that a mysterious old Native American man had entrusted him with the secret truth about the Scandinavian origin of the ancient Mound Builders. Likewise, in 1859, one Nelson Lee falsely claimed to have been a captive of the Comanche and to have been told by a Chief Rolling Thunder about a race of ten-foot white men who had built the ancient earthworks. Most of the fraudulent evidence for the myth came in the form of inscribed stone hoaxes, though, most of which I previously discussed in my episode “Written in Stone: The Archaeological Frauds of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories” and some of which I dramatized in fiction that I released in patron exclusive audio productions. These include Dighton Rock, the Grave Creek Stone, The Newark Holy Stones, the Bat Creek inscription, and the Michigan Relics. There was one such inscribed stone fraud which I mentioned only in passing at the time, though, which I think illustrates well the false evidence leveraged by writers promoting the myth of a lost Mound Builder race during these years, and I will tell its story here, intertwined as it is with the final scientific repudiation of the myth.

Illustration of the fictional De-Coo-Dah

In 1877, a Lutheran minister named Jacob Gass who spoke only German fluently and thus preached principally to German immigrants, made a seemingly astounding discovery during some of the mound explorations on a farm near Davenport, Iowa, that he had undertaken out of a great interest in antiquities.  At the time, the most pressing questions, the resolution of which would make any local scientific academy world famous, were, of course, the identity of the mysterious Mound Building race, and also whether man existed contemporaneously with the mastodon. Astonishingly, Gass pulled inscribed tablets out of the mound that seemed to conveniently resolve both of these mysteries. First, they appeared to bear written language, alphabetic signs that thus proved the ancient existence of a culture separate from that of known Native Americans, who never developed a syllabary until the Cherokee created a writing system in 1821. The presence of writing was common among inscribed stone frauds, of course, but the Davenport Tablets went further. With illustrations, it depicted the earthworks of the Mound Builders being used as altars for human sacrifice. Another illustration depicts a mastodon or elephant, handily answering the question of whether that animal lived simultaneously with the Mound Builders. The plate was further found with some pipes carved into the same elephantine shape. And lastly, a separate tablet appeared to depict astrological symbols and the makings of a calendar, firing further speculation about the Old World origins of these mound-building people. The Davenport Tablets made Gass and the Davenport Academy fantastically famous, and numerous scholars supported their authenticity, citing these artifacts and their questionable translations of the characters inscribed thereon as proof that the Mound Builders were descended from Noah after the Flood, or that they were Hittites, or whatever pet theory they wanted to spread. Eventually, though, some scholars expressed doubt, most notably Cyrus Thomas, the new head of archaeology for the Smithsonian Institution who would go on to finally destroy the Mound Builder myth in academia. He pointed out the ludicrous coincidence of these items conveniently answering all the most popular questions of the day, all being found by the same man. He pointed out that Gass’s own descriptions of the find indicated that the burial place where he found the items appeared disturbed, with bones scattered, unlike the orderly burials with complete skeletons observed elsewhere at the same site, suggesting some intrusive and more recent burial during which the tablets may have been planted. And finally, he cited rumors that Gass had been involved in the discovery of several fraudulent artifacts before. The controversy did not die easily, but almost a hundred years later, in 1970, University of Iowa professor Marshall McKusick appears to have solved the mystery, demonstrating that a conspiracy of men had planted the artifacts, which they had carved from slate roof shingles stolen from a local brothel, and planted them as a prank on Reverend Gass, whom they called a “windjammer and a liar.” When the sham items suddenly became valuable because scientific academies wanted to buy them, though, they ended up covering up their fraud, in many cases with the assistance of the academics who so yearned for the artifacts to be genuine!

The Davenport Tablets.

This demonstrates how thoroughly the myth of a lost Mound Builder race had taken hold of not just the public but scholars as well by the 1880s, when, as it happened, the Smithsonian and its Bureau of Ethnology had come under the leadership of John Wesley Powell, who strongly, and correctly, doubted the myth. Such was the pressure from the government that the Bureau served that Powell at first had to appoint a believer in the Mound Builder myth to head up their investigation of earthworks, but thankfully, Powell found reason to fire him and hire Cyrus Thomas instead, knowing full well that Thomas would not shy from refuting the myth. After nearly a decade of systematic research as the principal archaeologist in the Bureau’s Mound Exploration Division, Cyrus Thomas published his 700-page Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, in which he methodically disproved the myth of a lost Mound Builder race and demonstrated that they were, indeed, the work of the ancestors of known Native American peoples. He unceremoniously demolished the supposed evidence of inscribed stones, showing them to be frauds, and he denied the claims that Native American culture was too undeveloped to have organized such civilizations. Evidence provided by De Soto’s chronicler reveals, after all, that at the time of first European contact, many Native Americans lived in populous walled cities that demonstrated large-scale agricultural cultivation. Thomas further refuted the claim that Native Americans had no knowledge of who had constructed the earthworks and had never been seen to build such mounds themselves, citing specific historical accounts of both. He further disproved the claim that metal artifacts discovered in mounds revealed metallurgical skills that Native Americans had never been seen to possess, revealing that these objects had been made from copper native to Michigan, requiring no metallurgy, and since such copper artifacts were discovered even at a great distance from Michigan, it just served as further evidence of the sophistication of Native American civilization prior to European contact, as they must have had established trade networks from Michigan all the way down to Florida. Cyrus Thomas’s final conclusion that “the theory which attributes these works to the Indians [was] the correct one” reverberated through the scientific community. No scholars worth their salt would ever again make such fools of themselves as to resurrect the myth of the Mound Builders.

Cyrus Thomas, the man who disproved the myth of a lost race of Mound Builders.

Unfortunately, such a sea change in academic thought does not always filter down to public opinion, and as Jason Colavito shows in his thorough work, the popular press continued publishing books that promoted the myth long after Cyrus Thomas had decimated it in his report, just as newspapers continued to publish giant hoaxes that fed into it. The myth seemed to disappear during the middle of the 20th century, but in the late 1960s, the myth was folded into the growing UFO myth when Erich von Däniken published his book positing the visitation of ancient astronauts. Suddenly the American earthworks were not just the work of a lost white race, or of giants, but of aliens. Anybody, it seems, but Native Americans. Other fringe pseudohistorians, Most notably Graham Hancock, have since taken up Däniken’s torch, and broadcast and cable television have been some of the worst purveyors of this nonsense, producing slick and sensationalist specials on the topic. The History Channel is perhaps the party guiltiest of propping up this long-disproven racist myth in series like Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed. Meanwhile, on the Internet, promoted by mystic wackos and conspiracy theorists who believe the Smithsonian is involved in covering up the truth, the Mound Builder myth thrives, co-opted and supported, unsurprisingly, by White Nationalists who appreciate its claims of superior white antecedents. Even as recently as 2019, Graham Hancock published a bestselling volume titled America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization, in which he perpetuates a mythical connection between Native American earthworks and the lost continent of Atlantis. So as we have seen with countless topics, even if an idea has long been debunked, it seems there will always be a market for frauds, hoaxes, and myths, even when, at their dark heart, they represent an evil and destructive ideology.

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a “Lost While Race.” University of Oklahoma Press, 2020.

Feder, Kenneth L. Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. 10th ed., Oxford University Press, 2020.

McKusick, Marshall. The Davenport Conspiracy. The Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa, 1970.

Silverberg, Robert. Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth. New York Graphic Society, 1968.

No Bones About It! Part Two: GIANTS in the "New World"

During the era of European exploration and colonization, as the Columbian Exchange created a flow of crops, diseases, and beliefs between continents, new legends of giants came back from overseas. Early European settlers came to believe that some native inhabitants of the “New World,” that seemingly mythic and alien land across the globe, were themselves giants. But were these merely the exaggerations of explorers seeing for the first time a new people that impressed them, just as in biblical times the Israelites saw the robust inhabitants of Canaan and feared them as giants, as I discussed in part one of this series? For example, it is said that Tuscaloosa, the chieftain of Mississipian tribes in the modern day state of Alabama was a great giant whose stature impressed conquistador Hernán De Soto. But how tall was he really? Apparently he towered at about a foot and a half over all of De Soto’s Spaniards, but this is no precise measurement, and it is a well-known fact that the average height of European colonizers was relatively low, at about five and a half feet, give or take some inches. So it sounds more like Tuscaloosa was just a tall man well over six feet, and given that he was said to be the most impressive of his chiefdom—unsurprising, since an imposing physical presence has helped many a man in many a culture rise to power—we can otherwise infer that the rest of his subjects were of rather more average height. Similarly, when John Smith explored and mapped the Chesapeake region in 1608, he reported a “giant-like people” inhabiting the Susquehanna River’s mouth. Specifically, he described “the greatest of them…The calfe of whose leg was three quarters of a yard about, and all the rest of his limbs so answerable to that proportion.” Now, this description seems rather more focused on the brawn of the tribe he ended up calling the Susquehannocks, with mention of their height curiously absent. And again, like the Israelite spies in Canaan saying, “Hey, we  may not want to mess with them, they’re giants,” John Smith gives this description on his maps as a warning to colonists, and we have no way of knowing how exaggerated it may be. We do know that over the next hundred years or so, these Susquehannocks had further contact with European settlers in Maryland and with the French during the Beaver Wars, and there is little further mention of them being giants. So was it hyperbole, or had Smith just seen one really big guy, but not preternaturally large? Even among Native Americans themselves, there are legends of giants, and we see them engaging in the same kind of exaggeration of the other as being gigantic. Among the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, there was legend that the Erie tribe were a bunch of giant cannibals, but again, European contact with the Erie does not bear out such claims. It seems, rather, that the Iroquois Confederacy were just slandering their enemies, whom they would eventually destroy, along with all their allies. As we saw in part one, ancient folklore and poetry cannot be treated as credible evidence, and now we may categorize the reports of explorers in the same realm, as unreliable oral traditions. What is needed, as I stated previously, is an osteological record, one single preternaturally lengthy human femur, to prove the existence of giants in the past.

In 19th century America, the claims of giant bones became part and parcel with baseless claims about the ancient builders of the impressive tumuli, or earthen mounds, that are found across the U.S., throughout the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi River Valley. These burial places fired the imaginations of white farmers and antiquarians alike, who propagated the racist myth that the builders of these mighty structures could not have been related to the Native American peoples they knew, so there must have been some lost race that had inhabited the New World before European settlement. This lost race of mound-builders, unsurprisingly, was said by many to be a lost white race, and in the 1800s to be a lost white race of giants, whose enormous bones were said to be found within these mounds by many a farmer and antiquarian turned grave despoiler. So what of these giant bones? Where are these bones, that we may measure them and determine whether they may indeed belong to mastodon rather than man? Funny story. These bones were often said, rather conveniently, to have self-destructed shortly after discovery. One Harvey Nettleton, writing on the history of Conneaut Township in northwestern Ohio, claimed in 1841 that around 1800 a man named Aaron Wright had been digging up graves in the area, and the bones he discovered not only were gigantic but also “on exposure to the air soon crumbled to dust.” In fact, 20 years prior to Nettleton’s account of Wright’s discovery, an antiquarian named Caleb Atwater, a major proponent of that lost Mound Builder race myth, had actually published a report of his findings in burial mounds near Conneaut, which specifically stated that he had “found skeletons of people of small stature,” but despite that, Nettleton’s larger than life account proved more popular and long-lived. Specifically one image seems to have struck a chord, that a skull Wright had discovered was so large he had been able to place it over his own head like a helmet. Nettleton’s story about Wright was widely reprinted, and reproduced and summarized by various historians, until elements of it became a kind of meme. We see in further stories produced by other antiquarians and recorded by different historians the same claims about massive skulls fitting over the heads of those who find them, and of other giant bones that are witnessed upon excavation but, alas, cannot be examined by experts because they had disintegrated as soon as they had entered local folklore. It may be impossible to tell if elements of this tale were invented out of whole cloth by Harvey Nettleton forty years after the fact, just to spice up his sketch, or if they were told by Aaron Wright and passed into legend and local oral tradition. A simple genealogical search turns up a real Aaron Wright born in 1775 who lived in Ashtabula County, Ohio, and was buried at Conneaut Township. This was likely the same Aaron Wright who gave evidence against the authenticity of Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon in an affidavit collected by Dr. Philastus Hurlbut around 1833. It may be that this little-known individual, who contributed somewhat to the skeptical view of early Mormon claims, also made a hoax claim that has long outlived him and added greatly to the legacy of this false notion.

Diagram of mound excavations at Conneaut.

The same holds true for other supposedly large bones said to have been recovered from burial mounds throughout the 19th-century. It proves difficult to ascertain whether they were hoaxes or mistaken identifications of mastodon bones or perhaps a combination of the two. One antiquarian, T. Apoleon Cheney, who was known as Doc even though he had not earned the honorific through formal education, claimed to have discovered more than one giant skeleton in a Western New York mound that he excavated with a partner, a bona fide medical doctor, Frederick Larkin. As one of my principal sources, Brad Lockwood’s On Giants, clarifies, Cheney’s most widely cited work, Illustrations of the Ancient Monuments in Western New York, 1859, is actually widely misquoted, since this work really only contains illustrations and no text. However, it is clear, from later editions of his work and from the passages in other works that summarize his supposed findings, that Cheney did indeed claim he had found giant skeletons in a mound, that in fact he staked his reputation and founded a career on the claim. At a mound on Cassadaga Creek, near the town of Conewango, he claims that he “discovered nine human skeletons, which had been buried in a sitting posture…The skeletons were so far decayed as to crumble upon exposure to the atmosphere, but were all of very large size.” Here again, the meme of the self-destructing evidence is reproduced, but Cheney claims that one femur remained, whose measurement of 28 inches proved the stature of the man to whom it belonged. That’s about ten inches longer than the average adult male’s femur, and if such a bone were genuine, and determined by a paleontologist to belong to a human being, it would indeed constitute evidence that it was the remains of a tall person. You’ll find some online claiming that a femur is about a quarter of one’s height, so a 28-inch femur would make for a height of over nine feet. However, from what I have been able to determine, forensic anthropology tells us such a calculation is too simple, and to calculate the likely height of a male by the length of a femur, converted to centimeters, one must instead multiply by 2.32 and then add 65.53, which in the case of the 28-inch femur gives us a likely height of seven and a half feet. Unusually tall indeed, but no monster. The further problem, though, is that this 28-inch femur was never preserved for analysis, and more than that, after Doc Cheney’s death, his excavating partner, Frederick Larkin, the only medical professional on the scene to examine these supposedly gigantic skeletons, ended up writing his own book, Ancient Man in America, in which he revealed Doc Cheney’s claims to have been exaggerated. As Brad Lockwood reveals, having tracked down a copy of this rare text, Larkin writes, referring to Cheney’s claims about the giant skeletons at Cassadaga, “That the Mound-Builders were a trifle larger than the present type, is very probable; but that they were giants eight and ten feet is all fabulous. I have seen many skeletons from mounds in different states, but have seen none that will much exceed the present people now living. … The subject under consideration has enough of the marvelous about it to gratify almost any imagination without resorting to giants.”

As we have discussed more than once, in the 19th century, newspapers regularly ran stories of dubious origins that made improbable claims, hoping that sensational content would increase their circulation. For more on this, see my episode on the prolific newspaper hoaxer, Joseph Mulhatton, or my episode Unfit to Print: A History of Bad News. Anyone today who points to 19th-century newspaper reports about the discovery of giants as ironclad evidence of its truth should rightly be laughed at and mocked until they delete their accounts. Only rarely in the 19th-century might a newspaper follow up on such a report. For example, in 1883, after printing a report about the discovery of a nine foot skeleton in a gravel pit, the Indianapolis Journal afterward published the report of a local physician who investigated and refuted the claim, saying they were more like the remains of a five foot eight inch man, calling the incident “a giant fraud and an imposition on the credulity of the people.” The problem is, such follow-up reports were rare. 19th century newspapers in many states published story upon story of giant skeletons without ever bothering to follow them up with the reports of experts who had determined them to be frauds. It became so common that Mark Twain actually decided to pen his own hoax, getting a spurious tale of a petrified giant published in a Virginia City, Nevada, newspaper, with the telltale detail that the mummified giant had his thumb pressed to the side of his nose and his fingers spread, a well-known gesture showing contempt or derision, as if the giant were taunting the reader, saying “Na-na, na-na, boo-boo. Stick your head in doo-doo.” In this atmosphere of rampant giant hoaxes, it is no surprise that the greatest of them all, the Cardiff Giant hoax, about which I spoke in detail and which I dramatized in fiction in my recent patron exclusive episode, was so credulously received by the public. Mark Twain found this hoax, and especially the fact that P.T. Barnum created a fraudulent version of this fraud, quite hilarious, inspiring him to write a short story about the Cardiff giant’s ghost haunting the wrong remains. The fact that these widespread hoaxes about giant skeletons were publicized so avidly by newspapers but their debunking was not, and the fact that Doc Cheney’s claims about giant bones in burial mounds became so widely read while his more educated partner’s denial of those claims was mostly lost to history, is just clear evidence of the old saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots.” Ironically, that quotation is typically misattributed to Mark Twain, when really it is a common corruption of an older quote by Jonathan Swift.

Illustration of the Petrified Man from 1882 edition of Twain's Sketches, New and Old, depicting position of the supposed giant's hands.

So it seems fake news in newspapers then begets fake news on the Internet today. These tall tales about giants having been discovered in burial mounds in America may have taken a hiatus of several decades, but with the advent of the Internet, they have seen a resurgence. If you spend much time searching for giants online, you’ll find a bevy of paranormal and conspiracy blogs claiming that a race of red-haired, cannibalistic giants was spoken about in the lore of various Native American tribes. One story has it that the Paiutes trapped this race of red-haired giants in a cave, where they suffocated them with smoke. The evidence is the fact that a cave was discovered by guano miners in western Nevada, and there were indeed many artifacts and remains of the native tribe that had lived within, and the hair of some, having been preserved, looked reddish. The problem is, as Brian Dunning has pointed out in an episode of Skeptoid on the topic, none of the remains recovered were actually of an unusual size, nor did the artifacts appear made for the use of larger people, and the redness of their hair was just the loss of pigmentation in hair that was formerlydark. Moreover, the actual Paiute legends do not appear to include red hair or gigantism. As usual, though a genuine archaeological find is cited, the find did not actually support the claims made online. And other stories don’t even rely on real finds. For example, Steve Quayle, a self-proclaimed giantologist, promoted to his website’s readers a claim made on a random blog, perhaps as satire, that mummified giants had been discovered in Iowa by a farmer named Marvin Rainwater on his land near Kossuth Center. According to the story, Rainwater happened upon a stone tomb while digging, and inside he discovered the mummified remains of seven figures, each ten feet tall and with long red hair. The find was apparently even verified by archaeologists from Georg von Podebrad College in the nearby town of Zoar. What is even wilder is that this report was supposed to have been made recently, as it spoke about materials being held at the State Historical Society awaiting DNA testing. However, when someone actually contacted the Historical Society, they discovered not only that such a find had never been reported, but also that, Kossuth Center and Zoar are both ghost towns, and no college named after the 15th-centuiry Bohemian king Georg von Podebrad has ever existed. Moreover, the farmer that the story says discovered the tomb, Marvin Rainwater, appears to have been named after a country-western singer from the 1950s. The Internet abounds with blog posts that to this day repeat this story. If you’re lucky they may include a disclaimer that it may be a false story, urging readers to “please research it out and judge for yourself.”

Another strange fake news story regarding giants appeared in 2016. This one connects to the biblical story of a giant with extra toes and fingers from Gath, Goliath’s stomping ground, which I spoke about in Part One, and it also incorporated the popular red hair trope of these recent giant hoaxes. The story, which originated from a dubious interview with a supposed military contractor on the YouTube channel of a fringe conspiracist who produces a lot of content on the topic of giants. Already it doesn’t have a lot of credibility. The interview subject, called only Mr. K, described an encounter between an American Special Forces unit and a 13-foot-tall giant wielding a sword. The giant was described as having red hair, of course, and extra toes, a bonus, and also more than one set of teeth—a common detail from old 19th century giant skull discovery stories, which archaeologist Andy White has proven was actually just a common 19th century phrasing used to describe nice teeth, meaning a skull have two intact rows of teeth, top and bottom. Essentially, this hoax purposely incorporated elements from other hoaxes and from old fake news reports and from the bible in order to bolster its claims. Snopes reported a denial of the incident from the Department of Defense, but that isn’t going to do much to convince conspiracy nuts. Hoaxes like these are designed to be nearly impossible to disprove, since any denials are simply proof of the cover-up. Typically, fake giant news on the internet arrives in the form of an image of uncertain origin, shared and gone viral online, purporting to show a person crouched over some ridiculously massive skeleton or skull, with no actual information to fact-check and just the simple claim that the discovery of giants has been covered up. Snopes and National Geographic have debunked such images as manipulated photos and even tracked down the origin to a photoshop contest called “Archaeological Anomalies,” which challenged participants to fake strange pseudo-archaeological discoveries. Yet despite being revealed as fraudulent images, they continue to be spread along with the claim that the scientific community is hiding the discovery of these giants.

This is one manipulated image from the photoshop contest that has been passed off as real in conspiracist memes.

One extremely popular story is of gigantic skeletons with horns having been discovered in Sayre, Pennsylvania, and this one too is typically accompanied by a dubious image of a horned human skull. Even as recently as March this year, fake news memes circulated Facebook about this archaeological discovery in the 1880s, stating that besides the bony projections above the eyebrows of skulls recovered at the site, the skeletons themselves were of an unusual height, averaging 7 feet. The image concludes with the claim that “The bones were sent to the American Investigation Museum in Philadelphia, where they were stolen—never to be seen again.” In fact, there was no such institution as the American Investigating Museum, but there was indeed an excavation in Sayre, which took place in 1916 rather than the 1880s as the Facebook posts claim. Conducted by the so-called “Dean of American Archaeology,” Warren King Moorhead, as well as Pennsylvania historian George Donehoo and Alanson Skinner, archaeologist, ethnographer and curator of the Museum of the American Indian, or the American Indian Museum, which may be the origin of the false American Investigating Museum. This excavation was the culmination of an expedition to find the relics and remains of the Susquehannock tribe that Captain John Smith had long ago suggested were giants, so there may have already been some expectation that the remains uncovered might be those of giants. The New York Times and a variety of other newspapers reported on the find, specifically claiming that the remains of 68 men were found, averaging seven feet, “while many were much taller,” and with them were buried artifacts of unusual size to match their stature. The column further describes their notorious “protuberances of bone.” On first blush this would appear well-documented, but we have seen that we should not trust old newspaper articles and must look further for subsequent corrections. Indeed, only 2 weeks after the first news reports about gigantic, horned skeletons spread far and wide, the archaeologists themselves set the record straight in a lengthier feature article in the Times. In it, they make no mention of horned skulls, and state more specifically that they estimated the height of the skeletons at about six feet six inches, certainly tall enough to appear imposing to a European of average height making first contact with the tribe. In another newspaper column that has been uncovered, Alanson Skinner is quoted as setting the record straight on July 14th, 1916. He states that they had excavated 57 skeletons rather than 68, and that they appeared to be “perfectly normal individuals with the usual relics.” He further explains the origins of the horned skull as the result of a reporter misunderstanding or being misled about, or perhaps purposely misrepresenting, what was actually found: “a deposit of dear antlers,” laid over the bones, “hence, I suppose, the skull with horns on it!” In the Times feature article, they further describe other artifacts placed atop the bones: “Over the head of one of the skeletons was a bear’s jaw, indicating the bearskin headdress,” which the man had presumably worn in life. One wonders that this did not start a further rumor that this had been a fearsome race of men with two sets of jaws!

Beyond the claim about horns, which is rather unique among such stories, the claims of gigantism among the skeletons excavated at Sayre are pretty tame. A height of seven feet is not unheard of, though it may have been unusual for that to be the average among more than fifty people in a group. However, the archaeologists themselves corrected that to more like six and a half feet, which of course is even less difficult to believe. But it must be pointed out that determining the actual height of any of these persons in life would have been exceedingly difficult. As mentioned previously, modern forensic anthropologists have gotten it down to a science, able to determine the likely height of a man or woman based entirely on the length of a femur, but in the infancy of the science, skeletons were often measured as they lay, or if found in a sitting or curled position, manually laid out to be measured, a process that would not yield an accurate result. The reason for this is that once the flesh and cartilage of vertebrate remains have decomposed entirely, skeletons become more spread out and scattered than they would be when the bones are tightly attached with tendon and ligament and encased within the body’s musculature. This process is called disarticulation, and the effects of bone dispersion during disarticulation was not the subject of much scientific study until the 1970s. Indeed, the fact that skeletons dug out of burial mounds in the Americas were often reported to be unusually tall could be entirely explained by the fact that the farmers and antiquarians measuring them did not adequately understand the spreading of disarticulated bones. Even among the experts digging up the Susquehannock graves at Sayre, Pennsylvania, all were archaeologists and ethnographers, not anatomists or experts in fossilized remains, and therefore might not even be expected to know how best to measure the remains they disinterred. Moreover, their description of the graves they excavated seems to indicate that assembling a single skeleton would not have been a simple task. In the New York Times feature, they explain that “in some cases the bones had been buried long after death when the flesh had disappeared, and in these instances, the skull was usually deposited in the grave, and the long bones, fingers, and ribs heaped beside or over it. …in some of the graves a number of skeletons were found heaped together.” Just how they reassembled and measured remains deposited in such communal graves is a pressing question, as are the calculations they may have used if they reached their height estimations based on the measurements of long bones.

This image of the supposedly genuine horned skull that accompanies most online claims about giants skeletons in Sayre, Pennsylvania, can only be found online at Surnateum, the Museum of Supernatural History, which claims to have the object in its possession. It is easy to see here that it is NOT a giant skull.

So the horned giants of Sayre, Pennsylvania, appears to have been a fake news story from a bygone era recycled as a fake news Internet meme today that continues to convince Facebook aunties that preternatural skeletons have been discovered in Native American burial grounds. Further investigation into the image that always accompanies the post, of a seemingly human skull with horns and a kind of wreath around it, unsurprisingly reveals that it is not related to the Sayre, Pennsylvania, excavation at all. The paranormal podcast Astonishing Legends did some admirable investigation into this image in their series on giants, The Tall Ones, particularly in Part Two, and determined that the skull is supposedly held by an online Museum of Supernatural History called Surnateum, and they claim it is of normal human size but originated in France as a ceremonial object for cult worship of the Horned God of Wiccan belief. The fact that this website has more than one photo of the skull, the image typically spread with the Sayre excavation story and another with the skull sitting atop a basket—an image that I have been unable to find on any other website using reverse image searches—tends to support their claim that it is in their possession. However, as Astonishing Legends rightly pointed out, Surnateum appears to just be a website, with no physical location to visit and view exhibitions. Moreover, the Internet Archive shows their website has been active for about 10 years, since 2012, and searches of Google Books and the Ngram viewer turn up no publications mentioning the museum, which tends to cast doubt on their claim of having acquired the skull in 1952. However, using reverse image search and the Wayback Machine, I was able to track down the earliest surviving posting of this image, to an old StumbleUpon post in 2006 that mentions Surnateum and its claims that the skull came from France in the first half of the 20th century. However, on this post, which appears to be one of the first times the image was shared on the Internet as far as I can determine—the poster links to a mysticism messaging board page at Thothweb.com that is no longer working and is not archived in the Wayback Machine—the poster states that the skull’s whereabouts were at the time unknown, contradicting the museum’s current claim. All that remains would be for an expert in photo manipulation to examine the images for signs of falsification. But even without such analysis, I think it is fair to conclude that this artifact, if it even exists, is a fake. If the person or persons running Surnateum want the public to believe their claims that they possess this object, have examined it and have determined that “the horns are genuinely part of the skull,” they need to make the object available for scientific examination and public scrutiny. Regardless, even according to them, it is not the skull of a giant.

Believers in such giant hoaxes, though, fail to be convinced by the point that such bones do not appear to exist, for none are today exhibited publicly or have been surrendered for scientific examination. Instead of this logical evidence that such bones do not exist, conspiracists take it as evidence that the bones have been hidden away and covered up! We see some insinuation of this in the text on the viral horned skull image, and it was there all the way back in 2006 on the obscure StumpleUpon posting of the image I managed to find. The notion that the scientific community’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of giants was tantamount to a cover-up is not exactly new. Even during the Cardiff Giant hoax, critics of the statue passed off as a petrified giant were dismissed as obfuscators attempting to make the public doubt the truth of the Bible. But today, this conspiracy theory has gelled into a specific claim found on many websites and in numerous conspiracist books that the Smithsonian Institution is in particular responsible, taking giant bones and then purposely losing them so that they can never be examined again. These conspiracists even see NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, as part of the plot. This admirable law, passed in 1990, made it illegal to dig up burial mounds and required the return of items to culturally affiliated Native American tribes. Well-known scholar and skeptical writer Jason Colavito has written the most extensively on the absurdity of this claim and has even traced it to its recent origins. Having done the research, Colavito makes a strong case that no claims of a Smithsonian cover-up ever existed before fringe researcher David Childress began to make them in the 1990s. Childress is not much of a reliable researcher, as he is known for making a lot of baseless claims about lost civilizations, UFOs and sasquatch, many of which rely on conspiracy speculation. Childress seems to have started the idea of “Smithsoniangate” in 1993, in defense of his racist ideas about a lost white race of Mound Builders, and the entire idea, ludicrously, may have been inspired by the iconic scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, cited by Childress as an analogy, in which the crate containing the Ark of the Covenant is hidden away in a massive warehouse. As Colavito points out, though, it is strange to think that these conspiracists believe the Smithsonian is some monolithic organization that controls the entire narrative of physical anthropology in the world. Such a conspiracy would need to be global, including every museum and research university on the planet. We know that such a conspiracy just defies simple logic. Furthermore, he points out that NAGPRA is only enforced on Federal land, so any extant giant skeletons out there on private or state land would not be subject to this supposed cover-up, yet we still find no big bones to support these claims. Lastly, though since the 1860s the Smithsonian has been on board with the Cuvier explanation of massive bones as belonging to extinct megafauna, it has been pointed out that, in the late 19th century the Smithsonian was still known to publish the work of antiquarians and archaeologists who claimed to have measured skeletons between 7 and 8 feet uncovered in mound explorations. Though these heights are not superhuman, and could still be explained by the spreading of disarticulated bones improperly measured, the reports seem to prove beyond doubt that back when such claims were commonly made, the Smithsonian was just as likely to amplify them as to silence them.

To conclude this series, perhaps it is time to take a wider and simpler view of the phenomenon, taking into account some relevant findings of modern science. If the claims about giants were accurate, it would mean that mankind has greatly reduced in size over the millennia of our existence. This is the concept of the degeneracy of humanity that lies behind all these tall tales. But modern science tells us that we are not shrinking over time, but rather growing. The average height of Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries was in the mid-five-foot range, and today we creep closer to a six-foot average. There are many reasons for a growth or reduction in average height among populations, though, and it tends to be dependent upon local conditions, making any calculation of worldwide averages misleading. Think about the shorter Europeans arriving in America and encountering the taller Native Americans that they thought to be giants simply because the natives might have had a half a foot or a foot’s greater height. Scholars who study average height across the ages argue that the height we reach depends on health trends related to climate and the availability of food. Considering this, it may be no surprise that Europeans were of shorter stock than the Native Americans they encountered. Science tells us that childhood nutrition has a lot to do with eventual height. A welcoming climate and plenty of food signals to the hypothalamus that living conditions are optimal, and thus the body should grow as quickly as possible in order to develop sexually and procreate. This further explains why heights have continued to grow on average in modern times, as nutrition and medicine have improved. However, rather than a steady growth over time, studies show cycles of height fluctuation. In the Middle Ages, it appears mankind was taller, but then heights began to fall before rising again centuries later. Fossil records of archaic man and subspecies like Neanderthals tend to show that we started out shorter, around five foot, five foot two, not as towering monstrosities or as diminutive little gnomes. And all the data we’ve gathered shows that our fluctuations in height have remained within a certain range, between about 5 feet and six feet, where average height tends to plateau. Of course there are exceptions, outliers typically related to physical conditions like those I’ve already discussed, but all signs point to the existence of giants as nothing more than fantasies that have always loomed large in our collective imaginations.

*

Until next time, remember the words of not Mark Twain, but rather Jonathan Swift, who in full, wrote, “[a]s the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. “How David Childress Created the Myth of a Smithsonian Archaeological Conspiracy.” Jason Colavito, 31 Dec. 2013, www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/how-david-childress-created-the-myth-of-a-smithsonian-archaeological-conspiracy.

---. “Is the Smithsonian Conspiring to Suppress the Truth about Giants?” Jason Colavito, 28 July 2013, www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/is-the-smithsonian-conspiring-to-suppress-the-truth-about-giants.

Dunning, Brian. “The Red Haired Giants of Lovelock Cave.” Skeptoid, 26 Nov. 2013, skeptoid.com/episodes/4390.

Lockwood, Brad. On Giants: Mounds, Monsters, Myth & Man; or, why we want to be small. Dog Ear Works, 2011.

Hill, Andrew. “Disarticulation and Scattering of Mammal Skeletons.” Paleobiology, vol. 5, no. 3, 1979, pp. 261–74. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2400259.

Leutwyler, Kristin. “American Plains Indians Had Health and Height.” Scientific American, 30 May 2001, www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-plains-indians-h/.

“A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes.” Quote Investigator, 13 July 2014, quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/.

“Mummified Giants ‘Found’ in Kossuth County.” Iowa Historian: The Newsletter of the State Historical Society of Iowa, vol. 17, no. 2, Spring 2003, p. 4, www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/45917253/spring-2003-state-historical-society-of-iowa/5.

Palma, Bethania. “Did U.S. Special Forces Kill a Giant in Kandahar?” Snopes, 31 Aug. 2016, www.snopes.com/fact-check/u-s-special-forces-killed-a-giant-in-kandahar/.

“The Petrified Man.” The Museum of Hoaxes, hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_petrified_man.

White, Andy. “The Modern Mythology of Giants: ‘Double Rows of Teeth.’” Andy White Anthropology, 28 Nov. 2014, www.andywhiteanthropology.com/blog/the-modern-mythology-of-giants-double-rows-of-teeth.

“Why Are We Getting Taller as a Species?” Scientific American, 29 June 1998, www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-we-getting-taller/#.

No Bones About It! Part One: GIANTS in the "Old World"

In the wake of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, believers in the literal truth of scriptures struggled to reconcile the new scientific understanding of prehistory with the biblical story of two progenitors in paradise and a global flood wiping out all but a pair of specimens of each animal species. In the 1870s, one uneducated man named George Smith got a job at the British Museum mainly because he was always hanging around there and scrutinizing the shards of clay tablets they displayed from Mesopotamia. After studying the artifacts for a decade, he one day deciphered an account of a deluge destroying humanity, all except for one man and his family. Smith leapt out of his chair and tore articles of his clothing off in his excitement, for he believed, and would convince others to believe, that he had just discovered evidence confirming the truth of the biblical flood story. What he had actually discovered was the world’s oldest known poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and for the rest of his life he would track down further shards, completing the text. What we can determine from the fact that this poem contained a flood tale similar to that of Genesis, along with the fact that many other cultures have produced comparable legends, is a worthy topic, but not the one we investigate today. In seeking to hold up the translated Epic of Gilgamesh as a primary source document proving the truth of the Bible from a literalist view, George Smith also promoted another fantastical claim made in the scriptures, for the ancient poem he had discovered was about a giant who stood seventeen feet tall. Long had it been believed by biblical scholars that in ancient prehistory, there had been a race of giants who inhabited the Earth, or that humans used to be much larger but had been growing smaller and smaller through the millennia, a process they called the degeneracy of the human race. The Bible gives us stories of mighty giants, Og and Goliath, whom it traces to the races of giants, the Rephaim and the Anakim. But more than this, it tells us of the origin of giants in Genesis 6, when it reveals that bene elohim, or “sons of god,” believed to be angels, came to the daughters of men and had children with them. These children, identified by biblical scholars as the original giants, were called the Nephilim in the original text. So while some might believe that mankind was created as a race of giants and has grown gradually more diminutive, such as French savant Mathieu Henrion, who in The Degeneration of the Human Race calculated that Adam was 128 feet tall and Eve 118 feet tall, others see a race of giant springing from an unholy union between fallen angels and human women, a kind of hybrid species that must have been destroyed by the flood. But of course, a poem, like Gilgamesh, whose historical accuracy cannot be confirmed, can never serve as evidence of the existence of such giants, whether they be early humans or angelic hybrid beings. The only scientific evidence for their existence would be bones, an osteological record of their existence. Many are the reports and repeated claims that such bones did exist and were at one time seen and even displayed, recorded by such ancient chroniclers and natural philosophers as Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Flavius Josephus, Plutarch, Philostratus, and Augustine, but words are not bones and can prove nothing but that stories of giants have long existed. Early editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica reprinted a lecture delivered to the Academy of Science at Rouen in 1764 by one Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, a French science writer and surgeon, which lists dozens of enormous skeletons found throughout the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Therefore, to many in the 19th century, the Epic of Gilgamesh’s depiction of an enormous protagonist was not fantastical. In the science literature and in newspapers of the day, as well as in sermons shouted from the pulpit, they were told that the evidence of ancient giants was endless, that it had been definitively proven. So they believed, without ever having seen gigantic human bones for themselves. And why hadn’t they seen them? Because they were nowhere to be found. If there were so many reports of colossal skeletons proving the existence giants, where are they? As one of my favorite musical groups, They Might Be Giants, once sang, “They might be giants/ They might be fake/ They might by lies/ They might be big, big, fake, fake lies…”

As we undertake this massive study (sorry, I might be making a lot of giant puns), we must start with what seems to me the root of all giant mythology, the Nephilim of Genesis. For biblical literalists, everything comes back to proving this throwaway line accurate. As mentioned, the verse in question, Chapter 6 verse 4, seems to indicate that Nephilim were the product of a union between angels and human women, but that is not the only interpretation. The words bene elohim, translated as “sons of god” and interpreted to mean angels, have alternative interpretations. Second century rabbis held that this verse described nobility interbreeding with commoners, while Augustine, writing in the 5th century, argued that it referred to intermarriage between the godly sons of Seth and the women of the lineage of Cain. But what is really interesting is the word Nephilim, which is the word usually translated as “giants.” There is no consensus of what this word means, and some versions of the scriptures just use the word Nephilim and make no attempt to translate it. Some argue that Nephilim is actually a form of the verb naphal, or “to fall,” making Nephilim more accurately a plural noun designating these people as “the fallen ones.” So why was it ever translated as giants? The only hint in this verse is that it says the Nephilim were “mighty men” and “men of renown.” We must look elsewhere in the Bible, where the word Nephilim is also found, to discover a link between Nephilim and giants. In Numbers chapter 13, verse 33, in the story of the 12 spies sent from among the Israelites to surveil the inhabitants of Canaan, we are introduced to the Anakim, the sons of Anak, who it says were descended from the Nephilim. Never mind how descendants of the Nephilim survived the Flood God sent to destroy them, I guess. Here, again, some versions of the Bible translate Nephilim as giant, but it is the description of the Anakim in Canaan that gives us the first hint of great size, as some spies reported that, compared to the Anakim, the Israelites were “like grasshoppers.” OK, but if we are to take this literally, considering a grasshopper maybe an inch high, compared to maybe an average five foot height among the Israelites, that means the Anakim must have been at least 300 feet tall. And if we are not to take this literally, if as seems more likely it was a matter of hyperbole, then it opens up the possibility that the spies were not talking about physical stature at all, but rather an indication of how powerful their foes seemed, perhaps in their fortifications or armaments. It is noteworthy that not all of the dispatched spies appear to have remarked on the Anakim being giants, which it would seem must be the first thing observed if they had been 300 feet tall, and their buildings large enough to house men of such height. Therefore, perhaps saying they felt like grasshoppers compared to them was simply another way of saying they appeared impressive, or “mighty,” as the earlier verse described the Nephilim. However, if we look at the preceding verses, we actually do see them mention the inhabitants of their promised land being “great in stature,” but hilariously, it is explicitly stated that this is a “bad report.” Verses 31-32 state: “But the men who had gone up with him replied, ‘We cannot go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are!’ So they gave the Israelites a bad report about the land that they had spied out: ‘The land we explored devours its inhabitants, and all the people we saw there are great in stature.’” It is then that they raise the legend of the Nephilim. Read with this context, it almost appears that the spies simply felt they were outmatched by the Canaanites and therefore tried to dissuade the Israelites from attacking them by lying about them being giants. Even a biblical literalist can take this meaning from the text.

Return of the Spies, 1860 woodcut by Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld depicting the return of the 12 spies to the Israelites with their report of giants in Canaan.

The story of the 12 spies raises another possible rational explanation for all biblical giants, a viable alternative to the notion that any of these peoples were actually physically gargantuan to any preternatural degree. Instead, perhaps all of them were just what you might call giants among men, or men of renown, as the first verse mentioning Nephilim calls them. Just as the Canaanites whom the Israelite spies claimed were Anakim descendants of the Nephilim may have just been imposing figures that struck fear into their heart, perhaps that was case for many another supposed giant. We see Nimrod depicted in later generations as a giant, when the book of Genesis only calls him a mighty warrior. Then there is Og, a king said to be descended from the Rephaim, another group said to be connected to Anakim and Nephilim and thus to have been giants. Og is said to be a giant because the Bible describes his bed as being very large, but of course, a king might be expected to have a very large bed. So is being remembered as a giant simply one of the perks of being rich and powerful, or renowned as a great warrior or leader? That certainly seems to be the case with the notorious and mysterious Gog of Magog, corrupted to become two figures, Gog and Magog, later associated with Mongol horde and, due to the growth of fearful legends, becoming giants and even beasts. And this myth was translated by Geoffrey of Monmouth into a legend of a giant in Albion named Gogmagog. Reputation breeds legend, which invariably ascribes superhuman qualities to figures. Scholars now believe that Gilgamesh was indeed a real king, who perhaps inspired the writing of poems in which he was depicted as physically larger than he actually was. We see the same thing happen more recently, in America, with our tall tales. Any U.S. citizen is probably familiar with the legend of Paul Bunyan. Many are the roadside attraction carvings of this gigantic lumberjack and his equally massive pet blue ox. Some researchers have suggested that the oral tradition that started this tall tale had its origins in a real lumberjack. One suspect is a French-Canadian lumberjack named Fabian Fournier, nicknamed “Saginaw Joe,” while another is a little know soldier who fought in a Canadian rebellion named Paul Bon Jean. These claims remain unverified, but it illustrates well the idea that, even in more modern times, the exploits of a real person might end up blowing that figure up to outsized proportions.

It is harder to make such interpretations work with stories that explicitly mention a figure’s measurements, however. We may dismiss vague statements about stature and contrasts to insects, and we might disregard Gilgamesh’s seventeen-foot height, recorded as it is in an epic poem, which we expect to be fictionalized. But what are we to make of the character of Goliath in 1 Samuel chapter 17, verse 4, the Philistine, champion of a city called Gath, said to be a descendant of the Rephaim and described quite precisely as having a height of “six cubits and a span.” In today’s common measurements, that would make Goliath almost nine feet 9 inches tall, or nearly three meters. There is no getting around this precise measurement. In fact, it is the only specific height recorded in all of the Bible. Well, not so fast. As I said before, words are not bones that can be so easily measured. So we must examine further. In modern times, an archaeological site known as Tell es-Safi has been revealed to be the Philistine city of Gath from which originated Goliath, as well as numerous other giants, if the scriptures are to be believed on this account. Professor of Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies Jeffrey Chadwick, who is involved in excavations at the site, argues that such measurements actually varied from place to place in the ancient world, and that at Gath, a cubit would have been around 54 centimeters, or 1.77 feet, and a span, sometimes thought of as half a cubit, was actually reckoned there as being about 22 centimeters, or 0.72 feet. So by his reckoning, if Goliath was 6 cubits and a span by Gath metrics, that would have made him over eleven feet tall. However, some earlier versions of this Bible verse, discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, have Goliath ringing in at only 4 cubits and a span, which would only be about 6 foot 9, or if Chadwick is correct, more like 7 foot 10. While the former is tall but not abnormal, by our standards today, the latter does seem pretty gigantic—but not unheard of. The tallest man on record, Robert Wadlow, measured nearly 9 feet in height! Still, Chadwick suggests that the 4 cubits and a span measurement may be suspect as well. He notes that the composer of 1 Samuel would not have had the chance to measure Goliath, so the measurement must have come from oral tradition. He further observes that a wall he has excavated in what was once Gath happens to measure exactly 4 cubits and a span wide, and he speculates that applying this exact measurement to Goliath may have been a way to indicate, metaphorically, how stout and impenetrable he was as their champion, likening him to their protective wall. That does little to explain the supposed great weight of Goliath’s armor, also mentioned in those verses, but it does make the exact measurements of the figure seem far less certain. And if you need further evidence that Gath was no city of giants, take the words of Professor Aren Maeir of the archaeology department of Bar-Ilan University, who was in charge of the Tell es-Safi dig site as he describes the excavation’s findings: “There are no skeletons of people who are taller than NBA centers.”

David and Goliath, a color lithograph by Osmar Schindler (c. 1888)

Another tale out of 2 Samuel, chapter 21, verse 20, tells us of yet another man from Gath of “stature,” said to have been descended from the Rephaim, and so typically translated as a “giant.” This figure lacks any specific height, but we are given the further interesting detail that he “had on every hand six fingers and on every foot six toes.” Interestingly, this story raises the idea of a giant as a kind of monster, or some sort of mutation with other differences from humans besides his great height. It leads one to think of the giants of Greek mythology, such as the Gigantes, described by Ovid as having a hundred arms and serpents for feet, or the Cyclopes with their single eyeballs. It leads one to wonder if there might be medical explanations for such tales. The giants of Greek myth may be more difficult to explain in this way, but Goliath and other biblical giants said to be from Gath might be explainable. For example, modern science and the annals of the Guinness Book of World Records tell us that, indeed, giants do exist, but not as the towering monstrosities of myth. Rather, they are unfortunate people who suffer from pituitary disorders that are passed hereditarily, causing conditions such as gigantism, or acromegaly when onset occurs during adulthood. These individuals suffer greatly from their conditions and do not tend to live to any advanced age. The tallest man on record, Robert Wadlow, who was eight foot eleven and over 400 pounds, passed away at 22 years old. As has been argued in at least one scholarly paper, the Bible’s mentioning of more than one supposed giant in Gath may suggest a family in the area whose member’s suffered from just such a familial pituitary disorder. The researchers further speculate that one member of said family may have had the genetic mutation polydactyly, the growth of extra fingers and toes. There are even known overgrowth syndromes, such as Simpson-Golabi-Behmel syndrome, which result in facial and skeletal abnormalities and polydactyly, causing one to wonder if some ancient giant stories might not be accurate records of individuals living with physical disorders that sadly made them appear monstrous to others. If this were the case, it would have been rare then, as it is now, explaining why their remains tend to be elusive.

While we would expect the remains of such medically afflicted persons to be rare, ancient reports of the discoveries of such gigantic remains actually seem quite common, as previously stated. Herodotus talks of the discovery of a “coffin seven cubits in length,” or about 10 and a half feet, and the report that the body inside was equal in length. Plutarch talks of the discovery of “a coffin of a man of extraordinary size,” thought to be Theseus. Phlegon of Tralles, in his On Marvels, shares a report credited to Apollonius about the discovery of “a sepulchre of one hundred cubits in length, in which there was a skeleton of the same dimensions,” and further tells the tale of some Carthaginians digging up “two skeletons placed in coffins, one of which was twenty-three, and the other twenty-four cubits in length,” or between 34 and 36 feet. Perhaps my point is already becoming clear. These reports describe the dimensions of coffins or tombs, only sometimes with further assertions that the remains within were of the same length, when of course, a thing cannot fit within a container of the same length. Never mind the fact that these reports are all secondhand or even further removed, none having been observed by the persons writing about them, and thus are no better than legends, even if there is truth to them, there is a simpler explanation. Sir Jean Chardin, a travelling French scholar of the Near East, was among the first to observe that ancient peoples were known to make tombs and sarcophagi much larger than the bodies they contained. For the same reason, mummified remains often gave the further impression of great size when the remains within were not unusually large. It seems to have been a way to give a strong impression of the dead. Some such reports throughout history mention actual massive bones, though. For example, in Crete alone, there are reports of earthquakes and floods opening chasms and revealing skeletons between 50 and 69 feet in length, if we can trust standard modern cubit conversion. The question remains: Where are these skeletons? Do we actually have a bone to pick, so to speak?

While the massive bones and giant skeletons reportedly discovered in ancient times have long since been lost to history, we have a simple explanation for them derived from the supposed bones of giants that have been displayed in more modern times. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, near the castle Chaumont in France, a series of huge bones were unearthed and thereafter exhibited in various cities throughout the country. According to their exhibitor, they were the bones of a Teutonic barbarian king, and according to a Jesuit priest, Jacques Tissot, who helped publicize their existence, their size proved the claims of giants in scriptures. These bones are kept today at the French National Museum of Natural History. Certain gargantuan bones discovered in the Americas even convinced one of the fathers of paleontology, Franciscan naturalist José Torrubia, that the legends of antediluvian giants must be true, prompting his composition of the influential work:  La gigantologia Spagnola. In the American colonies of the 18th century, Puritan minister Cotton Mather, early adopter of smallpox inoculation practices and erstwhile instigator of witch hunts in New England, firmly believed that enormous bones unearthed in America definitively proved the existence of the Nephilim. In 1705, a discovery of huge fossilized molars and leg bones near Albany sent Mather into a tizzy, declaring to the world that proof of antediluvian giants had been discovered in the New World. There were already rumblings, however, from critics, that all these enormous bones, some of which were even being displayed in houses of worship, venerated as gifts from God to validate the beliefs of His faithful, were not actually giant human bones at all, but rather from large beasts. The skeleton of Teutobochus, the barbarian king exhibited throughout France, was exposed by a member of the Medical Faculty of Paris, Jean Riolan the Younger, as being the bones of something like an elephant, perhaps one of Hannibal’s, left behind during his campaigns in Gaul. Certainly, the anatomist Riolan could discern that its exhibitors had merely arranged the bones into a vaguely human form. And the famed naturalist Georges Cuvier was among the first to suggest that the large fossilized bones and teeth found in the Americas and promoted by Torrubia and Mather appeared to belong to the extinct mastodon. Think back to the many reports of dead sea serpents that I discussed in my series on the subject, and the so-called globsters that washed up on shores and were presumed to be sea monsters but were in fact whale carcasses or the remains of other known marine animals. As the science of paleontology has progressed, all such giant bones have been proven to be the remains of mastodons or other creatures. In fact, with the cartilage having decomposed away, the mammoth skull appears to have one large hole in the center, giving the impression of a single massive eyeball; thus it has been argued that mammoth bones were also the origin of the myth of Homer’s giant Cyclops.

An example of an elephant skull with a central nasal cavity that may have been mistaken for a single cyclopean eye.

Claims of the bones of giants being discovered continued throughout the 19th century, many of them said to have been dug out of Native American burial mounds in America, and I will discuss these in great detail in part two of this series. Let us conclude part one by examining the so-called Giant of Castelnau, which is really just a few bone fragments excavated from a Bronze Age cemetery near Montpellier, France, in 1890. The anthropologist who dug them up and afterward promoted them as evidence of a giant, was Georges Vacher de Lapouge. According to Lapouge, it was “unnecessary to note that these bones are undeniably human, despite their enormous size,” but it’s unclear how he determined that they were human and not, for example, those of a mammoth or some other creature. In the surviving sketch of the fragments, which is all we have to judge by, we see half a femur and a portion of what he claims is a tibia, but the length of neither could have been measured, broken as they are. For scale, they are sketched with a “normal” humerous recovered from the same site, which itself is fragmentary. It begs the question, why not depict them in comparison to intact bones of the same kind, his fragment of a femur next to a normal whole femur? It seems sketchy, if you’ll excuse the pun. Lapouge states, “The volumes of the bones were more than double the normal pieces to which they correspond,” which would tend to indicate they may not have been human, or at least not “undeniably” so. An anatomist from Montpellier reportedly examined them and called them “abnormal in dimension,” but perhaps they were only abnormal if one was insisting on seeing them as human. The same anatomist stated that they were “of morbid growth,” or “diseased.” Is this evidence that they were simply fragments of the skeleton of a person with some pituitary disorder or overgrowth syndrome that resulted in skeletal abnormalities? Another professor from University of Montpellier, according to The Popular Science News of Boston, August, 1890, determined the bones were “normal in every respect.” So what are we to believe? The bones were reportedly given over to the French Academy of Sciences, where they have since, apparently, disappeared. Perhaps this is because they were nothing more than unremarkable bone fragments that didn’t actually warrant much attention and thus were filed away and forgotten, but as we will see in part two of this series, such cases today tend to encourage baseless conspiracy theory.

Further Reading

Acocella, Joan. “How To Read 'Gilgamesh.’” The New Yorker, 7 Oct. 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/14/how-to-read-gilgamesh.

Bressan, David. “Fire burn, and cauldron bubble… Bones of Giants.” Scientific American, 29 Oct. 2013, blogs.scientificamerican.com/history-of-geology/fire-burn-and-cauldron-bubble-bones-of-giants/.

Cole, J.R. “It Ain't Necessarily So: Giants and Biblical Literalism.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, Winter 1985, pp. 49-53. National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo/it-aint-necessarily-so-giants-and-biblical-literalism.

Dahlbom, Taika Helola. “A mammoth history: the extraordinary journey of two thighbones.” Endeavor, vol. 31, no. 3, Sep. 2007, pp. 110-114. ScienceDirect, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160932707000610?via%3Dihub.

Donnelly, Deirdre E., and Patrick J. Morrison. “Hereditary Gigantism-the biblical giant Goliath and his brothers.” The Ulster Medical Journal, vol. 83, no. 2, May 2014, pp. 86-88. National Library of Medicine, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4113151/.

“Fragments on Giants.” Jason Colavito. www.jasoncolavito.com/fragments-on-giants.html.

Jarus, Owen. “Biblical Goliath may not have been a giant.” LiveScience, 1 Dec. 2020, www.livescience.com/was-biblical-goliath-a-giant.html.

Lockwood, Brad. On Giants: Mounds, Monsters, Myth & Man; or, why we want to be small. Dog Ear Works, 2011.

“New Excavation Reveal Goliath’s Birthplace Was More Giant than Believed.” Israel Faxx, vol. 27, no. 149W, July 2019, p. 11. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=n5h&AN=137768865&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

“New World Giants: The Study of American Fossils by ‘One of the Founders of Paleontology.’” Martayan Lan, www.martayanlan.com/pages/books/B5726/jose-torrubia/la-gigantologia-spagnola.

“A Pre-Historic Giant.” Popular Science News, vol. 24, Aug. 1890, www.google.com/books/edition/Popular_Science_News/vmHnAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Giant+of+Castelnau&pg=PA113&printsec=frontcover.

“A Race of Giants in Old Gaul.” The New York Times, 3 Oct. 1892, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1892/10/03/106086633.pdf.

White, Andy. “Cotton Mather: America's First Nephilim Enthusiast.” Andy White Anthropology, 26 Feb. 2015, www.andywhiteanthropology.com/blog/cotton-mather-americas-first-nephilim-enthusiast.

The Lost Empire of Tartaria

You have heard of the ancient lost civilizations of Atlantis. Perhaps you’ve also heard about the lost continents of Lemuria and Mu. You’ve heard me talk about beliefs in the lost cradles of civilization Hyperborea and Ultima Thule. But have you heard about the lost empire of Tartaria? Depending on your interests and thus the calibration of your YouTube recommendation and search algorithms and the pages you find promoted to you on Facebook, you may have learned a great deal about this globe-spanning mega-civilization in recent years. For example, you may have been surprised to find out that this ancient civilization, which originated in central Eurasia as a vast kingdom encompassing most of Siberia, was so successful that it spread around the world, even into the Americas, and that even today we can see the remnants of the civilization’s grand architecture. Your surprise may have turned to wonder and dismay as you learned of a great worldwide catastrophe, a flood akin to Noah’s but composed of mud that destroyed most evidence of this magnificent civilization. Your wonder and dismay likely further turned to shock and outrage as you learned of a global conspiracy to suppress the history of the Tartarian Empire, to cover up the existence of this mud flood, and to claim the impressive accomplishments of their advanced culture as our own. So throw out everything you know about the history of the world, disregard everything you think you understand about ethnology, geography, architecture, and geology, and prepare to be awakened from the sleep of ignorance, liberated from the herd of the sheeple, and initiated into the mystery of Tartaria!

*

If you’re still reading, I’ll come clean. I don’t actually believe this claptrap. But there is something very satisfying to me about the idea that some proponent of the Tartarian Empire conspiracy mythos might stumble upon or seek out this blog post and think at first that I’m promoting this nonsense, when actually this is perhaps the most absurd pseudohistorical conspiracy delusion I’ve ever heard. It cannot be taken seriously, making it a perfect topic for my April Fools episode. However, there are other reasons I feel compelled to address this somewhat obscure claim now. First, it is new and growing. Some have likened it to Qanon because of its agglomeration of other conspiracy claims, and while it is still in its infancy, it seems important to make the public aware of it and its rather surprising implications. According to Brian Dunning, whose Skeptoid blog and podcast covered it briefly about a year ago, the Tartarian Empire claims exist solely online, having first appeared on Youtube conspiracist channels around 2016 and gaining traction in 2017 and beyond on Reddit, Facebook, and elsewhere. He confirmed this using Google Trends (though when I tried to reproduce his findings, I was seeing it spike more in 2018). A quick search of word frequency in publications using Google Ngram corroborates that the topic became more common in the mid- to late 2010s but also suggests that it was not a purely online phenomenon, although any early conspiracist publications could very well have been inspired from online content, rather than vice-versa. However, the reliability of these tools in determining the origin of such pseudohistories and conspiracy claims is decidedly questionable. For example, it is entirely possible that these conspiracy claims crossed over into the English-speaking world from foreign language publications that aren’t mined in an Ngram search, or from online content in another language that, if I understand the tool correctly, wouldn’t show up in a Google Trends search, even if it were set to conduct a worldwide search, because the keyword used is in in English. This appears to be the case with the claims about a global Tartarian Empire, as there is good reason to believe this pseudohistory originated in Russia and may have spread to the West as online propaganda or disinformation. So, surprisingly, this ridiculous topic is actually very relevant to current events, particularly the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in the Ukraine. But I will get to that. Let us start with a simple refutation of the Tartaria mythos.

Historical map designating most of Inner Eurasia and Siberia as “La Grande Tartarie”

It has been suggested that the entirety of the Tartaria conspiracy myth can be blamed on conspiracists looking at historical maps and getting confused because of their ignorance of certain aspects of history. In truth, there appears to be something far more insidious behind this conspiracy myth than simple misunderstanding and well-meant speculation, but let’s have a look at this explanation just the same, as we will have to address the name Tartaria anyway. So the idea goes that the whole thing is due to the fact that many old maps label massive swathes of inner Eurasia as Tartaria, or Tartary. It is claimed that, lacking the knowledge of what this term referred to, conspiracists jumped to the conclusion that there must have been a huge kingdom or nation-state called Tartaria that has since disappeared. From there, the theory goes, they let their speculation about this presumably lost civilization run wild. It is certainly true that these old maps using the label of Tartary or Tartaria are frequently raised as evidence for these outlandish conspiracy claims, and their proponents do indeed reject the simple and historically accurate explanation for why these regions were called Tartary. Prior to the 18th century, the West lacked much knowledge about the peoples and societies within Siberia and Central and Inner Asia and simply called all of them “Tatars”, which then became “Tartars,” and their lands “Tartary.” It was a blanket term, similar to the way ancient Greeks called all the lands northeast of Europe Scythia, and any nomadic people from that vague area came to be called Scythians. Some scholars suggest the initial name “Tatar” derived from a Chinese word, dada, which dated to the 9th century C.E. and was used to refer to any nomads north of China. Indeed, it was the bellicose northern peoples of the Eurasian Steppe that the Chinese had built the Great Wall to keep out who would eventually come to be called “Tatars” by the West, such as the Manchu and Mongol peoples, as well as Turkic tribes. As mentioned in my episode on Prester John, a legend that somewhat coincides with Tartaria claims since it talks of a magical kingdom in the same region, the term “Tatar” appears to have become “Tartar” because of a racist pun. According to Matthew Paris, King Louis IX of France, hearing news about the hellish ravages of Mongol forces invading Europe, said of the so-called Tatars, “Well, may they be called Tartars, for their deeds are those of fiends from Tartarus,” which of course was the Latin name for Hades. Thus the corruption “Tartars” was supposedly coined, basically calling the Mongol hordes demons from hell. As the West did not have much concrete knowledge of the political geography of the region from whence these hordes had come, European cartographers indiscriminately slapped the name Tartary, or Tartaria, onto vast tracts of land. In subsequent centuries, the label was persistently applied to a wide range of distinct peoples and regions, such that later maps might distinguish Lesser from Greater Tartary, or Eastern from Western Tartary. Eventually, as ethnological knowledge of the region’s peoples grew, further distinctions had to be made, such that those in Manchuria were called Manchu Tartars, and those in the eastern reaches of the Russian Tsardom were called Muscovite Tartars. Gradually, the term was dropped altogether, with only the occasional remnant to be found. As will be seen, the origin of the Tartarian Empire conspiracy claims found online today are not the result of simple ignorance of the story behind some old cartographic labels, but this ignorance is clearly exploited by or feeds into the conspiracy claim, providing plenty of fodder for supposed primary source evidence that may seem convincing to a lay person who encounters these conspiracy claims online. 

It is because of such out of date and inaccurate maps, along with a heaping portion of racial stereotyping, that the belief in a Tartarian Empire in the Americas can be found. That’s right, we are not only talking about an inner Eurasian lost civilization. As I indicated in the beginning, believers claim the remnants of a lost Tartarian Empire can be found all over the United States as well. As evidence, they will cite maps from the 17th century that happen to have the word “Tartorum” near the Bering Strait and visually group North America with Eastern Asia according to the same color. With a simple translation of the Latin, they would be able to tell that the blurb with the word “Tartorum” is describing the Mongol tribes on the other side of the strait, not in North America, and describes a simple rural life that is very different from the technologically advanced civilization they imagine Tartaria was. Likewise, they will bring up a 19th century map of the “Distribution of Races in the World” that, again, color codes sections of Eurasia and much of North America to indicate the presence of the same culture. This racist 19th century map chooses the color yellow for Asia and these portions of North America, and tellingly, it labels these areas Mongolian, not Tartarian. The cartographer appears to have mistakenly conflated Mongolian and Inuit cultures, as the portions of North America identified as Mongolian are predominately north of the Arctic Circle. Of course, in the distant past, Native American peoples likely did migrate across the strait and were distantly related to Eurasian nomads. Specifically, ethnologists recognize that the Yupik aboriginal peoples dwell in both Alaska and Siberia. But again, we are talking about rural nomads, not an advanced civilization that, according to believers, is responsible for the construction of architecturally magnificent edifices. Nevertheless, to the proponents of the Tartarian Empire fiction, these cherry-picked maps are evidence that Grand Tartary, the mythical civilization that they have built up in their minds to Atlantean proportions, was present in the Americas, and though their own false evidence would suggest it could only be found above the Arctic Circle, they claim it was present everywhere. As proof, they point to almost any ornate building constructed in any architectural style other than modern, and they say that must have been a Tartarian structure, because we don’t build things like that in our culture. This may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. They really do point to any pre-modern structure that is especially impressive and elaborately decorative, and they claim it was not built, could not have been built, by builders of our culture.

Racist 19th century map asserting Mongolian cultures are present in North America.

In some ways the conspiracist proponents of a global Tartarian Empire are traditionalists, or nostalgists. They seem to value only an old-fashioned or ancient style of building and reject all modernist architecture as ugly, nondescript, and thus inferior. One Norwegian Youtuber focused on Tartaria, Joachim Skaar, lumps all of modernist, and therefore non-Tartarian, architecture together under the label of Brutalism, although that is a very specific offshoot of Modernist architecture that emerged in the 1950s and declined in the 1970s. However, the name and the aesthetics provide a striking counterpoint to what he and others call Tartarian architecture, which again lumps together many known styles, from Classical, Baroque, Gothic and Renaissance to Beaux Arts, Neoclassical, Second Empire and Greek Revival. Again, any sufficiently ornate building, with columns supporting entablatures with carved friezes and cornices with scrollwork, or any building with an especially elaborate roof like a mansard or a cupola or a large dome, seems, in their fevered imaginations, to be a relic of this lost civilization. As evidence, they hold up old photos from 19th century America, in which can be seen such grand edifices, usually municipal buildings like city halls or state capitols, rising above simple wood frame houses and shacks, or on otherwise empty stretches of dirt fields. To them, these are evidence that 19th century Americans were living among the ruins of this vanished civilization, when in fact the photos depict nation building. With a basic grasp of the fact that the construction of such government buildings was well funded, and that architects were specifically sought out and well paid to design impressive architectural structures, it’s quite clear why such projects were initially surrounded by empty space and simple A-frame clapboard hovels. But like most conspiracists, the Tartarian Empire proponents believe there are secrets to uncover in almost any old book or photo they pore over, no matter how widely available they might be. They find beautiful old buildings that no longer exist, and they decide they have uncovered another clue about the destruction of Tartarian structures. For example, the Chicago Federal Building, whose dome was larger than the U.S. Capitol’s dome, but which was demolished after about 60 years, or the slender, 27-story Singer Building in New York City, which for a time was the tallest building in the world but was leveled in the 1960s. Their speculation about the ancient and mysterious origins of such buildings simply disregard their known history. To wit, the head of the Singer Manufacturing Company, makers of the famous sewing machines, commissioned the Singer building as their New York Headquarters and hired architect Ernest Flagg to design it. Such historical details, to the Tartaria conspiracists, are just more lies covering up the truth.

Perhaps the most absurd claim they’ve made is that the impressive temporary complex of ornate facades built out of straw and plaster of Paris for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—the so-called White City—was actually a grand Tartarian metropolis that “they” have pretended was not real. Much of their idiotic claims boil down to not just ignorance of history, but amateurish misunderstandings about architecture that I imagine would really gall any actual architects. They point to the fact that grand buildings of certain distinct styles can be found all over the world, but of course that is because architectural trends spread internationally. They claim that the shift away from these ornate buildings that are so aesthetically pleasing to them, and the movement toward the concrete and steel architecture of modernism, is a clear sign of the disappearance of the Tartarian culture, when in fact, there are plenty of books written by Modernist architects and city planners like Le Corbusier that expound on their reasoning and argument for moving away from more classical styles. And finally, they claim that our culture simply couldn’t have produced such beautiful structures, and yet plenty of New Classical architects design such buildings even today. Take for example, the neo-Gothic Whitman College at Princeton, built in 2002, or the Classical Greek architecture of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center built in Nashville, the so-called Athens of the South, in 2006. Simply put, one gets the impression that these Tartarian Empire Youtubers and Reddit posters are just basement dwellers in boring towns who have only recently discovered the beauty of fancy buildings and simply cannot believe such structures are American. Instead, they envision a massive mega-culture of advanced builders. Joachim Skaar, the aforementioned Youtuber, has been quoted as claiming, “The same people that built the Capitol in Washington built the pyramids in Egypt,” and that gives us a sense of the great depths of ignorance displayed by these conspiracists.

An image of the State Capitol of Iowa, with less impressive buildings surrounding it. Just the sort of image that looks like proof to a Tartarian Empire believer.

Equally absurd are their explanations for why there does not exist ample archaeological evidence of this widespread culture, aside, from, oh, say, all the surviving buildings they claim are artifacts of the culture and all the photographs of their buildings that are no longer standing. Well, they say there was a worldwide catastrophe that destroyed much of their culture. It was much like the Flood of Genesis, in that it swept into every Tartarian city across the globe, destroying the inhabitants and their records and monuments. They call it the “great reset.” Unlike the biblical flood, though, this was a “mud flood,” and in its wake, entire grand Tartarian cities were left entirely or partially buried. Just what would cause such a global flow of mud is not typically clarified. Some have suggested that it was the result of a worldwide volcanic event, caused by mud volcanos. Mud volcanos are real, and instead of producing magma flows they produce slurries of warm mud. However, even some cursory research into mud volcanos would reveal that they are typically small and don’t cause mass destruction. In fact, they are often identified more as hot springs, and can be enjoyed as natural mud baths. It’s pretty clear some Tartaria “researcher” went looking for a feasible reason for the “mud flood” they invented, found mention of a mud volcano, and said “Bingo!” not bothering to read much more into the topic. But of course, anyone who would believe in a global mud flood isn’t thinking too hard about the science of geology or the analysis of strata performed at any dig site that could handily disprove their “theory.” But they still find supposed evidence for their mud flood, once again in old photos. They bring up black and white photos from the 19th century that show people digging, whether employing hand shovels, mule teams, or steam shovels, especially if there is a fancy building around them. Of course, civic engineering requires a lot of digging like this, even today. Hills must be flattened and depressions filled in order to make streets flat. It’s no great mystery. But Tartarian Empire conspiracists go further, pointing to photos of Gilded Age buildings with windows at ground level and saying that they all appear to be sunken into the ground. Again, these “theorists” seem woefully unfamiliar with buildings generally, but maybe they aren’t basement dwellers after all, since if they were, they would easily recognize these as basement windows. But perhaps the most ridiculous thing about this mud flood aspect of their claims is that, since they’re using photos from the 1800s as evidence, they played themselves and had to place their supposed worldwide mud flood catastrophe in the 19th century. That’s right. These geniuses claim that a global catastrophe happened sometime between the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, and there is no record of it anywhere, and they don’t even bother explaining how it only seemed to affect the Tartarians and us lousy non-Tartarians escaped it just fine.

But hold on! The other element of the so-called “great reset,” besides the global destruction caused by the mud flood, was the purposeful erasure of Tartarian history. Or at least, that’s what they claim. In fact, believers in Tartaria claim that most major armed conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries were actually about Tartaria. They say Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia was really a war against Tartaria, and that after the mud flood, the World Wars of the 20th century were all actually just excuses to destroy all remaining traces of Tartaria. What is their evidence of such a cover-up? Well, they too use Google Ngram, and they find it suspicious that use of the words “Tartaria” and “Tartary” plummet to nonexistent following the 19th century. But of course, we know why that is. It’s because we stopped using an inaccurate blanket term that was actually a pun suggesting they were from hell and instead started calling them Mongols or some other more accurate name. However, never let it be said that conspiracy speculators aren’t ingenious, for they managed in their blindly focused keyword searches to turn up an obscure declassified CIA report on “National Cultural Development under Communism.” In it, there exists a paragraph that is presented as smoking gun evidence of a cover-up of Tartaria’s history. It reads as follows:

…let us take the matter of history, which, along with religion, language and literature, constitute the core of a people’s cultural heritage. Here again the Communists have interfered in a shameless manner. For example, on 9 August 1944, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, sitting in Moscow, issues a directive ordering the party’s Tartar Provincial Committee “to proceed to a scientific revision of the history of Tartaria, to liquidate serious shortcomings and mistakes of a nationalistic character committed by individual writers and historians in dealing with Tartar history.” In other words, Tartar history was to be rewritten—let us be frank, was to be falsified…

The obvious problem here, of course, is that the CIA appear to be condemning Communist revision of “Tartar” history, which simply isn’t in keeping with the idea that the erasure of Tartarian history was a global conspiracy, which likely would have to involve the CIA. But the real issue is that this oft-used quote is taken entirely out of context. Only this paragraph in the entire report mentions “Tartaria,” and this is only because they are quoting a Communist committee that uses the term. The rest of the report makes it clear that the CIA is talking about Communist attacks on Islam and the Muslim peoples within their authority. Furthermore, if they even gave enough context to quote the entirety of the last sentence, it would be revealed that the history of these Muslim people was being rewritten, or falsified, “in order to eliminate references to Great Russian aggressions…so that the Russians always appear in a good light.” And this, the fact that Russians have long been engaged in a revision of history, producing a pseudohistory intended to serve their political purposes and falsely burnish their image, leads us to what may be the true origin and sinister purpose of this batshit crazy conspiracy claim.

Mud Volcanoes at Gobustan State Reserve. Not exactly a global threat. Image credit: Nick Taylor, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The way that the Tartaria conspiracy claims blithely do away with massive parts of world history somewhat reminds me of the claims of chronological revisionists that I previously discussed at great length in a three part series. Indeed, searching Google Trends for Tartaria, one sees Phantom Time, the chronological revision theory of Herbert Illig that I spoke about in my series, listed as a related query. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the origins of the Tartaria claims can actually be traced to the chronological revisionist writings of Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. I encourage listeners to go back to my Chronological Revision Chronicles series, specifically Part One, The Fomenko Timeline, to hear more about this figure and his theories. In brief, Fomenko claims to use statistical analysis and astronomical data to prove that entire eras of accepted history didn’t actually occur. Instead, he argues that much of accepted history is actually duplicated from medieval history. He has been nicknamed The Terminator due to his penchant for finding reasons to delete vast swathes of history, and his rewriting of biblical history has drawn the ire of the Russian Orthodox church. But Fomenko found popularity and success in writing about history, with his “New Chronology” book series, History: Fiction or Science, bringing him far more fame than he had ever earned as a mathematician. He claims to be politically impartial, but historians and critics of his work, especially Konstantin Sheiko, who wrote extensively about the implications of Fomenko’s claims in his PhD thesis, point out that Fomenko’s work fits clearly into an ethno-nationalist tradition of producing pseudohistory and alternative history that presents the Russian people and their history in certain favorable ways. As the CIA report I referenced indicates, this historical negation, denialism, and revisionism had been perpetrated by the Soviets, but as Sheiko describes, it continued, in a somewhat different vein, after the fall of the Soviet Union, as Russia sought out some post-Soviet identity. Among these pseudo-historians, Russian identity, its greatness, is in its power and control of space on the world map, thus they find reason to suggest that a great Russian Empire existed long before the Soviet Union or the Tsardom of Rus. Others in this category see Russian identity wrapped up in racial heritage, and they trot out the old myth of an Aryan people. Though he feigns academic impartiality, Fomenko’s work is at the forefront of this movement to forge a false ethno-nationalist historical identity for Russia. When he eliminates entire periods of history, he typically claims that they are duplications of Russian ancient history. The Holy Roman Empire? Well that is just the appropriated history of a great Russian Empire. His alternate history is at its heart, one in which the accomplishments of Russia are far greater, and its greatness has been stolen from it and attributed to other regions and historical periods. According to Fomenko, the Mongols, formerly known as Tatars or Tartars, did not exist, as such. Instead, he claims that there existed a vast Slav-Turk Empire, not a Mongol Horde but rather a Russian Horde. In this way, he and other Russians can deny that they ever came under the Mongol Yoke. The Mongol invasion, he claims, was a myth invented by the Romanov Dynasty and the Church. In fact, Genghis Khan was a Russian, complete with European features. So under it all, all the mathematical reasoning, the elaborate statistical and astronomical proofs, behind Anatoly Fomenko’s New Chronology, we see the ugly head of Aryan mythology, of white supremacy, rearing.

Is the Tartaria nonsense actually the New Chronology repackaged? In turn, is it just Russian ethno-nationalist propaganda as the work of Fomenko is revealing itself to be? Well, you could describe both as the myth of a vast Siberian / Inner Asian empire whose history has been stolen and erased. Tartarian conspiracy nuts also scrutinize old portraits of Genghis Khan and speculate that he may have been more European-looking, more white, than he is otherwise portrayed. In their reaction against the historical distortions of Tsarist and Church propaganda, Communists initiated their own revision and falsification of history, as the CIA observed in the aforementioned report, and after the fall of Communism, a new false history has emerged, still intent on painting Russia in the best light, and justifying its geopolitical powerplays. Just as Vladimir Putin today justifies his invasion of the Ukraine with falsehoods, claiming that it has always been a part of Russia and has no historical right to independence, his nationalist rhetoric is validated by, or perhaps inspired by, the pseudo-historian Anatoly Fomenko, who claims that Ukraine has no identity apart from Russia, for its people were always only part of his “Russian Horde.” This pseudo-history tacitly justifies war crimes. So what am I arguing? I suppose I am arguing what others before me have argued: that the Tartarian Empire conspiracy myth originates from Russian disinformation, spread online to the Western world by professional Russian propagandists, and transforming along the way, through a weird digital version of the telephone game, to something almost unrecognizable. This may itself sound like conspiracy speculation, but the fact that Russian propaganda programs are active in spreading disinformation through bots and puppet accounts run out of troll farms is well known. We also know that they are involved with the encouragement of the growth of conspiracy claims. Hell, that goes back a long time before Qanon and COVID-19 conspiracies on social media. Back in the 1980s, the KGB ran a disinformation campaign aimed at encouraging the baseless conspiracy claim that the U.S. government was responsible for the creation and spread of HIV/AIDS. Now, there is a fast-spreading conspiracy theory about the existence of an ancient, suppressed mega-empire that originated in their region, and it is remarkably similar to the ethno-national propaganda Russia’s president spouts as a pretext for expansion, asserting the Russians are just reclaiming what has always been theirs. Tell me that doesn’t sound like there is a connection. What’s really scary is if Putin starts to assert that the ancestral claim of the Russian people extends all the way to America, where the Tartarian Empire is said to have formerly reigned.

Anatoly Fomenko, mathematician and ethnonationalist propagandist masquerading as a legitimate historian. Don’t @ me.

As with that other conspiracy mythos, Qanon, that has likely been encouraged every step of the way by Russian disinformation campaigns online, the Tartarian Empire hoax has grown to become a mega-theory as its proponents take a buffet-style approach, incorporating into the myth complex any pet theory or crazy notion they fancy. One can imagine that it’s especially hard to control a conspiracy narrative once it has been fed to the conspiracy nut community. Thus we see claims about the Illuminati come in to explain the worldwide cover-up, or of the Jewish World Conspiracy, which isn’t that surprising considering its connection to Russian claims of Aryan supremacy. To further explain why the existence of Tartaria had to be covered up, conspiracists have incorporated elements of the fantastical claims about Atlantis or hollow earth civilizations: namely that the Tartarians had advanced technology, free wireless energy technology to be more specific, and that the powers that be conspired to hide this from the energy dependent masses. And then, there is the doozy—that Tartaria was actually peopled by giants. Never mind that all the buildings they identify as Tartarian are made for regular size people. They found a few photos of grand, oversized doors, and of course they found statuary and paintings depicting, you guessed it, giants. They link the existence of giants in the lands of Tartary through the tales of Gog and Magog, which have historically been associated with Mongolians, as I discussed in my episode on Prester John. And from there, it just devolved into photoshopped hoaxes of gigantic bones. But the argument against the historical existence of giants deserves to have its own episode and would be too much of a digression here at the end of this one. To conclude, let’s just hope that the fringe nutcases who have taken up the Tartarian standard and run with it online continue to take the idea in such ridiculous and fantastical directions that it becomes ever more laughable, and thus, if we’re lucky, useless as Russian propaganda.

 Further Reading

Dharma, Nagato. “Tartary / Tartaria — The Mystery of an Empire Lost in History.” History of Yesterday, 2 July 2020, historyofyesterday.com/tartary-tartaria-the-mystery-of-an-empire-lost-in-history-a99abb5cc9b6.

 Elliott, Mark C. “The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, 2000, pp. 603–46, https://doi.org/10.2307/2658945.

 Mortice, Zach. “Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture.” Bloomberg, 27 April 2021, www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-27/inside-architecture-s-wildest-conspiracy-theory.

“National Cultural Development Under Communism.” Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room, 11 Nov. 2016, www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-02771r000200090002-6.

Sheiko, Konstantin. “Lomonosov's bastards: Anatolii Fomenko, pseudo-history and Russia's search for a post-communist identity.” (PhD thesis) School of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, 2004. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/222.

“Tartaria: The Supposed Mega-Empire of Inner Eurasia.” Reddit, uploaded by u/EnclavedMicrostate, www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/ieg2k0/tartaria_the_supposed_megaempire_of_inner_eurasia/.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Four: The Vigilante

At the moment the first shot was fired on Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963, a motorcycle cop named Marrion Baker, recognizing the sound of a rifle shot from on high, looked up toward the Book Depository and saw some pigeons take flight from the building. While other authorities were engulfed in confusion, looking first at the grassy knoll, Baker sped over to the Depository, ran inside, and demanded to know where the elevator was. The building manager, Roy Truly, led him to the elevator, but it appeared to be unresponsive. Truly afterward came to believe that Oswald had purposely left the elevator’s grate open so that it could not be called back down. If this is the case, then it was poor planning. While it meant that authorities could not take the elevator to investigate his sniper’s perch, it also meant they would have to take the very same stairs that he was taking. After firing his three shots, Oswald exited his sniper’s nest between the stacks of books, rushed to the staircase, ditched the rifle, and began his descent. However, as he approached the second floor, he heard the sound of other footsteps on the stairs below and exited toward the nearby lunchroom. That was when Officer Baker, who had given up on the elevator and taken the stairs, saw him “hurrying” off, and called out for him to stop, which Oswald did. Officer Baker, presuming that the presidential assassin must not be an employee at the Depository but rather someone who had gained entrance to the building for the sole purpose of taking a sniper position in its upper windows, asked the building manager with him if he recognized Oswald. Roy Truly answered that indeed, Oswald was an employee, and Baker let him go. This left Oswald in a perfect position to establish the alibi he would later provide police—that he had been in a lunchroom at the time of the shooting. He bought a soda pop from the machine, and lingered momentarily. If he had remained in the building, it certainly would lend some weight to the notion that he had been framed and knew nothing about the assassination, provided one ignores the physical evidence on the 6th floor and the witness testimony that shows his premeditation and planning of the murder. However, he did not stay in the building. Instead, he fled, and his flight is further strong evidence of his guilt. After buying his Coke, he walked through the second floor offices toward a different staircase, and he was seen by another Depository employee as he passed near her desk. She said something about the President being shot, and he mumbled an indistinct reply. She found the encounter “strange.” Then he went down the front stairs and out the front doors of the Depository, which had not yet been locked down as only three minutes had passed since the fatal head shot and chaos still reigned on the Plaza. Later, when the police had the building locked down, they gathered all of its employees for questioning, and Oswald was the only one missing. And even later that day, when giving his alibi, he gave the lame excuse that he had immediately left, without checking with his boss, because he assumed work would be canceled for the day because of the assassination. Outside, his movements indicate not the leisurely trip home of a man unexpectedly given a half day off, but rather a man trying to get away from the scene of a crime. He would normally have waited for a bus on Dealey Plaza, but on this day, he walked resolutely east on Elm, away from all the commotion, in the opposite direction from his boarding house. Ten blocks away, he ran up to the door of a bus in transit and pounded on it to get it to stop and let him on. On the bus, unnoticed by Oswald, happened to be one of his former landladies, who later described him as looking “like a maniac” when he boarded the bus. Sirens increased, and traffic kept the bus from continuing on, and Oswald suddenly rose and demanded a bus transfer, exiting the bus and walking to the station two blocks away. However, instead of boarding another bus at the station with his transfer, he instead hopped into a taxi cab, something he later admitted himself that he had never done before, a further indication that he was in panicked flight. Also telling is that he directed the taxi driver to take him not directly to his boarding house, but some blocks away from it. After walking the remaining distance to his room, he entered, and a couple minutes later, he left again. A housekeeper who saw him said he was “in a hurry” and “all but running.” Though it was warm, he left with a jacket on, because he was carrying his revolver in the waist of his pants.

*

In this final installment of the series, I want to tell Oswald’s story to the end, which means also telling Jack Ruby’s story, but I also want to address some of the larger logical flaws of conspiracy claims generally, as well as the difficulties inherent in refuting them. Many conspiracy proponents will not even attempt to exonerate Oswald, since the evidence of his involvement is so overwhelming. But there are those who will try to assert that he was a complete patsy. As one of my sources, JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy by John McAdams, observes, one can talk until one is blue in the face about Oswald’s psychological and ideological predisposition toward political violence—as I have in this series—and all it does is help make the case that Oswald would have been a perfect patsy, since he was just the sort of person one would expect to take a shot at the President, and therefore the perfect person to frame for it. Those conspiracists who attempt to find corroboration for Oswald’s alibi—besides requiring their audience to disregard witness statements about Oswald smuggling his rifle into the building, to doubt physical evidence that the rifle found was Oswald’s and that he had been in the improvised sniper’s nest, and to disbelieve testimony that placed Oswald on the sixth floor at the time of the assassination—rely instead on outlier witness statements that are easily discredited. For example, the secretary of the Depository’s vice-president, Carolyn Arnold, claimed she had seen Oswald in a booth in the second-floor lunchroom at 12:15pm. Never mind the fact that Oswald’s actual alibi claimed he had been eating in the first-floor lunchroom and had only gone to the second-floor lunchroom to buy a soda. The fact is that numerous workers who were in both lunchrooms have stated that Oswald was not present in either location, and Ms. Arnold never started saying she had seen him there until 15 years afterward, when a conspiracist author questioned her. In statements to the FBI not long after the assassination, she said she wasn’t sure whether she might have seen him fleetingly in a hallway, and then that she certainly had not seen him. We see this time and time again. Conspiracy speculators get a witness alone in a room and somehow, magically, get them to remember entirely different details years after the fact. Others claim that Oswald could not have been in the stairwell immediately after the shots were fired, before Officer Baker saw him rushing toward the second-floor lunchroom, because those critical witnesses who had been in the fifth floor window below his sniper’s nest, Junior Jarman, Bonnie Ray Williams, and Harold Norman, had afterward taken the stairs themselves and not encountered him. However, according to those men’s testimony, they remained upstairs for ten to fifteen minutes. Other employees who said they had been in the staircase following the shooting also can be confirmed not to have been in there until several minutes after Oswald would have taken them and then ducked out upon hearing Officer Baker’s footsteps approaching from below. But more than any of these refutable claims, Oswald’s shocking actions after leaving his boarding room with his revolver prove beyond any doubt that he was no innocent on that day.

The soda machine from which Oswald bought a Coke following the assassination in the Book Depository’s second floor lunch room.

The armed Oswald waited at a bus stop, but seeing no buses, he got impatient and started walking. He still had the bus transfer, and after walking about a mile, he was only a few blocks from catching a bus that would have connected him to a Greyhound headed for Mexico. We can’t know for sure that that was where he was headed, though, because he never made it. A Dallas police officer in a patrol car, J.D. Tippit, saw Oswald walking hurriedly and, probably recognizing that he matched the description of the assassin being broadcast to all police units based on witness statements, he pulled over and stopped him. Police had done this numerous times elsewhere in Dallas that day as the manhunt for the gunman unfolded. Numerous witnesses saw what happened next. Oswald said something to the officer, and Tippit got out of the vehicle and came around toward him. That’s when Oswald brandished his revolver, shot Tippit dead, leaving four slugs in his body, and fled down the street, emptying his spent shells as he ran. The witnesses to this murder include a woman waiting nearby for a bus, two women in their nearby home who came to the front door upon hearing the shots, and a cab driver parked nearby eating his lunch. All picked Oswald out of a lineup that day. A man driving a pickup only about fifteen feet away saw the entire thing, and though he was not brought in for a lineup—a failure of the police that conspiracists claim means he could not identify Oswald—he later, with high certainty, identified Oswald as the shooter from photographs. Numerous further witnesses saw Oswald fleeing the scene as he ran past some used car lots, and identified him in lineups and from photographs. As he ran through a gas station, he even dropped his jacket, which his boardinghouse’s housekeeper identified as the one he had left wearing, and which Marina identified as one of the only jackets he owned. Moreover, the shells he emptied were recovered and later matched ballistically to his revolver, to the exclusion of all other weapons. One of the slugs recovered from Tippit was also matched conclusively to his weapon, which would be on his person when he was apprehended not long later. The evidence in the Tippit murder case was just as clear and conclusive as that that of the assassination case, but of course, conspiracists still find reason to speculate. They ignore the wealth of witness and ballistic evidence, instead investigating Tippit’s personal relationships and suggesting he was actually murdered by someone else in retaliation for a torrid affair he was having. Or they suggest Tippit was part of the conspiracy—since conspiracies can apparently be as massive as one needs them to be, so why not?—insinuating that he may have been there to aid Oswald’s getaway but then turned on him, or that he may have been sent to kill the patsy but Oswald got the drop on him. When conspiracist writers find Oswald’s murder of Tippit too problematic, they sometime just gloss over it, mentioning it only in passing, and presenting it as an unresolved murder that can’t be conclusively tied to Oswald. As you can see, though, that’s the furthest thing from the truth.

Still fleeing from the scene of the Tippit murder, Oswald entered a shoe store. Sirens were in the air, and the shoe store manager saw Oswald enter the lobby of his store, looking scared, and staring out at the street. After some squad cars passed by, the manager watched Oswald walk back outside, look toward where the police had gone, and then head the opposite direction. He felt Oswald was acting very suspiciously, and since he had been listening to the radio broadcasting reports about the assassination, he began to suspect it could be the assassin. He followed Oswald, who ran toward the nearby entrance to the Texas Theater, and when the clerk in the box office wasn’t looking, walked inside without paying. The shoe store manager spoke to the ticket clerk, making her aware that a man had just gone in without paying and voicing his suspicions that the man was running from the police. After ensuring that the exits were secure, they called Dallas police, who arrived shortly, entered the theater, and as officers with shotguns fanned out, they raised the lights. When the officer walking up the aisle scrutinizing the filmgoers came to Oswald, he told him to stand. Oswald stood, raised his hands, shouted, “Well it's all over now,” threw a punch into the policeman’s face, pulled out his revolver, and pulled the trigger. Thankfully, it failed to fire. Oswald was subdued, handcuffed, and taken to a patrol car. The police found his ID on him as well as his false ID with the name Alek Hidell, the one he had made himself. “Which one are you?” they asked him, and he smirked, replying, “You figure it out.” At the station, Oswald was interrogated on and off for twelve hours over the course of about 45 hours, during which he lied about everything, saying he had no knowledge of the name Hidell, even though he had a fake ID with that name on him, claiming the Marines had never given him an undesirable discharge, that he’d never lived at the address where he’d taken photos with the rifle, that he’d never handed out leaflets for Fair Play for Cuba, and that he’d never been to Mexico. Conspiracists who want to believe the alibi he gave during those interrogations just tend to gloss over all the other lies he told, or they suggest that nothing in the interrogation can be trusted, claiming it is highly suspicious that the police did not record any of their questioning of Oswald. In fact, there is nothing suspicious about this at all if you investigate the practices of the Dallas police in 1963. At the time, an early version of Miranda rights was state law in Texas, and according this law, any statements made during interrogations had to be produced in writing and signed by the person being questioned before they could be used in court. So their questioning of Oswald was purely for informational purposes, since even if he confessed on tape, they would have had to get him to sign a confession before they could use it. Because this law effectively made the recording of interrogations pointless, from their view, the Dallas police did not even have a tape recorder at the time. But regardless, the record of Oswald’s statements during his interrogation have been corroborated by more that twenty-five detectives, district attorneys, Secret Service Agents, and FBI agents who participated. Hell, some postal inspectors were even present, questioning him about his use of post office boxes, and confirmed the statements made during interrogations. So I suppose this vast conspiracy implicates even the U.S. Postal Service, if we’re to believe a veil of secrecy was kept over his interrogations as part of the plot.

The murder scene of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Image courtesy University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

The Dallas police were somewhat overwhelmed by the press during the weekend they had Oswald in custody. At one point, over three hundred journalists had gathered on the third floor, making it nearly impassable with all their equipment and wires. The police were walking a tightrope between ensuring security and granting press access to the biggest story in history. When it came time to transfer Oswald, they weren’t sure how to manage it. At first they wanted to use an armored car, but the two cars that they acquired were either too small for Oswald and his guards, or too tall to pass through the ramp to the basement from which they intended to depart. Eventually, they settled on using the armored trucks as decoys and simply hustling him out in an unmarked car. They cleared the basement of everyone but about 30 members of the press, and posted a guard at the top of the ramp, but just before Oswald was brought out, the guard at the ramp left his post to direct traffic as one of the decoy vehicles departed, giving the opportunity for someone to descend the ramp from the street and blend in with the press unnoticed. Oswald was brought down the stairs and out before the bright lights of the reporters, and then a man pushed through the crowd and fired a pistol into Oswald’s abdomen. The shot was fatal, and the act of vigilantism would forever ensure the common belief that there had been a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, and that the conspirators had sent someone to silence Oswald. The shooter was a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby, and entire books have been written just focused on him and his supposed involvement with a conspiracy. Conspiracists will claim he knew Oswald, that he had been on Dealey Plaza during the assassination, that he had ties to the mafia. To place the endcap on this entire story, and to evaluate the claims about Oswald’s murder, we must know who Jack Ruby was, why he was there, and why he did what he did.

Jack Ruby’s birth name was Jacob Rubenstein, born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Chicago. Like Oswald, he was of below average intelligence according to IQ tests and his educational attainments—he only ever finished the 6th grade. Also like Oswald, he may have suffered some psychological disturbance, some of which can be traced back to his parents. His father beat his mother and was frequently arrested on assault and disorderly conduct charges. After their separation, his mother beat him regularly. Eventually, she was deemed unfit, and Ruby was placed in foster care. She would later be committed to a mental institution. Whether inherited from his father or instilled in him by years of abuse at the hands of his mother, Ruby developed a problematic temper and violent tendencies, earning a reputation as a street fighter in his youth. In his twenties, after a few years in California working menial odd jobs, he returned to Chicago, where he found work through a friend as a union organizer. Many conspiracists suggest this shows he was involved with the mafia, but in fact, when he had been working for the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union there, it had been legitimate. Later, the local mafia did take over the union, at which point Ruby lost his job with them. After that, he went into business for himself, selling novelty items like plaques, keychains, salt and pepper shakers, bottle openers, etc. He was never successful, and after serving in the Army Air Force in World War II, he ended up moving to Dallas, where his sister Eva ran a nightclub. For the talkative Ruby, who loved to be in the middle of the action and make acquaintance with anyone he came across, it was the perfect industry, and he threw himself into it. Some conspiracists believe he was a mafia front man, bringing the Chicago mob’s business interests to Dallas, but in truth, he was never solvent. By 1963, he was running two nightclubs with his sister, but over the years he had been involved with six and lost money on all of them. FBI investigators who were intimately familiar with all aspects of organized crime in Chicago actually questioned informants after the assassination, both low level and high ranking, and none even knew who Ruby was. Some Dallas mafia figures sometimes attended his clubs and knew Ruby, but so did a great many police officers. In fact, one Dallas mafia figure actually visited Ruby in jail after his murder of Oswald, which actually seems to prove that the Dallas mafia had nothing to do with Oswald’s murder, as a mafia leader would not go and visit one of his hitmen in jail after they were caught. Finally, some of Ruby’s business dealings prove he had no ties to the mafia. During the years leading up to the assassination, he was having problems with a stripper’s union, the AGVA, which was itself involved with the mafia. So the clearest link between him and the mafia puts him at odds with them. Finally, those who knew Ruby best insist that the mafia would never have wanted anything to do with him because he was a snitch, always ingratiating himself with the Dallas police, inviting them to his clubs, and running his mouth in conversations with them.

A young Jack Ruby in his Army Air Force Uniform. Image tweeted by TheSixthFloorMuseum

Understanding the aspect of Ruby’s character that drove him to befriend police officers is important to understanding why he was there at the police station, likely having walked down the ramp just as the officer posted there had left it unguarded. After he shot Oswald, he said, “I am Jack Ruby. You all know me,” and it was true. Most did know him. In fact, he had been in and out of the police station over and over since Oswald’s capture, drawn to the center of this historic moment and trying to make himself useful to those who were present, whether they be policemen or reporters. Again, like Oswald, he seemed to relish any attention. For years he would loiter around police stations and newspaper offices, offering help to these professionals and inviting them to his clubs for free drinks. Many thought him a “kook,” a “creep,” or a “psycho,” while others viewed him as a colorful character, which seems to be how he viewed himself as well. In addition to his efforts to befriend police officers by offering information about petty crime, he frequently gave tips to newspapers, and their description of him gives a clear sense of his activities: “He is just a guy that calls on the telephone, and he knows everybody in town,” according to a newsman who took his tips. There is some sense that he actually thought, in his simple way, that he was an amateur reporter. That is certainly one of the ways that he gained entrance to the police station during the weekend that Oswald was being interrogated, and according to those who observed his activity in the station, he was just being his awkwardly amiable self, inviting people to his club, attempting to help people where he could, and chatting with people about his hatred for the “lousy Commie” who had murdered his President. Those who knew him afterward described his tendency to seek publicity and be attracted to centers of important activity. “He was a known goer to events,” said Seth Kantor, a member of the press corps who saw Ruby on the day of the assassination hanging around Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy had been taken, and thought it was “perfectly normal to see Jack Ruby standing there.” Another reporter who knew Ruby told a researcher, “If there was one Ruby trait that stands out, it is that he had to be where the action was. He was like horseshit, all over the place.” This perfectly describes his activity between the assassination and his murder of Oswald. After learning of the assassination, and by all accounts being severely shocked and dismayed about it, it appears he may have driven directly to Parkland Hospital, and later that evening, on two separate occasions, he managed to get onto the third floor of police headquarters, even standing outside the room where Oswald was being questioned and at one point trying to enter but being stopped by police. The next day, Saturday afternoon, he was again seen wandering around among the press and police, handing out passes to his nightclub. To many, this appears to be a concerted effort to infiltrate the police department. But most there knew him, and he was introducing himself to those who didn’t. And it simply makes no sense for Ruby to have been part of a longstanding plot to kill the President’s assassin, or the patsy taking the blame for it, since if Oswald’s capture had gone any differently, if he had been arrested by state troopers or the FBI or anyone but the Dallas police, Ruby would not have been to able to get so close to him. Also, if Ruby had been tasked with murdering Oswald and intended to do so despite his own certain capture, he had an opportunity to do so on the night of the assassination, when Oswald was led past him, passing just a couple feet away from him. It appears, based on a lump in his jacket visible in photos of him that day, that he was likely carrying his pistol the entire time. Ruby later denied carrying his pistol and also denied his frequent presence within the police station that weekend, but witnesses and photographs refute him, and he was probably lying because he intended to fight the charge of premeditation in court, and all this seems to show he was stalking Oswald. But was he?

On the morning of Oswald’s transfer, Ruby was at a nearby Western Union office, wiring money to one of his dancers. The clerk who helped him did not believe he seemed in a hurry. In fact, he could have had no idea when Oswald was to be transferred because it had been delayed by some further interrogation and because Oswald had asked to change his clothes at the last minute. When he walked over to the police station afterward and made his way down the unguarded ramp toward the press gathered there, according to him, the opportunity just kind of presented itself to him. In his own words, it would have had to have been “the most perfect conspiracy in the history of the world” to work as precisely as it did. Conspiracists claim that such coincidence is impossible. They point to discredited witness statements claiming Ruby knew Oswald, or placing him at Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, even though numerous witnesses have sworn that Ruby was in a newspaper office placing an ad for his nightclubs when the assassination occurred. Whether or not it was a premeditated or an spontaneous act, his true motives are clear. Witness after witness describe his terrible dismay and grief at having learned of Kennedy’s assassination. During his visits to Parkland and the police station, it was all he could talk about. He was openly crying throughout the weekend, despite reportedly not being the type of person to cry in public. Between his visits to the police station, he was at his nightclub, which he decided to close indefinitely, despite his dire financial situation, out of respect for the President and his family, and his employees said that he was inconsolable and incoherent in his anger and depression. His sister, who he sat and watched news reports with on Friday between visits to the police station, said he was crying so hard he was “sick to his stomach.” She described him as “a broken man,” and quoted him as saying, “I never felt so bad in my life, even when Ma and Pa died…. Someone tore my heart out.” In numerous conversations that weekend, people spoke about how someone ought to take Oswald out, and it has further been stated that Ruby was highly suggestible. After killing Oswald, when police asked why he had done it, he said, “Well, you guys couldn’t do it. Someone had to do it.” And finally, his sister further described his great sadness upon reading a newspaper article that said the First Lady may have to return to Dallas to attend Oswald’s trial. Many statements by Ruby suggest he thought he would be treated as a hero, and felt persecuted when he was afterward not released from jail and instead tried for murder. So was there premeditation? Had he been hanging around the police station hoping to take Oswald out? Or did all these feelings and motivations just overwhelm him in that moment when he saw Oswald, and his well-established temper flared when, according to what Ruby’s brother Earl claimed Ruby told him, “there was a smirk on his face, and he thought, Why you little s.o.b.” Regardless of what the truth may be about premeditation, what seems apparent is that it was a classic case of vigilantism.

One of many images capturing Ruby’s murder of Oswald taken. Via Dallas Morning News

Even if we were to disregard the evidence that Ruby had no connections to the mafia, to Oswald, or to a larger conspiracy, simple logic tells us that there was little point in sending someone to silence Oswald. By the time Oswald was killed, he had already been interrogated for 12 hours. He’d had plenty of time to spill the beans on any conspiracy about which he might have had knowledge. Likewise, the many claims about those with special knowledge being silenced by murder squads just doesn’t hold up. Conspiracists claim there are more than a hundred suspicious deaths related to the assassination. More than half of these died of natural causes, and more than half also died more than ten years later, which gives them ages to have divulged anything they might have known. It’s the same problem with the idea that George de Mohrenshchildt was silenced in the 1970s, a decade and a half after he testified before the Warren Commission. Of those supposedly mysterious deaths that occurred within a year of the assassination, some were even convinced of Oswald’s guilt, which makes it seem like there was no reason to silence them, and many had very minor connections to the case. There is the further problem of selectivity. For example, one witness of Oswald’s murder of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit would be shot dead by an intruder in his home a few months later. The claims that this was an act of a conspiracy to silence a witness begs the question why this one witness was brutally murdered while a dozen others who saw the same thing were allowed to live. Furthermore, we must ask why none of the plethora of witnesses on Dealey Plaza are included on this list of witnesses that had to be silenced, while many of them are simply journalists who afterward published about the case. This just illustrates the central problem with most conspiracy speculation: the refusal to acknowledge coincidence. My source JFK Assassination Logic by John McAdams highlights numerous logical problems with conspiracist thinking just like this. Conspiracy speculators rely on cherry-picked, outlier testimony that is demonstrably less credible than other witness claims, they engage in the creation of false memory in leading interviews with witnesses years after the fact, they mislead readers by presenting evidence stripped of important context, and they present an argument that suggests most evidence points to conspiracy, when if that were the case, official investigations would have come to far different conclusions. Finally, they demand that believers suspend disbelief in the face of truly odds-defying scenarios. Simply put, large-scale conspiracies are not plausible. As McAdams demonstrates, even if the odds are extremely low that one member of a given conspiracy might betray the rest and reveal the plot publicly, for any number of reasons, the more people involved in the conspiracy, the higher the probability it will be revealed to the world. Conspiracists like to point to real, genuine conspiracies in their efforts to demonstrate that their claims hold water, but any conspiracy that really occurred stands as evidence against the believability of their claims, since all such genuine conspiracies have been uncovered by whistleblowers and journalists.

After the release of the first part of this series, I was accused of playing down the events surrounding the JFK assassination, of taking a “nothing to see here” point of view. This from conspiracy believers, perhaps unsurprisingly, began to think that I myself have something to hide, that I am engaging in cover-up. I’d like to conclude this series by addressing this. Of course I’m not saying there is “nothing to see here.” This is the longest series I have ever produced on one topic for this podcast. There is a ton to see here. I’m saying that what there is to see here is far different from what many have been led to believe. And far from suggesting that the Dallas police and the FBI have done nothing to contribute to this confusion, they have given the public real reason to be suspicious of them. For example, the night after the assassination, while Oswald was being questioned and Jack Ruby was slapping backs around police headquarters, an assistant district attorney leaked to the press that they intended to indict Oswald for killing Kennedy “in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy.” Later, he invented another story to anonymously provide the press, that Oswald was an FBI informant. In explanation, the attorney, Bill Alexander, explained that he “never much liked the federals” and put out the phony stories to keep them occupied. It’s things just like this that have led to many thinking massive conspiracy is more likely than any mundane explanation, and distrusting authorities who insist the opposite. Then there is the FBI, who appear to have genuinely engaged in a cover-up after Oswald’s capture. Before the assassination, the FBI agent tasked with looking into Oswald after he turned back up on their radar had gone to the Paines’ house and spoken to Marina. Oswald had been so upset, continuing to believe the FBI was hounding him, that he went to the FBI office in Dallas and left a note for the agent (whose name he misspelled) demanding he leave his wife alone. After Oswald death, this note was destroyed. According to the FBI, this was because there was no need to keep it if Oswald could no longer be tried in court, having been killed. In truth, though, this appears to have been a genuine cover-up. Far from a wide-reaching conspiracy, though, the simpler explanation is that Dallas special agent-in-charge J. Gordon Shanklin ordered the note’s destruction just to cover his own butt. J. Edgar Hoover was already certain that Oswald was guilty, and it appeared there would be no need of the evidence, so the only purpose it might serve would be to indict Shanklin and his office as having dropped the ball and not recognized Oswald as the threat he was. So am I convinced law enforcement never acted improperly or was never negligent in this case? Absolutely not. But for all the reasons I’ve given over the course of this series, a massive conspiracy to murder the President is simply not supportable. Of course, it makes a great story, though, and when told by a competent, if unscrupulous, storyteller, it can even convince someone who knows better. That is the case with Marina, Oswald’s wife, who knew her husband better than anyone, and whose testimony demonstrates so clearly that Oswald was a desperate and disturbed individual acting alone. Today, the 80-year-old Marina, despite everything she knows about his temperament, his attempt on Walker’s life, and his behavior the last time she saw him, believes that her husband was innocent, because “[t]here are just too many things,” things conspiracist writers have told her and convinced her are true. In the 1980s, in fact, some conspiracist writers convinced her to approve of Oswald’s exhumation in an attempt to prove that a KGB impersonator had been buried in Oswald’s place. Unsurprisingly, forensic pathologists confirmed using medical and dental records that the remains in his grave were indeed that of Marina’s husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

“Exhumation of Lee Harvey Oswald's casket at Rose Hill Cemetery (Fort Worth) for examination of the body in Dallas, Texas.” (1981) Courtesy Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. UTA Libraries Digital Gallery, https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/10009894.

 Further Reading

 Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Three: The Lone Gunman

With his wife Marina so near the end of term and ready to deliver their second child, it was determined she should continue to stay with the Paines while Oswald moved into a room at a boarding house closer to Downtown Dallas, where he was searching for work. It worked out well when Oswald, who couldn’t drive and had no vehicle, got the job at the Book Depository, as it was just a 2 mile bus ride from his boarding house. On some weekends, he caught a ride the 27 miles to the Paines’ house to be with Marina. He caught that ride with his new co-worker at the Depository, Buell Frazier, the brother of Ruth Paine’s friend, through whom she had first gotten the lead on the job at the Depository. Marina gave birth to their second daughter in late October, and Oswald saw them at the end of most weeks, otherwise settling into his new job at the Texas School Book Depository, where he was known to sit by himself in the lunchroom and read the day old newspapers. Later the next month, some of those newspapers contained an announcement that President Kennedy’s motorcade would be passing right through Dealey Plaza, smack in front of the Texas School Book Depository. Some conspiracy speculators charge that the motorcade’s route was changed in order to give Oswald his shot at Kennedy, but there is no evidence for this beyond one newspaper misreporting the route, showing a different one that would also have provided a clear shot at Kennedy from the Depository. Regardless of what newspaper Oswald may have read the news in, it’s clear that he did read it and began to hatch a plan, seeing a far more massive opportunity to change history than that which he had attempted to seize in firing his rifle at General Walker. What makes it clear is his behavior during the few days between the news releasing and the day of the assassination. On Thursday, the 21st, the day before Kennedy’s arrival, the notoriously stingy Oswald splurged on a big breakfast, and at work, he asked Buell Frazier to give him a ride to the Paines’ house, an unusual request for a Thursday. He explained it away by saying he needed to fetch some curtain rods from their house for his room at the boarding house, something that his furnished room already had. Sometime before leaving with Frazier, probably using materials present at work, he crafted a long sack by taping together pieces of paper. Marina was surprised to see him that Thursday. He usually called ahead, and he was acting somewhat desperate, trying to kiss her and being more affectionate than usual, saying he missed her and that he “wanted to make peace” with her. Marina brought up the President’s visit, thinking Oswald would relish the opportunity to expound on politics, as he usually did, but Oswald refused to talk about it, claiming he knew nothing about Kennedy’s visit, and remaining quiet through dinner. At some point, Ruth Paine recalled that he had gone out to their garage, where he had stored a bundle that the Paines thought was camping equipment, wrapped up and leaning against a wall, but which Marina knew was his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. When he left to go back to work the next morning, November 22nd, he left almost his entire savings, $170, on the dresser for Marina, telling her to take as much as she needed and “buy everything.” He also left his wedding ring behind. He walked to Buell Frazier’s house carrying a long, taped up, brown paper parcel, placing it in the back seat of Buell’s car and then simply staring at Buell’s sister in the window to indicate his readiness to leave. It struck her as unusual. When Buell came out and asked what was in the back seat, Oswald said it was the curtain rods he had mentioned previously. Some have tried to claim that Frazier and his sister’s estimation of the length of the package shows that it couldn’t have been Oswald’s rifle, even disassembled. However, curtain rods were never found inside the book Depository, but the Mannlicher-Carcano was, hidden between boxes near a stairwell. Moreover, the package they saw him with that morning, made of brown paper and tape of the kind found in the Depository, and which Buell saw him take into the Depository that day, was the same as an improvised paper bag that would later be found at what appeared to be a sniper’s nest. On the sixth floor of the Depository, which was under construction and almost entirely empty at the time of Kennedy’s arrival because employees had taken their lunch and gone out to watch the passing motorcade, stacks of books had been moved to create a little hiding place by the south-east corner’s window, obscuring anyone’s view of someone standing in that corner looking down on Dealey Plaza. In that makeshift alcove, crime scene investigators found a palm print and a right index fingerprint on boxes, later identified as matching Oswald’s prints. Inside that improvised paper bag found in the sniper’s nest were fibers that matched the blanket that Oswald had kept his rifle in before taking it from the Paines’ garage, and silver nitrate tests would later reveal Oswald’s palm and fingerprints on that bag as well. Along with this evidence were three rifle shells that would later be conclusively proven to have been fired by the Mannlicher-Carcano abandoned elsewhere in the building. That Mannlicher-Carcano was confirmed to be the same rifle Oswald held in the famous backyard photos, as mentioned in Part One, but more than this, a palm print matching Oswald’s was lifted from the stock by Dallas police, and partial fingerprints found on the trigger guard would eventually, through photo enhancements reveal 18 matching points, convincingly identifying them as having been left by Lee Harvey Oswald’s right ring and middle fingers. This evidence alone, from the testimony of Frazier and his sister, the Paines, and Marina, as well as concrete evidence afterward documented by Dallas police, appears conclusive. But those who believe in a conspiracy to murder Kennedy have been determined, through the years, to make this a far more complicated puzzle than it actually is. As the author of one of my principal sources, Vincent Bugliosi, told the Los Angeles Times: “Because of these conspiracy theorists who split hairs and proceeded to split the split hairs, this case has been transformed into the most complex murder case in world history. But, at its core, it’s a simple case.”

Hearing the evidence laid out like this should be convincing—damning, even—but if you have invested your belief in any of the many longstanding conspiracy theories surrounding this case, perhaps because you read a conspiracist book or two, or because you watched the Oliver Stone film JFK, or simply because you have heard too many friends or family members regale you with their secondhand regurgitations of conspiracist reservations, then I’m sure you are already formulating objections. Fingerprint evidence can’t be trusted, you might protest, or, If it was Oswald’s rifle, then of course it would have his prints on it. Notwithstanding the witness testimony that entirely details his efforts to retrieve the rifle himself and smuggle it into the Depository after the newspaper announcements of Kennedy’s motorcade route, those who want to believe Oswald was a patsy will contend that someone planted the rifle and the shells, even though there is no evidence of anyone else entering the Paines’ home and having the chance to fetch the rifle from their garage. Also, a complete frame job, I suppose, would entail knowing which boxes Oswald had recently touched on the 6th floor, so that when they built the sniper’s nest, they could use boxes that had his palm prints on them. And since no mysterious strangers were witnessed by the many book Depository employees that day, it would mean the conspiracy would have to be composed of other employees there. A more feasible conspiracy claim is that Oswald did fire his Mannlicher-Carcano, but that he was not the only shooter that day, that the supposed conspirators allowed him to take his shots but took shots of their own as well to ensure the job was done. This notion, that there were other shooters present, within the book Depository or on the patch of grass between a parking lot and a fence along Elm Street near the railroad overpass—the so-called “grassy knoll”—or elsewhere, has become the central thesis of nearly every conspiracy claim surrounding the JFK assassination. According to these narratives, Oswald may have been a shooter, but he was not the shooter. It’s these claims that we must examine in order to achieve a clear picture of what happened on that chaotic day. But first, let us take a moment to imagine and remember the historic and tragic moment with something approaching respect and sympathy for a beloved life that was lost.

The President’s motorcade, minutes before shots were fired on Dealey Plaza.

At 12:30pm on November 22, 1963, the presidential motorcade turned from Main Street onto Houston Street, to much fanfare. Crowds lined the street, cheering, as John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie waved. In the convertible limousine’s fold-down jump seats sat Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, also waving to the crowds. In the front seat, driving and riding shotgun, were two Secret Service agents. Kennedy himself had chosen to do away with the plastic bubble top that might have saved his life that day, preferring to have nothing between himself and the gathered people. As usual, all was not as it may have seemed with the President, who presented a public image of great vigor despite personal health struggles. Under his suit, he wore a back brace strapped against his body with ace bandage. Despite any pain or discomfort, though, he also wore a smile as he passed through Dealey Plaza toward the Texas School Book Depository. He had a nice luncheon to look forward to—roast beef. When the first shot rang out, many thought it was a vehicle backfiring, or maybe a firework. But the following gunshots, and the terrible commotion inside the President’s vehicle, made it very apparent what was happening. Dealey Plaza exploded into panic and pandemonium, screams of terror and anger, shouts of confusion, filling the air, ringing through the plaza’s strange acoustics, and echoing, like the gunshots, even today.

Among the claims made to support the idea that Oswald could not have committed this heinous act alone are the claims that he was not a good enough marksman, or that his rifle was not accurate enough, or that its bolt action could not possibly be operated fast enough. It is odd that conspiracist authors have decided Oswald was a terrible marksman when he actually qualified as a sharpshooter with the Marines. The superior officers in charge of the marksmanship branch and Oswald’s training, who actually have some idea of Oswald’s skill with a rifle, Sgt. James Zahm and Major Eugene Anderson, have gone on record as saying Oswald was a fully capable marksman, and more than that, that the shots taken from the Depository were not especially difficult, that it was, in fact, “an easy shot for a man with the equipment he had and his ability.” A marine who served with Oswald, Nelson Delgado, is sometimes quoted as remembering Oswald not hitting his targets, but Delgado didn’t serve with him at the time when he received his marksmanship training and therefore was not an authority on his abilities, as were the officers who trained him. Another tale has it that Oswald came up empty handed on a rabbit hunting trip in Russia, but of course, hunting rabbit is far different than taking a pot shot at a man in a slow-moving convertible, and Oswald’s brother Robert remembered Oswald complaining about that hunting trip, saying his rifle’s firing pin had broken. Robert himself had been hunting with Lee more than once and has stated, “He was a good shot.” So that leaves his equipment, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, which conspiracist authors allege is universally condemned as slow and inaccurate and a terrible choice for sharpshooting. Certainly it may not have been the absolute best choice, but Oswald chose it because it was the right price. He clipped a coupon from the magazine American Rifleman to buy it. As for Oswald’s particular Mannlicher-Carcano, when the FBI conducted shooting tests with it, they found it “very accurate.” It had come with a four power telescopic scope already assembled, easily seen in the backyard photos, and the FBI firearms expert who examined it stated that it required hardly any adjustment within the range of the assassination shots, and that such a scope would allow even an untrained marksman to operate the weapon like a sharpshooter. And it was further determined that the rifle had little kickback, which would aid in maintaining aim after firing and rapidly working the bolt-action to reload. The false claims about Oswald’s rifle seem to have no end. It’s been claimed that it had a “hair trigger” that would have made sharpshooting difficult, but it was determined that its trigger needed 3 pounds of pressure, a full 2 pounds more than anything considered a hair trigger. Some have even claimed that Oswald could not have used it properly because it was set up for a left-handed person, but the $7 scope on Oswald’s rifle would be used exactly the same way by a lefty or a right-handed person. That only leaves the claim that Oswald could not work its bolt-action quickly enough to fire off the shots.

Three shells were found in the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the book Depository. According to the Warren Commission, the three shots had been fired in just about 5 to 5 and a half seconds, and during the FBI’s testing of the weapon, they determined that it took 2 and a quarter seconds to work the bolt action and take aim, which meant firing all three shots seemed impossible. However, it has been proven more than once that it is possible. A 1975 CBS documentary recorded the efforts of 11 marksmen to fire three bullets from a similar weapon at a moving target, and some were able to fire all three shots in only 4.1 seconds and still hit their marks. The House Select Committee a couple years later also conducted such tests, and as a result, they lowered the minimum time to fire three good shots from the Mannlicher-Carcano to less than 3 and a half seconds. And it must be kept in mind that, according to Marina, Oswald obsessively practiced the bolt-action on his rifle, such that he must have been expert at working it. Regardless, though, there is good reason to believe that Oswald took well more than 5 seconds to fire his three shots. You see, the entire basis of the 5 second time-frame is based on the Zapruder film, the 8mm home movie filmed by a local dressmaker. The Warren Commission worked under the assumption that the first shot fired must have hit, since Oswald must have had the time to aim carefully with that shot. In the film, Kennedy and the Governor seem fine, then Zapruder’s view of them is obscured by a sign, and afterward, they appear to be reacting to their gunshot wounds. Knowing that Kennedy must have first been struck while he was passing the sign, and further knowing that for a few moments as he approached the sign, until a certain point while passing behind the sign, he must have been obscured from the sniper’s view by a certain oak tree, it was determined that the first shot must have been fired just after emerging from the foliage and while obscured momentarily from Zapruder’s camera—at frame 210 of the Zapruder film. Knowing from the consensus of eyewitness testimony that the head shot, which can clearly be seen on the film, was the final shot, this allowed them to determine that the three shots had been fired in 5 to 5 and a half seconds. One of these bullets struck Kennedy in the back, exiting his neck and further injuring Governor Connally. The bullet believed to have caused these injuries was later discovered intact in Connally’s hospital gurney. The final bullet entered the back of Kennedy’s skull and created a massive exit wound on the right side of his head. The problem with the Warren Commission’s timeline is that they presumed the first bullet hit Kennedy in the back, the second bullet missed, and the third hit his head. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that Oswald’s first shot, the shot many witnesses believed was a backfire, was taken before Kennedy passed behind the oak tree’s foliage, and that this was the shot that missed, making the second and third, taken after he emerged, the only two that hit. This would make sense; one can imagine Oswald aiming and then taking a hurried shot before Kennedy went out of sight behind the foliage. Governor Connally, who survived, always insisted that the first shot, which he had heard, had not been the one that struck him. Multiple witnesses describe hearing the first shot just as their car turned from Houston onto Elm in front of the Depository and passed behind the oak tree there. Oswald’s acquaintance Buell Frazier, on the Depository steps, heard it that way, as did a witness half a block away, and another standing on the corner of Houston and Elm as Kennedy’s limo made its turn.  Up on the railroad overpass, another witness described the first shot coming as the corner was taken, and even the President’s own driver and another Secret Service agent remembered it that way. In fact, some witnesses even report having seen sparks as a missed shot struck the pavement. One man even had minor injuries likely from chips of concrete striking his face. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez (about whom I had occasion to speak when talking about his hypothesis regarding the mass extinction of dinosaurs in my episode on the Chicxulub Crater) suggested that evidence of a first missed shot could be discerned through “jiggle analysis” of the Zapruder film, that is, examining the film for blurs caused by Zapruder jerking when the first shot startled him. Sure enough, a significant jiggle was detected at the moment when Oswald would have been about to lose his shot because of the obscuring foliage as the President’s limo completed its turn. If, as this evidence suggests, this was the first of the three shots, then Oswald would have had something more like 8 whole seconds to fire the three rounds.

Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, Warren Commission exhibit 139.

Then there are those conspiracists who claim there were more than three shots. For writers who push the idea that shooters other than Oswald were present on Dealey Plaza, such as on the grassy knoll, it is imperative to suggest more than three shots were heard, or that they were heard from directions other than the book Depository. The 200 or so witness statements that speculate on the origin of shots are sometimes given as a percentage, to the effect that some startlingly high percentage of the witnesses believed the shots came from the grassy knoll rather than the book Depository, but conspiracist authors, such as Josiah Thompson in Six Seconds in Dallas, have been caught falsifying the numbers and misrepresenting the testimony. The fact is that 88 percent of the witnesses heard exactly three shots, and only 5 percent claimed they heard more. Likewise, the largest portion of the witnesses, 44 percent, could not determine where the shots came from, and of those who believed they could, most—28 percent—identified the Book Depository, with only 12 percent suggesting the grassy knoll, and only a measly 2 percent saying they heard gunshots from multiple directions. This last bit is important. Hardly anyone claimed they heard shots from more than one direction. So that means those who heard shots originating from a different direction than the Book Depository, from which we know three shots had been fired, were likely just confused by the acoustics of the plaza, which are known to make pinpointing the location of a sound difficult. Numerous witnesses even specifically mentioned being confused by echo patterns and admitting to uncertainty because of them. These acoustics could easily explain the few witness statements about a fourth or fifth shot as well. But the most confusion regarding number of shots was created by the House Select Committee in 1979, when they obsessed over a recording from Dallas police channels apparently captured from a motorcycle officer’s radio whose microphone was stuck on and capturing constant audio. The thing is, they didn’t know whose mic it was, or if it was even at Dealey Plaza that day. No gunshots were heard on the staticky recording, but they had experts pick it apart for inaudible sounds. A first set of experts said they found “impulses” that may have been gunshots, and after attempting to recreate the impulses by firing two rifles on Dealey Plaza, from the Depository and the grassy knoll, recording it, and then comparing these impulses, they suggested that the recording had been on or near Dealey and recorded four shots. Their certainty was 50 percent, but then just as the Committee had been ready to deliver its conclusions, a second pair of experts they consulted claimed it was as high as 95 percent. Then a Dallas policeman who had been accompanying the motorcade offered the dubious statement that sometimes his mic gets stuck, and that clinched it for them. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, which had been moving inexorably toward a finding that Oswald acted alone, changed their conclusion to declare that JFK was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” all based on that mysterious recording. Conspiracy lovers just about did backflips, of course, but they were less excited when the officer afterward listened to the recording and said it couldn’t be his mic, because no sirens were heard when he accompanied the motorcade to Parkland Hospital. And the entire farce of the police channel recording would be revealed within a few years, when National Academy of Sciences experts made out some cross-talk on the police channel recording that was known to have been spoken by a sheriff one minute after the assassination. So the audio evidence of four shots that swayed the committee in favor of conspiracy, on which no gunshots or sirens could actually be heard, and which might not have even been a recording of audio at Dealey Plaza, had actually been recorded after the time in question, making the supposed “impulse patterns” observed by audio experts nothing but further crackling among the static.

Some eyewitnesses claimed they saw multiple shooters in the Depository that day, but their testimony has been discredited. For example, a prisoner in the Dallas County Jail claimed he was able to see two men in the sniper’s nest, but he was considered unreliable, not only because of his multiple arrests for behavior displaying mental instability, but also because the FBI determined one could not actually see the Depository from his cell. Other witnesses claimed to see multiple gunmen in windows other than the one around which the sniper’s nest had been made, or on different floors, but their testimony is invariably inconsistent, not matching established facts or even statements they made themselves in the immediate aftermath, and more than once was contradicted by people they had been with, who didn’t see the same thing and also indicated that the witnesses never mentioned seeing such things at the time. On the other hand, a great deal of consistent eyewitness testimony describes a lone man, fitting Oswald’s description, in the 6th floor window that had been turned into a sniper’s nest, even seeing the stacks of boxes behind him, and seeing the rifle in his hands. A Dallas Times Herald photographer and another cameraman who were both in the same motorcade vehicle witnessed this. A court clerk across the street pinpointed the window as well, said as much to his friend, and then directed a deputy sheriff to search there. A student on the street below looked up after the first shot and saw the barrel extended from that window, and then he saw the muzzle flare when it fired again. A fifteen year old boy who had been lifted onto a high perch across the street for a better view said he saw everything in the sniper’s nest, indicating just one shooter and running to a police officer immediately to report what he’d seen. A construction worker named Howard Brennan who had a perfect view of the sniper’s nest described a man fitting Oswald’s description to a T, and even described his lack of expression before the shooting and his self-satisfied smirk after.

Conspiracist writers relentlessly attempt to discredit Brennan because he didn’t express absolute certainty while later picking Oswald out of a lineup, but he did pick him, and later he explained his hesitance to express certainty as a product of fear, since he was having second thoughts about becoming a principal witness against the President’s assassin, thinking it could put a target on him if there really were some conspiracy, as some were already saying. Conspiracist authors like Jim Marrs, and Mark Lane, one of the earliest and most vociferous conspiracy peddlers, bring up Brennan’s poor eyesight to discredit him, saying he was nearsighted and thus could not have seen all the details he claimed. In fact, though, Brennan was farsighted. After the assassination, his eyesight was damaged in a sandblasting injury, but at the time of the assassination, he was actually peculiarly suited to discern the specific details he described from a distance. Regardless of all this testimony from outside the Depository, though, the statements of other Book Depository employees clear everything up. His fellow workers saw him on the sixth floor, lurking near the windows that looked out on the plaza. At about 11:45am, everyone took their lunch, intending to go down and watch the passing motorcade, and several remembered Oswald staying behind. One coworker even came back to get some cigarettes he had left on that floor, saw Oswald near the sniper’s nest window, and asked him if he was coming down for lunch. Oswald said he was not. Another employee came to the sixth floor to see where others were gathering and found it empty, but he did notice the high stacks of books in front of the south-east corner window. He ate his lunch quickly at a different window and then left to find others who were watching the motorcade, joining two friends at a fifth-floor window just below the sniper’s nest. All three, Harold Norman, Junior Jarman, and Bonnie Ray Williams, are critical witnesses, for they heard exactly three rifle shots coming from directly overhead, and they were even seen by some witnesses on the street leaning out their window and straining to see the window above them.

Commission Exhibits 1301-2, revealing Oswald’s sniper’s nest, courtesy the National Archives.

Much has been made of the supposed goings on at the grassy knoll further down the motorcade route from the Depository, but if we look closely at the reasons for suspecting a shooter was there, it starts to look entirely like a red herring. Remember that all the physical evidence and the preponderance of witness testimony indicate just three shots were fired, and all from the Depository. We’ve also established that echo patterns in Dealey Plaza confused the origin of sounds. Therefore, it is unsurprising that a couple police officers—not fifty, as some unreliable witness testimony claimed—went first to the grassy knoll to search for a gunman, and that they very quickly discerned there was nothing there. Being urged by most witnesses to search the Depository, that building quickly became the focus of their search. As with much conspiracy speculation, claims involving the grassy knoll often rely on mistaken witness statements, like that of a woman, Julia Ann Mercer, who was stuck in her car during the motorcade’s passage and said she saw men taking a gun case from a pickup truck and taking it to the grassy knoll. It turned out that the truck was stalled, and the men were getting tools from the back in order to fix it. The Dallas police had been monitoring the vehicle as they tried to maintain security on the plaza. Much of the speculation about the grassy knoll derives from witness statements that a puff of smoke was seen there during the shooting, but any modern ammunition a second shooter would have been using would be mostly smokeless, and the strong northerly wind that day would not have allowed smoke from a firearm to simply linger in the air. If something smoke-like were momentarily seen above the grassy knoll, it’s more likely that it came from the exhaust of an abandoned police motorcycle, as one witness described, or from the nearby steam pipe which would shortly thereafter scald the hands of a Dallas police officer searching the area. Other than these mistaken reports, there are the unreliable accounts of people seeking attention, like Jean Hill, who was swept into the drama because she took a Polaroid picture of the back of Kennedy’s limo at about the time of the third shot. Her early reports show a lack of reliability, getting all kinds of things wrong, like not being clear on the number of people in the car with the President, saying she saw a dog in the car, and claiming things happened that did not, for example, attributing exclamations to the First Lady that no one in the vehicle heard her make. Hill’s story became more and more lurid as she had further chances to tell it. First she added that she heard five or six shots, the later ones from an automatic weapon. Then she said police fired back on the shooters, which clearly never happened. Then she said she gave chase to a suspicious man, even though photos taken in the wake of the assassination picture her not having moved from her original spot on the south side of Elm. Her statement was afterward taken by a Times Herald reporter, but in later retellings, she claimed it was some mystery men impersonating Secret Service agents who questioned her. In that initial interview, she emphatically asserted that nothing had drawn her attention during the shooting, but more than 20 years later, she was enthusiastically providing conspiracist author Jim Marrs with details about gunmen firing from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. To explain why her later claims don’t line up with testimony she gave to the Warren Commission, she claims that she was coerced to alter her story, even though a stenographer was present and recorded none of the threats and manipulation she describes.

On and on it goes with the witness claims about the grassy knoll. A tiny portion of another woman’s faded Polaroid is blown up and said to show a mysterious badged man with a rifle, though in fact it just appears to be foliage. A man in a nearby railroad signal tower, who had a view behind the fence on the grassy knoll, said he saw two men behind the fence, standing apart as if they did not know each other, but then after speaking with conspiracist author Mark Lane, as happened with more than one witness, he changed his story to say he saw a flash of light as though one of the men had fired a gun. In fact, though, he has admitted that he was busy at the time of the assassination, having to work the control panel in his tower, which required him to have his back turned to the entire scene. Fifteen years after the fact, yet more grassy knoll shooter witnesses came forward, one claiming to have seen men with CIA IDs there, and asserting that he heard bullets flying past his ear. Another says he saw a man in a suit enter the railyard behind the grassy knoll and pass a rifle to another man, who disassembled it. But the problem with these latecomers’ claims is that others who were present in those areas did not see them there, casting doubt on whether they were there at all, or at least on whether they were where they claim to have been. This is the same credibility problem that all the grassy knoll claims suffer: there are other witnesses who were present and saw nothing of the sort. There are numerous witnesses confirmed to have been within view of the grassy knoll who saw no shooters peeking over the fence, and three who were standing just in front of the fence who certainly would have been aware if a rifle had been fired just behind their heads. And there were police stationed on the railroad overpass for security purposes who would have been able to spot any gunmen firing from that fence in broad daylight. Yet claims about the grassy knoll never cease. One writer, David Lifton, determined to make the grassy knoll idea work despite its problems, fell so deep into his scrutiny of faded photos that he began to see all sorts of strange things, convincing himself that conspirators had somehow managed to build fake trees on the knoll as a kind of hunting blind. He claims they must have built this artificial foliage without anyone on the busy plaza having noticed, and then afterward removed it in the days following the assassination, when the entire plaza was an active crime scene, again without anyone seeing them. And more than that, in the shapes and shadows of photo enhancements he made himself, he believed he could make out men in those fake trees wearing headsets and spiked imperial Prussian helmets, using periscopes and manning machine gun emplacements. In fact, he was pretty sure that he recognized General Douglas MacArthur somewhere among those black-and-white blotches. To illustrate the absurdity of the notion that General MacArthur was hiding in fake trees on the grassy knoll to oversee Kennedy’s assassination that day, it’s helpful to know that there was much mutual respect and admiration between the two, who had both served in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. At the time, MacArthur was 82 and frail, ailing from cirrhosis, which would take his life in less than a year. Kennedy had actually already made plans for MacArthur’s state funeral. Upon hearing the news about the assassination later that day, MacArthur sent Jackie Kennedy a powerful telegram, which reads, “I realize the utter futility of words at such a time, but the world of civilization shares the poignancy of this monumental tragedy. As a former comrade in arms, his death kills something within me.” Unfortunately, it’s quite typical of conspiracy speculators to not consider the human side of their claims, to toss out connections and spew ill-considered allegations, just hoping something sticks, never really considering that the names they throw out belong to actual people with rich lives and relationships and feelings.

A Polaroid photo taken the moment after the fatal head shot, in which can be seen a few people standing on the grassy knoll and, if we may judge by their postures and the direction of their gazes, clearly not hearing shots being fired from behind them.

The last and, to some, most important element to consider in this forensic mess, so relentlessly obfuscated by conspiracy speculation over the years, is that of the single bullet, dubbed the “magic bullet” by doubters, that was determined to have entered Kennedy’s back, exited his neck, and then caused multiple wounds in Governor Connally, thereafter remaining intact and ending up in the governor’s hospital gurney. There is, of course, much to be said about the actions and statements of the doctors who treated Kennedy at Parkland, the taking of his body out of Dallas on Air Force One, and the results of his autopsy at Bethesda, and the conspiracy narratives that have been spun around these events. In fact, there is so much that I will be releasing a patron exclusive on the topic. To conclude this episode, let us only look at the so-called “magic bullet” trajectory. Using the visible reactions of Kennedy and Connally on the Zapruder film to determine when they were struck, the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee encountered a timing problem. It appeared to them, looking at Kennedy’s arm movement and a later change in Connally’s facial expression, when he opens his mouth widely—a moment in the Zapruder film that Connally himself identifies as when he was shot—that there was too long between their reactions. They both tried to explain this away by saying Connally simply had a delayed reaction, but Connally himself said he instantly felt the bullet’s impact. This discrepancy, which conspiracy speculators take as proof they had been struck by different bullets, has since been resolved by expert modern enhancements of the Zapruder film in the 1990s. It can now clearly be seen that between frames 224 and 227, Kennedy assumed “Thorburn’s Position,” a neurological reaction to spinal injury as the bullet passed near his sixth vertebra, and Connally, nearly simultaneously changes his posture. His lapel can even be seen to flip up in the same spot where there was later seen a bullet hole in his shirt. The moment he picked as when he was hit, when he opens his mouth widely, was more likely a reaction to his first attempt to take a breath after being shot, when his lung collapsed. With the timing problem resolved, there is the further question of the bullet’s path through Connally’s chest and his right wrist and then into his thigh.

With the timing problem resolved, there is the further question of the bullet’s path through Connally’s chest and his right wrist and then into his thigh. The famous claim of those who mockingly call it a “magic bullet” is that it would have had to make impossible turns in midair to make all of Connally’s injuries. There is no surprising refutation here. That’s just simply untrue. Computer recreations of the Zapruder film have demonstrated that Connally was in a perfect position for the bullet to take its path, turned in his seat to search for the source of the first gunshot he had heard. Fired downward from the Depository’s sixth floor, as recreations proved it must have been, the bullet passed through Kennedy and entered Connally’s back, changed course slightly within his body when it struck his rib, exited below his right nipple, then passed through his wrist, which was in front of him holding his hat, and entered his thigh only a short way. The path of the bullet can even be discerned in the Zapruder film when one sees the movement of his hat at the moment his wrist is struck. Some have claimed the bullet later found in his gurney was too “pristine” and must have been planted, but it was a full metal jacket round, designed to pass through its targets as it did, and it was slightly damaged. The doctor treating Connally at Parkland immediately suspected the bullet must have survived intact when he saw how shallow the wound in his thigh was, and he even suggested Connally’s belongings be searched to find it. Lastly, anyone who watched the film JFK knows that much has been made of the motion of Kennedy’s head when he was struck by the last shot. “Back and to the left” echoes in our minds, having even become a darkly humorous meme, parodied in Seinfeld. Conspiracists claim the head’s backward movement demonstrates that he was not shot from behind but from in front, from the grassy knoll. However, again, conspiracy proponents are just talking out of their asses here, pretending to be experts on the human body’s reaction to gunshot wounds. Actually, doctors with expertise in gunshot wounds say that every person reacts differently depending on numerous factors. Some of the factors identified by experts for Kennedy’s backward movement include a neuromuscular spasm, triggered by the destruction of his cortex, causing his back and neck to stiffen, a reflex heightened by his tightly strapped on back brace, which prevented him from falling forward. Another factor is the so-called “jet effect” cited by Nobel prize-winner Luis Alvarez, who observed that the explosive force of his massive exit wound on the front right side of his head may have actually thrust him back in the opposite direction. Regardless, though, if conspiracists will only believe the shot came from behind if there is a forward motion, they should be satisfied by the fact that enhancements of the Zapruder film indeed show him jerking a couple inches forward before his motion back and to the left.

A diagram of the single bullet’s remarkably unmagical path, included in Posner’s Case Closed.

Further Reading

Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Two: The Activist

On Wednesday, April 10th, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald tearfully admitted to his Russian wife Marina that he had been fired from his photoprint trainee job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. His eyes welled up with tears as he blamed the FBI, who he assumed had spoken to his employer and gotten him fired. In fact, after his second interview, the FBI appears to have lost track of him for the time being because of his frequent moves, but Oswald’s inflated sense of self-importance made it hard for him to believe they weren’t hounding him. Marina could tell he was on the edge of something that night, as he ate dinner tensely and silently. After dinner, he left the house, and Marina became anxious, pacing and fretting over what she should do. She had no great love for her husband, who had long abused her physically and mentally, but she relied on him. He had refused to teach her any English, probably so that she was wholly dependent on him, and it worked. Her only friend was Ruth Paine, whom she had met through the Russian émigré circle that had cast them out because of their dislike of Oswald and because of Marina’s reluctance to leave him despite his abuse. Ruth, however, who could speak some Russian, as she was learning the language, remained close with Marina, wanting to help her but fearing retribution from the volatile Oswald. On this night, though, Marina feared telling Ruth about her suspicions. Four days earlier, Lee had left the house with his rifle, the one she had photographed him holding, and he had returned home without it. She had worried since then that he intended to do something terrible with it, and tonight she had an awful feeling. If she told Ruth, though, her friend might report Lee to authorities, and she feared being left alone America, unable to speak the language, with no husband to support her, especially now, as she was pregnant with their second child. So instead of calling anyone, she went into Oswald’s little study, where she found a note with a key set on top of it. It appeared to have been left for her, written in Russian, telling her where his post office box was located, telling her to reach out to the Soviet embassy for help and assuring her that once they found out what had happened to him, they would come to her aid. The note read like a last will and testament, instructing her what to do with his papers and belongings and how much money he had left behind for her, but it ended by telling her where she could find the city jail in the event that he had been captured alive. Needless to say, the note only upset her more, driving her to near desperation when Oswald finally returned before midnight. He looked quite shaken himself, breathing as if he had been rushing home on foot, and pale-faced, as if terrified. When Marina confronted him about his note, he confessed that he had attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker, the right-wing extremist he had been stalking, by shooting at him in his home. He wasn’t certain whether he had succeeded, for after taking his shot, he had fled and buried his rifle. He turned on the radio, expecting at least to hear about the attempt, but was disappointed when he could find no news about it. Marina slept poorly, fearful of police tracking dogs leading authorities to their door. When she woke, she found Oswald hunched over the radio. She did not understand the English spoken by the broadcaster, but she gathered the gist of the report when Oswald angrily said, “I missed.” In fact, he had only just missed his mark. His bullet had gone slightly off its course when it passed through a wire screen, causing it to carom off the window’s woodwork before striking the glass. Lee explained that he had been planning the assassination for months, showing her photos he’d taken of Walker’s house and maps on which he had traced his escape route. He assured her that killing Walker would be like killing Hitler before the Holocaust, that the ends justified the means, but Marina extracted a promise from him that he wouldn’t try to kill Walker again, threatening to go to the police with evidence of his guilt if he ever did such a thing, and insisting he go stay with family in New Orleans and look for a new job there just to keep him out of trouble. For days afterward, she noticed Oswald having violent nightmares in his sleep. She feared her husband was irredeemably sick in his mind.

*

It did not take long for conspiracy believers to begin messaging me about claims I “overlooked.” It was implied by some of these reply guys that I had some ulterior motive for the position I am taking on the Kennedy assassination, or that I have knowingly presented false information for which there is no evidence. True to the character of a conspiracy speculator, they see conspiracy everywhere, so if someone presents a compelling argument to refute their notions, they must also be part of some conspiracy to obscure the truth. Some of the complaints were about parts of the history that I haven’t even gotten to yet, demanding my position on some conspiracist claim that I will likely eventually address during the series or its tie-in exclusives, such as the claims about Oswald’s friend George de Mohrenschildt being his CIA handler, telling all later in life, and then being suicided just before he could testify. Please realize that I cannot address every false claim or misrepresented detail in this series. It’s not a 5-hundred-page book. If you’re looking for a more encyclopedic refutation of all conspiracist claims, I encourage you to read my sources. Nevertheless, I made attempts to answer the claims about de Mohrenschildt in good faith by responding to one self-appointed social media interrogator, though admittedly in brief, since I was planning a patron exclusive podcast episode about de Mohrenschildt, but my reply was apparently not enough, as I was thereafter accused of using biased sources or even making up sources. I then indicated what my sources about de Mohrenschildt were, but they were rejected out of hand as suffering from “confirmation bias.” Tellingly, my sources’ actual research and evidence were not refuted, but rather the authors themselves, based on reputation, and no preferable or supposedly less biased sources were recommended, likely because any conspiracist authors could likewise be accused of suffering from confirmation bias, as could my interlocutors themselves. What I have shown, however, and what my sources show, is that conspiracist authors’ research frequently omits important aspects of the story and misrepresents information or exaggerates the reliability of witnesses in order to further their theses. It’s easier to attack the researcher in this case than to address their actual research, which is what I and my sources try to do with conspiracist research. So let’s talk about my sources. In part one, I mentioned Gerald Posner’s Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK as a principal source, and I’ve had loyal supporters of the program message me with concerns about his reputation as a plagiarist. In my view, Posner has answered for his plagiarism and misattribution of quotes, which occurred later in his career, when he was the chief investigative reporter for the Daily Beast and facing deadlines that he asserts resulted in some confusion in handling his source materials before taking responsibility and resigning. As far as I've been able to determine, few aside from the conspiracists who refuse to acknowledge his conclusions have ever suggested his research into the JFK and MLK assassinations was anything but exhaustive, calling it “meticulous” and “authoritative.” What few respected researchers suggest he may have omitted certain details, like Vincent Bugliosi, nevertheless agree with his conclusions and call his work “impressive.” Here I’ll recommend other books as sources that confirm Oswald acted alone: Kennedy scholar and assassination historian Mel Ayton’s Beyond Reasonable Doubt, and former LA County Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History. One of the conspiracy believers who has told me he would be “monitoring” my work has said Bugliosi’s background makes him biased. Surely this doesn’t refer to his personal scandals, which have nothing to do with his research on JFK and have mostly been raised by those promoting Charles Manson conspiracies, since Bugliosi prosecuted Manson. No one should believe that his abusive behavior in his private life should discredit his research unless one cannot recognize the ad hominem fallacy. Rather, it seems to be a suggestion that anyone with a law enforcement background or any connection to government cannot be trusted in this case, and that’s the same kind of thinking that would suggest everyone involved in every federal investigation of the assassination, whether conducted by the FBI, the Secret Service, or Congress, must be in on the vast conspiracy, which is simply an untenable argument. And I suppose in the conspiracist view, somehow Bugliosi, who successfully prosecuted hundreds of felony trials, including the conviction of Charles Manson, is somehow unreliable, whereas conspiracist author Jim Marrs, who also writes about the Illuminati and Freemasons covering up an extra-terrestrial presence on earth, is credible as a researcher? As you can see, some of my encounters with believers in a large conspiracy to assassinate JFK have left a bad taste in my mouth. Those I’m speaking about shouldn’t be surprised to find themselves blocked by me on social media. I’m sure they’ll take it as some victory that I blocked them, but really it’s just a reflection of your poor etiquette in the tone you took when you came at me online. I only sparingly block anyone on social media. Also, I just don’t have time to trade tweets endlessly with someone who isn’t really looking to consider my view and simply wants to save face and get the last word. I hope you keep listening and maybe keep an open mind, as I have done—yeah, I used to believe there was some shadowy conspiracy involved here, but keeping an open mind when I began to actually examine the research out there, I changed my mind and am now convinced that Oswald was a lone assassin. If you keep listening and still want to get in touch, do it by emailing me through the website instead of making it a performative public challenge, which doesn’t seem conducive to a good faith debate.

*

General Walker, not long before the attempt on his life. Image via Dallas Morning News

Back to the plot, and the pot shot at Walker. Conspiracy speculators have a conflicted relationship with the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald attempted to assassinate General Walker just seven months before he successfully assassinated JFK. Some argue that it proves he couldn’t have shot JFK from the Book Depository because his failure to hit the much easier target of Walker in his dining room proved he was a terrible marksman. We will get to the claims about Oswald’s marksmanship and capabilities of his rifle, but it is clear from the evidence of the failed Walker assassination that his missed shot was not proof of poor marksmanship. Walker himself afterward described the scene, explaining that at night, from a hundred feet away where Oswald had likely taken position by Walker’s back fence, the window would have exposed a wide, illuminated view of his dining room, and it would have been difficult to even see the wire screen that threw the bullet off its path and into the wood of the frame. As Walker explained, “[H]e could have been a very good shot and just by chance he hit the woodwork.” But after all, it could not have been so poor a shot, for even with the slight deflection by the screen, wood, and glass, the bullet still only just missed Walker’s head, for he said he felt it pass through his hair. Other conspiracy speculators dismiss Marina’s testimony, even though she knew Oswald better than anyone in the world, and they assert Oswald was not the shooter who attempted to assassinate Walker, or that the same rifle later found in the Book Depository was not the one used to fire at Walker, pointing out that ballistics experts could not conclusively match the recovered bullet to the rifle. This is true, because the bullet was very damaged, but experts did determine that it was highly probable that it had been fired from the same Mannlicher-Carcano, which Oswald retrieved from it hiding place 4 days after the attempt on Walker’s life, because certain marks on the slug matched those on bullets fired by the rifle in ballistics tests after the JFK assassination. Furthermore, neutron-activation tests proved that the bullet had been manufactured by the same company as the bullets fired in Dealey Plaza. Essentially, the 6.5mm cartridges used in both incidents might very well have sat next to each other in the same box of ammo. But even more difficult for these conspiracy speculators to explain is the fact that FBI investigators discovered evidence of the Walker assassination attempt among Oswald’s belongings after the Kennedy assassination. Indeed, five of the photographs Oswald took of Walker’s home have survived. Because this is all very hard to address, some conspiracy speculators, like the famous Jim Garrison, just ignore it, never bothering to mention Oswald’s first foray into politically-motivated murder.

Nor does it seem that Oswald gave up entirely on perpetrating an assassination after his failure to kill General Walker. Only 11 days later, his temper rose when he read in the paper that Richard Nixon was pushing to move against Communists in Cuba, and further reading that Nixon was in town on a visit, Marina says that he took his revolver and tried to leave the house to go find him. Marina lured him into the bathroom before he could leave and then locked him inside. She insisted that she would rather he kill her than leave the house with his gun to murder a political figure. She wouldn’t let him out until he had cooled down and stripped off all his clothes so that he could not easily push past her out of the house. Afterward, it turned out he had misread the paper. It was Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson who was in Dallas at the time, not former Vice-President Richard Nixon. The next day, after he had surrendered his pistol to Marina, Oswald admitted his mistake, and within 4 days, he had taken a bus to New Orleans and arranged to stay with his aunt Lillian there while he searched for a job, according to Marina’s wishes. However, he wasn’t entirely done with politics. Before leaving Dallas, he picked up a stack of leaflets sent to him by Fair Play for Cuba, a pro-Castro organization that he had taken in interest in and may have done a little demonstrating for the month prior. Oswald intended to expand his political activism in New Orleans, but first he needed to get a job. After lying freely on his many applications, he found a position greasing machinery at a coffee company for a buck and a half an hour, so he went in search of an apartment for him and Marina and little June, lying to his new landlady about where he worked. His sense of himself as an outlaw or spy being hounded by the FBI continued, though they didn’t even know where he was. The maintenance job was hard, so Oswald slacked, as he always did, spending his some of his work hours playing hooky at a neighboring garage, where the proprietor had a lot of gun magazines that Oswald would sit and read and even borrow. The owner of this garage, Adrian Alba, a firearm enthusiast, remembered Osborn picking his brain about the subject, asking him which caliber bullet was deadliest to humans. Alba sometimes worked on FBI and Secret Service vehicles, and he would later claim that he had seen Oswald accepting an envelope from an FBI agent who was getting a vehicle serviced at the garage. Conspiracy believers love this story. The problem is Alba mentioned no such incident when questioned by the FBI or the Warren Commission after the Kennedy assassination, only first claiming it fifteen years later because, according to him, he had forgotten it. When the House Select Committee investigated this claim, though, they found no record of the FBI using Alba’s garage all that year.

Exhibit showing Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans.

In June, about a month after Marina and his daughter had joined him in New Orleans at the squalid little apartment he had rented for them, Oswald took her to the hospital and learned that they would not deliver Marina’s child for free, even though Oswald’s income was very small. Marina remembered this as an inflection point in his evolving feelings about the United States. When he had grown to hate Soviet Russia and wanted to return home, he had softened a bit on the U.S., but his hatred of American capitalism had only grown more pronounced since his return stateside. He had many times suggested that they should return to Russia. She remembers that it was after the hospital turned them away that he first made a disparaging remark against President Kennedy, specifically about how “his papa bought him the Presidency. Money paves the way to everything here.” So he threw himself into his political activism for Cuba, believing that, though Russia had let him down, Castro was surely building a perfect Marxist utopia, and the U.S. should leave them be. He started by disseminating leaflets that said “HANDS OFF CUBA” and encouraging people to join his branch of Fair Play for Cuba, which was just him. He never managed to attract any prospective members of the branch he hoped to start, but that didn’t stop him from writing to the President of the organization, as well as to leaders of the American Communist Party, and bragging about all the good work he was doing in New Orleans, lying about his chapter’s growing membership. In a further effort to impress, he tried to infiltrate a local anti-Castro Cuban expatriate group, presenting himself as a supporter and offering to train Cubans to fight Castro. These Cubans were suspicious of him right away, and later, when they happened to see Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets in the street, they confronted him, starting a big fight for which all of them were arrested. While the Cubans made bail, Oswald was stuck there overnight. After lying in his police interview about where he lived and worked, he asked the police to contact the FBI. The fact he asked for the FBI, and that an agent promptly came to the station on a Saturday, is latched onto by conspiracy speculators as proof that he was working with them, but the agent who reported was simply the agent on Saturday duty at the local FBI office and was duty-bound to answer such summons by the New Orleans police in order to determine whether the case might be of interest to the Bureau. Their meeting was not secret, and the report that the agent afterward wrote indicates that Oswald also lied to him. It is apparent that Oswald, who believed the FBI was hounding him and getting him fired from jobs, wanted to explain his arrest to the FBI on his own terms. He claimed that other members of Fair Play for Cuba had asked him to distribute the leaflets, giving one of his go-to alias names, Hidell, to the agent. Furthermore, if he really were secretly working with the Bureau, as some researchers have pointed out, it does seem unlikely that he would completely blow his cover by summoning the FBI to him like that.

What really complicates any rational, evidence-based detailing of Oswald’s path to assassinating Kennedy on Dealey Plaza is the sheer quantity of false claims that have afterward been made by conspiracists looking to sell books and witnesses who were either genuinely mistaken or seeking attention. It is nearly impossible to tell the story without stopping every minute to say, “some have claimed this, but here’s why they’re wrong.” For example, it has been asserted that the anti-Castro Cuban arrested for fighting with Oswald, Carlos Bringuier, the New Orleans delegate of the Cuban Student Directorate, was allied with the CIA and staged the fight and the arrest just to establish Oswald’s supposed cover as an activist supporting Castro. Bringuier denies it, and the only evidence of his contact with the CIA came after the Kennedy assassination, when the agency interviewed him about his nephew, who had defected to the U.S. from Cuba. So it is just a baseless accusation that, once made, gets repeated despite a complete lack of evidence that it’s true. This is the stock in trade of the conspiracy speculator. Some claims, however, start with a bit more, a puzzling detail and a coincidence. These are the claims that are harder to dispute, because a conspiracist will never admit to the existence of coincidence. One such rabbit hole has to do with a certain address that Oswald appears to have stamped on a few of his leaflets. Most were stamped with his home address, or with the name Hidell and his P.O. Box, but a few were stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, a building at which a private eye named Guy Bannister kept an office. Bannister was a former FBI agent and Bircher with connections to the intelligence world, and he also did investigative work for Carlos Marcello, a powerful mafia figure, so for a conspiracy speculator, he is the perfect person to connect Oswald to a variety of different groups they like to imagine were behind the President’s assassination. However, both the FBI and the Secret Service investigated this connection, finding that none of the building’s tenants, nor its janitor, had ever seen Oswald there, and none had ever seen any Fair Play for Cuba literature in the building. Years later, though, the House Select Committee on Assassinations and various conspiracist authors managed to find some people to say they had seen him there. One, another P.I. who sometimes worked with Bannister, was a known drunk and liar who had previously stated that he had never seen Oswald there. The other, Bannister’s secretary, likewise said at first that she’d never seen Oswald there, and only later said she had, after apparently being paid by the conspiracist author interviewing her, to whom she would later admit to lying. So with nothing concrete or credible tying Oswald to that address, the only question remaining is why it was stamped on his leaflets. It’s been suggested that it may have been mere coincidence. Oswald was known to use false addresses all the time, and he happened to pass by this address when visiting the unemployment office. Perhaps he even saw a “For Rent” sign on the building and fantasized about opening his Fair Play for Cuba branch office there, even though he didn’t have the money for it. Then there is the fact that this used to be the headquarters for an anti-Castro organization, and Oswald may have seen the former address stamped on some of their old leaflets. In that case, stamping the address of a rival group on his propaganda may have struck him as funny, ironic, or even as a provocation.

The oddball David Ferrie, often connected to Oswald through coincidence.

The wayward stamped Camp Street address also leads conspiracy speculators to link Oswald with a strange man named David Ferrie, an anti-Communist mercenary and self-ordained bishop who claimed to be a cancer researcher, a fighter pilot, and a hypnotist. Ferrie was a strikingly odd character, and looked unusual as well, suffering from alopecia and compensating for his complete hairlessness by wearing a red wig and pasted on eyebrows. Ferrie worked with Bannister as well as for mafia boss Carlos Marcello, but he was further connected with anti-Castro Cubans. Conspiracists argue that Oswald had known Ferrie since he was 15 and had joined the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans, where Ferrie happened to serve as a squadron captain. Ferrie later told the FBI that he never knew Oswald, but of course a conspiracy believer wouldn’t believe him. Records show that Ferrie had been rejected from rejoining the patrol after giving right-wing lectures to cadets in 1954 and wasn’t reinstated until 1958, which would mean he wasn’t there when Oswald was a cadet in ’55, but certain photos have appeared purporting to picture both of them together in a large group. Some such photos were proven to be fakes, while others were not, but regardless, happening to be in that organization at the same time, or even in the same photo, does not prove a relationship or a conspiracy, and Ferrie may have been truthful in saying he didn’t know Oswald if he didn’t remember the youth. The more unusual accusations linking David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald would turn up years later, when Jim Garrison produced six witnesses from the little backwater Lousiana town of Clinton who claimed in testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that they had seen Oswald with Ferrie in a car in Clinton when an initiative was underway to register Black residents to vote. They said that Oswald got out of the car and stood in line with the Black registrants. This certainly does seem like something Oswald would do. He was known to disregard segregation codes out of principle and sit among Black people in public places, such as at his own trial for disturbing the peace. However, it doesn’t make much sense for David Ferrie to have been involved, since he held right-wing views, which of course makes it out of character for Oswald to associate with him at all. It has been suggested that they were involved with some FBI COINTELPRO operation, to infiltrate and undermine the Congress of Racial Equality, which was organizing the registration that day, but this too would be very out of character for Oswald, requiring us to believe he had been building a false persona since middle school, when he was first drawn to leftist politics. A clearer explanation is that the witnesses, whose testimony was sealed by the House Select Committee, were mistaken, or had been misled. Indeed, Garrison produced the witnesses after interviewing over 300 others, and there are clear indications that he and his staff coached them, encouraging them to change their story if it contradicted a known fact. For example, some of these witnesses believed they had seen Oswald in October or later, when the weather was cold, but Oswald and Marina had moved away when the weather was still hot, in September. Moreover, the fact that witnesses identified Oswald and Ferrie and another of Garrison’s suspects, Clay Shaw, may have been because Garrison only showed them those three photos and told them others had already identified them. These problems, as well as inconsistencies among the witnesses’ stories, make their claims less than reliable and leave a conscientious researcher doubting whether there was in fact a connection between Oswald and Ferrie in 1963.

After Oswald’s arrest and trial, at which he pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace, he received a little taste of fame and gloried in it, which certainly does not seem like something that an intelligence agent would be seeking. A local television producer took an interest in him, filmed him demonstrating and then asked to videotape an interview of him. Oswald excitedly wrote to the head of Fair Play for Cuba and to figures in the American Communist Party again, boasting about all the attention his fictional branch of Fair Play for Cuba was getting. With his confidence growing, he agreed to a further television appearance, but he didn’t know that the television producer had since been in contact with the local FBI office. After Oswald had summoned an agent to him in jail, the FBI now knew where he was again and had sent his file to the New Orleans office. The television producer happened to have a contact in the FBI office, learned about his file, and was invited to come examine it, something that, again, it doesn’t seem the FBI would have wanted done if they were using Oswald as some kind of confidential informant or even as a stooge. The result was Oswald’s televised humiliation, in which the reporter confronted him about his undesirable discharge from the Marines and his attempted defection to the USSR. Oswald was revealed as a liar and presented to the viewing public as a turncoat. Oswald was destroyed by the humiliation. He seemed to give up on his political activism entirely, staying at home, brooding, sitting on his porch in the dark with his rifle, practicing its bolt action over and over. As he had always done when unhappy, he fantasized about abandoning the country, this time turning his thoughts to Cuba. When Marina found him studying airline schedules, he revealed to her that he intended to hijack a passenger flight at gunpoint and take it to Cuba, and that she would need to take part, holding a gun on the passengers while he dealt with the pilots. Marina was horrified. Eventually, though, since he had successfully renewed his passport a few months earlier, he decided instead to visit Mexico, planning to go to the Cuban embassy there and lay out a case, based on his Russian defection and pro-Castro activism, for being granted a Cuban visa. He began to teach himself some rudimentary Spanish, and he sent Marina off to Dallas with their belongings to live with her friend Ruth Paine, telling her he would send for her when he was settled in Cuba.

Oswald appearing on television in New Orleans. Image via WDSU TV.

One of the really confusing aspects of Oswald’s story is that, after the Kennedy assassination, numerous witnesses came forward claiming they had seen Oswald in Dallas or elsewhere when he was actually on his trip to Mexico seeking passage to Cuba. This is not that surprising or strange, since mass media coverage often leads to misidentifications. What’s really odd, though, is that even though we know that Oswald was in Mexico—from numerous positive identifications by fellow passengers on his bus as well as at the Cuban and Soviet embassies that he visited while there, along with the fact that the Cuban embassy instructed him to get passport-sized photographs taken and those remain on file, definitively proving that the man in Mexico calling himself Oswald was indeed the Oswald we know—even though we have the evidence to refute these other identifications of Oswald at the time, conspiracists have muddied the waters further by claiming that, instead of being mistaken, these witnesses must have seen an impostor who was going around calling himself Osborn in Texas at the time. For example, an employee at the Selective Service headquarters in Austin said he came in there, but other employees could not confirm this, and no one using the name appears to have signed in. A waitress says she saw him at a nearby café that day, but does not appear to have actually been working at the time. Then a woman who had been an early founder of a certain anti-Castro organization said she’d been visited by Oswald and others in late September, and that later, she was told this Oswald had been saying Kennedy should be shot over the Bay of Pigs. Problem was, though, she couldn’t make a proper identification from photos, and her psychiatrist would later cast doubt on the veracity of her story in his testimony to the Warren Commission. The weight of testimony and evidence falls on the side of Oswald having been in Mexico, and the rest we have good reason to disregard as unreliable.

At the Cuban embassy, the consul disappointed Oswald by not granting him a visa, despite Oswald’s presentation depicting himself as a devoted Marxist, a noted activist, and a friend of Castro’s revolution. It turned out that processing his request could take weeks, but he only had a Mexican tourist visa for a few days. It was suggested that obtaining a Soviet visa might facilitate faster approval of his visit to Cuba, so Oswald made his way to the nearby Soviet embassy. Inside, he spoke Russian, presented his documents, declared he was formerly a defector and needed a Soviet visa immediately because the FBI were hounding him. He even went so far as to claim that he had some crucial intelligence that he would only divulge when they granted him his visa. The staff thought him unstable. When he was told it could take four months for his visa, he began crying out in despair. “It’s all going to end in tragedy!” he exclaimed. KGB agents present at the embassy actually sent a cable to Moscow, which was received by none other than Yuri Nosenko, who would later defect to America, as detailed in my recent Blind Spot exclusive minisode. Nosenko cabled back that they would not grant the volatile and fickle Oswald his visa, so they turned him away, diplomatically, of course. Simply proving his instability, Oswald returned the next day and brandished his revolver, complaining about how he had to carry it because of FBI harassment. They wrestled his gun away from him and kicked him out. After one more fruitless attempt at the Cuban embassy, he eventually returned to Dallas an abject failure, moving in with his wife’s friends, the Paines, who greatly disliked him for his treatment of Marina. In the end, his entire Mexican adventure stands as profound evidence that he was completely on his own.

The Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald got a job with a little help from his wife’s friend after she learned from a neighbor that they had hired her brother. Image courtesy University of North Texas

Back in Dallas, he started looking for a job, and he found it hard, not because the FBI was stopping people from hiring him, as he suspected, but because prospective employers called any former employers and learned that Oswald was a terrible employee. Eventually, with the help of Ruth Paine, who wanted to see her friend provided for, Oswald got a job at the Texas School Book Depository. Ruth had heard from someone who knew someone else who got work there that they may hire Oswald, and she had called herself to recommend Oswald, despite her feelings for him. Here we see the circumstances of the Kennedy assassination coming together, but not arranged by a conspiracy. During this time, Oswald threw himself back into politics, attending one of General Walker’s rallies as well as ACLU meetings with Ruth’s husband, Michael Paine, to whom he confided his beliefs that political change must be forced through some act of violence. We see the development of a possible motive throughout the year, as he came to admire Castro, who had been the target of assassination attempts himself, and who had been quoted in newspapers Oswald read as calling Kennedy a cretin and suggesting that “U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” We know from his brush with television fame that he relished attention for his political views, and we know that he believed he might win entrance to Cuba by impressing them with his political activism. We further know that he still had the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, and that he practiced dry runs with it incessantly while brooding. Now we place him in the book depository on Dealey Plaza. Many a conspiracy speculator has suggested that his getting the job there was part of the set-up, as it would give him such a perfect shot at Kennedy, but we know how he got the job—Ruth Paine, who despised him but sympathized with his wife. Was she part of the conspiracy too? Or perhaps her friend, who recommended the Depository, was part of the plot? Or maybe the man who hired him was a conspirator as well? And the fact is, when Oswald got the job, there hadn’t even been plans for a motorcade to pass by the building. Likewise, all of Oswald’s life, which conspiracy believers think was manipulated in order to place him at the scene of the assassination, took place long before any plans had even been made for JFK to visit Texas. The President’s trip to Dallas was not even announced until Oswald was on a bus to Mexico, and if things had gone differently there, he never would have been in Dallas that November. But conspiracy speculators see no problem with a conspiracy involving as many people is it may need to involve. Yet when it comes to coincidence, it seems they won’t even consider that one could possibly take place.

Further Reading

Ayton, Mel, and David Von Pein. Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The Warren Report and Lee Harvey Oswald's Guilt and Motive 50 Years On. Strategic Media Books, 2014.

Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Moore, Jim. Conspiracy of One: the Definitive Book on the Kennedy Assassination. Summit Group, 1990.

Peppard, Alan. “Before Gunning for JFK, Oswald Targeted Ex-Gen. Edwing A. Walker — and Missed.” The Dallas Morning News, 19 Nov. 2018, www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/11/19/before-gunning-for-jfk-oswald-targeted-ex-gen-edwin-a-walker-and-missed/.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part One: The Defector

Ahead of President’s Day this year, I wanted to devote an episode to dispelling some common myths or misconceptions about a well-known American president. The question was, who? I have been thinking about myths related to the youth of George Washington propagated in textbooks since my post on curriculum controversies, so that was a candidate. I’d further been thinking about conspiracy theories surrounding Abe Lincoln’s assassination since my series on the Jesuits. Both would be interesting, and I’d like to cover both, but no one seems to loom larger in American myth and conspiracy theory than John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Why is that? Is it because his assassination is more recent in memory? Yes, but there is something more about Kennedy and his legacy. He is venerated by many as an icon, a hero, an almost messianic martyr. Certainly Lincoln is venerated as perhaps our greatest statesman and savior of the Union, but he doesn’t seem to inspire the same kind of worship as does JFK. Is this notion of the real man earned or more myth than reality? When one looks more closely at Kennedy’s life and presidency, one sees that he has become more of a symbol than a historical figure. Early in his presidency, there was little to distinguish him as being among the great leaders of our history. He took the presidency at the height of the Cold War, and he suffered early humiliation when his efforts to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba resulted in the politically catastrophic Bay of Pigs failure, and likewise was unprepared for his summit with Kruschev that summer, in which, as Kennedy put it, Kruschev “savaged” him. None of this was surprising to his critics, who always viewed him as an impetuous playboy whose father had bought his way into the White House. But to many among the public, Kennedy represented a sea change in Washington, a youthful new hope sweeping away the old ways of the past. Certainly he was the youngest U.S. President, and he was replacing its oldest, but more than this, he appeared intent on ushering in a modernist and intellectual approach to government, filling his administration with Harvard alumni. He inspired such hope for a utopian future that some had taken to calling his Washington “Camelot,” making him the boy who would be king. Certainly he and his wife Jackie’s good looks and seeming vitality did much to inspire this adoration, although much of that was mere stagecraft, as Kennedy actually struggled with numerous longtime digestive and glandular diseases. His reputation as a ladies’ man, or philanderer as we might call him today, does not appear to have been exaggerated, but it has also never harmed his popularity among the American people. And eventually, he did come into his own and begin live up to the great expectations his believers had. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy displayed masterful diplomacy and leadership, deftly, though narrowly, sidestepping a nuclear incident. Afterward, he did much to soften America’s relationship with the Soviet Union. And most admirable today is his decision to make the push for civil rights the central issue of his administration. There may be evidence that he was only looking for some national purpose, or “Grand Objective” and that he was less interested in what that objective was than that we had one, but nevertheless, the simple fact that he chose racial justice and equality as that objective must be applauded. Unfortunately, he would make no real progress in ending segregation. That progress would not arrive until after his murder, perhaps hastened out of respect for him as a kind of martyred prophet. For this was the Kennedy that most Americans saw—a young idealist, an intellectual progressive, a fighter for justice and a champion of hope for all mankind—and this was the promise that was dashed on November 22, 1963, when he was shot dead in his motorcade as he passed through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. That afternoon, police arrested one Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine, and as would become known afterward, an attempted defector to the USSR. He was accused of the President’s assassination, of having fired the murder weapon from the Texas School Book Depository, where he worked, and of having afterward murdered a police officer on the street. Two days later, Oswald too would be dead, the victim of apparent vigilante violence perpetrated by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. While JFK the symbol of hope and progress and change would live on, his legend perhaps even strengthened by his untimely end, so too would the mystery and suspicion surrounding his death persist through the decades, long after it should have been resolved, maybe reverberating even more strongly through history than did his actions in life. And among all the alleged intrigue that confuses and obscures the truth of the JFK assassination, oddly, what has been almost entirely lost is a clear picture of the man said to be responsible for it all. This is Historical Blindness. I’m Nathaniel Lloyd, and I would venture to suggest that if you simply couldn’t wait for the disclosure of records on the JFK assassination last month, hopeful that some long-hidden truth might finally be revealed, maybe you haven’t read much about the records that have long been available.

*

Through the years, as I have researched and produced this podcast, I have come to recognize that the spread of baseless conspiracy theories, whether as propaganda or as popular beliefs that arise rather more organically, represent the central sociopolitical problem of our time. You may protest that political division, racial inequity, or rising authoritarianism are more pressing issues, but I would reply that unfounded conspiracy theories often lie at the root of such issues, or at least contribute to or worsen them. I understand that this is nothing new. I’ve shown it in my exploration of Illuminati conspiracies in early American elections, the rise of the Anti-Masonic political party in the early 19th century, and the spread of anti-Catholic nativism in the mid-19th century. With modern conspiracy theories, though, we see a fragmentation. Fewer are the grand unifying theories of conspiracy, except at the extreme fringe, and many competing conspiracist versions of historical moments proliferate, becoming normalized. In 2013, Public Policy Polling surveyed more than 1200 registered voters. They found that that 20% believed in the long disproven link between autism and vaccination, 21% believed that the U.S. covered up a UFO crash at Roswell, and an astonishing 37% believed climate change is a hoax. Perhaps even more disturbing, 28% believed that a globalist cabal conspired at authoritarian world domination, or a New World Order, which of course is usually just code for Jewish World Conspiracy. Survey results like this appear pretty frequently. In 1991, more than 30% of respondents to another poll expressed belief that Roosevelt allowed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In ’95,  pollsters revealed that around 20% of people they surveyed believed President Clinton had his former aide murdered. In 2007, more than 25% of respondents to a survey believed that 9/11 was an inside job. But king of all the conspiracy theories remains the theory that John F. Kennedy was the victim of a large-scale conspiracy to murder him. In 2013, PPP revealed that more than half of those they polled believed this. More recently, polls suggest that this number is more like 60% or higher. Such numbers have not been seen since 1975 when around 60% of those polled said they thought James Earl Ray had not acted alone to murder Martin Luther King, Jr., a widespread conspiracy theory about which I previously produced a series of podcast episodes. However, like the theories about the murder of King, the theories about JFK’s murder don’t typically agree. Some say Oswald worked for American intelligence, while others say he was working for the KGB. Many argue there were numerous shooters, and some suggest Oswald was not even one of them. The FBI has been put forward as the responsible party, but so has the mafia. With so many competing theories, and so many books published and reputations staked on different versions of events, it’s nearly impossible not to believe something was going on. This is the reason I for so long dreaded delving into this supposed mystery, as it just seemed like too much research to bite off. But then I found my principal source, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, by Gerald Posner, the author of the main source I relied on in my exploration of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination. Posner cuts through the many competing theories with clear evidence, indicating over and over where conspiracy theorist authors purposely misrepresent the record or omit important information in service to their own theories. One of the biggest problems with conspiracist literature on the subject, as Posner demonstrates, is that it typically misrepresents, ignores, or gives short shrift to the main suspect in the case, the man that the Presidential Commission tasked with investigating the assassination, the Warren Commission, determined had acted alone in murdering him. As Posner shows, any worthy investigation of the JFK assassination must start with the man Lee Harvey Oswald. The only reason to avoid an in-depth examination of his life would be if one had already decided he was not the lone assassin.

While the Warren Commission delved into Lee Harvey Oswald’s early childhood and psychology to determine whether he may have fit the profile of an ideologically-driven murderer, conspiracist authors like Jim Marrs and Anthony Summers tend to gloss over his youth and his troubled relationship with his mother, preferring to imply that he was perfectly well-adjusted, thus casting doubt on his guilt. This characterization of Oswald couldn’t be further from the truth. His mother Marguerite is almost universally described by those who knew her best as dominating and controlling and withholding of maternal affection. Oswald’s father had died before he was born, and without his support, Marguerite chose to commit her three children to an orphanage until she had enough money to care for them. However, Lee was too young and so would instead be passed between an array of relatives and temporary babysitters, some of whom routinely beat him, calling him “unmanageable.” When he was three, his mother finally put him in the orphanage as well, but two years later, she pulled him and his brothers out and moved them from New Orleans to Texas, into the house of a new stepfather. Another two years later, after many arguments with her new husband about wanting more money, she left back to Louisiana with Lee. Afterward Marguerite would reunite with this husband, and occasional father figure to Lee, but then separated again. This is the pattern of neglect and instability in Lee Harvey Oswald’s early years, shuttled between Louisiana and Texas, sometimes with a father figure in an acceptable residence, but more often in a poor hovel with his cold mother. His brothers would later describe him as withdrawn and brooding in these early years. He was enrolled in school after school, and he was usually older and bigger than other kids. He thought himself smarter than everyone, perhaps because of his age difference, though an IQ test in his youth, as well as his poor literacy even as an adult tends to show this was not the case.

Marguerite Oswald, image courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Like many who believe themselves smarter than those around them, Oswald refused to respect authority and resisted discipline in school. Rather than making friends, he bullied other kids, throwing rocks at them. This early propensity toward violence was clear at home as well, where he once attempted to throw a butcher knife at his brother during a quarrel. At one point during his youth, when he and his mother had moved in with his older, married brother, Lee threatened to kill his sister-in-law with a knife when she told him to lower the television volume, and then he struck his mother in the face when she demanded he put down the knife. His early attraction to firearms was also apparent as early as middle school, when he had made plans to break into a store and steal a Smith & Wesson automatic. Witness after witness after the assassination called Oswald “strange,” “belligerent,” “insolent,” “arrogant,” “a loner” and “a psycho.” At thirteen, he underwent a psychiatric evaluation due to his truancy, and his analyst, a clinical psychologist named Dr. Renatus Hartogs, saw in him “a potential for explosive, aggressive, assaultive” behavior, calling him “intensely self-centered,” “cold, detached,” “an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self-involved and conflicted mother.” Hartogs’s analysis indicates a clear propensity for violence, but he chose not to recommend institutionalization, preferring to recommend probation and further psychiatric help, hoping the boy’s mental state might still stabilize. This evaluation of Oswald is damning in proving that he had long demonstrated the telltale signs of one capable of violence and murder, but what is even more shocking is that many conspiracist authors, including the District Attorney Jim Garrison who was played by Kevin Costner in the film JFK, fail to even mention it.

Jim Garrison and others also cast doubt on the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was a rabid Communist, undermining the notion that he might have been driven by ideology to shoot Kennedy. However, according the preponderance of all testimony from those who knew him, his interest in Communism started early, developed throughout his adulthood and during his time in the military, and culminated in his attempt to defect to the Soviet Union. Other students at his middle school have spoken on the record about Lee’s radicalization in his youth, recalling how he would go on and on about the plight of the worker and bragging that he would join a Communist cell if he could find one. Apparently he had found some copies of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto in the local library, and the ideas he discovered therein became central components of his nascent identity. He was not so much radicalized, but “self-indoctrinated,” as Oswald himself put it in one of his many unfinished pieces of writing. Some have suggested that his desire to serve in the armed forces seems to contradict his newfound Communism, but that is not at all the case. He had wanted to join the Marines long before he had educated himself about Communism, and it remained his best way to escape his domineering mother and stultifying surroundings. He wanted it so much, he demanded his mother lie about his age in a failed attempt to enlist at 15 years old. Afterward, having dropped out of school and taken a job, he continued to read Communist literature, and even this early on, he tended toward thoughts of political violence. He once told a coworker that he wanted to assassinate Eisenhower because of his exploitation of the working class. At seventeen, he finally joined the Marines, but as would happen over and over, when Oswald got what he wanted, he discovered it did not make him happy. While in his youth he had bullied those around him, in the Marines, he was bullied incessantly, which in turn made him even more withdrawn and brooding. He took solace in his identity as a devoted Communist, even though it made his fellow Marines dislike him even more.  He took to flaunting his political leanings, speaking as if he wasn’t himself American, accusing them of being the tools of imperialism and exploitation. When any other Marines tried to engage him in legitimate political debate, he dismissed their views by saying they were misinformed by propaganda. It was while he was serving in the Marines that he first began to consider defection. While stationed for a few weeks in Japan, he met some Communists who talked up the USSR as a Communist utopia, and after that, he began to learn Russian and make plans. According to a fellow Marine who was stationed in California with Oswald upon his return, Lee thought for a short while about making his way to Cuba and even contacted the consulate in LA. However, those plans seem to have evaporated as he took steps to defect to Russia, asking his mother to lie for him again about being disabled and needing care so that Oswald could be discharged, whereupon he immediately took the money he’d saved in the service and booked himself passage to Helsinki, where he intended to apply for a visa at the Soviet consulate and buy a tourist package that would allow him to penetrate the Iron Curtain.

Oswald as a Marine in 1956. (Public domain image).

JFK assassination conspiracy theorists often fall into one of two camps. They say Lee Harvey Oswald was recruited by the CIA while in the Marines, or they say he was recruited by the KGB while in Russia. If they favor the KGB, they may argue he was sent back to assassinate the U.S. president, and if they favor the CIA, they may say he was sent to Russia as a double agent, and was afterward used by his intelligence contacts as a patsy to take the fall when the intelligence community conspired against Kennedy. These theories, and variations on them, give the historical Lee Harvey Oswald entirely too much credit, and basically ignore what we know about his career in the military and his time in the USSR. Those who claim he was recruited by the CIA will say he was connected to the U-2 spy plane because he was posted to the base in Japan where it was kept and tested, but Oswald served as a mere radar operator among many others and would have known the U-2 only as a blip on a screen. They claim that at one point, the CIA arranged for Oswald to be injured so that he could be absent from duty and outperforming espionage, but his fellow Marines testified that he accidentally shot himself, an offense for which he was afterward court-marshalled because his weapon was unregistered. Records further show that he never left the hospital during his recovery. The simple fact is that he was an unstable individual with anti-American views, he did not take orders well, was undisciplined, and ended up being court-marshalled twice. He was hardly a strong candidate for intelligence recruitment. And if the CIA had wanted to get him discharged and have him fake a defection to Russia, he would not have had to ask his mother to lie just so he could get a dependency discharge. When he arrived in Russia, like all other Western tourists who purchase a tour package, he was assigned a guide who was a KGB informant, and Oswald told her about his desire to defect. We know a great deal about Oswald’s time in Russia because of the KGB file on him, which Boris Yeltsin eventually gave to President Bill Clinton in 1999 after its contents had been published by Russian newspaper Izvestia, and more importantly we know about it from the testimony of Yuri Nosenko, the deputy chief of the Tourist Division of the KGB at the time, who would later defect to America and tell all. Nosenko’s division refused to grant Oswald citizenship, he said, because he was useless to them. He had access to no information, and he wasn’t even in the Marines anymore. Oswald was devastated, and his guide afterward found him in his room with his wrist cut. He had left a suicide note saying that it was to be a sweet and easy death, but after being rushed to a hospital, he was saved. Afterward, the KGB ordered that he undergo psychiatric evaluation, and a doctor confirmed his earlier diagnosis of being “mentally unstable.” Nosenko explained that the KGB certainly wanted nothing to do with him after that, but fearful that this deranged American might try to harm himself again while, at the time, Kruschev was engaged in precarious diplomatic talks with Eisenhower, they decided not to kick him out of the country. Instead, they shunted him off to Minsk and gave him an apartment and a job, telling the local KGB division to keep an eye on him. It wasn’t special treatment, as some conspiracists have claimed, but rather standard treatment for defectors, with the exception that they refused to grant him citizenship.

The KGB surveilled Oswald in Minsk, building their file on him, not because he was an asset of theirs but because they believed him unstable and capable of violence. There were still some lingering worries that he could be working for American intelligence, but as they spied on him, they came to believe, as the KGB defector Nosenko put it, that “Oswald was not an agent, couldn’t be an agent.”  They asked themselves, “Would the FBI or CIA really use such a pathetic person to work against their archenemy?” One episode seemed to satisfy the KGB that Oswald could not possibly be an intelligence agent: his radio broke, and he asked a friend he had made to help him repair it. Apparently it was a simple fix, leaving the KGB surveilling him with the impression that he’d had no intelligence training, which would have included some basic understanding of radios. Back in America, the CIA appears to have taken little notice of Oswald’s defection. According to records they’ve released, they did not start a file on him until a year after he ran off to Russia, and the file, a 201, was simply for a person of interest, not a personnel file as some conspiracist writers have claimed. So Oswald was finally living his dream in Russia, working and living in what he believed was the workingman’s paradise. Hoping to convince the Russian authorities to finally give him the citizenship they had refused him, he went once into the American embassy in Moscow and told the consul that he wished to renounce his American citizenship. However, the consul thought Oswald too young and reckless to make such an irreversible decision, so he delayed him, telling him he would have to come back, which Oswald never did as he’d afterward been sent to Minsk. And it was a good thing, too, because it wasn’t long before Oswald became disillusioned with Russia and regretted his decision to defect.

At first, he seems to have been the happiest he’d ever been. He had friends for the first time in his life because people were interested in him as an American defector. Even in love he was suddenly successful, as he found Russian women all too happy to date a man with an apartment. However, when his friends faded because he was no longer such a curiosity, and when a woman he had fallen for refused his marriage proposal by laughing in his face, the shine began to come off the place. He began to find Minsk terribly dull, and he realized that he greatly disliked the job they’d assigned him as a sheet metal worker, and that they had no intention of honoring his request of sending him to study at university. He further came to resent nearly every aspect of the Soviet socialist system, the pittance wages, the compulsory union meetings and gymnastics sessions, the mandatory political lectures, and having to work in crop fields on the weekends. One wonders what Oswald was expecting exactly, since what he came to resent, the extremely regimented and oppressive life of the worker under Soviet Communism, and what he came to realize about their hypocrisy, that there still existed a privileged class, a class of party officials and bureaucrats, elevated above the populace, was already well known in the West. Surely in the many political debates he’d had, someone had told him that the USSR was no utopia, but Oswald must have dismissed their characterization of life in Russia as Western propaganda. Now, though, experiencing it firsthand, he altered his ideology once again, deciding that he was a pure Marxist, and that the USSR had twisted and perverted true Marxism. Eventually, missing the freedoms and creature comforts of home, he decided to return to America, which he considered “the lesser of two evils.”

Associated Press image of Oswald and Marina in Minsk handed out by the Warren Commission.

Luckily for him, the consul had not made it easy to successfully renounce his American citizenship, so he still had it. However, the Russian government was not going to make it that easy for him to leave after all the trouble he’d caused them. Further complicating the matter was the fact that he met another young woman after beginning his arrangements to repatriate, Marina Prusakova, and soon they had married. Like other women, Marina began dating Oswald because of his apartment, but she seems to have agreed to marry him because she was interested in coming to America. Some have suggested Marina was a KGB agent or informant, but this is baseless speculation not borne out by any evidence and refuted by both the KGB defector Nosenko, by Marina herself, and by her family. The sudden marriage meant that now, not only did Oswald need an exit visa from Soviet authorities, but he would also need an American entrance visa for Marina. Some conspiracy theorists argue that it was all too easy for Oswald and Marina to get out of Russia, but records and testimony show otherwise. It took almost an entire year for them to make the required arrangements, and by that time, Marina had borne their first child, a daughter named June. So rather than a shamefaced return, as one might have expected, Lee Harvey Oswald seems to have felt his return to America triumphant, with a lovely little family in tow and, in his mind, unique insights into the failings of both countries. He told Marina that he expected reporters to swarm them upon their return, and he had prepared remarks scorning both the capitalist and communist systems. He was quite disappointed when there were no reporters and no one seemed to care much about his return. With no money or prospects, he had no choice but to return to Texas and move in with his brother Robert in Fort Worth. Shortly after his arrival, someone finally took an interest in him: not the CIA, who had opened a file on him after his defection, but the FBI, who commonly interviewed returning defectors. Oswald sat through the 2-hour interview and flatly lied to the agents, denying he had had any contact with the KGB and claiming he had never wanted to become a Soviet citizen and never tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship. Seven weeks later, the same FBI agents checked in again, extracting a promise from Oswald that he would contact them if any Soviet agents attempted to get in contact with him there in America. Oswald confided to Marina that he worried the FBI thought he was a spy and would never let them live in peace.

The Oswalds did not live in peace, though, and that was not the FBI’s fault but Lee’s fault, for shortly after arriving back in Texas, he began to beat Marina whenever his temper rose. And he was angry quite often. He did not care for his new job, as he’d had to take employment as a sheet metal worker again, and he was also unhappy with their living arrangements, first with his brother, then with his mother before they moved into a rundown shack of their own. During the rest of 1962, the only highlight of their lives were new friends that they made among the Russian émigré community in Fort Worth. Almost all of these Russian immigrants came to sympathize a great deal with Marina. They liked her, but they found Oswald to be intolerable, with his ill-informed political tirades. When they saw the bruises that Oswald left on Marina, they took great pity on her and came to despise Lee for brutalizing her. Some would eventually take action to convince Marina to leave Oswald and even offer her help, but she was hesitant to go through with it, and they were loath to make an enemy of Oswald, whom they believed was “unstable,” “diseased,” and “mentally sick.” Only one of the emigres proved to be a friend to Oswald, a tanned womanizing playboy character in his fifties named George de Mohrenschildt who loved to upset conventions and push the boundaries of people in his orbit. As such, he took a liking to Oswald, who really knew how to push people’s buttons, and Oswald responded well to the attention de Mohrenschildt offered him. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that de Mohrenschildt was Oswald’s handler, working for either the CIA or the KGB, but once again, with no evidence to support it, this is a case of conspiracist authors building a myth through pure speculation. It is quite clear, though, that de Mohrenschildt encouraged Oswald’s radical politics. He used to talk to Oswald about conservative acquaintances in their circle, calling them right-wing fanatics and fascists, and firing up Oswald against them. One particular target of his ire was General Edwin Walker, a segregationist and member of the John Birch Society who had been relieved of duty by Kennedy because he was handing out right-wing propaganda to soldiers. Walker was at the time engaged in an anti-Communist crusade called Operation Midnight, which of course made Oswald hate him. Some in their émigré community have testified that they believed de Mohrenschildt told Oswald in early 1963 that if someone were to kill General Walker, they would be doing the world a service. It was during this year, the year of the Kennedy assassination, that Oswald began to take specific actions that incriminate him as the assassin.

General Edwin Walker, right-wing extremist and object of Oswald’s obsession. (Public domain image)

It seems Oswald began to develop a fantasy about participating in espionage. He read numerous Ian Fleming novels and was seen to possess a book called How to Be a Spy—which really goes to show that he did not have intelligence connections, as that’s not the kind of literature that actual agents are given for training purposes. He found work in Dallas as a photoprint trainee for a graphic arts company called Jaggars, Chiles & Stovall, Inc., which allowed him to develop his abilities as a photographer, something he thought spies must do a lot of in their surveillance work. Probably using the typesetting equipment at his workplace, he forged identification under a false name, Alek Hidell. Under this false name, he ordered a Smith & Wesson .38 special revolver through the mail, and later, a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. While waiting for the arrival of the firearms, he began to plan his assassination of General Edwin Walker. He compiled maps to prepare escape routes, he wrote a manifesto detailing his motivations, and he even went to General Walker’s house and took photographs. When the rifle finally arrived, he came into the yard where Marina was hanging laundry and demanded that she take his photo holding his rifle. Though she thought him foolish, she dared not cross him. His abuse had culminated not long before in threats to murder her and in her own attempt to hang herself with clothesline rope, but Oswald’s recent obsessions had kept his attention elsewhere, so she was willing to indulge him. The photo she took that day is world famous, and the rifle in it is the same one found in the book depository after the Kennedy assassination. This photograph is damning evidence against Oswald, so many conspiracy theorists try to cast doubt on its authenticity, claiming it is a composite, or that the rifle in it is not the same as the one found above Dealey Plaza and determined to be the murder weapon, or that it is all too convenient and suspicious that Oswald would have the photo taken in the first place. All of these claims, however, have been refuted. First, we know why he had the photo taken. In it he is holding a copy of the American communist magazine, The Militant, a magazine that had recently published one of his letters. He intended to send the photo to the magazine. The photo was unlikely to be a composite fake since Marina took multiple photos of him in the yard, each with a slightly different pose, and in the 1970s, 22 photographic experts testified before Congress that not only were the photos real and untampered with, but that marks on the edge of the frame proved they had been taken by Oswald’s camera. Lastly, using enhancements of the photos, the House Select Committee on Assassinations found 56 unique marks that corresponded between the rifle in the photo and the rifle found at the murder scene. So despite the naysaying of conspiracists, the weight of concrete evidence tells us that early in 1963, Oswald, working alone, was planning some violent political act against a public figure, and that he had in his possession the gun that would be used to kill John F. Kennedy before the year was over.

Further Reading

Alcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 31, no. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 211-36. American Economic Association, www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211.

Ayton, Mel, and David Von Pein. Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The Warren Report and Lee Harvey Oswald's Guilt and Motive 50 Years On. Strategic Media Books,

Brinkley, Alan. “The Legacy of John F. Kennedy.” The Atlantic, Fall 2013, https:/www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-legacy-of-john-f-kennedy/309499/.

Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

“Democrats and Republicans differ on conspiracy theory beliefs.” Public Policy Polling, 2 April 2013, www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_National_ConspiracyTheories_040213.pdf.

Mailer, Norman. “Why Did Lee Harvey Oswald Go to Moscow?” The New Yorker, 2 April 1995, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/04/10/oswald-in-the-ussr.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Moore, Jim. Conspiracy of One: the Definitive Book on the Kennedy Assassination. Summit Group, 1990.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.

Savodnik, Peter. "Lee Harvey Oswald Arrives in the USSR." New England Review, vol. 34, no. 3-4, fall-winter 2013, pp. 161+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A363188964/AONE?u=sjdc_main&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=bbb324c3. Accessed 14 Feb. 2022.

The Coup on Cape Fear - Part Two: Red Shirt Riot

It is no secret that prominent conspiracy theorist and erstwhile U.S. President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud, proven to be without merit in court case after court case, were the main impetus propelling the Capitol Rioters in their attempted coup on January 6th, 2020. And such claims were nothing new from Trump. He was telegraphing his intentions to make these claims throughout the 2020 campaign, using this lie as a means of suppressing votes by casting suspicion on the perfectly legal and secure mail-in voting protocols that many states relied on during the first year of the pandemic. Indeed, Trump had told this lie many times before. He blamed Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012 on voter fraud, he blamed his own defeat by Ted Cruz in the 2016 Iowa caucus on cheating, and when he was projected to lose the presidential election that year, he suggested he could only lose if the election were stolen. Even after winning, he doubled down on his voter fraud claims, seemingly in a desperate effort to save face over having lost the popular vote, and he organized the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, appointing to it people like J. Christian Adams, who had been making false claims about voter fraud for years through his conservative legal group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, or PILF. The voter fraud commission was not long lived, but PILF has continued to make claims about non-citizens voting and dead people voting, all of which have been investigated by journalists and election supervisors and disproven, but conservative media amplifies these claims and not their eventual disproof or PILF’s quiet retractions of claims. It is propaganda, pure and simple. Certainly, voter fraud exists, but it is not the epidemic they claim. In fact, it is frequently conservatives themselves who are guilty of committing it in the occasional genuine cases that are proven. Take for example, some of the only real cases of voter fraud to have been turned up after all the scrutiny over the 2020 election, a cluster of incidents all in the same Florida retirement community, The Villages, where four different residents have been arrested for voting more than once for Trump. It shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise; after all, in his rhetoric before election day, Donald Trump had said that, in order to counteract the cheating he said would be happening, his supporters should vote more than once. Essentially, he said there’s voter fraud, so the solution is more voter fraud! Absurd as it may seem, this is actually more common than you might think. Let us return to North Carolina, the scene of our story, for a further example. 120 years after the post-election insurrection in Wilmington, a definite case of voter fraud occurred. Conservative proponents of the widespread voter fraud conspiracy theory like to point to this case because it involved absentee ballots, but it was the Republican candidate for congress, Mark Harris, or more specifically, his political operative McCrae Dowless, who was guilty of the fraud. In Bladen County, northwest of Wilmington, a Black get-out-the-vote group had previously seen great success with an absentee ballot initiative. Many conservatives suspected that group, The Bladen Improvement Association, of voter fraud, but they never produced any evidence of wrongdoing because the Improvement Association’s use of absentee ballots appears to have been completely above board. Unable to confirm their conspiracy theories about voter fraud favoring the Left, the Right just went ahead and committed voter fraud themselves, with McCrae Dowless found guilty of organizing an elaborate ballot fraud operation, in which they would collect blank ballots, fill them out in support of Republicans, forge witness signatures using different colored pens and different names to prevent detection, and deliver them in small batches to avoid suspicion. NPR’s Serial Productions made a fantastic podcast about the whole affair, called The Improvement Association, which I encourage everyone to check out. The takeaway here is that we see a pattern among reactionaries: point your finger in voter fraud accusation with one hand while the other is stuffing fraudulent ballots into the box. We can see the pattern all the way back in the 19th century, when the progressive and reactionary parties had opposite names. On Cape Fear in 1868, after Abraham Galloway mustered newly freed Black residents and stood up to the voter intimidation of the KKK, their subsequent legitimate victory at the polls, making universal male suffrage a reality in North Carolina, was blamed on voter fraud by white supremacists. Yet thirty years later, white supremacists would gleefully resort to voter intimidation and fraud and even armed insurrection to achieve their own political ends.

Numerous times on this podcast, I have spoken about the supposed and the real influence of secret societies on changes in government. When it is the claim of a vast conspiracy, such as the idea that the Illuminati was behind the French Revolution, or that the Jesuits intrigued to assassinate kings and reverse the Reformation or the Revolution, it is a disprovable and untenable fallacy. However, there have been clear instances of secret societies influencing political change through electioneering. In Bourbon Restoration France, the secret society of the Chevaliers de la Foi, or Knights of the Faith, were instrumental in achieving Ultramontane Catholic domination of the government. I spoke about this in part two of my series on the Rise and Fall of the Society of Jesus. And in the mid-nineteenth century, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner in America, about whom I have released a Patreon exclusive podcast episode, swore their members to secrecy as they worked to stir resentment of Catholic immigrants and eventually launch the nativist Know-Nothing Party into political power, their party’s name a direct reference to the secrecy of the society that started their movement. After the Civil War, Southern Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan, another effort to influence the social and political order through secret combination, and more specifically through violence. Thus it should come as no surprise that, as the newspaper editor Josephus Daniels and the Democratic chairman Furnifold Simmons developed their White Supremacy campaign in 1898, it relied on the clandestine scheming of more than one secret society in Cape Fear country. Some of these secret societies, operating as compartmentalized cells of the White Supremacy campaign in Wilmington, were called Group Six and the Secret Nine. They did much of the on-the-ground planning for the coup to take place after the election, establishing safehouses and organizing the “citizen patrols” and “vigilance committees” that would act as death squads when the violence erupted. Some among them may have truly believed the false news about an impending Black uprising that Josephus Daniels was purposely spreading, but many of them were in it for the sake of hate and just out for blood, as evidenced by the fact that the men commanded by these secret societies, most already sporting the red shirts symbolic of white supremacist anti-Reconstruction violence in the South, had to be held back and talked down from commencing with their planned reign of terror before election day. They were champing at the bit to strike at Alexander Manly, the offending Black newspaperman who had dared to suggest that whites raped Black women just as much or more than Black men raped white women and, even more offensive to their sensibilities, that it was possible for white women to welcome the amorous advances of Black men and even made such advances themselves. The Red Shirts wanted to lynch Manly, as they had wanted to do since the day his controversial editorial was printed, and they wanted to burn his newspaper, the Daily Record, to the ground. The leaders of the White Supremacy campaign had to reassure their Red Shirts that they would be set loose on Manly and the Record after the election, and that it benefitted them and their cause to keep the peace for the time being.

Alexander Manly. Photo Courtesy of the J.Y. Joyner Library, Special Collections, East Carolina University

With their newspapers creating the false impression that the Black citizens of Wilmington were planning some kind of uprising, they justified their mustering of a standing army of Red Shirt white supremacists who were ready at any moment to strike first and thereby create the race riot they said they feared. Indeed, Red Shirts were already assaulting Black residents in the streets with impunity. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the White Supremacists had full control of the situation, which they made clear to the Fusionist Governor of North Carolina, Daniel Russell. In their first bid to undermine the forthcoming election and seize power, the White Supremacists threatened Russell. First, they said that he couldn’t make a campaign stop in Wilmington because a speech from him would set off a race war. When Governor Russell canceled his visit, they pressed further, knowing that Russell feared being blamed for the outbreak of a race war. So they strong-armed Governor Russell into removing all the Fusionist and Republican candidates for county offices. Election Day was still weeks away, and already White Supremacists in Wilmington had threatened and bullied their way to victory in all county offices up for election. Then Election Day came, and lo and behold, there was no uprising of Black residents. Instead, Black and white men alike went to the polls early, hoping to cast their votes and avoid trouble. Red Shirt “vigilance committees” stopped and searched black men wherever they saw them, certain they would find them armed or carrying kerosene intent on setting the city ablaze, but of course they found nothing of the sort. Their harassment certainly dissuaded many Black citizens from even attempting to vote though, and in some precincts, Red Shirts actually turned Black voters away in flagrant acts of voter intimidation. Many Red Shirts wanted to attempt far more on Election Day, pushing to move in force on the Daily Record offices and Black newspaper editor Alexander Manly, but they were again kept in check by their leaders, who assured them that they would be set loose like attack dogs in the aftermath of the election. Governor Russell was obliged to travel to Wilmington, his hometown, to cast his vote, but he was on alert that Red Shirts might attack him. In fact, as he was escorted to the polls by White Supremacists who wanted to avoid such a scandal, he suffered nothing worse than some insults about his corpulence. Afterward, the governor suffered the indignity of having to switch trains and finally having to hide away in the baggage car to avoid Red Shirts who were hunting him throughout his return journey. Finally, that evening, as votes were being tallied, the White Supremacists carried out the most brazen part of their plan to steal the election. They surrounded polling stations in predominately Black and Fusionist precincts, turned off the streetlights outside, stormed inside shoving people over and upending tables, knocking lamps aside. In the ensuing confusion, as poll workers scrambled and fled in darkness or stamped out fires spreading from the overturned lanterns, the White Supremacists stuffed the ballot boxes before escaping. Some of their opponent candidates had already stepped down at the governor’s request due to the corrupt bargain they’d made, and now their voter intimidation and fraud resulted in White Supremacist Democrats illegitimately winning the rest of the races. By the time all the ballots were counted, the so-called “White Man’s ticket” had swept the election of 1898 in Wilmington.

On November 9th, the day after the election, the absolute domination of the White Supremacists was trumpeted in newspapers that did not give any hint that their victory was illegitimate. The day was quiet, and many believed the White Supremacists might cease their reign of terror, having gotten what they wanted, but their secret societies and other orchestrators of the campaign knew that more was to come. They had pent up the hatred and violence of their Red Shirt army as long as they could and could postpone its full expression no longer. One white supremacist newspaper printed a notice inviting the white men of Wilmington to a meeting at the courthouse, at which White Supremacists approved a statement they called the “Wilmington Declaration of Independence.” Their declaration resolved that they would no longer be “ruled by Negroes,” nor by whites “affiliating with negroes.” They denounced the right of Black men to vote, suggesting that they used the franchise only to antagonize the interests of whites, who “paid 95 percent of taxes.” They claimed that employing Black workers had somehow harmed Wilmington’s economy and resolved that those jobs must be “handed over to white men,” and that the Daily Record was to be shut down, its editor, Alexander Manly, banished from the city. But more than this, these seditionists resolved that the rest of the city’s Fusionist government was to be overthrown. The Mayor and the Chief of Police were to be forced to resign, and the entire board of aldermen likewise would be unceremoniously ejected from office. One man emerged from this meeting, rather against the preferences of the White Supremacy campaign orchestrators and the members of its secret society leadership, as the de facto leader of the mob. Alfred Moore Waddell, a Confederate veteran, skilled orator, and former congressman, had become something of a drunk with gambling debts. Over the last year, he had seen in the White Supremacy campaign an opportunity to restore his political career, and had wormed his way in by volunteering to give speeches, one speech in particular, declaring that they would “choke the Cape Fear with carcasses” in order to overturn the current social and political order, having stuck in the minds of many Red Shirts. Waddell had only heard about the meeting at the courthouse on November 9th last minute, but once he rushed over, he was called on to speak, much to the chagrin of the campaign’s leaders. After that, he was selected to lead a committee of 25 men to plan their overthrow of the government and to further ensure that no Black man would ever again hold a position of authority in Wilmington. Waddell’s Committee of Twenty-Five started by summoning the men they thought of as the leaders of the Black community. With little time to prepare, these Black leaders, all of them lawyers and business owners, answered the summons and came to the committee, hats in hand, terrified.

Alfred Moore Waddell. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.04294

Alfred Waddell gave these Black leaders an ultimatum, reading the white men’s “Declaration of Independence” aloud and insisting that the Back leadership reply in writing, agreeing to use their influence to meet the demands or face consequences. These summoned Black community leaders left the meeting and immediately wrote their letter of response, capitulating entirely and agreeing to do everything in their power to help ensure white supremacy in the city. But their capitulation would mean nothing. The young man tasked with delivering the letter to Waddell’s house became afraid of the Red Shirts who filled the streets, firing their rifles into the air, and instead chose to drop the letter off at the Post Office. After all, word had already been sent to Waddell that the Black leaders had acquiesced in writing. Waddell, however, was hoping for any reason to escalate the situation and in the process further elevate himself. The next day, November 10th, he emerged from his home after the deadline he had given to the Black leaders to respond, and despite knowing that their response was in the mail, he declared that they had failed to respond to the Committee’s demands. Taking command of some five hundred white gunmen who had gathered in Wilmington, spoiling for a riot, he marched them to the Daily Record office and politely knocked before breaking down the door and destroying the place. Broken piece of the printing press as well as fixtures and pieces of furniture flew out of the office’s windows, and then came smoke as the Red Shirts set the place on fire. A Black fire crew quickly responded as the fire spread to adjacent buildings, but the white rioters kept them at bay until the newspaper offices were entirely burned down. Many were disappointed that the office was empty and that Alexander Manly, the truth-telling Black newspaper editor, was not there for them to lynch. Apparently he had read the writing on the wall and had already fled the city for his life. According to one story passed down in his family, Manly, who often passed for white, was stopped by White Supremacist gunmen outside of Wilmington, who believing him white, confided that they were planning “a necktie party” for the Black newspaper editor Alexander Manly. Supposedly they even gave Manly a rifle and told him to keep an eye out for himself. For the rest of his life, Alexander Manly, who had shown great courage and principle in publishing his inflammatory editorials, would blame himself for what happened next in Wilmington.

At a cotton compress that employed many Black laborers, the workers’ wives showed up, telling them that the White Supremacists were attacking, and the workers left their tasks, begging their employer to let them off work in order to protect their families and homes. Waddell’s Red Shirts, hearing the rumor that a Black mob was forming at the compress, hurried there and begged Waddell to issue an order to shoot all the black workers present. Before that situation got out of hand, though, rumor of an armed Black mob drew the Red Shirts away. A small crowd of Black men had gathered in front of a saloon, dismayed at the burning of the Record and the threats of the Red Shirts. A few of them were armed with what few old weapons they could find, and the Red Shirt mob, believing the long foretold Black uprising had begun, converged on them, amassing across the street and cursing them. Finally, the white rioters unleashed a barrage of gunfire, and some of the Blacks fired back, though they were hopelessly outgunned. White Supremacists would afterward claim that the Blacks fired first, but this seems very unlikely. Twelve Blacks and only two whites were afterward delivered to the hospital with gunshot wounds following this first skirmish, and it is very telling that all of the Black patients had been shot in the back, whereas none of the white patients had been, which certainly would seem to indicate the whites were the aggressors. Regardless, though, the Red Shirts would go on to raise absolute hell that day, marching from place to place around the city, chasing after the ghosts of rumored Black mobs that didn’t exist and shooting down Black men in the streets along the way. Telegraphs were sent to Governor Russell claiming that the Black residents of Wilmington had started the race war they had long warned about, prompting Russell to declare martial law, activate the Wilmington Light Infantry, and send in the state militia. The problem was, many of the Red Shirt rioters were part of the Light Infantry and were commanded by White Supremacy campaign leaders, and the militia detachments sent in were full of white supremacists as well. They now had a mandate from the state to put down an uprising that didn’t exist. In other words, they had the go-ahead to freely massacre the Black people of Wilmington. They hitched the rapid-fire guns that they had obtained in anticipation of this day, and they rode through the streets in machine gun death squads, mowing down any Black citizens who were not already in hiding, and afterward they went to their churches and then to their homes, shooting up the walls of their refuges and demanding they surrender, whereupon they were more likely to be summarily executed than taken prisoner. Before the massacre was over, at least 60 Black residents had been murdered, but many think the number of dead is likely much higher, counting in the several hundreds. A multitude of the Black residents of Wilmington disappeared after the White Supremacist riot, and it is unclear whether they simply fled the city or were buried in the ditches that reports say Red Shirts filled with Black corpses.

White Supremacists posing in front of Alexander Manly’s Daily Record newspaper office after burning it down. Public domain.

 That evening, as the Black families of Wilmington left their homes and hid in cemeteries and swamps to avoid the death squads, Alfred Waddell, now the undisputed leader of the White Supremacist campaign of terror, convened his Committee of Twenty-Five and plotted the completion of their coup. They sent letters to the Fusionist Police Chief, the Mayor, and the Board of Aldermen, demanding that they gather at City Hall for an emergency session. Then they simply drew up a list of names for who would replace the current officeholders. Unsurprisingly, Waddell was selected as the new Mayor of Wilmington, and the rest of the offices would likewise be filled by staunch White Supremacists. When the time came, Waddell and his Committee, as well as a huge mob of Red Shirts, stormed City Hall, shouting taunts and curses as they entered the seat of local government and made their way through its corridors to the main chamber in a scene that should seem exceedingly familiar to us in the 2020s. The purpose of the emergency session was made very clear to all the remaining Fusionist government. They were being asked to resign, and the aldermen had no illusions about whether there was any real choice in the matter. Red Shirt gunmen leaned from the rails in the gallery, scowling and scorning them. Each duly elected board member resigned in turn, and their replacement was “nominated and elected,” though election had nothing to do with it. They were being installed by insurrectionists in a blatant coup. Afterward, Waddell would claim the whole process had been perfectly legal, and astoundingly, even Northern magazines and newspapers, like Collier’s and the New York Times, would report it as such. Northern journalists had been present in town both before and during the riot because of all the anticipation of a race war, but they invariably interviewed whites rather than Blacks about the troubles and took their word for what was going on. After the overthrow of Wilmington’s government, the Times shamefully reported that the city’s Board of Aldermen had simply “resigned in response to public sentiment.” Thus the lies of seditionists and insurrectionists were recorded as truth and became the accepted historical narrative for what happened on November 10th, 1898. The lies proliferated through the years in pamphlets and even textbooks. It was not until 1951 that a historian rejected the White Supremacist version of events. Now, for the most faithful accounting of what really happened, you can read my principal source for this episode, the Pulitzer Prize-winning work by David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy.

In the days after the coup, while the working class Black residents of Wilmington stayed hidden in the forests and swamps outside of town, the Black business owners and white Fusionist leaders remained, confident that the White Supremacists would relent after getting what they wanted. The White Supremacist insurrectionaries, though, were not satisfied. They rounded up Black and Fusionist pillars of the community and directed them to depart from the city and never return. The choice was banishment or certain death, and they were not even given enough time to put their affairs in order. Even among those who complied, some still did not make it out alive, like a Black barber, Carter Peamon, who got onto a train that also carried a group of Red Shirts and was later found dead in the woods with numerous gunshot wounds. Even one white Fusionist, a deputy sheriff the White Supremacists had forced to resign, would likely have been murdered by a gang of Red Shirts during his attempt to leave town if it weren’t for the fact that he gave the Masonic distress call and some whites among his attackers were oathbound to protect him. Eventually, Mayor Alfred Waddell was obliged to get his Red Shirts under control, as it reflected poorly on him when they swarmed the city jail and attempted to lynch the Black men being held there. Waddell slowly but surely leashed his war dogs, and he even made attempts to reassure the Black families hiding in the forests and swamps that it would be safe for them to return, since the city relied on their labor despite their intentions to give as many jobs as they could over to whites. Meanwhile, the white newspaper propaganda continued to churn out falsehoods, pretending everything that had happened was perfectly lawful, and minimizing the violence that had occurred. And among the Northern newspapers that did criticize the methods of Southern Democrats, many nevertheless praised the outcome, tacitly accepting that the city was in better hands than it had been under the Fusionists. It was clear enough that even in the North, most white supporters of emancipation and universal male suffrage still did not feel that Black men were competent to hold public office and wield authority.

Top: a group of Black residents in the Wilmington community. Bottom: a group of the White Supremacist Red Shirts who massacred and banished people like those in the above photo.

Republican President William McKinley was a son of abolitionists who had campaigned against Democrat intimidation of black voters, and yet, he did little to address the insurrection in Wilmington, North Carolina, despite the Afro-American Council beseeching him to present the matter to Congress. Instead, his Attorney General directed a U.S. attorney in North Carolina to investigate the matter with a view to indict. The attorney dutifully undertook the investigation, but in the end, he found no political will in Washington to organize a grand jury. So much as I fear will the orchestrators of the Capitol insurrection of January 6th, 2020, the North Carolinian organizers and perpetrators of the White Supremacist campaign to steal the 1898 election, commit wholesale massacre, and overthrow the government ended up getting away with it scot-free. And if there is one further lesson to drive home why we cannot let the orchestrators of even a failed coup attempt get off without penalty again, it’s the terrible harm that these White Supremacists went on to do while in power. The following year, White Supremacist Democrats took control of North Carolina’s legislature, and they immediately set about enacting policies that would suppress the Black vote. The coup de grace came when they established a poll tax and required a literacy test to vote, but with the caveat that men whose fathers or grandfathers had voted prior to 1867—which of course was the year just before Black men received the right to vote—would be exempt from the requirement. So essentially poor, illiterate whites could still vote without taking the literacy test and paying the poll tax, but most poor, illiterate Blacks could not. This Grandfather Clause was one of the early examples of Jim Crow laws, a law designed to privilege whites and ensure that Blacks remained forever an underclass. Anyone who suggests that there never has been systemic racism can hardly respond to this, and those who claim there no longer remains such systemic racism simply don’t understand how these actions reverberate even today through class divisions, geographic segregation, educational disparity, and enduring racial inequality. These policies and structures spread across the U.S. North Carolina took the idea of the Grandfather Clause from Louisiana, where a similar constitutional amendment had been passed, and in the same way, other Southern states after 1898 used the North Carolina playbook to intimidate and suppress black votes. In the end, this is why we must hold the ringleaders of the January 6th insurrection to account. This is why not only civilians must be prosecuted, but elected representatives who were directly involved, including and especially the former President. They must at the very least be barred from ever again holding office under the 14th Amendment. If they are not held responsible, then their failed coup will only invite further attempts, and when the enemies of democracy seize power, who knows what authoritarian systems and structures they may attempt to establish.

 Further Reading

Bump, Philip. “The Villages sees a voter-fraud outbreak — with a MAGA twist.” The Washington Post, 5 January 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/05/villages-sees-voter-fraud-outbreak-with-maga-twist/.

DeSantis, John. “Wilmington, N.C., Revisits a Bloody 1898 Day and Reflects.” The New York Times, 4 June 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/us/04wilmington.html.

“Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.” Reveal, 24 Oct. 2020, https://revealnews.org/podcast/remembering-a-white-supremacist-coup/.

Solender, Andrew. “All The Elections Trump Has Claimed Were Stolen Through Voter Fraud.” Forbes, 29 Nov. 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2020/11/29/all-the-elections-trump-has-claimed-were-stolen-through-voter-fraud/?sh=214fed9d1d30.

Zucchino, David. Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020.

The Coup on Cape Fear - Part One: The Dark Scheme

They marched in a raucous throng, shouting and chanting, making their way inexorably toward the building that housed the seat of their government. Their intentions were clear. Manipulated and roused to action by an inundation of fake news during the recent election year, they were set on overthrowing officials who had been lawfully elected to represent them. They meant to drive them out, by coercion or by violence, if necessary, for they had not shrunk from violence that day. This was a message to the whole of the country, that men such as they, white men who felt keenly that political change had taken from them the power they felt they deserved, the supremacy to which they felt entitled, that they would not be governed by those they despised, even if they had to defy the laws they claimed to love in order to make sure of it. So with the recent election still fresh in their minds, they stormed the hall of government, kicking up a riot as they made their way through its corridors, shouting out insults as they flooded into the main chamber, pouring into the room and heaping abuse on the duly elected representatives for whom they had come searching. Innocent lives were lost in their historic insurrection, yet afterward, when the dust settled, they and the journalists who had helped to incite them would present these insurrectionists as victims, and as patriots. In the end, there would be no real accountability for the orchestrators of this coup, but the date would be long remembered and live in infamy . . . November 10th 1898.

What’s that? Oh you thought I was talking about January 6th, 2020? I suppose they do have some striking similarities, now that you mention it, but I’m referring to a different insurrection, which occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, 123 years ago. They’re quite different, I assure you. The Wilmington coup was deadly… well, yes, so was January 6th, but I mean deadlier, taking far more lives. And it was perpetrated by white supremacists… well, I mean explicitly, like ALL the insurrectionists were white supremacists, as in self-professed and proud, rather than on January 6th when it was just a good portion of the insurrectionists. Well, if nothing else, the insurrectionists of 1898 North Carolina were at least different in that they were staging a coup following an election they actually won, or rather, stole, and perhaps the biggest difference is that, they actually succeeded in their coup that day, and got away with it afterward, too. Surely those who incited the attempted coup of 2020 won’t also get away with such brazen sedition. OK, you’ve convinced me. Maybe the story of the Wilmington insurrection is indeed the perfect historical lesson we need to better understand how we must respond to the insurrection that took place in Washington, D.C., a year ago.

*

It has now been a full year since Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen election encouraged Qanon conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and true believer Trumpers to lay siege to the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., in an effort to overturn the election results by coercing then Vice President Mike Pence not to accept the electoral vote tally. In marking a year since the Capitol attack, I want to shed some light on the event by looking to the past. The Capital attack of 2020 was hardly the first insurrection or attempt to overthrow the government in the U.S. Not counting numerous slave rebellions, the most famous of which I will have more to say about later, there remains a laundry list of failed insurrections like the one that occurred a year ago. There is Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Fries’ Rebellion, and the Dorr Rebellion. There was the State of Muskogee in Florida, the German Coast Uprising in Louisiana, and the Anti-Rent War in Upstate New York. Of course, John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry would count as one, though that too was a slave revolt, and the secession of the Confederate States can be counted as the most significant. Several insurrections occurred following the end of the Civil War as a response to Reconstruction, and these typically involved white supremacists, like the White League in Louisiana, which tried to rise up against their state government in 1874. The Wilmington Coup that I will be discussing has been called the only successful insurrection or coup in American history, but that’s not quite accurate. One white supremacist, anti-Reconstruction insurrection, the Election Massacre of 1874 in Alabama, was quite successful in driving out the Reconstruction government and suppressing Black voters, and was also, as its name indicates, very deadly. Indeed, it might even have been viewed as an example to follow by the orchestrators of Wilmington’s insurrection decades later. The reason I will focus on the Wilmington insurrection as a precedent and a lesson warning us against letting the leaders of such an insurrection go unpunished is because of some striking similarities. Like the previous insurrection in Alabama and like the Capitol attack of 2020, the Wilmington coup involved a reactionary minority, outnumbered at the polls, who sought to take back power illegitimately. As with every major insurrection in the 21st century, both the Alabama insurrection of 1874 and the one we’ll focus on in 1898 North Carolina were perpetrated by right-wing extremists, and much like the Capitol attack, which has seen hundreds of participants prosecuted but none of its orchestraters, including media figures, congressional representatives, and the former president, held accountable, the leaders of these anti-Reconstruction coups were never prosecuted. However, unlike on January 6th, these insurrections succeeded, creating illegitimate, unelected governments, and encouraging similar violence in other Southern states to intimidate and disenfranchise Black voters. In fact, it can be argued that it was in this time, as white supremacists sought to illegally fortify their control of civil government and limit the political influence and economic opportunities of free Blacks that the kind of structural, systemic racism we see today first began to take shape. But what makes the Wilmington insurrection especially relevant today is the way that it was propelled by fake news propaganda, and the way its orchestrators afterward projected guilt onto their opponents. Just as apologists on the Right have claimed a false equivalence between Capitol insurrectionists and racial justice protestors, or attempted to gaslight the country by saying it was actually far-left provocateurs in disguise who stormed the Capitol, after the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, its leaders assured the rest of the nation that their seizure of power was all perfectly lawful and that their violence was actually warranted to quell a race riot initiated by Black residents of the city. The scary part is that most seem to have believed them, and this false narrative of their massacre was accepted as accurate history for more than fifty years.

This Thomas Nast cartoon depicts anti-Reconstructionist white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White League combining forces to restore a “white man’s government” and redeem the “lost cause” by brutally oppressing free Citizens.

In order to grasp the motivations of the insurrectionists in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the end of the 19th century, we must look further back, at the struggle for political power in this important coastal city beginning during the Civil War. Wilmington, as with all of North Carolina, had always been a contested state, split between the pro-slavery Democratic Party and the anti-slavery Republican Party. The state was among the very last to secede and join the Confederacy, and after the Confederacy’s collapse and the end of the Civil War, Wilmington was something of a Mecca for free Blacks. There had always been a relatively large population of free Black people living in North Carolina even before the war between the states, and from the nation’s independence until 1835, the state actually permitted free Black men to vote. And at Wilmington, a bustling trade hub on Cape Fear, there were many port jobs available to Black workers, loading and hauling shipments of fruits and vegetables, rice and corn, peanuts and cotton, tar and guano. Out in the forests, they worked in the timber industry, or harvesting sap to process into turpentine. In 1868, after more than 30 years denied the vote, free Black men who lived and worked around Wilmington were again given the opportunity to exercise the franchise, and even to campaign as delegates to the state’s constitutional convention. With the state under the control of Union forces following the end of the war, and Confederates who refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the Union being denied the right to hold office or vote, it was no surprise that Republicans took the majority of delegate positions in the convention. More surprising and galling to the unreconstructed rebels, though, was that 13 Black men won their races and became delegates. The new state constitution being voted on might guarantee universal male suffrage, which, with the growing population of eligible Black voters around Cape Fear, meant that the party of slavery might never hold power again in cities like Wilmington. This was unacceptable to white supremacists, so unsurprisingly, the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, only recently formed in Tennessee, increased in that area and commenced a voter intimidation campaign. A month before the election, the KKK placed placards around the city, warning that “When darkness reigns, then is the hour to strike,” and publishing notices in newspapers stating that “THE AVENGER COMETH WITH THE NIGHT.” They even went so far as to parade ominously through the streets in their hoods, hauling a cart full of dry bones behind them. What the KKK did not count on, however, was the leadership of one delegate, a relentless campaigner for Black suffrage named Abraham Galloway, who roused his fellow Black men to patrol the streets with pistols and fence posts in hand, ready to combat any white-clad terrorist attempting to intimidate Black voters. Galloway’s resistance campaign was successful, the Black vote was not suppressed, Black men in North Carolina regained the right to vote under its new constitution, and the Ku Klux Klan, as such, did not come back to Wilmington again for several decades.

After the passage of the new constitution, the anti-slavery Republican Party, bolstered by the Black vote and the disenfranchisement of former Confederates, kept control of the state for only a couple years. In 1870, former Whigs and white supremacists formed the Conservative Party and took back the legislature. Eventually the Conservative Party merged with the dominant Democrats, who by fearmongering and race-baiting were able to muster their white base enough to retake power in North Carolina through the 1870s and 1880s, during which time they rigged the game, making it so that certain county official positions that had been going to Black candidates were appointed by them instead of elected, and finding procedural excuses to suppress the Black vote. However, following a recession, many white farmers left the Democratic Party and joined the Populist Party in the early 1890s. A new alliance between the Republicans and the Populists, called Fusionism, would eventually retake the legislature and restore the election of county officials. By this time, sixteen counties in eastern North Carolina boasted Black majorities, and starting back in 1880, Wilmington had had the highest percentage of Black citizens of any city in the South, with a staggering 60 percent of the city’s population. The result was Fusionist domination in local politics, and Black residents winning election to office and earning appointment to positions typically reserved for white men. Wilmington, North Carolina, between 1894 and 1898, was ahead of its time as a truly racially diverse community. In addition to the majority white Republican and Populist officials, like the mayor, the police chief, and the deputy sheriff, there were several Black officials, including magistrates, aldermen, and police officers. In the end, this is what chafed Wilmington’s white supremacists the most. It wasn’t the loss of their party’s political influence, or even being outnumbered by free Blacks, who mostly kept to their own neighborhoods or to the poor, wooded areas outside town. Certainly the poor, jobless whites resented when employers hired a Black laborer instead of them, but the real impetus for the white supremacy campaign mounted in 1898 was the fact that some Black men had been elevated to positions of authority over white men. The mere thought that a white man might be arrested by a Black police officer and convicted by a Black magistrate led white supremacists to bemoan so-called “negro domination.” Of course, this was classic race-baiting. Black officials were still in the minority among the Republican leaders in Wilmington and across the state, and white Republicans were sensitive to the racial resentments of Democrats, and maintained an informal segregation, such that Black magistrates decided cases for Black residents, and Black police arrested only Black offenders. After all, despite many liberal and even radical Republicans in favor of racial equality before the law, many white Republicans still shared the same notions that Black and white should not be social equals. But these first gestures toward Jim Crow segregation were not enough for white supremacist Democrats, who would not be happy unless the Black residents of the Cape Fear area were stripped of any power and made as subservient and afraid as they once had been under the lashes of harsh overseers and cruel slave patrols.

A North Carolina newspaper cartoon spreading propaganda about “negro domination.”

Here, before I go further and discuss the inception of Wilmington’s White Supremacy Campaign of 1898, I feel I must digress to clarify something about the Civil War–era and postbellum Democratic and Republican parties. You’ll sometimes hear conservative commentators today criticize the modern-day Democratic Party as being the party of slavery and the KKK. Usually, it’s in defense of the modern-day Republican Party, which has become the favored party of white supremacists—a kind of whataboutism or tu quoque fallacy, a hurling of the same charge back at the accuser… y’know: classic “no puppet, you’re the puppet” rhetoric. But those who try to use the history of the Democratic Party against them like this are either ignorant or arguing in bad faith. First of all, it’s a conspiracy theory at heart, arguing that Democrats have somehow made the world forget that they used to be pro-slavery white supremacists and that they probably still secretly are. And if you accepted this, then you would have to accept that Republicans also must have taken on a kind of secret façade, one that actively promotes voter suppression, denies the existence of systemic racial injustice, rejects the grievances of racial justice protesters, and appears to actively be courting the support of white supremacists. So if Democrats today are secretly the party of racism, this must mean that the GOP secretly supports universal suffrage, stands behind BLM, actually wants schools to teach the history of racism despite all their protests, and only draws the support of white supremacists because those stupid racists have failed to see through the mutual ruse of both parties. It’s absurd, and such gaslighting relies on historical blindness; it only works on someone who doesn’t understand how our dominant political parties changed over the course of the 20th century. Some will try to simplify this change by saying that the two parties are just different parties with the same names, which is inaccurate, or that they merely “switched” or just swapped platforms, but that is not strictly true either. The change was gradual, called a realignment. At the same time as the Populists in North Carolina were giving Republicans the majority they needed, elsewhere, they were allying with Democrats and beginning to change the party. While previously, Republicans had been the party of a strong central government and Democrats campaigned against it, the populist William Jennings Bryan, who would eventually come to control the Democratic Party, argued instead that the federal government should have different priorities, focusing more on social justice. Bryan put Democrats on the path toward Progressivism, and after the Great Depression, the party was nearly unrecognizable. Meanwhile, Republicans were, at the same time, gradually losing Black voter support, and eventually moved away from arguing for a stronger federal government. Surely this was partly rhetorical, to move in opposition to their political rivals, who now advocated for federal programs, but it was also practical. As historian Eric Rauchway has pointed out, the Republican Party has always been the party of big business interests. Early on, those business interests profited from the federal programs the Republicans pushed for, like the creation of a national currency and the institution of protective tariffs, but later, their big business supporters favored a less intrusive federal government, and the Republicans adjusted their principles accordingly. The realignment according to racial justice issues can be most clearly observed in the politics of the 1950s and ’60s, when it was Democrats who finally delivered significant civil rights legislation, and when Republicans achieved increased political influence in the South through their Southern Strategy, effectively becoming the new party of Southern white supremacy. So to sum up in a simplistic way, Republicans used to be socially progressive, but now Democrats are, and Democrats used to be the party of racism, but now Republicans are. Through it all, however, Republicans have remained the party of the rich. So when someone suggests that you should decide which party’s candidates to support based on what their parties used to represent, remember that it makes a lot more sense to support a party because of what it stands for now, or better yet, to support candidates based on their personal convictions.

Back to Wilmington in 1898, we have Democrats looking for a path to reclaim power from the Fusionist alliance of Populists and Republicans, and we have white residents resenting the social and political equality awarded to the city’s Black majority. Having learned from the actions of anti-Reconstructionists elsewhere in recent decades, some Democrats planned out a White Supremacy Campaign ahead of the election that would deliver them everything they had lately lost to the Fusionists. And I’m not just calling it a “white supremacy campaign” because it was white men wanting to take free Blacks and their allies down a few pegs. No, that’s what its orchestrators called it, proudly, in capital letters. Devised by North Carolina’s Democratic Party chairman, Furnifold Simmons, and Raleigh newspaper publisher Josephus Daniels, the plan was first and foremost to inflame resentment among white residents throughout what they called the “Negroized East” of North Carolina, with especial focus on the Black Belt counties, including Wilmington. This meant a focused propaganda campaign in his and other white supremacist newspapers, lamenting the suffering of poor Southern whites under so-called “Negro domination,” and arranging for public speakers to whip up the white populace to a fever pitch. If their propaganda campaign was successful, they correctly surmised that they would be able to command their own private army of enraged white supremacists come election day and would be able not only to carry the day through intimidation and fraud, but could even go further than that in the days after the election. As they commenced with their plan, using the printed word as well as political cartoons, what Simmons and Daniels found was that they needed to stir up more than just resentment over Black residents voting and holding positions of authority. They needed to spread fear throughout Cape Fear country, make it live up to its name. Following Daniels’s lead, white supremacist newspapers fell back on the age-old specter of the Black man as a beastly rapist. They printed story after lurid story about affairs between Black men and white women, which they presented as rapes, for the prevailing sentiment was that intercourse between the races cannot possibly be consensual. It got so ridiculous that he would report on complete non-events, like a white woman noticing a Black man cross her yard or a teen girl who felt uncomfortable in passing two Black teen boys in the street, and he would report them as narrow escapes from rape with headlines like “No Rape Committed; But a Lady Badly Frightened by a Worthless Negro.” He focused his reporting on Wilmington in order to demonstrate what he called “the result of Negro control in the city.” And make no mistake: he was not in earnest. Josephus Daniels knew what he was doing. In a later memoir, he admitted “that the Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality,” remarking that, “The propaganda was having good effect.” It succeeded in winning white Populists and even some Republicans to their cause because of deeply ingrained racial tensions, but also because the manipulative and false reporting was not robustly challenged. In one case, a Black newspaper editor did have the courage to challenge the propaganda, and it cost him everything.

White supremacist newspaper propagandist and orchestrator of the Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898, Josephus Daniels.

Alexander Lightfoot Manly was the publisher of a respected weekly Black newspaper in Wilmington, the Record, and he had long tried to follow in the tradition of Abraham Galloway before him, advocating for equality and justice for the Black citizens around Cape Fear. When he stirred the pot, he even made some enemies with certain ministers and upstanding figures in the Black community who preached accommodation, urging the Black residents of Wilmington to keep their heads down and avoid confrontation with whites at all costs. And none of Manly’s editorials upset them and enraged white supremacists as much as his challenges to the notion of Black men as insatiable, beastly rapists. Manly had the courage and honesty to point out the double standard, remarking on how frequently white men raped Black women without consequence. He suggested that if they were to condemn all rape, and seek to prosecute rapists whether they were Black or white, they would find the Black residents of Wilmington their greatest allies in such a crusade against this heinous crime. And he further challenged claims about the frequency with which Black men raped white women, rejecting the doctrine that white women could not possibly be consensual paramours of the Black men who may be caught with them. While Manly may have believed his editorials could do some good, speaking truth to power as good journalists should, in the hands of Josephus Daniels’s and Furnifold Simmons’s White Supremacy Campaign, it became little more than fuel for the white hot fire they were stoking. They reprinted his most damning editorial over and over, suggesting that it was a provocation and an admission that Black men openly intended to ravage their white women. White supremacists threatened to haul Manly out of his newspaper office and lynch him, but Josephus Daniels discouraged such mob action. After all, it was only August. He much preferred to keep stoking resentments until Election Day, so he pressured the Republican Governor, Daniel Russell, to condemn Manly’s editorial. With white advertisers ceasing to do business with him, this was the beginning of the end for Alexander Manly in Wilmington.

During the next leg of his White Supremacist Campaign, Josephus Daniels kicked his fake news propaganda machine into high gear. He began to report on supposed rumors that the Black residents of Wilmington were planning an uprising. Never mind the fact that he and Furnifold Simmons and certain secret societies in Wilmington were planning their own uprising, which of course he did not report on. No, he reported unconfirmed rumors about Black women intending to burn down the white homes in which they were servants, of the entire Black populace intending to embark on a murder campaign house to house if the Democrats won the day. It was all part of the white supremacists’ plan to gaslight, to obfuscate, to project. Such that, when they finally chose their moment to enact violence, they could say they were defending themselves. And it worked. The white citizens of Wilmington began to stockpile an arsenal of revolvers and Winchester rifles. They even acquired a rapid-fire gun that they placed on a tugboat just off shore, and they invited certain Black leaders to a demonstration of their artillery piece just to intimidate them. Unsurprisingly, some Black citizens, fearing for their safety, also attempted to acquire guns, and the white gun sellers refused to fulfill their orders and informed Josephus Daniels, who reported on it as proof of the Black conspiracy to rise up in armed revolt, writing, “The Dark Scheme Has Been Detected.” In October, at a white supremacist rally called the Great White Man’s Basket Picnic, Red Shirt brigades from other regions travelled to put on a show. These mounted terrorists in red shirts showed how a terrifying brigade of armed white supremacists could intimidate Black and Republican voters. And the keynote speaker, Pitchfork Tillman, former governor of South Carolina and rabid white supremacist, spoke of his successful campaign to intimidate Black residents in his home state. He wore a scowl and an eyepatch as he recounted his involvement in the Hamburg Massacre, in which he and his Red Shirts oversaw the murder of six Black men, an event that set off a series of similar attacks and an estimated 100 further murders leading up to the election of 1876, in which the Democrats took power, or “redeemed” the state. Following the Great White Man’s Rally and Picnic, the white supremacists of Cape Fear began wearing red and forming brigades of their own, and the lynchings of Black men steadily increased.

Amexander Manly, editor of the Black newspaper the Daily Record, and a courageous voice against white supremacist propaganda in late 19th-century North Carolina.

This was not the first time that false rumors of a forthcoming Black rebellion resulted in indiscriminate violence in North Carolina. Back in 1831, just north of North Carolina’s border with Virginia, Nat Turner initiated his bloody rebellion, killing more than fifty white residents of Southampton County, including women and children. While he and his followers remained at large, similar rumors began to spread south of the border, in North Carolina, that slaves were planning a large scale uprising. As in Wilmington more than 60 years later, the newspapers fanned the flames of this panic, falsely reporting that armies of fugitive slaves were marching into North Carolina, murdering white families and freeing their slaves to add to their numbers. It was the most horrific nightmare of slaveholders throughout the South, every Southern white man and woman’s secret terror, and whites in North Carolina, including Wilmington, reacted to their worst fear coming true without questioning its veracity. They rounded up Black people who had the misfortune of being out on the street or away from their plantations, many of whom had not even heard about Nat’s Fray, as it was called, and they whipped them, tortured them, burned them at the stake, beheaded them and placed their heads on posts as warnings to the other rebel slaves, who didn’t actually exist. In fact, there was not a single instance of a slave killing a white person in North Carolina at the time, or for some time afterward. The newspapers, in warning about a massacre of white residents, had incited the massacre of Black men and women instead. In 1898, when Josephus Daniels ratcheted up his White Supremacy Campaign to lie to the public about Black plans for an armed uprising, he was tapping into that same fear. And he certainly was knowingly misreporting, for accomplices in his campaign had hired Black detectives to infiltrate the community and report back on what the Black residents of Wilmington were up to, and these detectives had reported that the Black residents were not up to anything besides fearing for their lives. By this time, Daniels’s and Simmons’s White Supremacy Campaign had determined to foment real violence after Election Day, so we can assume that when he began to spread rumors of this so-called Dark Scheme on Cape Fear, he was counting on his white readers having the very same reaction as they’d had in 1831. He would not be disappointed. Join me for Part Two to hear more about how this disinformation campaign led to voter intimidation, election fraud, armed insurrection, and massacre.

 Further Reading

“Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.” Reveal, 24 Oct. 2020, https://revealnews.org/podcast/remembering-a-white-supremacist-coup/.

Rauchway, Eric. “When and (to an extent) why did the parties switch places?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 May 2010, www.chronicle.com/blognetwork/edgeofthewest/when-and-to-an-extent-why-did-the-parties-switch-places.

Zucchino, David. Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020.

A Very Historically Blind Christmas Carol

The year is 1888, and the city of London is gripped by terror because of the ripper murders. This serial killer mutilated at least five women at night around certain impoverished districts of the city, though other killings were also believed by many to have been committed by the same person. Newspaper coverage of the murders turned into one of the first true media frenzies, and the result has been a lasting legacy of myths and pseudohistory surrounding the murders. The story of Jack the Ripper is one I’d certainly like to tell one day on this podcast, but this Christmas season, I want to focus on another story that is said to have occurred in this time, while all of London was locking their doors, afraid of the bloody phantom killer stalking the streets. That year, during the week before Christmas a young girl named Carol Poles went missing. When the authorities failed to find young Carol, her family and others from her community banded together to find her, terrified that she might become the victim of the Ripper, if that wasn’t already her fate. However, as they went from house to house, knocking on doors and asking about their dear Carol, few would open their doors and talk to them, fearing that it was the Ripper lurking outside their door. Therefore, as a signal that they meant no harm to the occupants of each home they visited, they sang Christmas songs outside each door, and only when the residents opened up did they inquire whether little Carol Poles had been seen. Alas, they never found young Carol, but every year, they kept up the tradition in her memory, singing songs from door to door, and that is why we call Christmas songs sung from door to door Christmas Carols. Isn’t that a fascinating story. Too bad it’s utter nonsense. It’s unclear where this urban legend originated, but it’s very clear that it is hogwash. If they first called Christmas songs carols in 1888, it’s rather hard to explain why Charles Dickens called his novella A Christmas Carol in 1843. So where does the word “carol” come from? Some identify John Awdlay, a chaplain in Shropshire, as being the author of the earliest known English usage of this word when he compiled a list of 25 “caroles of Cristemas” in 1426. Certainly the Oxford English Dictionary confirms it was well in use by the 1500s. As for its origin, some, like Andrew Gant, author of one of my principal sources for this episode, The Carols of Christmas, claim that its derivation is murky and that it is said to have been borrowed from many different languages. The Oxford English dictionary tells us the English word was in use as far back as the 1300s referring to songs or dances generally, and not necessarily those associated with Christmas, and it traces the word etymologically to Old French. However, from there the origins do indeed become obscure, and there is debate over whether it may be derived from the Greek-Latin chorus or some other ancient derivation, such as the Latin corolla, or little crown, referring to the ring-dances also called “carols.” So as we begin to look closely at these famous songs of Christmas, we already see a patchwork of myths, misinformation, and historical blind spots.

We cannot begin our study of the little known history and surprising facts behind certain well-known Christmas carols without first properly delving into the true history behind the tradition of caroling from door to door, as we hear in the classic carol “Here We Come a-Wassailing.” This tradition has its roots in the older forms of Christmas that I spoke about in my first Christmas special, when it was more of a midwinter bacchanal that saw the norms of society, from gender to class, upended topsy-turvy style, which of course I also spoke further about in my second Christmas special. If you haven’t listened to those, you’ve got plenty of fun seasonal listening in store this holiday. The word “wassail” can be traced to an Old Norse toast to one’s health. “Waes hael,” was toasted, essentially meaning “Be healthy,” and the response was “Drinc hael,” whereupon the toasters drank. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote in the 12th century that it entered the English language when the Anglo-Saxon chieftain’s daughter Rowena taught it to Vortigern, King of the Britons, though this is pure mythologizing. How this toasting became specifically associated with Christmas is unclear. The toast was commonly shouted at coronations, some of which occurred in Christmas time during the 11th and 12th centuries, including those of William the Conqueror and Stephen of Blois. However, it may simply be because people did a lot of drinking during the wild old Christmas festivities. Since then, though, the toast has evolved in meaning. A wassail is a drink, typically some kind of spiced ale, commonly drunk in Christmas and Twelfth Night festivities, and the verb, wassailing, refers to the nocturnal visits of the poor to houses of the affluent. These house-to-house visits were not the mannered and lovely caroling of today, however, but rather a kind of drunken form of panhandling in which wassailers asked for money or food. Often the singing was more of a threat. If the occupants did not treat them generously, they would annoy them with their intoxicated caterwauling until they got what they wanted. This, the true nature of Christmas caroling, may surprise some of you listeners, but Christmas carols are full of surprises like this. When you look into them, you find that lovely songs may not be about what you think they’re about, may not even be about Christmas at all, and may have a surprising history behind them.

A Christmas Eve 1842 issue of the Illustrated London News, depicting Father Christmas in a wassail bowl.

Ever since the premiere of A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, watching it has become something of a national tradition in the U.S. In 1992, the Peanuts gang returned with an all-new Christmas special, It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown. Just as the first special had encouraged a more traditional Christian view of the holiday, the new special once again had Linus turn to the Bible for some insight, this time seeking an understanding of the classic repetitive song The Twelve Days of Christmas. “That song drives me crazy,” says Sally. “What in the world is a calming bird?” In response, Linus cracks open a Bible and says, “A calling bird is a kind of partridge. In 1 Samuel 26:20, it says: ‘For the king of Israel has come out to seek my life...just as though he were hunting the calling bird.’ There's a play on words here, you see? David was standing on a mountain, calling. And he compared himself to a partridge being hunted.” In reality, “calling birds” are not “a kind of partridge.” In fact, the original English version of this song, first published in the 18th century as a children’s rhyme, actually describes the 4th day’s gift as “colly birds,” which referred to European blackbirds. Oddly, among the many translations of this verse in 1 Samuel, none matches what Linus reads, and most translate it as a partridge, not a “calling bird.” It’s very strange then that they didn’t just have Linus talking about the first day’s gift, the iconic partridge in a peartree. But this line too sparks debate among ornithologists, since a partridge is a ground bird that would not typically be found in a tree. Some have looked to an alternate version of the song which says that on the first day of Christmas, the true love gives “a part of a juniper tree,” suggesting some corruption has turned it into a partridge in a peartree. However, most of the gifts in the song are game birds, so it would stand to reason that it is a partridge. Another explanation lies in the fact that the original English version was a translation of an older French rhyme, Les Douze Mois, The Twelve Months, not a Christmas rhyme at all. It is pointed out that the Old French word for a partridge was un perdrix, which sounds very much like a peartree. However, if the line was originally bilingual, “A partridge and un perdrix,” that would make it a gift of two birds on day one, spoiling the whole structure of the song. Regardless of what the original line was and how it was corrupted, one thing is certain. The song is absolutely not derived from that verse in 1 Samuel that Linus implies it is from.
Charles Schulz would not be the last to suggest that this classic Christmas song, which had evolved like so many others from earlier versions that were not about Christmas at all, actually has some religious meaning that it doesn’t really have. Since the 1990s, a claim has been circulating the Internet that the Twelve Days of Christmas was actually a secret coded Catholic catechism dating to the English Reformation, when Catholics could not openly practice their faith. However, this claim, often credited to 20th century Canadian hymnologist Hugh McKellar, doesn’t make much sense on a number of levels. First, the code itself is asinine. It says the twelve drummers drumming represented the twelve points of the Apostles Creed; the eleven pipers piping were actually the eleven apostles (minus the Twelfth Apostle, Judas Iscariot); the lords a-leaping clearly must represent the 10 Commandments; the ladies dancing were the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit; the maids a-milking stood for the eight beatitudes; the swans a-swimming represented the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit; the geese a-laying were the six days of creation, the five golden rings really the five Books of Moses or Pentateuch; the four calling birds could be the four gospels; three French hens were the three gifts of faith, hope, and love; two turtle doves stood for the Old and New Testaments; and the partridge in a pear tree symbolized Jesus Christ on the cross, with God himself as the “true love” that gives all these things. The clearest refutation of this claim was given by Snopes, which pointed out that there is simply no support for this claim beyond the simple repeating of the claim itself. If we look at all these supposed symbolic connections, there is no correlation beyond the numbers of the things. There is no clear reason to associate Christ with a partridge, or leaping lords with commandments, or milkmaids with beatitudes. Also, besides the fact that there were varying levels of toleration of Catholicism in the centuries between Henry VIII and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, most of these secretly coded symbols, with the exception of the 12 points of the Apostle’s Creed, are just Christian things, not explicitly Catholic things. It’s not as though the Reformation did away with all talk about Christ, his Apostles, the Holy Spirit, and the books of the Old Testament. In fact, the time when the contents of the song might have been forbidden would have been during the English Civil War, when Puritans briefly outlawed Christmas, but in that case, it would have been the carol itself that was banned, not the mere mention of certain Christian concepts. While this Christmas carol myth is altogether ridiculous, it is perfectly representative of the way people simply don’t understand the origins of their favorite seasonal songs and sometimes choose to completely invent a fictional origin that suits their worldviews.

Statue of Saint Wenceslaus in St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague

One classic Christmas song, with an earworm melody and an uplifting message of Christian charity in the face of a harsh winter, is Good King Wenceslaus, but the history behind this popular Christmas song reveals that it is not quite what it seems. First, there is the ancient history of King Wenceslaus himself, who was actually a 10th century Duke of Bohemia, named Václav. According to the legend that that would see him later venerated as a saint and remembered as a king by Czechs, he was an honorable and virtuous ruler, devoted to Catholicism despite the pagan beliefs of much of his family, and he was known for his great charity to the lowliest of his subjects. This is the legend that would inspire the songwriter who would further immortalize him, but the reality of his life was rather more violent than the song lets on. When his father died, his grandmother became regent, but his pagan mother resented her and had her murdered, strangled with her own veil, it is said. When his mother took control, she suppressed Christianity, leading to a rebellion and coup by Christian noblemen who ended up exiling her and installing a teenage Václav as duke. His duchy was beset on all sides by enemies, from Magyars to Saxons, as well as from within, by conspirators who had gathered around his pagan twin brother, the resentful Boleslav who wanted power for himself. Duke Václav was eventually killed by his brother’s supporters, and supposedly run through by his own brother with a lance while celebrating the birth of Boleslav’s son. This has been portrayed in the many biographies and hagiographies of Václav as a trap laid by his brother, who had invited the duke to celebrate his son’s birth all the while planning to assassinate him, but this may very well be an embellishment meant to further portray the Catholic duke as a martyr of his faith, killed by pagan usurpers. In truth, the invitation may have been a genuine peace offering that only turned violent when a drunken argument broke out. It’s impossible to tell because the history of Václav comes to us principally through the aforementioned hagiographies, the purpose of which are to encourage the elevation of their subjects to sainthood, and thus are inherently unreliable.

Thus the image of Good King Wenceslas as a barefoot penitent who gave everything to the poor, the so-called “father of all the wretched,” is unlikely to have much relationship to the true character of the man. But it was just such hagiography that inspired Victorian clergyman John Mason Neale to write the famous hymn about him. Of course, the story that Neale describes in the hymn, of Wenceslas and his page trudging through the snow and risking frostbite to carry food and firewood to a poor subject living up a mountain, is pure fiction, a bit of further hagiography. Neale wrote the lyrics to the tune of an old Latin hymn, “Tempus adest floridum,” which in translation means, “Spring has unwrapped her flowers.” And he wrote it not as a Christmas song, but as a hymn for St. Stephen’s Day, observed in the liturgical calendar on December 26th. This much is clear from the first lines of the song, “Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even…” So we have a hymn adapted from a song about spring to celebrate St. Stephen’s Day, all about a Bohemian duke whose pagan family made a habit of bloody coups. Where is Christmas here? Is it enough simply to talk of snow? Or is it the least mention of Christian charity? And what of the beliefs of the hymn writer, John Mason Neale? Does it spoil his song entirely that he chose as his subject a Catholic saint for song to be sung by choristers in the Church of England? Many of his contemporaries certainly thought so, accusing him of idolatry and crypto-Catholicism because of his high church sympathies, leading even to mobs threatening to stone him and burn his home to the ground. Once, at the funeral of a nun, he was physically assaulted for his encouragement of Anglo-Catholicism. So the question, very relevant to the history of other Christmas carols, becomes this: how much might the biography of a songwriter cast different light on a well-known Christmas song?

James Pierpont, the unsavory character who wrote “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” better known today as “Jingle Bells.”

The perfect example of a carol-writer’s life completely changing a Christmas carol can be found in one of the most upbeat, light-hearted, and seemingly innocent of all Christmas songs: Jingle Bells. Since learning more about its composer, I personally have not been able to listen to this previously lovely song without some distaste. There is actually some debate over where the song was written, with both Medford, Massachusetts, and Savannah, Georgia, claiming to have been its birthplace. In truth, both have some rightful claim, since its composer, James Pierpont, was surely writing about his memories of snowy Massachusetts when he wrote the lyrics, for the city in which he actually wrote it, Savannah, is not known for snow. James Pierpont came from a family of Unitarian preachers, but he wasn’t very pious himself. At fourteen, he ran away from boarding school and went to sea, where he seems to have picked up some poor character traits. Returning to his family’s hometown of Medford, Mass., seven years later, he took a wife and fathered three children, but he promptly abandoned them to seek his fortune Out West, in San Francisco. After losing everything to a fire and then losing his wife, who remained back east, to tuberculosis, he did not return home to raise his children. Instead, hearing that his brother John had started a church in Savannah, he left his children in his father’s care and went south to play the organ. There in Savannah, as his brother preached an increasingly unpopular anti-slavery doctrine to his Southern congregation, James seems to have fallen into scandal. He took a new bride, fathering a child with her years before their nuptials, according to one census, and thereafter begetting more, a second brood, seemingly without much thought for the three children he had left behind in Massachusetts. Looking at his most popular song, the Christmas song he titled “The One-Horse Open Sleigh,” we can see that it’s not really about Christmas. Once again, it’s simply the presence of snow that has made it a Christmas standard. Rather, the song is about wooing ladies, and may illustrate James Pierpont’s reputation as something of a rake. Its full lyrics are about taking a young lady out for a sleigh ride, and then being shown up and humiliated by another “young gent.” The message of the song seems to be that you get more girls with a more impressive sleigh, as summed up in its final stanza, “Go it while you’re young. Take the girls tonight.” Think of it like a more modern song that might talk about impressing one’s conquests with a flashy car.

Besides this song, Pierpont’s other lyrics further betray his low character. He wrote more than one song complaining about having to pay his debts. And his numerous minstrel songs betray his drifting away from his Unitarian roots toward a more Southern and racist mindset, especially one titled “The Colored Coquette.” Finally, when his abolitionist preacher brother returned home to Massachusetts at the outbreak of the Civil War, James showed his true colors. He remained in Savannah, and he joined the Confederate army, serving in a cavalry regiment for two years, and he wrote numerous Confederate war songs, including “Strike for the South,” the lyrics of which unironically argue that Confederates fought for liberty; “We Conquer or Die,” whose lyrics suggest that defeat (read: the end of slavery) was a fate like unto death; and “Our Battle Flag!” which told Confederate soldiers that if they died in battle, they went to a “hero’s grave.” So there you have it. Next time you hear Jingle Bells, you, like me, may have a hard time not thinking about the child-abandoning, debt-evading, womanizing, white supremacist secessionist who wrote it. And ironically, his nephew, John Pierpont Morgan, or J.P. Morgan, the famously ruthless banker of the Gilded Age, has been unfavorably compared to that iconic Christmas film villain, Henry Potter, of It’s a Wonderful Life. Now, I’m not suggesting that the art cannot be separated from the artist, that this classic Christmas carol, so simple and popular among children, should be canceled. Rather, I’m saying that, if knowing this kind of spoils the song for you, as it does me, then maybe you delete it from your Spotify Christmas playlist. And there is a contemporary alternative with which you might replace it. “Up on the Housetop,” a jaunty and genuinely Christmas-y song about Santa Claus’s visit, was also written during the Civil War, but its composer, Benjamin Hanby, was an abolitionist through and through, whose family is said to have worked the Underground Railroad. Like Pierpont, he too wrote other songs, like “Darling Nelly Gray” and “Ole Shady,” which unlike other songs about slavery in that era actually highlighted the cruelty of the institution with a focus on its separation of families.

The Illustrated London News's illustration of the Christmas Truce.

Much as Jingle Bells was never really about Christmas, so too another iconic Christmas carol, Oh Christmas Tree, was never really about Christmas trees per se. Nevertheless, it plays a central role in one of the most cherished modern Christmas stories, which itself may be somewhat embellished. Many have heard the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914, when during an unofficial ceasefire on the Western Front, German and British soldiers crossed the trenches, sang Christmas carols, and played football, or soccer as Americans like me would call it, all of it to the chagrin of their sternly disapproving generals. Like most stories in history, this one too has gathered a variety of myths and misconceptions on its way through the years. For example, it was not so general a truce as some might believe, with hostilities continuing in many places, and the military leadership was not so disapproving as the legend would have it. They did not angrily take action to halt the armistice or discipline those soldiers who had participated in it or censor news about it afterward, as would later be claimed. Even the soccer matches seem to have been greatly exaggerated, with most accounts of them originating from rumors or reports that games of football had been proposed but never actually played because the soldiers didn’t actually have a ball handy. The carol-singing does appear to have been accurate though, and the song they often as not sang together was one well known in both their languages: “O Christmas Tree” to the British, and “O Tannenbaum” to the Germans. But the two were not really singing about the same thing. Tannenbaum more accurately translates to fir tree; turning this song into an ode to Christmas trees was a bit of creative mistranslation.

The song and its melody both evolved from different folk traditions. When Bavarian composer Melchior Franck wrote the lyrics in the 17th century, praising the evergreen tree for its hardy survival through the harsh cold of winter—a lesson on perseverance and stoicism in the face of cruel hardship—he was taking part in a long folk tradition of poetry and song that used evergreens as metaphors. But the lyrics would not be set to its recognizable melody until arranged by another German composer, Ernst Anschütz, in 1824. The tune he used can also be traced back to an old Westphalian folk song, the lyrics of whose later iteration, popular as a drinking song among German students in the Middle Ages, spoke of Roman poet Horace, his romance of women, his drunken merrymaking, and his intention to live in the moment and enjoy life, or carpe diem, as Horace would have said. In some sense, the song’s association with Christmas seems natural: the imagery of greenery in the winter lends itself well to the seasonal festivities, which have always been about celebrating the persistence of life in the midst of the winter’s cold lifelessness, and even its melody’s now lost association with merrymaking connects perfectly with the true Saturnalian origins of the holiday. But it occurs to me that, during the Christmas Truce, while the British might have sung the song with visions of Christmas trees festooned with gaudy decorations in mind, the Germans may have been thinking more about the intended meaning of the song, about precious life surviving in a cruel world and the need to persevere like the evergreen through this ghastly, numbing time. And unknowingly, all of them were acting in accordance with the old theme associated with the song’s melody, seizing the day, plucking some few moments of joy for themselves before time marched them on, many of them to their deaths.

Publicity photo of American entertainers Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien, who played her little sister in Meet Me in St. Louis

Even the meanings of more modern Christmas songs are not always what many think they are, or what they were at first meant to be. For example, my father’s favorite Christmas song is “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” because, according to him, it’s so hopeful and uplifting. Dad, I know you listen to the podcast occasionally, so first, Merry Christmas, and second, you know I’m going to explode your understanding of this song. I’ve talked to you before about how this classic Judy Garland showtune is not hopeful but bleak and not uplifting but rather devastating. Well, now let’s go even further into why this song only seems positive because it was more than once revised to alter its tone. The song was originally written for the musical Meet Me in St. Louis, a classic that I recommend everyone view this season. In the musical, a family’s patriarch has decided to move them all from St. Louis to New York, and none of his girls is happy about it. The song is sung by Garland’s character, Esther, to her little sister Tootie, who is afraid that Santa won’t be able to find her in New York. Esther is melancholy herself in the scene, looking pensively out a window at the snow and thinking about the young man she’ll have to leave behind because of their cross-country move. This is the context of the song, full of pain because of a major life change that seems to be the end of their lives in the city they love, and its lyrics’ talk of having a merry Christmas is ironic and even rueful. When the song was first written, the lyrics better reflected this tone. Esther was to sing “Have yourself a merry little Christmas; it may be your last; next year we will be living in the past.” We have Judy Garland to thank for the somewhat brighter tone of the song in the film. She had been performing USO tours and had seen firsthand how another sad and yearning song of hers, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” had taken on greater meaning to troops who saw in it a song about their eventual return home from service. She felt that a revision of the lyrics to this song could make it similarly meaningful on more than one level. That and she thought her character came off a bit mean singing the harsh original version to an already tearful child. So the lyrics were changed from “No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who were dear to us will be near to us no more” to the more familiar “Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who are dear to us gather near to us once more.” Yet still the song retained its melancholic heart, with a line at the end that “we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” The song did not see its final, joyful sanitization until 14 years after it was written, when Frank Sinatra wanted to include it in his album and came to the original songwriter, complaining that the “muddle through somehow” line still made it too sad. “'The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas,” he said “Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?” And thus was born the line “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” and the original tone of the song was finally lost to any who hear it divorced from its intended context. Only the pathos in Judy Garland’s original performance of the song hints at the utter despair that the sung was meant to evoke.

In my previous Christmas specials I have spoken at length about the problems with the biblical nativity story, as well as the numerous myths and mysteries that derive from it. These include the true date of Christ’s birth, the time of year when he was born and the likelihood of shepherds tending their flocks at night during that season, the legend of the Christmas star, and the mythos of the Three Magi. Many of these elements of Christmas mythology owe their immortality to their inclusion in more than one Christmas carol. One example of a carol portraying the nativity, whose depiction has caused some controversy and debate, is Away in a Manger. One line in this song mentions “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” and its critics have gone so far as to call the song heretical. This innocent line about a placid babe, they said, suggests that Christ did not display human qualities, like a full range of emotion, and as such the song took part in the notorious heresy called Docetism. But whatever one thinks of this terribly serious debate, the song “Away in a Manger,” formerly called “The Cradle Song,” serves as a final apt example of the mystery and misconception that surrounds so many Christmas carols. The song is popularly attributed to Martin Luther, the famed church reformer. It was said that he wrote the song as a lullaby for his children. It’s feasible enough. Luther is known to have written hymns. But in fact, it does not appear to be true at all, having only first been claimed in 1884 by a Universalist newspaper whose editors regarded Martin Luther very highly. The true author of the lyrics remains unknown, and even harder to pin down is the composer of its melody, for it has been sung to many different tunes through the years. In a 1951 article, music scholar Richard S. Hill identified no less than 41 distinct tunes that have been used for the song. As with “Away in a Manger,” it seems the history of most Christmas carols is confounded by blind spots and myths. In this way, it reflects well on the history of the holiday generally. Those who bloviate like Linus about the “true meaning” of Christmas, or demand some adherence to a perceived original tradition of the holiday, fail to understand that the original meaning is mislaid in a confusion of misconceptions and mysteries, and that today’s traditions are just a jumble of whatever stuck through the years, their original forms lost to time. Such is the case with all folk tradition.

Further Reading

"carol, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/28123.

Collins, Ace. Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas. Zondervan, 2001.

Gant, Andrew. The Carols of Christmas: The Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Holiday Songs. Nelson Books, 2015.

Montgomery, Bob. “Four Calling Birds.” American Ornithological Society, 25 Dec. 2017, americanornithology.org/four-calling-birds/.

A Defense of the 1619 Project

In the early 17th century, the port city of Luanda on the western shore of Africa, in what is today Angola, was a Portuguese colony established through the invasion and decades-long subjugation of the Kingdom of Ndongo. An estimated 50,000 Angolans, many of them captured as prisoners of war, were shipped to foreign ports as chattel slaves, often via the Middle Passage to the New World. One ship, the San Juan Bautista, carried 350 slaves bound for the Spanish colony of Veracruz, but along the way, two English privateers attacked the vessel and seized some of the Africans aboard. These two privateer ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, landed, carrying “twenty and odd” of these enslaved Africans at the English settlement of Jamestown in Virginia in late August of 1619. Some of these men and women are recorded as having been sold to prominent settlers in Jamestown—including the colonial governor of Virginia, George Yeardley—and they are viewed as the first African slaves in the United States. Some may quibble, though. Their being the first African slaves must be specified, as some Native Americans had previously been enslaved by settlers. And some may point to African slaves in Spanish colonies in what is today Florida to argue that the slaves brought to Virginia in 1619 were not the first Africans enslaved on land that today is part of the continental United States, and this of course is true. Nevertheless, the date 1619 has long stood as the beginning of African slavery in English colonial America, and certainly as the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade in Virginia, which can be viewed as the birth of the Southern institution of slavery. Despite my caveats, recognition of 1619 as the beginning of American slavery is not controversial. Search any academic database—JSTOR, EBSCO, Gale—and you’ll see scholarly articles and books almost universally identifying 1619 as the birth of American slavery. In fact, you’ll see more disagreement about the end date, with some choosing 1862, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, or 1865, the end of the Civil War, and some suggesting slavery did not truly end until as late as 1877, the end of Reconstruction. The point is, such milestones will always be matters of emphasis and interpretation. The only reason that the beginning date of 1619 is so quibbled over now is that 400 years later, in 2019, the New York Times Magazine published a special issue launching The 1619 Project, an initiative that sought to “reframe the country’s history” with a central focus on the lasting repercussions of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans, and it approached this simply by asking readers to consider “what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” Since then, the project earned its creator, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, both a Pulitzer Prize and enough criticism that this series of articles and the educational resources it inspired are now buried beneath a stinking pile of controversy.

Whether or not you believe that our national narrative can be reasonably said to have begun in late August 1619, the beginning of this controversy undoubtedly began in late August 2019, when the Times launched The 1619 Project with the publication of numerous articles by journalists, legal scholars, and historians, as well as pieces by literary artists. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay argues that the country’s founding principles about inalienable rights and equality were not genuine until Black Americans, to whom said equality was not extended and such rights were denied, struggled to make them real. Additional articles included sociologist Matthew Desmond’s argument that cruel labor practices representative of American capitalism had their start in the treatment of slaves on plantations, journalist Jamelle Bouie’s tracing of obstructionist partisan politics and counter-majoritarianism to the efforts of Southern politicians to preserve slavery, historian Kevin Kruse’s piece on segregation and its connection to white flight and suburban sprawl, and journalist Linda Villarosa’s discussion of some medical stereotypes and myths previously used to justify slavery that persist even today. There was significant fanfare at the time for the project’s launch, and it was viewed as an admirable undertaking by many scholars, even if they felt it wasn’t exactly breaking new ground with its claims. As Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review explained, it struck him “as laudable, if unexceptional.” Certainly the Times and the writers involved in the project must have expected some criticism and controversy, considering the provocative tone taken by Hannah-Jones and other contributors and the central conceit of the entire project, which suggests the popular view about our nation’s founders and their principles may be a myth and that something more distasteful lies rotting in our roots, poisoning the whole tree. However, building as they were on the sentiments of much modern historical scholarship and sociology, they likely expected opposition to arise from the Right, from conservative think tanks, whose talking points would filter out to politicians and Fox New talking heads. And certainly that opposition would come in time. But imagine their surprise when strong criticism arose first from the Left.

Leon Trotsky, modern followers of whom were the first to object to The 1619 Project on ideological grounds. Public Domain.

The first major criticism of The 1619 Project came from the International Committee of the Fourth International, on their website, the Word Socialist Web Site. If you are not familiar with the ICFI and their website, they are an organization of Trotskyists, that is, a movement that follows the Marxist philosophy of Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In their first attack on the project, they called it “a politically motivated falsification of history.” In their view, it was an effort to further leverage “identity politics” and forge an exclusive political alliance between voters of color and the Democratic Party. This accusation really reeks of conspiracy theory, since the Democratic Party was not an official sponsor of the project and the writers who contributed to it, while liberal and progressive, are not explicitly affiliated with the party and may indeed lean farther left than many Democrats or may even have some sympathy for certain Trotskyist views and share some of their criticisms of the Democratic Party. It’s hard to tell, since journalists and historians typically try to steer clear of working directly for any political party, since it could undermine their authority and/or credibility. Regardless, though, the accusation is pretty rich, considering the central criticism that the Trotskyists leveled at The 1619 Project was itself politically motivated. They took especial umbrage with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s characterization of racism being “in the DNA” of the United States. According to the Trotskyist criticism, The 1619 Project is too pessimistic, and it fallaciously suggests that racism is an inescapable part of the fabric of American culture. In other words, the Marxists think that the Times didn’t go far enough in advocating for a change in political or economic conditions, even though such advocacy is implicit throughout the Project. To the Trotskyists, drawing attention to the ubiquity of racism is akin to throwing up one’s arms and saying there’s nothing to be done about it, and by their reckoning, the Project is problematic because it did not seek to foment an overthrow of the entire economic order. And how did they further their argument? By publishing a series of interviews with historians who also criticized The 1619 Project, though none of them on the same ideological grounds.

Among the larger group of historians interviewed on the World Socialist Web Site, only four of them, James McPherson, Victoria Bynum, Gordon Wood, and James Oakes, signed a letter penned by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz that demanded corrections be made to the articles thus far published. The letter insisted that it was only a matter of keeping the Times accountable and seeing factual inaccuracies retracted and corrected. Their complaints mostly focused on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, and their biggest sticking point, the inaccuracy they have spent the most time rebutting is Hannah-Jones’s assertion that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” These historians, and many others, refute this notion, arguing that anti-slavery activism was not prominent enough in Britain at the time for it to seem like a threat to slave holders in America, and anti-slavery principles were actually very prominent in New England, where the Revolution began, and were even proclaimed by certain revolutionaries, like Thomas Paine and John Adams. However, others have pointed out the way that the Constitution made definite concessions to slave-holders in the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Slave Insurrection Clause, and the Fugitive Slave Clause, and actually ensured the continuation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in America for another 20 years with the Importation Clause. This can be viewed two ways: as proof that the country was already moving swiftly toward the banning of slavery and thus is not racist at its roots, or as evidence that the slaveholders here saw the world swiftly moving toward abolition and by their participation in the founding of this new country, sought to negotiate the preservation of slavery. Certainly it had that effect, and the existence of slavery was ensured in America for a half a century longer than it would exist in Britain. So the argument of Wilentz and his co-signatories that this assertion was simply not true has been vigorously challenged as well, with concessions that while Nikole Hannah-Jones may have overstated anti-slavery sentiment in Britain at the time as well as pro-slavery sentiment in colonial America, it is otherwise a matter of interpretation and could be simply corrected by removing the word “primary” from the phrase “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain.” Likewise, the letter signers took issue with Hannah-Jones’s argument that Black Americans struggled for their freedom “largely alone,” suggesting that this erases the historical contributions of white abolitionist allies, but here Hannah-Jones’s modifier exonerates, for she did not claim that they struggled entirely alone, only “largely,” and certainly this too must be conceded as a matter of perspective and interpretation, since throughout the centuries of slavery and segregation, it certainly was a lonely struggle for most who endured it. A further objection the letter signers raise is Hannah-Jones’s focus on Abraham Lincoln’s support of colonization, or the removal of freed African Americans from the country, and that while he opposed slavery he also opposed black equality. But this is not so much a matter of factual inaccuracy as it is an argument that Hannah-Jones is making, and which she supports convincingly. Indeed, it is an argument that, as Alex Lichtenstein says in his American Historical Review editorial, “many historians will find…persuasive,” and one shared by Lincoln’s esteemed contemporary, Frederick Douglass, who asserted that Lincoln “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro.” So in the end, while these leading scholars claimed to be correcting factual errors, they were instead disagreeing with her interpretations and, at most, quibbling over some misstatements.

16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, claims about whose persistent prejudices, made in The 1619 Project, some historians have argued against. Public Domain.

While Wilentz and his co-signatories are certainly well-respected historians, the fact is that Wilentz approached far more than four other historians to join his crusade against The 1619 Project, but everyone else refused to be a part of such an attack, and some have gone on record to explain that, while they may have had similar objections to specific claims made in the Project, they declined to sign Wilentz’s letter because its tone, seeming more like an attempt to discredit the entire undertaking rather than a good faith correction of facts, was unwarranted and its approach unprofessional. Nikole Hannah-Jones agrees that the letter was not a good-faith suggestion for corrections. She has herself conceded that the revision of some overstatements could improve her essay and address genuine concerns, but she points out that neither she nor the Times were approached about these concerns by the historians before or during their efforts to find other historians to sign on to the letter, which makes it seem like these critics were not interested in having a real conversation about corrections but rather were engaged in a campaign to discredit the project. And this is certainly strange, since if we take these historians at their word, they actually admire the purpose behind the project. According to Sean Wilentz, speaking to The Atlantic, “Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it's just urgently needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and of racism to American history is a wonderful idea.” If that is the case, and as Wilentz also said, “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it,” then why has it been almost universally regarded as discrediting? Probably because of its tone, identified as problematic by Thavolia Glymph, one of several black historians that Sean Wilentz failed to convince to sign his letter, among others. And why is its tone so dismissive? It has been suggested that these historians are gatekeeping, protesting the mere idea of journalists spearheading a reframing of American history. Is has been further suggested that their criticisms all boil down to the central complaint that they would have written the articles differently, the perpetual grievance of the toxic nerd. As Lichtenstein points out, Gordon Wood, in his criticism of the project, “seems affronted mostly by the failure of the 1619 Project to solicit his advice.” And according to the aforementioned Thavolia Glymph, “They think they're trying to fix the project, the way that only they know how.” Furthermore, Nell Irvin Painter, another Black historian who refused to sign the letter, has stated that “For Sean and his colleagues, true history is how they would write it.” These historian critics cannot really object that no true historians were consulted in the making of the project, though, as numerous respected historians contributed to it, including Mary Elliott, the curator of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture; Tiya Miles, a History professor at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School; and New York Times bestselling historian Kevin Kruse. And perhaps the prominence of Kruse and his Twitter celebrity can explain the intensity of principal opponent Sean Wilentz’s criticism, for Wilentz and Kruse both teach in the same department at Princeton. Could jealousy that the Times asked Kruse to contribute and not Wilentz lay at the heart of this debacle?

Ironically, Wilentz has expressed fear that not correcting these few errors could provide fodder to conservative critics. “One of the things I’m worried about,” Wilentz said, “is…people on the other side, politically, I suppose, who are going to use this as an event to show how corrupt the left is. Unfortunately, you’re giving them the sword to kill you with.” As true as this might have been, Wilentz’s letter did worse than handing a sword to the project’s opponents; it gave them a cannon. As would always have happened, conservative commentators and politicians criticized The 1619 Project, but with the added ammunition of well-respected historians calling the Project a distortion, they turned it into a major Republican strategy, which dovetailed with the misplaced outrage over Critical Race Theory and has further evolved into the reactionary movement to censor discussion of racial inequity in the classroom. So let’s address some of the less intellectual arguments originating from rather more expected precincts. One of the most vociferous critics actually sounds rather academic, the National Association of Scholars. If you look further into this organization, though, they are an explicitly conservative advocacy group bent on combating what it sees as a liberal bias in academia, with especial focus on opposing affirmative action and multiculturalism. Not really surprising that this group would dislike The 1619 Project, especially after Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on it and the Pulitzer Center rolled out its 1619 Project Curriculum. In its eagerness to counter the project and find their own alternative anniversary to suggest was the true birth of the nation, they started the 1620 Project, memorializing the signing of the Mayflower Compact as a more appropriate true beginning of the country. What’s ironic is that, far from discrediting The 1619 Project, this impulse to find an alternative early 17th century origin of the country only legitimizes what the Times was doing, showing that it’s all simply a matter of interpretation and argument. I, for example, would argue that while it’s useful to point to the Mayflower Compact as an indication of the growing tendency toward democratic self-government, holding up the radical Puritans that we have come to call the Pilgrims and the document they drew up, permeated as it is by Christian imagery and language, does not really stand as a good representation of the birth of America for any who are not Christian. Moreover, to view the Puritans of Plymouth Colony as the true exemplars of America, rather than the settlers in Jamestown, is rather selective. Plymouth was a decidedly unusual colony among early settlements. If you view extreme piety as an American ideal, they’re you’re go-to, but their religious devotion was unusual compared to most early settlers. And of course, they did not murder women accused of witchcraft like some other Puritan settlements, but whether that makes them more representative of America and its entire history really depends on how pessimistic or optimistic your view of the country is. And more to the point of The 1619 Project, the fact that the Puritans of Plymouth colony did not keep slaves certainly stands as a counterpoint to the settlers in Virginia, but the sad fact is that, in 1614, 6 years prior to the arrival of the Puritans there, an Englishman abducted dozens of Native Americans from the area, including the man who would later serve as the Pilgrims’ own interpreter, Tisquantum, or Squanto, and sold them into slavery in Spain. So, search as we might for some sunnier and less squalid idea of our nation’s beginnings, perhaps, as The 1619 Project asserts, slavery is always there, rearing its ugly head.

The signing of the Mayflower Compact, 1620, proposed as an alternative foundational event for American history by critics of the 1619 Project. Public domain.

Predictably, amid the continuing George Floyd protests, the 45th President decided not to seek any redress for the demonstrators’ very real grievances, and instead promoted further division, latching onto The 1619 Project as an issue to run on in his reelection campaign. On September 17th, he convened the first so-called White House History Conference at the National Archives, and he laid the responsibility for recent unrest not on police violence or systemic injustice but rather on progressive indoctrination in schools, explicitly blaming the 1619 Project, which by that time, a year after its publication, had seen some use in classrooms. His solution was to establish by executive order a 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education.” The irony abounds with this commission. Trump and the GOP attack the 1619 Project for being a distortion of history and liberal propaganda, yet to correct the historical record, he established a commission whose membership is completely devoid of actual historians and instead is filled rank and file with conservative activists and politicians and even some of Trump’s own policy advisers. Of course, Trump then went on to lose the election and rushed the release of the report only a month after assembling the commission, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, making one of his final acts in office the release of a report on history scholarship that lacks any scholarly source documentation and doesn’t even properly credit any of its own authors. Without any apparent struggle with the cognitive dissonance, this report decries progressive propaganda while simultaneously propagandizing by likening progressivism to fascism and listing it alongside slavery as one of the “challenges to America’s principles.” It warns of the dangers of progressive indoctrination in schools while recommending a kind of government-sponsored indoctrination program to ensure traditional hero worship of the country’s founders, seeking to regress history education back to the myth-making curriculum of the 19th century. While Sean Wilentz could only find 4 other respectable historians to put their names on his letter censuring The 1619 Project, the American Historical Association’s condemnation of the 1776 Commission’s report has been endorsed by 47 highly credible historical and scholarly organizations. On his first day in office, just a couple days after the report’s release, President Biden saw fit to disband the commission and take down its report’s official webpage.

As with Critical Race Theory, the central objection to The 1619 Project has been that it is being taught to our youth. Unlike CRT, though, which isn’t really being taught outside of academia, The 1619 Project actually has inspired a high school curriculum presented by the Pulitzer Center. However, as the editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine, Jake Silverstein, has observed, “[T]here is a misunderstanding that this curriculum is meant to replace all of U.S. history.” In fact, Silverstein points out, “It's being used as supplementary material for teaching American history." And as Alex Lichtenstein, the previously cited editor of the American Historical Review, has noted, “[N]o specific, detailed analysis of the proposed K-12 curriculum accompanying the 1619 Project has yet been offered by teachers or scholars of history-teaching,” calling this blind spot “puzzling and ultimately inadequate to the vigor of the objections.” What seems to be a universal assessment among scholars and teachers of American history is that The 1619 Project’s purpose is worthy because history education about slavery and its lasting effects is sorely lacking. The Southern Poverty Law Center found in its 2018 report “Teaching Hard History” that “[s]chools are not adequately teaching the history of American slavery, educators are not sufficiently prepared to teach it, textbooks do not have enough material about it, and – as a result – students lack a basic knowledge of the important role it played in shaping the United States and the impact it continues to have on race relations in America.” More specifically, they discovered that “few American high-school students know that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, that the Constitution protected slavery without explicitly mentioning it, or that ending slavery required a constitutional amendment.” Hofstra University’s director of social studies education Alan Singer, a historian of slavery in New York, has detailed how, in New York State, high school social studies curriculum “minimizes the role of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the sale of people, and the sale of slave-produced commodities in global and United States history.” Meanwhile, among the teachers who are actually choosing to use the Project in their classes, it is clear that the project’s chief merit is that it has started a sorely needed discussion, despite or even because of all the controversy surrounding it. As explained by John Duffy, faculty fellow of the University of Notre Dame’s Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights, when he teaches The 1619 Project in his English classes, he uses the controversy to encourage critical thinking: “While I encourage students to draw their own conclusions about the controversies, we do not attempt to decide collectively which perspectives are more accurate. Instead, we discuss reasons historians disagree, how such disagreements are argued and what this suggests about historical truths. We consider who gets to tell the story of a people and what is at stake in the telling.” And this is how the project should be used, and how I imagine any teacher worth anything would use it. So what does this tell us about Republican laws to cripple the discussion of race in the classroom, some of which mention The 1619 Project by name? Either that the legislators lack a fundamental understanding of modern pedagogy, or that they are simply afraid such frank and critical discussions will lead to students developing viewpoints opposed to theirs.

Further Reading

“The 1619 Project.” The New York Times Magazine, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.

“The 1619 Project Curriculum.” Pulitzer Center, pulitzercenter.org/lesson-plan-grouping/1619-project-curriculum.

“AHA Condemns Report of Advisory 1776 Commission (January 2021).” American Historical Association, 20 January 2021, www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/aha-statement-condemning-report-of-advisory-1776-commission-(january-2021).

Anderson, James. “U. professors send letter requesting corrections to 1619 Project.” The Princetonian, 6 Feb. 2020, www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/02/u-professors-send-letter-requesting-corrections-to-1619-project.  

Autry, Robin. “Trump's '1776 Commission' tried to rewrite U.S. history. Biden had other ideas.” NBC News, NBC Universal, 21 Jan. 2021, www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-1776-commission-tried-rewrite-u-s-history-biden-ncna1255086.

Crowley, Michael, and Jennifer Schuessler. “Trump’s 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in Report Derided by Historians.” The New York Times, 18 Jan. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/politics/trump-1776-commission-report.html.

Kazin, Michael. “The 1776 Follies.” The New York Times, 1 Feb. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/opinion/trump-1776-commission-report.html.

Lichtenstein, Alex C. “From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That.” American Historical Review, vol. 125, no. 1, Feb. 2020, pp. xv–xxi. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/ahr/rhaa041.

Serwer, Adam. “The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts.” The Atlantic, 23 Dec. 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/.

Shuster, Kate. “Teaching Hard History.” Southern Poverty Law Center, 31 Jan. 2018, www.splcenter.org/20180131/teaching-hard-history.

Silverstein, Jake. “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project.” The New York Times, 20 Dec. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html.

Singer, Alan J. “Defending the 1619 Project in the Context of History Education Today.” History News Network, The George Washington University, 20 Dec. 2020, historynewsnetwork.org/article/178586.

Strauss, Valerie. “Professor: Why I teach the much-debated 1619 Project — despite its flaws.” The Washington Post, 14 June 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/14/professor-why-i-teach-controversial-1619-project/.

Waxman, Olivia B. “The First Africans in Virginia Landed in 1619. It Was a Turning Point for Slavery in American History—But Not the Beginning.” TIME, 20 Aug. 2019, time.com/5653369/august-1619-jamestown-history/.  

Wulf, Karin. “Why the Myths of Plymouth Dominate the American Imagination.” Smithsonian Magazine, 24 Nov. 2020, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-myths-plymouth-dominate-american-imagination-180976396/.

Curriculum Controversies in America

Over the last year, a conservative talking point has emerged that a new and dangerous kind of “woke racism,” originating from an arcane and supposedly nefarious ideological academic discipline called Critical Race Theory, is being taught to children in schools, amounting to a kind of un-American indoctrination. If you’ve paid attention, this view has garnered a lot of traction and become a favorite grievance on the right, resulting in many local school board meetings devolving into a venue for the breathless protests of ill-informed parents. The result has been recent legislation in states like Oklahoma, Tennessee, Iowa, and Idaho, with Republican-controlled legislatures, banning the discussion of Critical Race Theory, or CRT for short, in schools, a dreadful development indeed for free speech and academic freedom. As many have pointed out, though, CRT is not actually taught in public elementary or secondary schools. It’s an approach to legal scholarship that emerged in academia in the ‘70s and ‘80s, in which the inherent discrimination of public policies is analyzed with a view toward improving equity under the law. This scholarly subject has become the chief bogeyman to conservatives, who conflate it with all efforts to address systemic racism and cultivate anti-racist views and approaches in various fields, in both the public and private sector. In the wake of the George Floyd protests last year, many organizations began, admirably, to acknowledge the fact that the long history of racism in America may be present in their own administrations and bureaucracies, and to hold seminars and meetings to educate themselves about systemic racism and how they might be able to effect change within their domains. Of course, some fragile attendees at these meetings, when asked to examine the possibility that they may have benefited from privileges others are denied, balked and became defensive and suggested that such frank discussions of racism amounted to another kind of racism, one targeting them. Some even recorded their Zoom sessions, thinking of themselves as heroic whistleblowers on this new woke culture invading their safe spaces, and sent the footage to journalists to blow the whole thing wide open. Of course, one conservative journalist obliged. His name is Christopher Rufo, and he wrote a series of articles supposedly “exposing” these anti-bias seminars in Seattle, even though they were not closely held secrets or anything that the organizations who held them were embarrassed about. But Rufo believed he was uncovering a vast conspiracy. In the materials leaked to him, he unsurprisingly found references to some well-known books on anti-racism by authors like Ibram Kendi and others, and then, examining those books, he found further references to the legal scholarship of Kimberlé Crenshaw, who originated Critical Race Theory. Rufo shows his lack of experience in performing academic research in that, rather than understanding the nature of academic scholarship as a conversation between texts and authors over decades and centuries, in which supportive materials are cited to strengthen arguments, just as they would be by those who assert an opposing view, Rufo saw this as some kind of insidious conspiracy, fancying himself a kind of Robert Langdon, uncovering evil power structures through his rather cursory readings of a few works, all of whose points he seems to have missed entirely.

Christopher Rufo on Fox New, starting the CRT controversy. Image may be subject to Copyright.

Rufo believes that the perennial specter of Marxism lies at the root of Critical Race Theory and all anti-racist activism, mostly because of some anti-capitalist comments made by certain of the authors frequently cited, who recognize that discriminatory public policies are deeply enmeshed in our economic system, but he entirely disregards the more obvious cultural basis of these works in the Civil Rights Era struggles of Martin Luther King Jr. and others. He proposes that this activism started in academia and is now deeply embedded in our bureaucracies—again, taking a conspiratorial view, as if these anti-bias seminars were somehow foisted on unwilling organizations rather than sought out by administrators who may actually agree there are deeply entrenched problems in our society that they don’t want to be a part of. In Rufo’s view, anti-racist activism, and by extension CRT, which he paints as the evil puppet master, is simply about overturning the system by humiliating and shaming White people. If he had actually managed to grasp the message of Ibram Kendi’s work, though, he would understand that’s not what anti-racism is about. Perhaps it would have been better if Rufo had read Kendi’s simplification of anti-racism in the form of his children’s book, Anti-Racist Baby, which spells out for still developing minds the fact that anti-racism is not “reverse racism,” a term which itself is wildly racist, in that it suggests racial discrimination and bias is meant to be directed at only non-White people. Instead, as Kendi’s children’s book states, anti-racism celebrates our differences and identifies policies rather than people as the problem. But it’s Kendi’s suggestion that we use our words to actually talk about racism that seems to be the problem for Rufo and others. The backlash against Critical Race Theory, which is actually a backlash against anti-racism activism generally, is at its heart a resistance to talking about racism at all. Think about it in terms of gun violence. In the aftermath of a mass shooting, there are calls to address the issue and talk about gun control, and there is always a resistance, suggesting, “Now is not the time,” when clearly there is no better time. After the George Floyd protests, now clearly is the time to talk about systemic racism, and the protests against teaching Critical Race Theory are a clear attempt to squelch such conversations. Rufo recognized that Critical Race Theory was the perfect term to spark conservative outrage. The word “critical” being inflammatory to defenders of the status quo, the word “race” being outrageous to those who refuse to recognize that they may have been born privileged because of the color of their skin, and the word “theory” suggesting that it is not fact and can therefore be vigorously refuted. Rufo and his views were welcomed onto Fox News Channel by Tucker Carlson, and his calls for the President to issue an executive order were answered by Trump, who signed an order coauthored by Rufo limiting speech about race in seminars delivered to federal employees. But this was just the beginning. Even though Critical Race Theory is not taught in public schools, Rufo’s activism has sparked a huge push from the right to ban it, and these laws, in effect, seem to outlaw the candid discussion of race in classrooms generally. The vague contours of some of these laws seem to suggest that classic literature that explicitly addresses racism, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird could be banned from English classrooms. Especially hard hit would be American history classes, for how can students and teachers honestly discuss colonialism, slavery, the decimation of Native American tribes, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Era, or really any aspect of American history without acknowledging and openly discussing racism? This legislation is little more than a ban on ideas, and it is not the first time that the classroom has become a theater in which to wage the culture war.

To suggest that the current furor over discussing systemic racism with students in the classroom originated with Rufo’s conspiracist view of Critical Race Theory would be to turn a blind eye to the fact that he is capitalizing on long-standing sentiments among conservatives that liberals control academia (when in fact, perhaps, progressive ideas just stand up better to scholarly scrutiny), that the history of America is being distorted and falsified by the Left (when in fact historical revision to achieve better accuracy and understanding is a central tenet of historical research, without which we may today still believe falsehoods like that the women executed in 17th-century Salem really were Satan-worshipping sorceresses), and that changes to elementary and high school curricula represent indoctrination (when it actually represents efforts to improve education and prepare students for the academic rigor of college, which will in turn help them succeed in life and become better citizens generally). It is pretty hard to indoctrinate through the teaching of critical thinking, which is what lies at the core of historical revision and recent changes in curricula, and which serves as the foundation of all efforts to recognize the systemic racism that has been ignored or denied for so long. As I try to emphasize in this podcast, critical thinking encourages every individual to analyze and evaluate received information, to sift through it for falsehoods and errors in logic and reason, and to try to achieve a more perfect understanding of the truth, as far as it can be discerned. This is something that even conspiracy theorists and denialists claim to value. For example, take Glenn Beck, currently a vocal opponent of what he calls Critical Race Theory in schools (which again, seems to just be just be any acknowledgement of racism’s existence and the systemic preservation of privileges for some and not others). He likes to encourage critical thinking too! However, when he disagrees with where critical thinking leads students, he calls it indoctrination. In fact, back in 2012, ridiculously enough, the Republican Party of Texas actually made opposition to critical thinking a plank in their platform! When this resulted in controversy, they tried to claim that they actually only opposed a specific teaching approach called Outcome-Based Education which they argued was simply relabeled as higher order thinking and critical thinking. Here again, they rely on the argument that a relabeling has occurred, just as they say anti-bias training and anti-racism activism is actually repackaged Critical Race Theory, which is really Marxism, they’ll say. But the Texas GOP platform was clear about what they found offensive in critical and higher order thinking skills: that they “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs.” So already we see the aversion to having students exposed to what they view as ideas that may challenge the status quo.

Lynn Cheney on Charlie Rose amid the History Standards controversy. Image may be subject to copyright.

The political battle over how history is taught itself has a long history. Before the uproar over anti-racist approaches to education and so-called Critical Race Theory, there was outrage over the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to place slavery and its effects at the center of our understanding of America’s founding and subsequent history. In response to this series of publications, the Trump administration even founded a commission to defend a more traditionalist view of American history, to denounce progressivism in education as indoctrination, and to promote “patriotic education,” despite the fact that it is not the federal government’s place to control instructional programs or curriculum. However, the controversy over the 1619 Project deserves an entire episode, or at least a minisode, in its own right, so suffice it to say here that Christopher Rufo was latching onto this controversy when he conjured the specter of CRT. This more recent controversy over approaches to the teaching of American history echoes the controversy over National History Standards in the mid-1990s. In the fall of 1994, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife Lynne Cheney, who served as the chair for the National Endowment of the Humanities, sparked a lengthy political controversy by writing a rebuke of the forthcoming national standards which her organization had funded, developed by the National Center for History in Schools at UCLA, which again her organization had chosen for the task. Her central complaints, which were thereafter parroted by conservative talk radio hosts, talking heads, and politicians, were that the new standards focused too much on injustices related to race and gender and not enough on the traditional hero worship of former textbooks. It was all so negative, she whined, and she even resorted to score-keeping, counting the number of times that McCarthyism and the Ku Klux Klan were mentioned and bemoaning that Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers didn’t receive equal page space. While critics derided the proposed standards as an example of political correctness run amok, historians defended them as rigorous and dismissed the backlash as a reactionary attack on modern historical scholarship, which had for some time sought to bring the marginalized and underrepresented further into focus and do away with insupportable myths about our country. In the end, though, since these were just voluntary standards, and since most of the complaints stemmed from the numerous teaching examples provided, which were confused for curriculum, and not from the actual standards themselves, whose criteria were universally praised, a few simple revisions sufficed to appease the detractors and dampen the fires of controversy.

Woman protesting textbooks in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Via West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Curriculum controversies have not been exclusive to History, either. One of the most egregious examples of political scrimmage over teaching materials centered on literature reading lists. The story of the Kanawha County Textbook War sounds extremely similar to the protests seen this year in school board meetings. In April 1974, the Board of Education assembled in this West Virginia county to discuss how they would meet a mandate to include in their curriculum “multiethnic and multiracial literature.” One board member, Alice Moore, who had campaigned for her seat by protesting sex education, a curriculum controversy that has been consistent and ubiquitous in its own right. She seems to have seen in the new lit curriculum another opportunity for outrage. She found the poetry of e. e. cummings pornographic, the writings of Sigmund Freud atheistic, the Autobiography of Malcom X un-American, and generally complained that works by Black authors like James Baldwin were too depressing in their description of life in ghettoes. “[T]extbooks should show life as it should be,” she argued, “not life as it is.” Her rhetoric enflamed the resentments of parents, who boycotted county schools. Thousands marched in protest against these “dirty books.” They circulated pamphlets that claimed the new reading material contained sexually explicit passages, but these assertions proved to be false. In fact, unsurprisingly, neither Alice Moore nor any of her followers had read the literature they were railing against, which they openly admitted, claiming that they didn’t need to subject themselves to such radical propaganda to know it was harmful. The protests quickly turned violent. Property was destroyed as protesters shot firearms at empty school buses and firebombed an empty school building. They even set off dynamite at the district offices. Beatings and shootings occurred, board meeting broke out into riots, and people were arrested, and not only the violent protestors; Alice Moore managed to get other school board members arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Even though the violence eventually subsided and the books being protested were added to the curriculum, this conservative terrorism accomplished somewhat the outcome desired: it had a definite chilling effect on academic freedom and freedom of speech in the classroom, as for some time afterward, teachers censored themselves for fear of stoking controversy, avoiding potentially divisive books like 1984 and even skipping over biology lessons about animal reproduction for fear that it came too close to sex education. At the time, Alice Moore presented herself as just a concerned parent, but since, historians have suggested that she was more of a right-wing provocateur with connections to other organizations that had been protesting progressive curriculum since the 1960s, including the Christian Crusade, which focused on removing sex education from schools, and even that far-right anti-communist group who saw socialist conspiracies everywhere, including in curriculum that they believed was little more than Marxist indoctrination, our old friends, the John Birch Society.

Protest to progressive curriculum as Communist indoctrination was, unsurprisingly, common during the Second Red Scare, in the era of McCarthyism. Indeed, the House Unamerican Activities Committee, well known for its investigation of Hollywood, which resulted in so many careers ruined because of blacklisting, also went after teachers that they suspected of indoctrinating youth. In 1959, the HUAC planned to hold one of its dreaded hearings in San Francisco, California, where it subpoenaed dozens of teachers. In response, local college professors organized San Franciscans for Academic Freedom and Education, or SAFE, and solicited a broad base of bi-partisan support even among moderate and conservative organizations on the grounds that the federal government has no place in controlling local education. This public resistance led to the HUAC canceling its hearings for the first time, but they came back the next year with a new spate of subpoenas. They were met by thousands of demonstrators, representing a wide range of San Francisco society, including students, politicians, and other activists, in a significant protest movement that prefigured the anti-war protest movement of the 1960s. The response of authorities on the second day of the protest was much the same as would be encountered in later years as well, with truncheons and fire hoses wielded against the protestors. But on the third day, some 5,000 protestors marched in downtown San Francisco, and this display helped to encourage nationwide opposition to the HUAC, whose spell of fear over the country was finally breaking.

Anti-HUAC protesters at San Francisco City Hall, with seated Anti-HUAC protesters, after being doused with fire hoses. Via Zinn Education Group.

The absurdly paranoid John Birch Society and the witch-hunting HUAC were not the only groups to fear the creeping influence of Marxist thought into classrooms. One organization was the veterans association, the American Legion, which had for decades made it their mission to criticize and reject any textbooks they found to be “un-American.” One major target of the American Legion was the work of Harold Rugg, whose social studies textbook series, Man and His Changing Society, sought to highlight both the strengths and the weaknesses of America in order to demonstrate to younger generations where social change may be beneficial. The books sold widely and were adopted in many school districts, becoming a standard for years. However, the encouragement of change was viewed suspiciously, and the depiction of America as anything less than perfect was seen as unpatriotic. In the mid-1930s, some parents complained that they were communistic, and during World War II, the controversy expanded to the point that the books were being derided as treasonous propaganda. In fact, the books simply encouraged students to think critically about social problems and come to their own conclusions. Familiarly, protestors gleefully condemned the books without having bothered to read them, saying that they didn’t need to read them because they had heard all they needed to hear about the author. After enough sustained controversy, school administrators banned the texts in many districts despite their admiration for them simply because they did not want to deal with the anti-Communist crusaders, and not content to see Rugg’s books simply removed from the schools, the protestors, Nazi-like, held numerous public book burnings. This controversy did more than just remove and destroy Rugg’s books; it set back progressive education decades, as for years afterward, other textbook authors shied away from addressing social issues and avoided any implication that America could improve in any way.

This inclination among many on the right to desire a white-washing of America and our history finds its apotheosis in the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to recast the history of the South and promulgate the Lost Cause Myth that I spoke about in my episode Jubal Early’s Lost Cause. The United Daughters of the Confederacy are perhaps best known today for their efforts to erect monuments to white supremacists, monuments regularly targeted by racial justice advocates who continue working to get them removed. To those who might protest that Confederate monuments aren’t monuments to white supremacists, first I would point out that in 1926, the United Daughters of the Confederacy actually erected a monument to the Ku Klux Klan in Concord, North Carolina. But that blatant evidence aside, any who might protest that a monument to the Confederacy or its leaders does not itself represent a monument to white supremacy has accepted the false notion of the Lost Cause Myth that the South was fighting for anything other than a social order based entirely on the patrician rule of elite white families over the poor and their exploitation of Black chattel slaves as forced labor. I have refuted the Myth of the Lost Cause before and won’t retread the same ground here, but suffice it to say that the success of the Lost Cause Myth, the reason it is still so commonly repeated today, can be attributed to the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to remove textbooks they felt portrayed the Southern Cause in a negative light and install curriculum that exalted the South and distorted the truth about the war and about slavery.

A North Carolina chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, via Encyclopedia Virginia.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, or the UDC, took up their crusade to indoctrinate Southern youth with the Myth of the Lost Cause from other organizations, namely the United Confederate Veterans and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who in the 1890s balked at the portrayal of Southern planters and the Confederacy in histories written by Northern writers, which understandably condemned their treatment of slaves and their entire economic and social system, and further blamed them for the war. Motivated by their desire to maintain the dominance of patrician families in the postbellum South, they undertook a campaign to systematically vindicate themselves through propaganda and indoctrination. They removed Northern textbooks from their schools, accusing even the Encyclopedia Britannica of malicious distortion, and then wrote, published, and installed their own history texts onto school bookshelves. Their books, and others afterward promoted by the UDC, maintained the idea that the Confederacy did not secede in order to preserve the slavery on which their economy and social hierarchy was built but rather because of dignified and honorable ideals about state sovereignty, and more than this, they perpetuated the even older lies that slave owners were “kind and lenient” to their slaves and that “[t]hey in turn loved their master.” They even went so far as to suggest that, without the guidance of an overseer, slaves would have turned to cannibalism, which they claimed was their natural tendency in Africa. Meanwhile, they glorified white Southerners, describing the idyllic mansions of the plantation system and calling it “a civilization that gave us brave and true men and pure and noble women.”

The taking up of the cause to indoctrinate Southern youth with these ideas was the natural evolution of the UDC’s efforts to memorialize the Confederacy. Rather than just inanimate statues, they sought to create “living monuments,” as historian Karen Cox puts it. And their campaign was extremely effective. Beyond expunging history textbooks they disliked and getting Confederate-friendly texts adopted, they went after teachers and administrators who resisted and drove them out of schools. They sponsored essay contests that required students to use their texts, they filled the schools with teachers from among their own ranks, and they composed lesson plans for the rest. They put up portraits of Confederate figures in the schools, hung Confederate battle flags in classrooms, and even petitioned to have schools named after Confederate “heroes.” Perhaps most disturbingly, like the formation of the Nazi youth, the UDC organized Children of the Confederacy auxiliaries, grooming the kids for later membership in the UDC and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, having the children themselves cut the cord to unveil each new monument. This is what we must fear when conservative voices protest progressive curriculum. They will cry “Indoctrination!” but true to their nature, it is just projection, for what they really object to is any challenge to the status quo. They recognize that a progressive curriculum prevents them from propagandizing in schools and brainwashing young minds.

Those who protest anti-racist approaches to education, or what they have been told is Critical Race Theory, inevitably resort to the criticism that progressive curriculum is itself biased, or even racist. However, the lessons they protest often involve just the simple acknowledgement of racism’s continued existence or any encouragement for students to openly discuss and analyze disparities in representation and the systems of privilege at work in the world. Any calls for fairness or teaching both sides may seem reasonable, but you must consider what they’re saying. Even the United Daughters of the Confederacy claimed to want “impartial” history, but how is it edifying or moral to give equal time and emphasis to a point of view that exonerates and exalts white supremacy? The entire notion of “teaching the controversy” is always only a demand that inarguable or harmful ideas be unduly recognized or accorded merit they do not possess. Take the idea of “creation science.” It was not taught in science classrooms because it is not science. There is not controversy about it among actual scientists. Christian fundamentalists only attempted to portray evolution as controversial in order to put religion in science classrooms. Likewise, today, opponents of CRT argue that equal time must be awarded to any opposing view when it comes to racism in society and history. This has led to suggestions that any lesson on the Holocaust, for example, may need to be balanced with equal time given to Holocaust denial. The simple fact is that not all controversies have two equal sides, and hate should not be presented to children as an acceptable view to take. And the entire notion that teaching about racism is biased doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Trends in progressive curriculum, which as I’ve shown are not new, actually are an effort to redress cultural bias and one-sidedness in education, acquainting students with the experiences of underrepresented and marginalized groups that have previously been excluded from textbooks. To claim this inclusion is biased or exclusionary is exactly the same as refusing to explicitly acknowledge that Black lives matter and instead insisting only on repeating that all lives do. It reveals a fundamental, racist aversion to recognizing the struggles of any group other than one’s own.

Further Reading

Appleby, Joyce. “Controversy over the National History Standards.” OAH Magazine of History, vol. 9, no. 3, [Oxford University Press, Organization of American Historians], 1995, pp. 4–4, www.jstor.org/stable/25163026.

Bailey, Fred Arthur. “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 3, Georgia Historical Society, 1991, pp. 507–33, www.jstor.org/stable/40582363.

Camera, Lauren. “Federal Lawsuit Poses First Challenge to Ban on Teaching Critical Race Theory.” U.S. News and World Report, 20 Oct. 2021, www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-10-20/federal-lawsuit-poses-first-challenge-to-ban-on-teaching-critical-race-theory.

Carbone, Peter F. “The Other Side of Harold Rugg.” History of Education Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3, [History of Education Society, Wiley], 1971, pp. 265–78, doi.org/10.2307/367293.

Cox, Karen L. “The Confederacy’s ‘Living Monuments.’” The New York Times, 6 Oct. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/the-confederacys-living-monuments.html.

Gershon, Livia. “How One Group of Teachers Defended Academic Freedom.” JSTOR Daily, 29 Dec. 2019, daily.jstor.org/how-one-group-of-teachers-defended-academic-freedom/.

Huffman, Greg. “The group behind Confederate monuments also built a memorial to the Klan.” Facing South, 8 June 2018. www.facingsouth.org/2018/06/group-behind-confederate-monuments-also-built-memorial-klan.

---. “TWISTED SOURCES: How Confederate propaganda ended up in the South's schoolbooks.” Facing South, 10 April 2019, www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-confederate-propaganda-ended-souths-schoolbooks.

Paddison, Joshua. “Summers of Worry, Summers of Defiance: San Franciscans for Academic Freedom and Education and the Bay Area Opposition to HUAC, 1959-1960.” California History, vol. 78, no. 3, [University of California Press, California Historical Society], 1999, pp. 188–201, doi.org/10.2307/25462565.

Ravitch, Diane. “The Controversy over National History Standards.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 51, no. 3, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 1998, pp. 14–28, doi.org/10.2307/3824089.

Skinner, David. “A Battle over Books.” HUMANITIES, vol. 31, no. 5, Sep./Oct. 2010, www.neh.gov/humanities/2010/septemberoctober/statement/battle-over-books.

Stanley, William B. “Harold Rugg and Social Education: Another Look.” Journal of Thought, vol. 18, no. 4, Caddo Gap Press, 1983, pp. 68–72, www.jstor.org/stable/42589033.

Kay, Trey. “The Great Textbook War.” West Virginia Public Broadcasting, 17 Oct. 2013, www.wvpublic.org/radio/2013-10-17/the-great-textbook-war.

Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory.” The New Yorker, 18 June 2021, www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory.

Waxman, Olivia B. “Trump's Threat to Pull Funding from Schools Over How They Teach Slavery Is Part of a Long History of Politicizing American History Class.” Time, 16 Sep. 2020, time.com/5889051/history-curriculum-politics/?amp=true.

Winters, Elmer A., and Harold Rugg. “Man and His Changing Society: The Textbooks of Harold Rugg.” History of Education Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, [History of Education Society, Wiley], 1967, pp. 493–514, https://doi.org/10.2307/367465.

The Demoniacs: The True Spirit of Possession and Exorcism

Maricica Irina Cornici and her brother Vasile grew up in an orphanage in Romania after their poverty-stricken father hanged himself. Once they became of age to leave the orphanage, they struggled to find work, relying on meager wages that Maricica managed to earn as a nanny to a series of families. It was a time when the Eastern Orthodox Church was growing in Romania, recruiting inexperienced young men and women to serve as priests and nuns in their monasteries after a long period of the church’s suppression. An old friend from their orphanage days informed them of just such an opportunity in the rural commune of Tanacu in Western Moldavia, so Maricica and Vasile, ready to give themselves over to the church, packed their few belongings and headed into the Romanian countryside, where they met a charismatic young priest with long red hair and beard named Corogeanu. This young priest fancied himself an exorcist and had become popular in the community as a healer, casting out evil from villagers who sought his help before seeking the advice of a physician for a variety of ailments that superstition told them might be the result of a diabolical influence rather than simply an illness or disease. Not long after her arrival at Tanacu, Maricica began to exhibit odd and even unacceptable behavior.  It began with giggling during Mass, and eventually, it developed into Maricica mocking and cursing the clergy at the monastery. Her fellow nuns took to tying her up and leaving her in her room so that her behavior would not interrupt the services that villagers attended there, and eventually, the priest, Corogeanu, decided that she was possessed by a demon, or perhaps by the Devil himself. They took her from her room and chained her to a cross, stuffing a towel in her mouth to stifle her cursing and parading her about the church as Corogeanu performed his impromptu rite of exorcism. She endured this for three days, with no food or water beyond the dabbing of holy water on her lips. Unsurprisingly, she later died…after Corogeanu and the nuns gave her into the care of EMTs who took her in an ambulance to the nearest hospital. Yeah, that’s right. This did not take place in the Middle Ages. Rather shockingly, it occurred in 2005. Since these events, Corogeanu and the nuns were arrested and defrocked and the monastery at Tanacu shuttered. Blame has been cast not only on them, but also on the Eastern Orthodox Church for too quickly rushing to ordain uneducated priests in their rush to reestablish their influence following the fall of Communism in Romania. Corogeanu and others actually have had the nerve to blame the EMTs for administering too much adrenaline in their efforts to revive her in the ambulance, but the fact remains that the nuns had previously taken Maricica to the same hospital and had been informed that she displayed all the signs of being schizophrenic. Nevertheless, they rejected the opinion of modern medicine and chose to abuse her physically and psychologically by chaining her up, suffocating her, and starving her until she was unresponsive.

*

In starting this examination of cases of purported demonic possession and the practices of exorcism with a tale originating from the Eastern Orthodox Church, I may elicit objections that not only was Corogeanu practicing an illegitimate homebrewed rite of exorcism but also that the Eastern Orthodox Church generally does not have a strict and codified rite as does Roman Catholicism. People like to hold up Catholics as being a kind of gold standard when it comes to assessing demonic possession and eliminating scientific explanations and physical or psychological illness before resorting to exorcism. There’s currently a very enjoyable television drama that promotes this view called “Evil.” This notion is a result of the church’s own efforts to modernize the practice, as in 1999 Pope John Paul II updated the Church’s guidance on exorcisms to discourage the treatment of “victims of the imagination.” Rather than viewing this as a modernization of the barbaric rite, however, it should instead be considered the opposite. The Latin text in question simply affirmed the notion that some conditions cannot be treated medically or psychologically and encouraged the continued practice of exorcism. In fact, as of 2018, the Church appears to be mustering an army of new exorcists by educating a new generation of priests in the rite, in part as a bulwark, given claims from their priests in Mexico and other Latin American countries that demonic activity is on the rise. While the Catholic Church cautions against too lax a view on possession, they are still sending the message that more exorcists are needed to combat what they see as the growing diabolical influence in the world. However, not all those who answer this call to action are Catholic. There exists a subculture of Evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals and Charismatics, who believe themselves capable of casting out demons or “delivering” members of their congregation from the Devil’s power. Much of this is obvious theater during sermons in which preachers melodramatically touch the foreheads of their ecstatic followers, but behind closed doors, these would-be exorcists have no official strictures governing their historically harmful ceremonies.

Before I continue to historical cases of supposed possession and the exorcists that claimed to do battle with the demonic entities responsible, it should be said that the phenomenon is not unique to Christianity. German Psychologist Traugott Oesterreich, in his 1921 work Possession: Demoniacal and Other, Among Primitive Races, in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times, has provided the scholarly research showing the historical ubiquity of the notion, going back to Greek daimones, from which word we derive the word “demons.” The term meant something else entirely, signifying a kind of guardian or guiding deity, or even creative inner spirit, but as it was used to translate certain Hebrew terms for other kinds of spirits, it has become part of the Christian lexicon for evil spirits. Christian notions of demonology have passed to us from Assyrian and Persian religious notions, and the other modern monotheistic traditions, Judaism and Islam, all have their forms of demonic possession, whether by dybbuks or djinn, although a more detailed comparison would reveal these concepts to be very different from one another. However, monotheistic traditions do not hold a monopoly on the concept of spirit possession either. Austrian-American anthropologist Erika Bourguignon, in the 1960s through the 1980s, wrote a great deal about what she called “dissociational states” and the “possession trance,” with an emphasis on its cross-cultural nature. She surveyed 488 cultures and recognized some form of belief in spirit possession in 74% of them. Nevertheless, if we are to speak of demon possession in particular, and the practice of exorcising those demons, we are speaking principally of the monotheist traditions that dominate world religion, and among them, it is Christianity that was founded on exorcism. That may seem a strong claim, but it should be remembered that according to the gospels, Jesus Christ was an itinerant exorcist. The Gospel of John, which is so different in many ways from the others, makes no mention of Christ’s exorcisms, but it is a central aspect of Christ’s story as presented in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. And ironically, as we shall see, some of the most outrageous and telling cases of demonic possession in history supposedly affected women of the cloth, nuns who were said to have given themselves over symbolically in marriage to Christ, the first Christian exorcist.

A depiction of Christ exorcising demons. Public domain.

One thing that the Catholic Church has thankfully done away with these days is witchcraft accusations and trials. The history of the Early Modern witch hunts is well known. I discussed it at length in a two-parter last Halloween. Perhaps because witchcraft accusations are today synonymous with ignorance and persecution, the Catholic Church wisely steers clear of such claims. Strange then that they are still willing to indulge, so to speak, in claims of demonic possession, which ever since a series of famous cases of mass possession at convents in 17th-century France have been closely related. It began in Marseille in 1609, when 14-year-old Madeleine de Mandols de la Palud, beginning her novitiate at the local Ursuline convent, told her superior that her confessor, Louis Gaufridy, who had spent a great deal of time with her at her father’s house over the last few years, had seduced her. It started when they had shared a peach one night, and it progressed eventually to fornication. After confiding this, she was transferred to an Ursuline convent at Aix-en-Provence, ostensibly because she had become ill, and it was there that she began to demonstrate symptoms associated with demonic possession. She suffered convulsions, she appeared to be repulsed by sacred objects, and she seemed to have knowledge that some believed could only have been acquired through clairvoyance. During the course of her possession and exorcism, she changed her story about Father Gaufridy, claiming that he had done more than seduce her. He had charmed her, she said, with that magic peach, had taken her to a witches’ sabbat and made her renounce God and sign a pact with the Devil in her own blood. It was because of Gaufridy that she had been possessed. As we have seen with other mass delusions, such as the Dancing Plague and the convulsionism during the following century in France, such experiences are contagious, either through the power of suggestion or due to a desire to receive attention and be a part of a consuming phenomenon. At Aix-en-Provence, numerous other nuns began to claim they too had been bewitched by Gaufridy and were also possessed. This resulted in a sensational mass exorcism, carried out before a huge captivated audience. The exorcist, Sébastien Michaëlis, a Dominican inquisitor who had made a name for himself as a witch hunter and demonologist, addressed the demons supposedly invading these nuns in Latin… but contrary to what was expected at the time, they did not reply in Latin. Michaëlis rationalized this by making up new rules, saying, with no apparent support for his claim, that the Devil did not typically speak in foreign languages when he inhabited the bodies of women. But of course, we can easily ascertain the truth that these women did not reply in Latin because they did not speak the language. Furthermore, it is clear that Madeleine de Mandols de la Palud could have conceived of her witchcraft claims against Gaufridy as a kind of revenge for his seduction, and that she cleverly avoided the stigma of witchcraft herself by claiming possession instead, for while witches were objects of scorn, demoniacs were objects of sympathy. The entire affair, strangely, may have simply been a way for her to rehabilitate her honor. In some ways it worked. After denying everything at first, Louis Gaufridy confessed to everything she alleged under torture and was burned alive. Madeleine de Mandols de la Palud became a penitent and for a time was viewed sympathetically, but eventually the stink of brimstone that clung to her proved too overpowering, and in 1653 she was tried as a witch herself.

The mass possessions at Aix-en-Provence were not just the first of their kind, but also they would serve as an example and precedent in the numerous copycat possessions to come. The next couple of times the Devil supposedly ran amok in a convent, it would start, rather creepily, more like a haunting. At the Bridgettine convent in Lille, in the Spanish Netherlands, nuns reported seeing specters and hearing strange noises before several of them began to display the symptoms of possession, receiving exorcisms throughout 1612, the year after the conclusion of the Aix-en-Provence affair. And 20 years later, in a single night in 1632, two nuns, including the prioress of the Ursuline convent in Loudun, Western France, claimed that they had been visited separately in their rooms by the ghost of their former confessor, who implored them for help. Two days later, one of the same nuns, along with a third, saw a black sphere which approached them and knocked them down. What followed were the classic signs of a haunting, or as some modern day exorcists might call it, a demonic infestation. Disembodied voices were heard and several nuns said they had been struck by some unseen force. Then the behavior of the nuns changed. They began to suffer uncontrolled fits of laughter and convulsions. The nuns claimed that a priest named Urbain Grandier, whom they had never actually met, was in fact a sorcerer and was the cause of their possession, much as Gaufridy had been blamed for the Aix-en-Provence possessions.  Following the playbook of that earlier affair, the Catholic church turned the exorcism of the Loudun nuns into a spectacle, with thousands gathering to watch, and Urbain Grandier, much like Gaufridy before him, was convicted and burned at the stake. However, the Protestants of the region believed the entire affair to be a charade, claiming that the nuns’ confessor, Father Mignon, had coached them in their impostures with the approval of his Church superiors. Their reasons, it was claimed, were twofold. First, Urbain Grandier was a libertine and an embarrassment. He had had numerous affairs with local women and had even written a book against clerical celibacy. The other purpose the fraud served, besides ridding the church of Grandier, was to demonstrate the power of Catholic rites to defeat the Devil, an explanation that has been put forward for many witch purges and that explains the public exorcisms in France going all the way back to 1566, when a teen girl named Nicole Obry, who was said to be possessed by 30 demonic spirits, underwent exorcism rites in which the power of the Eucharist to harm an evil spirit was supposedly demonstrated on a public stage at a cathedral in Laon every day for two months, simply as a way to refute the Huguenots, who rejected the doctrine of the Real Presence of Chist’s body within the consecrated wafers. An alternative explanation, and something of a conspiracy theory, was that the powerful Cardinal Richelieu ordered the fraud as a pretext to rid himself of the troublesome priest Urbain Grandier, who had written a satire of him. No matter what the case, whether a mass delusion, religious propaganda, or a conspiracy against an unruly priest, or some combination of these, there are too many rational explanations to take the claims of the Loudun possessions seriously today.

A portrait of exorcist Sebastian Michaelis. Public domain.

About a decade after the events at Loudun, another nun’s claims about being seduced by a priest evolved into mass possession, public exorcism, and accusations of sorcery. Madeleine Bavent was the accuser, but in this case her allegations emerged years later in a written confession that sounds in many ways like the hoax claims of the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. She wrote that she had been seduced at 18 by a philandering Franciscan monk before entering the convent at Louviers, where the chaplain, she said, used to worship God in the nude and demanded his nuns did the same. This pervy chaplain was succeeded by Father Mathurin Picard, who Bavent said would turn Eucharist wafers into love charms and thereby receive sexual favors from his nuns. In this way, she wrote, Father Picard impregnated her. Picard and his assistant conducted black masses, at which the Devil visited them in the form of a black cat, she claimed. All of this in explanation of the convulsions and other possession symptoms that she and her fellow nuns were displaying. They had been bewitched from the grave by Father Picard, who had recently died. Her fellow nuns undergoing exorcism, however, had a different story. They said it was Madeleine Bavent who had caused them to be possessed. So while the Church dug up Father Picard and excommunicated his corpse just to be sure and ended up burning Picard’s assistant chaplain at the stake, Bavent too was tried as a witch. If she had concocted the story as revenge for a real sexual assault or in order to achieve some kind of agency in her patriarchal world, as has been argued before about such accusations, it certainly backfired on her. She was imprisoned in a subterranean dungeon, left to subsist for the next few years on bread and water three times a week, and died there within a few years. A couple years after the beginning of this affair, a treatise was written in Madeleine Bavent’s birthplace of Rouen, in which the specific indications of a genuine demonic possession are listed in an effort to better discern fakers from real demoniacs. The possessed must lead a wicked life (a strange requirement when the most famous purported demoniacs of the day were nuns), must think themselves possessed (which seems to ignore the possibility of delusions), must live outside the rules of society (a criteria that is likewise associated with many who were persecuted as witches), must blaspheme and be uncontrollable and violent (because surely no one could naturally do such things?), and must be tired of living (or in other words be suicidal, which again, is a criteria one need not be demonically possessed to meet). Among the few seemingly supernatural symptoms were signing of a pact with the devil, being troubled by spirits, showing a frightening countenance, making movements like an animal, and vomiting strange objects. This is at least an early indication that some thinkers at the time sought to differentiate “true” possessions from other, more naturally explained illnesses, but all such indications can be naturally explained as being lies, performances, and illusions, and these too go a long way toward explaining anything deemed to be a sign of a genuine possession even today.

The current signs of a genuine possession are all more focused on proving the supernatural: the ability to speak in a language the possessed person does not know, the demonstration of knowledge the possessed person could not know, and the display of supernatural strength. Just think on that a moment. There are exorcists going around believing they have proved the existence of supernatural phenomena. It makes you wonder why they haven’t brought in scholars and scientists to further publicize and study these definitively proven supernatural events. Of course, it’s because any of these might still have rational explanations. Supernatural strength may be subjective, based on what one imagines a particular person normally capable of, and the existence of augmented strength caused by adrenaline could scientifically explain such feats. As for displaying hidden knowledge or speaking a language one does not know, these could be easily faked with coaching or secret studies, especially today, with the Internet. Why would someone possibly want to fake possession, you may ask. Mental illness is an obvious answer, but the historical example of famous demoniac Marthe Brossier gives us alternative explanations. In 1598, Marthe Brossier attacked an older woman named Anne Chevreau in church and declared that the woman had bewitched her into being possessed. Anne Chevreau was arrested by civil rather than ecclesiastical authorities, and not being subjected to torture, she never confessed. This meant that Marthe Brossier had to prove herself possessed. Thus began her career as a demoniac, sent from one church to the next, having exorcism after exorcism, at which she satisfied many that she displayed the supernatural indications I’ve just mentioned. Her supernatural strength was observed in her strange bodily contortions and acrobatic movements like somersaults and backbends, which of course does not seem to have been an accurate test of strength at all but rather a test of how limber she was and perhaps of how committed she was to the performance. Furthermore, she seemed to prove her uncanny knowledge by telling audience members whether their loved ones were in heaven or their enemies bound for hell, which obviously couldn’t be proven accurate one way or another. As for speaking in a language unknown to her, she answered questions in Latin, but sometimes her answers seemed to betray a lack of understanding of the language, and when called on it, she typically dismissed the priests’ objections and threatened to stop talking altogether if they doubted her. What seems to have been happening was that her family was helping her in her charade. They had given her a book about the famous demoniac Nicole Obry, whom I previously mentioned, so that she might better learn how to behave like a woman possessed, and the local curé who had been her first exorcist, a family friend, was coaching her in Latin in order to fool ecclesiastic authorities. As it turns out, she was earning the family a tidy sum in profits from supporters who charitably donated to them.

The alleged diabolical pact of Urbain Grandier. Public domain.

While the making of money must have been a definite reason for the Brossier family’s complicity in her fraud, that was not Marthe’s reason for making the claims in the first place. Marthe had lost all hope for a respectable life. At the time, there were two paths for women of her class. She must either marry or become a nun. As she was one of four daughters and her father had lost his fortune and could therefore offer no dowry, marriage seemed impossible, and even entering a convent required some exchange of money, so neither had she been able to become a nun. She had been so upset by her position that she cut her hair and ran away from home pretending to be a man, which caused her and her family great shame when she was recognized and forced to return to her village of Romorantin. After that, as an unmarried, poor woman with a history of transgressive behavior, she may have actually feared being accused of witchcraft herself. In the last few years, numerous women in her position had been accused of witchcraft and of causing others to be possessed, leading to their execution. As mentioned before, while witches were reviled and murdered, their victims, the supposedly possessed, were typically objects of sympathy. Thus, Marthe Brossier, and maybe even her family, might have believed that claiming to be possessed was the only way to safeguard herself from witchcraft accusations, and it is perhaps no coincidence that she chose Anne Chevreau to accuse, since the Brossiers blamed certain other members of the Chevreau family for the failure of a marriage arrangement undertaken by one of Marthe’s sisters. Thus, with something of a family feud between them, revenge may also have been a motive. Whatever the case, Marthe must have rather enjoyed her role as a demoniac. She went from someone with no prospects and no power to being the principal bread winner of her family, the center of attention, an object of lust to many who watched her contort her body on public stages, and a woman empowered, because of the supposed demon inhabiting her, to speak her mind and even insult the men surrounding her. As her career as a demoniac continued, she found herself before crowds in Paris, having learned that she could further please her Catholic interrogators and exorcists if she had her demon tell the crowds that Protestants were followers of the Devil. But this was her undoing. Her anti-Huguenot propaganda may have put the Church on her side, but not the Crown. King Henri IV feared that she was upsetting the peace he had achieved between Catholics and Protestants with his recent Edict of Nantes, which pronounced tolerance for Huguenots. While the Church declared her possessed, medical doctors declared there was “nothing supernatural” about her condition, instead finding that she was faking it, and perhaps a bit mentally unwell, declaring there was “a large element of fraud, a small element of disease.” The king sided with the doctors and had her arrested on charges of fraud. In the end, the Paris court settled the matter by calling her an imposter and sending her back to her village, completely chastened and humiliated.

History is chock full of such cases of alleged possessions that either demonstrate the falseness of the phenomenon or can be debunked with just a little critical thought. In fact, I probably could have produced an entire series on this subject had I not feared that it would end up being a bit repetitive. Among the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony, prior to the Salem Witch Trials, there was Elizabeth Knapp, a servant in the household of a preacher, whom the preacher claimed had become possessed, citing as evidence her convulsions and contortions, her claims to see beings who were not there, and her speaking in a strange voice without opening her mouth. Though a doctor could not explain it then, medicine today may identify epilepsy or Huntington’s chorea as a cause of her physical symptoms, both of which can lead to depression, mania, hallucination, and even schizophrenia, which may further explain her behavior. Living as she did with a fire and brimstone preacher who would later be involved in witchcraft trials, it is perhaps no surprise that she eventually confessed to having made a pact with the Devil, and there may have been some further motivation for actually feigning possession, using a kind of ventriloquism to affect a voice in the back of her throat, in that it allowed her to get out of work and verbally abuse her employer with impunity. The same medical conditions may explain many a case of supposed demonic possession, but sometimes, when an exorcism appears to cure said condition, as it did in the case of George Lukins, the Yatton Demoniac of 18th-century England, it would seem some further explanation may be needed. Lukins seemed compelled to scream, and bark, and sing backwards hymns in a voice that sounded inhuman to those who heard it. These violent fits began during a Christmas pageant, when he claims to have felt some phantom blow. He eventually told any who would listen that he was possessed by seven demons, and that they must be exorcised by seven clergymen. Perhaps Lukins was an impostor, faking possession for attention or in order to promote the wonderful works of God—for though his exorcists claimed they wanted to keep the ceremony secret, through some error, they said, many townsfolk discovered what they were doing, eavesdropping on the exorcism and, to their supposed chagrin, afterward publishing reports about the miracle they had performed. Or perhaps Lukins did genuinely suffer the fits described and only believed they were diabolical because of his religious worldview, a belief system so strong that he was cured simply by the placebo effect, demonstrating the power of suggestion, if indeed he was entirely healed at all and never again suffered any of his fits.

The exorcism of Madeleine Bavent. Public domain.

Very religious, also, was the 19th-century French demoniac Antoine Gay, a carpenter of Lyon who had once been accepted as a lay brother at an abbey but had to leave because of some nervous disorder that surely represented the early onset of whatever condition would later be mistaken for demonic possession. A priest who would later sign a certificate affirming the authenticity of Gay’s possession cited as “grounds” for his belief in Gay’s possession that he displayed a preternatural understanding of a language he did not know because he seemed to contort more violently when they spoke prayers over him in Latin, which of course proves nothing except that he could discern the appropriate time to writhe, and that he replied to questions posed in Latin, though he concedes that Gay only ever responded in French. As one who had previously sought to enter the mendicant life, it is possible he had studied the exorcism ritual enough to know the nature of the questions that would be posed to him, even if he could not speak Latin in any passable way. Later, when Gay was placed in an asylum for the mentally ill, another priest marveled at how Gay and a female patient who was also believed to be possessed would hold long arguments in an unknown language, which Antoine Gay later translated for the priest. It sounds like little more than a folie à deux, two mentally disturbed individuals feeding off each other’s delusions and shouting gibberish at each other. It’s absurd to think that the priest believed the mental patient’s subsequent explanation of the content of their exchange. Much as the seeming mastery of unknown languages convinced many of Antoine Gay’s possession, the mysterious indecipherable Devil’s Letter, purportedly written by a possessed Italian nun in 1676, captured a lot of imaginations recently when in 2017 researchers at the Ludum Science Center used a decryption algorithm to finally translate it. Legend had it that the possessed Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione woke up one morning covered in ink with a letter of jumbled characters from different archaic alphabets. The Ludum Center’s algorithm was able to decipher from it a message in Latin, Greek, Arabic and Runic letters that sounds like the Devil’s very voice, sowing doubt that God can save mortals. The problem is that, even after its algorithmic translation, the message doesn’t much sense, and some parts remain undeciphered, suggesting it may not have even been translated correctly. Additionally, it seems Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione may have been studying ancient languages during the more than 15 years she had been in the Benedictine convent, and that she may have suffered from bipolar disorder or perhaps even schizophrenia. Such a confluence of knowledge and interests and manic behavior or delusions could quite logically lead to her concocting a mishmash alphabet and writing out the words she believed the Devil was whispering to her.

In the modern era, possession and exorcisms have taken on an even darker quality, and I don’t mean a diabolical darkness. I refer to the consistent occurrence of mental illness being mischaracterized or misdiagnosed as demonic possession by clergyman and lay consultants, resulting in exorcism ceremonies that cause real psychological and physical harm, and even death, as in the Tanacu exorcism. Roland Doe, the 14-year-old boy whose widely embellished story inspired the book and film The Exorcist and whose psychiatrists all agreed he was a deeply disturbed child that should not have been exposed to such a ceremony, thankfully survived, but many another victim of this outmoded belief and practice have not been so lucky. Perhaps the most famous and egregious case of death by exorcism is that of Annaliese Michel, a young German epileptic who suffered from psychosis as a result of her seizures. Tragically, as she succumbed to mental illness and depression and a belief she was possessed, her family went along with her desire to stop seeing medical professionals and instead focus on exorcism, enabling Michel’s intention to die as a kind of atonement. Her family, her exorcist, and the Church that approved the ceremonies are complicit in Annaliese Michel’s suicide by exorcism. After 67 grueling exorcism sessions, she died of dehydration and malnutrition, her knees shattered from her ceaseless kneeling. The Church may like to hide behind the fact that subjects must request an exorcism these days, as though this represents a kind of release of liability, but the fact is that the mentally ill don’t always have the presence of mind or rational judgement to know what is in their best interests, and if they are rejecting modern medicine for faith healing like this, then neither do their families. I didn’t really believe that this episode would connect clearly to my last episode about religious arguments against vaccination, but as it turns out, they are closely connected. We see religious creeds and specifically Christian beliefs encouraging their faithful to reject science and modern medicine, and as a result, people are dying. Just to emphasize how evil and ongoing this threat is, as recently as January, 2020, news reports appeared revealing that exorcists are responsible for massacres. In an indigenous community in Panama, a religious group that called themselves the New Light of God kidnapped people from their homes, brandishing machetes and beating them. They held them captive, performing an exorcism ceremony that demanded they renounce their evil ways or be killed. Before authorities stopped them, they murdered seven innocents, including a pregnant woman and her five children. Doubtless these murderers rationalized their heinous acts in much the same way as did the Romanian priest Corogeanu, who rather than accept responsibility for the death of Maricica Irina Cornici, asserted that her death was God’s Will, saying horribly, "Only God knows why he took her … I think that's how God wanted her to be saved."

Further Reading

Bourguignon, Erika. “Introduction: A Framework for the Comparative Study of Altered States of Consciousness.” Religion, altered states of consciousness, and social change, The Ohio State University Press, 1973, pp. 3-35. The Ohio State University, kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/6294.

Kington, Tom. “Nun’s letters from Lucifer decoded via the dark web.” The Times, 7 Sep. 2017, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nun-sister-maria-crocifissa-della-concezione-letters-from-lucifer-decoded-via-the-dar-web-d5jwx5mwk.

A narrative of the extraordinary case of George Lukins (of Yatton, Somersetshire) who was possessed of evil spirits, for near eighteen years: also an account of his remarkable deliverance, in the vestry-room of Temple Church, in the City of Bristol, extracted from the manuscripts of several persons who attended: to which is prefixed . a letter from the Rev. W. R. W. Thomas T. Stiles, 1805. U.S. National Library of Medicine, collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-0244605-bk.

Oesterreich, T.K. Possession: Demoniacal and Other among Primitive Races, in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner And Company, 1930. Internet Archive, archive.org/stream/possessiondemoni031669mbp/possessiondemoni031669mbp_djvu.txt

Sluhovsky, Moshe. “The Devil in the Convent.” American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 5, Dec. 2002, pp. 1379–1411. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1086/532851.

Smith, Craig S. “A Casualty on Romania's Road Back From Atheism.” The New York Times, 3 July 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/world/europe/a-casualty-on-romanias-road-back-from-atheism.html.

Stephenson, Craig E. “The Possessions at Loudun: Tracking the Discourse of Dissociation.” Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 62, no. 4, Sept. 2017, pp. 544–566. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/1468-5922.12336.

Walker, Anita M., and Edmund H. Dickerman. “A Notorious Woman: Possession, Witchcraft and Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century Provence.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, vol. 27, no. 1, Berghahn Books, 2001, pp. 1–26, www.jstor.org/stable/41299192.

---. “‘A Woman under the Influence’: A Case of Alleged Possession in Sixteenth-Century France.” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 22, no. 3, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 1991, pp. 535–54, doi.org/10.2307/2541474.

Willard, Samuel. “A briefe account of a strange & unusuall Providence of God befallen to Elizabeth Knap of Groton.” Groton In The Witchcraft Times, edited by Samuel A. Green, 1883. Hanover College, history.hanover.edu/texts/Willard-Knap.html.

False Prophecy: The Mark of the Beast - 666

I previously thought that, in my blog post on Anti-Vaccinationism, written about 6 months ago, I had said all I felt compelled to say about anti-vaxxer movements. With the recent FDA approval of some COVID vaccines, I had hoped that the protests of many who remained vaccine hesitant had been addressed and we would see wider vaccination rates. Instead, we see goalposts moved and refusals doubled down on, and we find renewed opposition to vaccination mandates on the grounds of individual and religious liberty. On one hand, considering the long history of organized protest to compulsory vaccination, which I discussed in depth in my April blog post, I am not that surprised at the resistance to vaccine mandates, although in most cases organizations and governments are not even currently discussing the enforcement of compulsory vaccination and are instead offering the alternative of weekly testing to accommodate vaccine holdouts, making most of their rhetoric and bluster effectively moot. I suppose what I do find surprising is the outrage and shock at the mere idea the government might consider the coercion of safeguards to protect the public against this deadly virus and the suggestion that it amounts to some kind of unconstitutional medical tyranny. This viewpoint, which is popular right now (I have even seen it espoused by some otherwise rational and educated individuals who work in academia) demonstrates an ignorance of American history and a basic misunderstanding of the ideals of liberty on which our country was founded. The coercion of precautions against infectious disease and infringements on individual liberties for the sake of community safety can be traced all the way back to the first quarantine laws in Massachusetts colony, 1647, leading in the 18th century to the empowerment of the government to forcibly remove sick individuals from their homes in order to isolate them and mitigate the harm they did to others. Anyone who has served in our Armed Forces and received so many jabs they don’t even know what they’re all for will tell you that compulsory inoculation has long been practiced by our government, and this goes all the way back to the Continental Army and General George Washington. Indeed, Washington was at first resistant to instituting a smallpox inoculation mandate, but his own soldiers convinced him that they had more to fear from the disease than they did from their enemy’s swords. After the advent of the vaccine and the first vaccine mandate law was passed in the U.S. in 1809, opposition to compulsory smallpox vaccination entered the courts, as I have written about previously. The final word on the constitutionality of vaccine mandates came in 1905, in the Supreme Court case Jacobsen v. Massachusetts, in which a Cambridge City mandate was challenged. The Supreme Court upheld the law, finding that our individual liberty does not extend to putting others at risk. Since then, when the issue has come up again, specifically in cases regarding vaccine mandates for children in schools, courts have consistently looked back at Jacobsen v. Massachusetts and considered the matter settled. Thus, the idea that governments, or organizations, instituting a vaccine mandate is somehow illegal, or even an overreach, is simply false. For those who might protest that it’s not a matter of the letter of the law but rather the spirit, and that the Framers of the Constitution would never have countenanced such a disregard of individual freedoms, let us look to the wording of the Constitution’s preamble, in which the Framers wrote explicitly that their intention in formalizing our constitutional rights was not to make individual rights sacrosanct but rather to “provide for the common defense” and “promote the general welfare.” And American history in particular has also shown that the best way to promote general welfare during an epidemic, the best defense against an infectious disease, is robust vaccination, and that mandatory vaccination laws work. Comparing smallpox infection rates in states with and without vaccine mandates between 1919 and 1928 reveals that states without vaccine mandates saw as many as 20 times more cases. However, what I find really complicates the issue is the notion of religious dissent to vaccination mandates. If a religious doctrine truly holds that the faithful must not be vaccinated, then there is little left to argue, except the validity of that doctrine and the reasoning behind it, which is a losing game, especially when the most prevalent religious objection to vaccination relies on a creative interpretation of an ancient prophecy about the end of the world.

I am writing this post as one final attempt to use historical insight in order to refute the logic of vaccine critics. Specifically, I want to address the claims that getting the vaccine, or requiring proof of vaccination, somehow fulfills the prophecies of John the Revelator about the so-called Mark of the Beast, and the argument that this interpretation of a few verses in Revelation constitute grounds for the religious exemption of Evangelicals, who comprise about a quarter of the U.S. population. Before we can really address this notion, though, we need some foundation of understanding. In case any listener is unfamiliar, the verses of Revelation in question are in Chapter 13—already an unlucky number. In it, the author describes a vision of a beast rising out of the sea with numerous heads and horns with crowns. This beast is described like a chimera, with elements of different animals, and is described as having great power and authority, and is said to miraculously survive a deadly wound. Now don’t be mistaken. This is just the first beast in Revelation 13. The next beast described by the revelator also rises to the same heights of power, and furthermore performs wonders and forces the world to worship the first beast, executing any who refuse.  Verses 16 through 18 are of especial interest here: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” These verses mark the beginning of the legend. Understandably, the beasts of the vision are interpreted in terms of power structures. The beast with multiple heads and crowns, one of whose heads survives a killing blow, has traditionally been interpreted in broader terms as a nation or empire or religion, while the second beast who forces worship of the first and institutes the Mark, is usually seen as a specific world leader. Not all interpretations of these verses look to the future. Many have looked to the past, to world powers and figures at the time it was written. We will get to that. What’s important to understand now is that Evangelicals take a Futurist view of prophecy, believing it to be a blueprint of the end times. In their view the second beast is typically the Antichrist, and the Mark is a milestone that they are always on the lookout to identify. Anything that might be clocked as the Beast’s Mark helps them to characterize their own times as the End Times, and importantly, allows them to demonize any political leaders or cultural trends they want to resist.

A woodcut by Albrecht Dürer depicting the Beast of Revelation. Public Domain.

The current iteration of the Mark of the Beast legend—the conspiracy theory that the vaccine itself or vaccine documentation are really the forced mark that will make of any otherwise faithful Christian a damned heretic, effectively erasing their name from the Book of Life and denying them their eternal reward—actually involves the unlikely figure of Bill Gates. That’s right, a software developer whose career has taken him from working on computers in a garage to his philanthropy efforts on the world stage, Bill Gates is currently viewed by many as the Beast, or at least as the man behind the Beast’s Mark. It seems to have begun when Gates, a proponent of vaccination in the developing world, suggested that by helping children survive into adulthood, vaccines could help slow population growth because with fewer fears for their children’s survival, families may end up having fewer total children. The misunderstanding and purposeful misuse of this statement turned into the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was intentionally thinning populations using vaccines that kill. The conspiracy theory intersected with the Mark of the Beast legend when a digital identity initiative called ID2020 announced in 2019 that it was joining forces with a vaccine alliance with which the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation partners in order to spearhead a digital identity program in developing nations. This was misinterpreted as an announcement that Bill Gates was putting microchips into people under the guise of vaccine injections. From there, it was only a skip and a jump to identifying Gates’s vaccine initiatives with the Mark of the Beast. Fears that vaccines might be the Mark of the Beast were, after all, not exactly new. Some early resisters of the smallpox vaccine saw the mark it left on the arms of the vaccinated and also cried Mark of the Beast.

The notion of an implanted microchip being the Mark of the Beast was also not new. It does seem, after all, the most logical and modern way to explain why this mark would be necessary for buying and selling, as in the imaginations of the public, it would be like an identification and a credit card that you’d never misplace. The makers of the VeriChip, a silicon microchip promoted in the early 2000s as a medical identification device or as a tracking solution such as we use on dogs, can certainly attest to the difficulty of convincing the public that their product was not the Mark of the Beast; it was one of the principal obstacles they struggled with in launching their product and probably the reason why it didn’t really take off. Never mind the fact that such microchips are subcutaneous, injected under the skin rather than into muscle tissue, and need a much larger gauge needle than is used in vaccinations, and require programming for each individual subject, which obviously isn’t happening before each jab of a vaccine dose. The pieces all seemed to fit, and the more conspiracy theorists looked, the more pieces they seemed to find. For example, in 2019, Microsoft applied for a patent for a system that rewards the fulfillment of tasks verified by the sensing of physical movement with cryptocurrency—a patent for something that sounds like an exercise app on a smartwatch, but which was erroneously claimed to be a patent for an injectable microchip… something that has certainly already been patented, since the VeriChip has been around for two decades. The really unfortunate thing is that the proposed patent was numbered W02020060606, taken by conspiracy theorists as the Number of the Beast, and thus confirmation of their theories. And how was this is all tied to the COVID vaccine in particular? Bill Gates did not develop COVID vaccines, despite what many a conspiracy theorist might tell you. Rather, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation took part in a pandemic simulation in 2019, called Event 201, in which a thought experiment was discussed as to what the response might look like if, for example, a novel coronavirus crossed species to infect humans. This event has been presented like it was a shadowy Illuminati meeting, when it was in fact a well-publicized and widely attended event, and not the first of its kind, since virologists have feared such a virus emerging for a long time. So rather than a vast conspiracy in plain sight, this appears to be a series of rather unfortunate coincidences that has now resulted in a massive and baseless conspiracy theory responsible for many avoidable deaths.

An implantable RFID chip. Image by Amaal Graffstra, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Before fears about injectable microchips were the fears about RFID, or radio-frequency identification technology generally. Christian apocalypticists have been raising the alarm about these so-called spychips being the Mark of the Beast since they first started being implemented in cattle tagging and, in the early 2000s, when major retailers began installing EPC, or Electronic Product Codes, on most merchandise in order to track inventory and product information online. In fact, anxieties about injectable RFID chips today seem rather pointless, since most of us already carry a credit card with an RFID chip in it. It’s kind of like worrying about corporations using smartphones to record your conversations when they don’t really need to because they mine far more actionable data just by monitoring browsing and social media habits. These fears about the RFID-enabled EPC tags echo even earlier fears about UPC or barcodes potentially being the Mark of the Beast. When UPCs were widely adopted, many Evangelicals were certain that what would come next would be barcode tattoos on the forehead or the right hand, thus fulfilling the prophecy. And credit cards also didn’t need a chip in them for Evangelical Christians to fear that they were the Mark of the Beast. Indeed, it seemed anything with a number might be considered the dreaded Mark. Bank routing numbers have 9 digits, which is 6 upside down. Your full zip code, too, is nine digits. Uh-oh. Well what is one to do, if you’re a God-fearing Christian and want no part of this forced worship of the beast? Clearly you must take your money out of the banks. And you must get yourself and your family off the grid. There were many Evangelicals in the late 1970s and 80s who did indeed feel that the only way to be a true Christian was to go full outlaw mountain man. This had been widely encouraged by the bestselling book The Late Great Planet Earth, which predicted a specific end times scenario, most likely occurring before the end of the 1980s. One such Christian American influenced by this apocalyptic culture was Randy Weaver, who believed that credit cards and the computer systems that networked them were the Mark of the Beast. In order to resist what he saw as Revelation come true, he moved his family to a cabin in remote Idaho, and began to associate with the only other well-armed group of professed Christians resisting the government and living off the grid out there, the Aryan Nations. To illustrate the danger of such apocalyptic thought, things did not turn out well for the Weaver family. When the ATF failed in their plan to use a firearm charge to coerce Weaver into informing on the white supremacists’ activities, the result was an infamous shootout and standoff at Ruby Ridge, the Weavers’ home, during which a Deputy U.S. Marshall and Randy’s son and wife were killed.

It's important to note here that a lot of these interpretations of the Mark of the Beast inherently rely on metaphor. If it’s not an actual barcode tattooed on you, than it’s not really a literal interpretation of a visible mark on the hand or head. An injected microchip, one might argue, could maybe be noticed as a bump; and others have pointed to a verse in Revelation about those with the Mark being afflicted with a sore to suggest that a subcutaneous chip might result in some kind of dermal ulceration, but this too takes liberties with the scripture, which is clearly referring to the sore and the Mark as separate things. Purchasing RFID tagged products, having credit card debt on record, opening a bank account or just living on the grid, these interpretations clearly have nothing to do with a literal mark on the right hand and head, and certainly neither does receiving a vaccine or having a vaccination record. This freedom from literal interpretation characterizes many of the explanations of this prophecy throughout history. It has long been associated with non-conformity and resistance to cultural norms as well. In fact, Pentecostal critics of World War One believed that nationalism was the Mark of the Beast, using the idea to support their political views. During the Reformation, this meant interpreting the visions of John the Revelator so as to see Roman Catholicism and the Papacy everywhere: signified in the heads and crowned horns of the first beast; represented by Babylon the Great, the corrupt city of the Antichrist; and embodied in the figure of the Whore of Babylon. In the 17th century, using some creative calculations, various biblical scholars suggested that the year in which the Antichrist would fall would be 1666, a year whose number further explained the Number of the Beast. This became a common fear, dreaded by many European Protestants during the decades preceding the so-called Year of the Beast, and for those in London, who suffered a plague and a devastating fire that year, it seemed that their interpretation of the prophecy had been confirmed. This notion of the infamous riddle that was the Number of the Beast would be echoed 333 years later, when worries about computers and Y2K led many, once again, to fear that the year 1999 would somehow fulfill the terrible prophecy of the Number of the Beast. Revelation is clear that the Mark of the Beast is one and the same as the Number of the Beast, and it is never satisfactorily explained by these interpretations how or why a calendar date might be received on the right hand or the forehead, even metaphorically.

Anonymous oil painting of the Great Fire of London in 1666. Public Domain.

Revelation further states explicitly that, rather than a date, the Mark is “the number of a man,” and more specifically “the number of his name,” which is why the bulk of the scholarly interpretations of the text treat it as a kind of cryptogram, a code that, once solved, will reveal the literal name of the beast, the identity of the Antichrist. Some of suggested, for example, that it was simply a matter of the number of characters in a name, thus it could be claimed that the number of Ronald Wilson Reagan’s name was 666 because each name contained six letters. Others have looked to Roman numerals, which of course correspond well with English letters. Typically, though, those who have tried to decrypt the Number of the Beast in earnest make their attempts using gematria, an arcane Kabbalistic method of interpreting scriptures in which each Hebrew character corresponds to a specific number. There is a real historical case to be made that the 666 cryptogram does refer to gematria. It was certainly in use in that part of the world and was known to be used for calculating the number of a name, as we see in an Assyrian inscription from the 8th century BCE that King Sargon II built a certain wall to a certain measurement “to correspond with the numerical value of his name.” Gematria is originally used with the Hebrew alphabet, but that hasn’t stopped some theorists from applying the numbers 1-26 to the English alphabet and applying that alphanumeric code to find out the identity of the Antichrist. During World War One, again, Penetecostal writers used this English version of gematria to suggest that the Kaiser was the Antichrist because his name and titles, William von Hohenzollern, King of Prussia, Emperor of all Germany, converted quite nicely to the number 666. At the advent of the World Wide Web, anxious Christians used gematria to suggest that using the Internet was taking the Mark of the Beast, for right there at the beginning of every URL was www, which corresponded to the 6th letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Among ancient scholars, like Irenaeus and Andreas of Caesarea, using gematria to solve the 666 cryptogram led to the listing of random names, like Evanthas, Lateinos, and Teitan, not the names of specific figures, but names maybe to be on the lookout for, since their number was equivalent to the Number of the Beast. The problem was that there were and are far too many variations in method. First, if  you don’t like the numerical value you get using gematria, you can always massage the numbers. One method of gematria involves integral reduction: say you get the number 231 from a name. By adding its integers—two, three, and one—together, you can reduce it to the number 6. This is the suppleness of such numerology. Beyond that, there is the problem of transliteration, as each interpreter might make a different decision regarding which Hebrew letter corresponds to whatever language’s letters they are using, since gematria requires that a word or name be converted to its Hebrew equivalent before its numbers can be determined. This was a problem going all the way back to ancient scholars who wrestled with the 666 cryptogram, many of them writing in Greek. Hebrew, a Semitic language, does not lend itself to simple transliteration with European languages, since its phonemes, or distinct sounds, and its orthography, or spelling system, are so different, providing the translator with a lot of choices and making this anything but an exact science. This leads to the rational question of whether the author, John the Revelator, himself writing in Greek, actually intended his readers to perform such an esoteric decryption.

So then, who was John the Revelator, also called John the Theologian and John the Divine, author of the Book of Revelation? Christian tradition would have us believe he was one and the same as the author of the Gospel of John, but this is not exactly a precise identification since the identity of that gospel’s author is also widely disputed, which I spoke about in my episode entitled, The Beloved Disciple and the Authorship of John. What the Book of Revelation tells us is that the author wrote it while on the island of Patmos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Thus the author’s other appellation, John of Patmos. Many biblical scholars place its composition between 81 and 96 CE, during the reign of Roman Emperor Domitian, suggesting that whoever this John was, he went to Patmos seeking refuge during Domitian’s legendary persecution of Christians. However, other scholars have suggested that there is little contemporary source support to actually confirm the truth of Domitian’s supposed persecution of Christians, which were only first mentioned by Eusebius of Caesarea hundreds of years later. An alternative dating, based on the writings of Irenaeus, whose Against Heresies, written about 180 CE, is one of the earliest exegeses, or critical interpretations, of the scripture, is that it was written during the time of Nero, who reigned as Roman Emperor from 54 to 68 CE. With this dating in mind, we must consider the possibility that John of Patmos was not at all referring cryptically to some far flung future events and figures in his Revelation but was instead speaking figuratively about contemporary events. This would be to take a so-called Preterist view of Revelation. In this view, Babylon the Great is Imperial Rome, and the Beast, the number of whose name is 666, was Nero. Indeed, according to the gematria calculations of preterists who espouse this view, the name Nero, transliterated from Greek to Hebrew, yields numbers that do indeed add up to 666. But more than that, one problem that has plagued many an interpretation is the fact that some early versions of Revelation actually have a different Number of the Beast, identifying 616 as the “number of his name.” Funny enough, though, Nero Caesar, transliterated not from Greek but from Latin into Hebrew, yields the gematria result 616, thus explaining the deviation in some versions of Revelation. And more than just the fitting of his name with the Number of the Beast, Nero and Rome can be made to fit other descriptions of the beast. The first beast, with many heads and crowns, might be seen as Rome, and the mortal wounding of one of the beast’s heads may refer to the assassination of Julius Caesar, which the Beast survived in that the empire survived, and the making of the world to worship the Beast may refer to Roman deification of their Emperors, starting posthumously with the cult of divus Iulius, making a god out of Julius Caesar. Or maybe after all the Number of the Beast refers specifically to the first beast, not the second (which is not exactly clear in the scripture) and the head of the beast who survives his mortal wound and is to be worshipped is a reference to Nero, for there was a legend after Nero’s suicide called Nero redivivus that said Nero did not really die or that he would soon return.

John of Patmos, depicted by by Hieronymus Bosch, 1505. Public Domain.

The Preterist view, in my mind, best explains the strange visions described in Revelation as well as the cryptogram Number of the Beast, and I encourage listeners to look into it further, as it is far more intricate than I can do justice in outline here. Still I am left with certain questions, such as the specific meaning of the statement that the Mark of the Beast would be received on the hand or forehead. This, I think, is the perennial problem with prophetic texts like these. One might compare them to, for example, the poetry of Nostradamus. Works of prophecy are so chock full of evocative but abstract and surreal imagery that they can be twisted to apply to whatever you want. So, purely as a thought experiment, let’s say I wanted to turn the political tables on Evangelicals and started suggesting that the prophecies of Revelation clearly point to figures or movements on the Right. Obviously the head of the beast that recovers from a mortal wound might refer to Donald Trump, who came down with COVID during his reelection campaign but recovered, or perhaps it could refer to his defeat in the election and the insistence by Qanon that he will return to office. If Trump were the Beast, then what is his Mark? Perhaps the alt-right hand gesture we sometimes hear about, or perhaps his MAGA hats, which place his symbol on his followers’ foreheads. And the flexibility of gematria allows us to turn his name into the Number of the Beast. Using a simple online gematria calculator, I get the value of 159 for Donald, a name with six digits. If I apply the integral reduction method, adding 1, 5, and 9, that six-letter name’s value reduces to 15, and one and five add up to, you guessed it, another six. Likewise, Trump yields the number 726, whose digits add to 15, which can again be reduced to six. I think you get the idea. Do I believe that Trump’s political career was predicted by John of Patmos thousands of years ago. No. If anything, this is just evidence that all claims about the Mark of the Beast are preposterous, especially considering all the many times they have been wrong—which is every time so far—and furthermore, it just goes to show that interpretations of prophecy should not be taken so seriously, especially if they are cynically used as a specious argument for religious exemption from a life-saving public health initiative like vaccines.

Further Reading

Astor, Maggie. “Vaccination Mandates Are an American Tradition. So Is the Backlash.” The New York Times, 9 Sep. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/us/politics/vaccine-mandates-history.html.

Batniji, Rajaie. “Historical evidence to inform COVID-19 vaccine mandates.” Lancet, vol. 397, no. 10276, 2021, p. 791. U.S. National Library of Medicine, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7946603/.

Brady, David. “1666: The Year of the Beast.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 61, no. 2, 1979, pp. 314-36. The University of Manchester Library, www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m1813&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF.
Gumerlock, Francis x. “Nero Antichrist: Patristic Evidence for the Use of Nero’s Naming in Calculating the Number of the Beast (Rev 13:18).” Westminster Theological Journal, vol. 68, no. 2, Fall 2006, pp. 347–360. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=23498834&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Johnson, David R. “The Mark of the Beast, Reception History, and Early Pentecostal Literature.” Journal of Pentecostal Theology, vol. 25, no. 2, July 2016, pp. 184–202. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1163/17455251-02502003.

Joyce, Kathryn. “The Long, Strange History of Bill Gates Population Control Conspiracy Theories.” Type Investigations, 12 May 2020, www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2020/05/12/the-long-strange-history-of-bill-gates-population-control-conspiracy-theories/.

Klein, Adam, and Benjamin Wittes. “The Long History of Coercive Health Responses in American Law.” Lawfare, 13 April 2020, www.lawfareblog.com/long-history-coercive-health-responses-american-law.
McGovern, Celeste. “Invisible ‘Mark of the Beast’?” Report / Newsmagazine (Alberta Edition), vol. 29, no. 7, Apr. 2002, p. 46. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ulh&AN=6412102&site=eds-live&scope=site.

McNeile, A. H. “‘THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST.’” The Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 14, no. 55, Oxford University Press, 1913, pp. 443–44, www.jstor.org/stable/23947355.

Merlan, Anna. “The Desperate Search for the Mark of the Beast.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2 June 2019, www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/desperate-search-mark-beast/.

“RFID: Sign of the (End) Times?” WIRED, Condé Nast, 6 June 2006, www.wired.com/2006/06/rfid-sign-of-the-end-times/.

Rojas-Flores, Gonzalo. “The Book of Revelation and the First Years of Nero’s Reign.” Biblica, vol. 85, no. 3, GBPress- Gregorian Biblical Press, 2004, pp. 375–92, www.jstor.org/stable/42614530.

Sanders, Henry A. “The Number of the Beast in Revelation.” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 37, no. 1/2, Society of Biblical Literature, 1918, pp. 95–99, doi.org/10.2307/3259148.

Stewart-Peters, Ella, and Catherine Kevin. “A short history of vaccine objection, vaccine cults and conspiracy theories.” The Conversation, 9 July 2017, theconversation.com/a-short-history-of-vaccine-objection-vaccine-cults-and-conspiracy-theories-78842.

Thomas, Elise, and Albert Zhang. ID2020, Bill Gates and the Mark of the Beast: How Covid-19 Catalyses Existing Online Conspiracy Movements. Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2020, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep25082.

Vanden Eykel, Eric M. “No, the COVID-19 vaccine is not linked to the mark of the beast – but a first-century Roman tyrant probably is.” The Conversation, 7 April 2021, theconversation.com/no-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-not-linked-to-the-mark-of-the-beast-but-a-first-century-roman-tyrant-probably-is-158288.
Walter, Jess. “Visions of the Mark of the Beast. (Cover Story).” Newsweek, vol. 126, no. 9, Aug. 1995, p. 32. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9508247700&site=ehost-live&scope=site.